#40 - Lewis Bollard - How to End Factory Farming

27:37And so they have done that. I mean, they've gone around every time an egg farm gets this, the USDA comes in, kills all the birds by very inhumane methods. Like what? Well, specifically what they do is they turn off the ventilation system and they pump in heat. So this is called, they call it ventilation shutdown plus. And the plus stands for the heat they're pumping in. But the thing that's just wild to me about this, so it used to be that at least when we killed birds like this, we would use something like gas. But gas costs money. And gas requires infrastructure. It requires you to be prepared to have local gas units in the right places.

28:15USDA has done nothing to prepare for this. The air industry certainly hasn't done anything to prepare for this. And so what they were able to say was, look, that's not logistically feasible. We need to kill tens of millions of birds, but we don't have any gassing units around. so what's the what's the next best alternative if the only thing we care about is killing these birds well we'll just turn off the ventilation system and put in heat we can do that immediately we don't need any special equipment it's like suffocates them slowly they suffocate and slowly back to death and we know from studies it takes hours for this to occur we also know it's not always effective so there are a whole bunch of these cases where the usda has to come back the next day and kill all the birds who are still alive from the attempt to kill them the previous day.

28:54They've also done this to pigs, by the way. I mean, this is also a method they've used to kill pigs. And it is unfathomable that this is something that we're accepting on today's farms. And it's been justified by this cruel argument of necessity that we have no other alternatives. They don't mention that we have no other alternatives because they didn't prepare any other alternatives. But so yeah, we now end up in the system where they have killed over 150 million birds, almost all, using this method. In the last, how, over the last year, over the last year or two since this current outbreak. 150 million.

29:28That's right. So it's like half the population of the US slowly baked to death in, and maybe, like half of them will probably survive anyway and they have to do it again, like round two next day. Completely, to me this should be a national outrage and I think the unfortunate thing is that the media just doesn't cover this. The media just, they don't, maybe they don't know what's going on, maybe they don't think it's a story they can convey. I think they don't know. And yeah, I think partly it's that I think there will be some media that do. And then there's others that are just like, oh, it's not, you know, it's so icky.

29:57Well, I think because I think a big part and I mean, we can get into this more, but like, whenever I try and talk about this topic with people, it's just the cognitive dissonance gets starts up because they're like, yeah, but I like me. And I don't want it. And, you know, I like I'm, I'm still a meaty. So I mean, I live with cognitive dissonance every single day. yeah yeah yeah but like i try to like okay i'm gonna work through this and try and move the needle nonetheless and it's okay to you know be in cognitive dissonance but just try and like we can ask for better we can demand better you don't have to just stick your fingers in your ears and shut down and go la la la it doesn't exist or i don't you know if it'll just i don't want to think about it i'll just say on that i mean i i i think that the animal rights movement should be a symbol of blame for that in that we made this about individual behavior and we made about guilt.

30:46And so we said, if you still eat meat, then you are part of the problem. You should feel terrible about it. And the only possible thing you can do is to stop eating meat. And unsurprisingly, most people said, I don't want to do that. And so then they just figured, well, now I just need to block it out. There's nothing else I can do. It's just unfortunate. I feel bad about it maybe, but there's nothing I can do. I'll block it out. In reality, this is like any other major societal problem. We need the government to step in. We need corporations to step in. We need better technology. We need to focus on the top levers of change.

31:21And whether or not someone eats meat is kind of beside the point. I mean, it's just such a tiny piece of this. And that framing has also worked very nicely for the industry. I mean, they're like, sure, if a few of you want to go vegetarian, we couldn't care less. You've opted out of the system. You're no longer putting pressure on us to change anything. That's great. So to me, the real emphasis should be on how do we get the societal change stop thinking about individual diets start focusing on getting societal change at the kind of level we need it yeah i've read like some things about the the environmental impacts of factory farming particularly to the local areas where these farms are they're like the people um living nearby and suffering from like the air pollution problems um and then in particular like waterway contamination so can you talk a bit about that?

32:03Yeah, I mean, the basic problem of factory farms environmentally is they concentrate all of the environmental harms in one very small space. So when you've got pasture-based farming, you've got manure being spread out over a large amount of land, it can absorb that, that's part of the natural process. When you create these tiny factory farms, you've got a huge amount of manure, no land to put it on, and you've got a huge amount of ammonia and other kind of toxins in that barn, collecting in a really tight space. And again, nowhere to put it. And because the industry has effectively lobbied to exempt themselves from environmental regulation, so they should be covered by both the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.

32:43They have managed to exempt themselves from all regulation under both of those acts through very adept lobbying in Washington, D.C. I mean, they're basically the only industry that is exempt. And as a result, there just aren't any standards on this. so if you want to just release all of that ammonia and other other toxins and pollutants into the local air you can go ahead and do it and it turns out that's exactly what they do in north carolina and being a neighbor of one of these factory farms is horrific you just you wake up every morning it smells like feces in the air there's there's nasty flies going around it's all you know it's just a horrible place to be and and the same thing with in a lot of cases waterways thankfully there is some local regulation of water pollution there's often not i mean right now the city of des moines iowa is suing the department of agriculture because the water that they're getting for the city's water supply is incredibly polluted with manure from factory farms upstream and they can't even get them to stop that i mean that's you know that's how bad this is so you've got like how is that not like because i remember the flint water crisis right which was from an industry polluting like local like that's a smaller town like des moines is like this state capital right yeah yeah that's right huge city totally why is that not in the news I mean, I think that people have this kind of bizarre idea that manure is natural, you know, and because manure is natural, it's not the same as lead.

34:06It's not the same as these other toxins. And, you know, I mean, for one thing, it's not just manure, right? There's antibiotic runoff and there's drug runoff. There's all kinds of other crazy shit that is going into the waterways along with the literal shit. But it's also like the sheer volume of this is completely unnatural. Like, yeah, sure, birds will poop in a river. Like, that's normal. but like having like a million pigs run off going into one small river stream is not normal at all uh i mean the one thing i say too is is the time when it's truly horrific is whenever a natural disaster strikes so for example in north carolina what they eventually did to try and stop the run off into the waterways was they said okay every pig factory farm needs to have a giant pool which all the manure goes into.

34:52They call them manure lagoons. And they said it'll be totally fine because it'll be contained to this pool, you know, and it'll dehydrate over time and it'll be good. What happens in reality is these are incredibly flood-plown areas where the factory farms are. Right, because they're on like flat. They're on the flats near the coast. And so every time a hurricane comes in, you know, pretty often, these manure lagoons flood. And the local water gets horrendously polluted. We get not just all the manure but in fact when that happens also the factory farmers always flee and don't take their animals with them because they have nowhere to take their animals too so you also end up with a whole bunch of dead pigs you know that have just drowned floating around in the local waterways and this is just i mean again it's treated as something that is a necessity it's treated as something where there's no alternative i mean how else could we possibly handle this uh and so it's just accepted as a fact as a fact of life any other environmental things that people might not be aware of?

35:46I mean, I think that the whole way you go along the chain, right? So you start off with the feed that's needed in this industry. A huge amount of that feed is coming from soy and corn. It's being monocropped. Some of it is coming from the Amazon. I mean, the fastest driver of deforestation in the Amazon is these crops for the use of factory farming. That's why they come down the trees. If you're concerned about climate, this is animal agriculture is 15 % of global climate emissions um but you know this i mean it's just at every level you look at some environmental harm and you see there is some way a factory farm is contributing to this it's it's air pollution it's water pollution it's the toxins and the food we eat everything about it is uh is is piling in and then another area that i think people don't i i actually didn't really consider until i was researching this um the mental health impacts on the people who work on these farms i i was reading some of the most horrific stuff.

36:45Because the people who often end up working in these things are arguably some of the more vulnerable members of society in the first place. They're either migrants, they don't have a lot of other job opportunities and so on. Just like one particular person was writing, personally, I didn't suffer any physical injuries working on this farm, but the place really affected my mind. As I spent day after day in that large windowless box, I felt like a gray fog descending over me. And at night, my mind would be filled with literal nightmares, replaying over and over some of the horrors I've witnessed throughout the day.

37:19I mean, I can't, yeah, like if you are doing something where you are just day in, day out, like either slaughtering thousands and thousands of animals and it's by your hand or like pushing them into a slaughter machine or whatever it physically is. Yeah, like ultimately we're not, no, again, this is not like on the planes where we evolved to shoot something with a bow and arrow or whatever. It's just on a mass scale. And every animal fights for its life. People don't think that they're just calmly walking in. Especially with pigs. We were talking about this earlier. Pigs. Well, actually, can you describe what you saw in some of these slaughterhouses?

37:57Sure, yes. I mean, years ago, I visited a slaughterhouse that slaughtered cows and sheep and pigs. And I was discussing it was one of the better run places. This was in New Zealand with our actual regulations. This is like a nice slaughterhouse. The biggest slaughterhouse in New Zealand, so it was well-regulated. It had a lot, you know. And, you know, I will say they had worked out the least bad process for slaughtering sheep and cattle. But when it came to pigs, there was no good process. I mean, the pigs know exactly what is coming. They had tried to do everything to stop it, but the pigs knew exactly what was coming.

38:30They would, the moment they were let out into the kill room, they would start squealing and screaming and trying to run up the walls. I mean, truly, they were doing anything they could to escape. They knew what was coming. And then, I mean, the other particularly horrendous part that I didn't mention is these slaughterhouses have an incredibly fast throughput rate. They have to. It's a disassembly line, so it's always moving at the same speed. So in this case, I think they had four or five seconds per pig to kill them. And what happens is, ideally, they get a good stun, and then the pig gets killed with an automatic knife, and it's dead.

39:01But if they don't, the pig continues the whole way down the disassembly line alive. and you know the next step after it is meant to have been stuck with a knife and killed is it is dipped into a vat of boiling water so that its skin will be easier to come off and i i said to the guy like do the animals ever survive there do they ever make it past there and he was like oh no no don't don't worry about it don't worry about it he was like you know if they when they do make it past they're alive the workers down the line get really pissed off he's like it's really hard to take apart a live animal you know so like don't worry there's a natural check on this system.

39:35And that was just the reality of it. And again, this is the best slaughterhouse. This is the best. This is as good as it gets. This is probably one of the best in the world. I mean, this is as good as it gets for pigs. And then when it comes to something like chickens, it can be even worse because they're worth so little. I mean, when it comes to chickens, you're not talking about getting four or five seconds per animal. You get less than one second per animal. And so again, they're just hoisting these chickens up, upside down, throwing their legs into shackles, legs often break, the wings often break, they don't care.

40:06It moves on to the next step. They're meant to get stunned by being dipped upside down into an electrical water bath, but the stun setting, that's just another crazy fact, in the European Union, they have regulated stun settings to ensure that these chickens actually get knocked out by this. In the US, there are no regulations. And so what the industry worked out was rather than optimizing for actually knocking them out, we'll optimize for meat quality, which requires a much lower stun. and so they have this much lower stun many of them are not knocked out and they just continue on the process ideally they get killed by the automatic blade that's meant to cut their neck but if they duck they keep on going and so there's just this this just this insane reality around these factory farms of if you have no regulations if you truly don't care what happens to the animals this is what you end up with yeah and then coming back to the human impact on the on the workers uh there was a guy virgil butler who worked at tyson foods poultry plant who actually like kind of became a whistleblower for this um because he's like again he's like you don't understand like I was turned into like a robot zombie machine because that was the only way either I have emotions about what I'm doing or I just turn myself into a zombie but there was like a particular there was one of his co-workers who ended up in a mental hospital because he just kept having endless nightmares of chickens coming after him so that's one aspect of the human suffering But then there's also this other factor, which is there are always a percentage of, I mean, there seems to be always a percent of human beings who tend to have psychopathic tendencies.

41:36It attracts those types of people. And again, I mean, I don't even know. I mean, I'll talk about it. Maybe we cut this. I don't know. but like some of the things I was reading of the games that some of these farm workers will play as like a way to pass the time one of them was called the shit game where they grab a live chicken each and they squeeze it as hard as they can so that its insides and shit fly at each other and that's like that was a game they play and like another one they like who could rip off the head of a live chicken with the bare hands and then stick the heads on their fingers like the most like psychopathic shit imaginable and it's just like this is the hell that we have created for our food system that we don't like out of like most people just don't know that is going on as we speak all the time um and again like what is that doing i mean now i'm getting like more wooey here but like to us humanity's soul if if such a thing exists which we don't know it might you know but like this even if you're not religious like this should you know this will bore i imagine every single person listening but like on the really like if i don't know just like the karma whatever you want to call it like this this stuff is mounting up and we're just not doing anything to address it i mean without adding any more gruesome details i would i would say one of the things that's totally crazy to me is for decades now some animal advocates have been going to work undercover in these factory farms to film and expose the conditions going on.

43:07And of course, you'd expect they would see the same cages and the same routine standard abuses. But one of the things that's wild to me is these investigators choose these farms at random. So they don't get reports. They don't learn that this farm is uniquely bad. They just go around, see where they can get a job. They get a job and they go to that farm. Almost without fail, they film sadistic abuse. They're often only at these places for like three months. And in that period of time, they almost always find some kind of crazy sadistic abuse. Now, whether that's because the workers started out as sociopaths, sociopaths or sociopaths, or whether it's just because, you know, when your job requires you to do these horrific things, you know, and maybe for instance, you have to, you know, package up a million chickens over the course of several days, and some of them start to flap their wings and try and get away, and you get frustrated, you know, and you find that it's easy to actually throw the chickens into the crate rather than to rather than to put them in gently and so it just it just encourages this crazy level of personal abuse that you know we only seen the tip of the iceberg i mean these investigations have captured less than one percent of these farms less than one percent of the time and still we have a huge litany of these abuses caught on camera one thing i will do is like in the show notes of this like i'm going to provide a bunch of resources for those of you who do want to actually go down this rabbit hole it's not a fun rabbit hole but I if you feel like it's sufficiently like we need more people going down the rabbit hole to understand this basically um so one thing I've noticed since I've started like tweeting about this more actively um that gives me a some kind of like glimmer of hope is how uniformly this topic upsets people across the political spectrum i was expecting you know i you know it doesn't surprise me that people who are like more like into social justice and all sort of left leaning would be upset by this but i noticed there were a bunch of like what i would consider almost far-right accounts um where like we're retweeting these or commenting saying this is the worst thing ever um religious people non-religious people everyone it seems across the board is like this sucks why are we doing this this is bad for everyone and everything if there's so many ways so why is it like in fact like there was a study in 2022 84 percent of democrats said they would support like a law in their state completely banning farmed animal confinement and 76 percent of republicans so this is truly a bipartisan thing so then why is it so entrenched i mean i know we've partially covered this talking about regulatory capture but like let's like really dig into this i want to understand what are the incentives that have got us like stuck and you know as we i often say in this podcast like it's moloch right there's this moloch trap this game theoretic trap that we're stuck in is it is it just simply because the meat is so cheap or what is the reason yeah well i mean first i completely agree that the thing that gives me hope is that almost everyone thinks this is wrong i mean there are just there are very few people who are excited about factory farming uh there was a survey the european union did where it found that 89 percent of europeans thought they should ban the individual caging of animals i mean 89 that's across the board that's crazy and then the european union did that survey and they they didn't move forward with their plans to ban the caging and i think the reason is the same as the reason we always say which is just this incredible capture by by of the political process by industry coupled with complete public ignorance so i think if every night on the news or every day on social media people were confronted with the realities of factory farming i don't think we'd have it for that much longer i mean i think if you if you kept having to see it and kept having to realize where it came from or even if they had to have accurate labels on the products i mean they just had a photo of the crate the pig had been in like on the pork product like i don't think people would buy it like uh so it relies on this total lack of transparency and that's reinforced by things you mentioned, like the ag-gag laws that actually ban you from providing transparency.

47:15And it's reinforced by this political capture where I think it works because, again, the calculus of these politicians is no one's voting based on this. The calculus is, yeah, everyone hates it, but they're instead going to vote on the latest cultural war issue or inflation or the economy or whatever, and they're not going to vote on this. And so on this one issue, I can give a sop to the lobbyists I can give a sop to this very narrow constituency who really cares about this one issue, really cares about keeping animals in crates and that's how it continues and I think the way it will change is when people start saying to their politicians, I am actually going to vote on this issue, I am actually going to hold you accountable on this issue and again, this is across the board, I mean Democrats have been just as bad as Republicans on this where there are plenty of Democratic Senators who basically serve as stooges for the factory farming industry and they think they can get away with it because they assume that no one is watching, no one's paying attention.

48:06So the combination of that lack of transparency and that capture the political process, I think, is the trap we're currently in, but also hopefully the way out of it. So you say they're acting as stooges. What does that mean? Are they literally being paid by Tyson or Smithfield or whatever big corporation? What is incentivizing them specifically? Is it just straight up money in their pocket? Well, some of it's money. I mean, certainly in the US system where there's a lot of money in politics, these are major campaign contributors. And within the agriculture sector, the largest campaign contributors are the big agribusinesses.

48:40And by contrast, the small farmers who are still clinging on trying to do things the right way are contributing nothing because they don't have any extra money to contribute. You know, it's the very profitable factory farming corporations that are giving all the money. But it's not just the money. I mean, I think as well that the factory farm lobby has been very effective at positioning itself as the voice of farmers. and so there is this idea and we saw this mythology in our society where we think of the hard-working farmer salt of the earth exactly you know these are these are the the greatest the greatest people and the politicians are really afraid of them i mean not just because they're held in popular esteem but also because they're very good at organizing so i mean for instance the european union was proposing a few regulations that farmer farm lobby groups didn't like and they immediately sent flotillas of tractors into Brussels and clogged up all the streets with tractors.

49:30And then the European Union said, sorry, sorry, we didn't mean to try and regulate you, you know, we'll back off that. And so they've long had this kind of agricultural exceptionalism where it's basically understood by politicians, you can't touch these guys. It was, I even remember Bob Dole, who was the Republican Senate majority leader, who actually was a huge advocate for humane reforms. He passed a number of landmark pieces of legislation. and yet he still said the one group i won't mess with are the farmers like it's you know i'm still deeply afraid of them so so what i'm a little confused about is i from what i understand it's not the small farmers that are doing these worst practices it's the big corporations so then it's but it sounds like you know when you describe this this protest in brussels that's mostly small farmers who are doing that so is it that any are they being misinformed that these laws are being you know actually against them when actually they're meant to hurt them you know any any like pro-welfare law or is it actually that the pro-welfare laws are also hurting the small farmers too so i i think it's a mixture so i should say that the protests in brussels were not specifically over farm and welfare reforms they were other kinds of regulations but what regulators interpret from that is we can't regulate anything anything at all including All regulation is bad.

50:47Yeah, and so I actually think it's the case that for a lot of the small farmers, yeah, they don't want environmental regulations. They don't want all these other things. But no, they'd be fine with the animal welfare regulations, but they get thrown into that heap. And so it gets thrown in the whole thing of like big government regulations are bad. You know, we're against it. The other part of the picture is that there are a lot of industries that are dependent on factory farming. So if you are growing soy or corn, it's probably going to factory farms. and it would be bad for you if the factory farms went away because they wouldn't need your soy and corn anymore.

51:17If you're selling agricultural equipment, it might be going to them. If you're a small town bank, then you're probably lending to factory farming operations. So this whole economy has developed around it. Now, to me, it's still kind of crazy because that economy wouldn't have to go away. I mean, if we had higher welfare farming, they would still need loans. They would still need some feed, maybe not as much monocrop, soy and weed. and they would still need a whole economy around it, but it would be a change and different people would benefit and some people would not benefit. And so I think a lot of it is this resistance to change.

51:50A lot of it is the idea that the status quo is working quite nicely for this small group of people. And then there really is a degree of these lobbies not representing the people who they purport to represent. So an example would be the American Farm Bureau claims to represent something like 10 million farmers. There are not 10 million farmers in America. Most of the people it represents are actually people who bought insurance policies through the Farm Bureau, who presumably do not care one way or the other about farm animal welfare regulation. But when the Farm Bureau goes up to Congress, they don't say that.

52:19They say, we've got 10 million members who are mad about this. You know, the European Farm Lobby claims to represent something like 20 million farmers. Again, they're not actually members of the organization. That's just roughly how many farmers there are in Europe, and they claim to represent them all, and that goes uncontested. So within the lobby space, basically the small farmers almost don't have a lobby at all. I mean, there are a few really small grassroots groups trying to represent their interests, and they support reforms. They absolutely support reforms. But because the small, hardworking farmers have either been driven out of business entirely or are just hanging on by a thread, they don't have the money or the time to go to Washington, D.C.

52:52and lobby their politicians. By contrast, the Farm Bureau is very good at finding those 1 ,000 factory farmers out there who stand to lose a lot and sending all of them to Washington, D.C. at the same time. And the senator says, oh, my God, there are 1 ,000 farmers here who are mad at me. you know, not realizing these are just the factory farmers. They don't represent the entire constituency, but they're the ones who are really, really worked up about it. So yeah, one of the most egregious examples I've seen of this, I kind of willful, like misleading of people of like what small farmers, like bucketing small farmers and big factory farmers into the same thing and misleading people that their interests are aligned when actually they're often quite misaligned is this EATS Act thing.

53:33Can you explain what that is? Because that's maybe going to pass this year and might be one of the worst sort of steps backwards for American farming that I've ever seen. Yeah, that's absolutely right. So, I mean, the hopeful story behind this, I'll start with, was that as people started to realize the conditions on these factory farms, particularly with gestation crates, they first went to their politicians and tried to get reformed. And state politicians had no interest. They said, you know, we're captured by the industry. But a number of states in the U.S. allow for ballot measures. They allow for issues to go directly to the voters.

54:05And so advocates took this issue directly to the voters, first in a number of red states. First it was in Florida, and then it was in Arizona. And each time they went overwhelmingly, I mean, people overwhelmingly, even in these red states, said, yeah, ban the crates. The gestation crates? The gestation crates, specifically. And when was this? So that was, Florida was 2002. Arizona, I think, was 2006. So this was a while back. The problem with, or the constraint to those laws, was that they only banned crates within the states. So the first thing that immediately happened was the Arizona pork producers using crates said, no worries, we'll just move over to Nevada.

54:36We'll just cross over the border and we'll sell our pork back into Arizona. And so because of that, advocates said, okay, the next step we need to do is we need to actually ban the sale of this cruelly produced meat in the state as well. We can't just ban the crates. We need to ban meat coming from crated systems elsewhere. And so they passed laws like that first in Massachusetts, then in California, and since then in a few other places, elements of those laws, like in Michigan. And the industry got really threatened by this. The industry realized, shit, someone has finally worked out a way to harness the popular will to not have these crates.

55:10And the first thing they did was filed a ton of lawsuits. They probably filed six or seven lawsuits so far. One of them made its way the whole way up to the Supreme Court. And to show you the power of this industry, the pork producers not only got on board every industry group in DC, they had the American Chamber of Commerce, the Petroleum Institute, all of them said, you know, we're with you in solidarity against these regulations. They managed to get the Biden administration on their side. So the Solicitor General of the United States appeared before the Supreme Court arguing on behalf of the pork industry on their right to knock down state laws stopping the crating of pigs.

55:47I mean, that's the just kind of surreal nature of this. I'm sure almost no one has any idea. I mean, no one who voted for Biden was voting for this, but they also don't know what even happened. You know, so that's how they get away with it. And so anyway, despite all of that, the industry lost. So the Supreme Court, a majority, both conservative and liberal justices, said, yeah, states absolutely have a right to do this. It's well within their power. It's something they can do. Voters, it's a very democratic process. Democratic process. It's a democratic process. And just because it costs your industry a little bit doesn't make it unconstitutional.

56:15Now, the moment that happened, pork producers went across the street to Congress, and they said, Congress, you need to undo this. you need to effectively overturn the supreme court ruling and at a federal legal level preempt all these state laws knock them out now normally when congress preempts a state law or set of state laws it does so because it's introducing its own standards so sometimes it says okay we've got a whole bunch of different you know fuel emission standards in these different states let's just harmonize that natural nationally let's just get our own standards in this case i think it's one of the only cases i know with the seven what congress is proposing to do is not to create their own standard, but to create no standard.

56:52And so to knock out these state laws and have nothing in their place, to just say it again, it's completely back to the pork industry to do whatever they want. And the really wild thing about this is they've gotten all these, I mean, they've gotten both Democrats and Republicans on board, but they've gotten all these states' rights Republicans to sign on to this idea of knocking out state laws that they don't like with the federal preemption power, which is about as un-Republican an idea as you can find. And at this point, you know, so first I had this thing of the EATSA. They knew that wouldn't actually pass on its own in Congress.

57:24But every five years, the Farm Bill comes up. And the Farm Bill is considered a must-pass piece of legislation, because it's got the huge billions in subsidies for the agriculture industry, and billions in food aid. So you get Republicans love the farm subsidies, Democrats love the food aid. I mean, obviously not all Republicans and Democrats, but many. And so it always passes. And so they said, we'll just slip it into there. So we'll put this provision in the Farm Bill. And if you can't get it out of the Farm Bill, no one's going to veto the bill based on this and so it'll pass through five that's exactly what they're trying to do right now and the other perverse thing about it is i was like playing watching what like um the hearing with brooke rawlins who's the new um the new agriculture appointee of trump's administration and she was claiming like as she was talking about the eats act i mean it's it's here to support small farmers i'm all about the small farmer but it's like she's lying through her teeth because it's literally the the small farmers aren't the ones doing this they aren't they aren't the ones they're in fact the ones being squashed out and like steamrolled by the factory farms by the industrial the big industrial lobby because, and you know, they're already suffering, and this, if the EATSAC passes, it's going to give them even more market share, which is going to crush the small farmers further.

58:39So it's literally a complete moral inversion. It's a lie. It's like a straight up lie. Why aren't the small farmers seeing this? Or are they? Well, some of them are. I mean, so some of the strongest lobbyists against us have been small pork farmers. There have been a whole bunch of them going to Congress and saying, please, this is a market for our value added product. We can make more money by selling into California, Massachusetts with these standards, this actually puts us on more of a level playing field. We don't have to sink to the depths of factory farming to sell onto the commodity market.

59:11And so they've been making that argument. And there are, in fact, the House Agriculture Chairperson, who is one of the chief people fighting this, the biggest pork producer in his own district is a small farm producer. They're against this. But he has repeatedly said, the National Pork Producers Council wants it. The national industry wants it. And so basically, these politicians just don't care what these small farmers think. I mean, I think what they have realized is the small farmers are not politically organized. They don't represent any real threat. They're never going to fund a primary challenge against them.

59:42They're never going to get out and organize because they don't have that kind of organizing ability. And by contrast, they've heard loud and clear from the Farm Bureau, the National Pork Producers Council, all the big farm lobbies that if you don't back us on this, we're going to go and fund a primary challenge against you and we're going to get you kicked out. And so if they're just thinking about what's in my own selfish interest it's doing this i mean great case in point was brooke roland's at that hearing she said you know i hadn't heard about this issue until a couple of weeks ago and she'd only heard about it clearly because she went around these senators offices and they all said like oh you need to back this you know this is this is this is critical this is critical and so she just towed the line she just said like oh yeah sure you know you guys want it yeah absolutely we'll knock these out it's it's this crazy this crazy reality where it's like as you say then then they say it's for small farmers that's for small farmers which you know there's no definition of what a small farmer is i mean i guess if they think you know 100 000 pigs are small then then yeah it helps those farmers i want to also just double click on these these ag gag laws as they're called which are basically um laws that were created to prevent uh transparency and what's going on because again maybe people don't realize this but like in in the early 2010s under the the the argument they used for this was protecting farms from competition they came up with these laws that first of all made it illegal for anyone to um take photographs or videos of of agricultural facilities without the owner's consent so any third party basically um or secondly to gain access to agricultural facilities under false pretenses so like hey i want to come work on a slaughterhouse or in a farm um because actually I want to document what's going on.

1:01:20Like that was made illegal. So like this, again, like this is an example of like twisting government, which is meant to be the sort of safeguard between consumers or like unrepresented stakeholders, like animals or whatever, from the worst excesses of corporate evils, doing the exact opposite, like using law to like help the big guys do even more evil. Now, some of those I think have been overturned. So what happened so that they were overturned? What went right there? Yeah, so the first incarnation of these laws, the factory farming industry basically said, you can't criticise us. They said, if you want to come on, literally some of these laws said, if you want to come on a farm and film to make us look good, that's totally fine.

1:02:05But if you make us look bad, that's illegal. Yeah, we'll see you. Now, thankfully, that is very clearly unconstitutional under the First Amendment. It's viewpoint discrimination and it's illegal. But what's happened has been this kind of crazy game of cat and mouse, where every time a court strikes down these laws as unconstitutional, the legislature is so motivated to stop transparency that they come back with a new one. And so I think Iowa is now onto its fourth ag-gag law, the previous three having been struck down. And each time they look at the court ruling and they say, how do we still achieve everything we want to do?

1:02:38How do we still stop any exposure of factory farms in the state of Iowa, but do it a little more narrowly and do it in a way where, you know, the first time around when they did it, the legislators said right into the record, oh, you know, our purpose here is to stop exposure of factory farms. This is to stop the vegan terrorists, blah, blah, blah. Recently, they've been a little cleverer than that. So now they don't say why they're doing it. They say or they say, you know, this is just general protection law, you know, some privacy concerns or, you know, some other baloney. Intellectual property.

1:03:08Yeah, intellectual property. Exactly. There's some kind of crazy reason. So they've kind of slowly worked out out of time how to take a lot of that. And the other thing they've worked out how to do is to attach ruinous liability. So if you want to go to attach legal liability to people who expose the stuff. So even separate from these laws, if you want to go and work at a farm that contracts with Tyson Foods or one of the other big ones now, you will be presented with a contract that says, I certify that I'm not going to film in here. No matter what I see, I will not expose it publicly. And if I do, I acknowledge that I'll be sued for a lot of money.

1:03:41And so they've now created something, even when they don't have ad gag laws, they now have these contracts in place that basically make it impossible for people to expose what they're doing publicly. So, yeah, it's kind of like, you know, everyone was up in arms about some of the whistleblower contracts that they made, for example, OpenAI employees sign, right? This is even more overt. Like that makes that seem like chump change. Yeah, that's right. That's right. And, you know, in that case, you at least have, like, computer engineers who are probably, you know, in many cases, independently wealthy enough that they could, like, afford to do it if they really wanted to.

1:04:13Now, it sucks they're going to have to lose their shares. But, like, in this case, you've got a bunch of really poor workers who know they can absolutely not afford to be sued by a giant corporation. Like, that is the last thing they can afford for them and their family. And so no matter what they see, there is no way these people are going to expose the public. I mean, that's exactly the system they have intentionally created. All right. So, I mean, hopefully we've sufficiently painted a picture to people of just how bad this situation is. But there are solutions and there's actually been an incredible amount of progress made, particularly in countries in Europe.

1:04:48The UK itself is making some headway. So perhaps first, can you talk about sort of the most, what are the different methods that have been used to improve welfare standards? Totally. Yeah, I mean, this is an important point. There is hope for change. I mean, I think that people often get despondent, thinking about the scale of factory farming suffering and their inability to do anything about it. But people have managed to do things about it. And, you know, as much as the system looks strong, it is deeply vulnerable because it is using practices that are almost universally unacceptable. You know, almost universally people disapprove of what they're doing.

1:05:28So some of the more exciting reforms we've seen. First, at the legislative level, we've seen a number of European countries moving away from the worst factory priming practices. The UK long ago banned gestation grades. Germany is now phasing them out. A number of other European countries are doing so, and the European Union is considering doing so. We have seen the practice of chick killing that I mentioned earlier, of killing all the male chicks when they're born. That's now on the way out. So France and Germany have banned that, and it's being phased out across Europe. At the corporate level, we've seen a huge amount of progress with major corporations being pressured by their customers and investors into adopting new animal welfare standards.

1:06:07So for example, McDonald's recently announced that it is 100 % cage-free in its egg supply in the US, Canada, and Europe. That's in the US alone over 7 million hens out of cages just thanks to McDonald's. Costco, one of the largest retailers in the US, is almost 100 % cage-free as well. And so are a host of other businesses. How verifiable are those? Well, it's verifiable in the sense that they are publicly proclaiming it to their investors. and I think the good thing is that these big companies they have a general counsel's office that if they want to commit fraud on the public and their investors will probably stop them and so it's not normally the sort of half truths you get around factory farming is we don't say anything about the conditions and we just know you'll assume they're not on factory farms and they can get away with that but I think they know that when they put on their website or on their packaging this is 100 % cage free that is actually a real claim that could actually expose them to legal liability.

1:07:07So I feel relatively confident they're actually doing it. Does like McDonald's own its chicken farms? No, no. So this is, I mean, part of how these factory farms have escaped any kind of pressure in the past is that they're not selling directly to consumers. And so the fact that, you know, there's this kind of complicated process whereby you have an integrator, like a Tyson Foods, that owns parts of the process, not the whole process they don't even own the farms and then it it goes through to someone like a mcdonald's they produce for the mcdonald's so what uh has happened more recently is these consumer facing brands like the fast food chains the retailers have said we're going to adopt standards and you know the funny thing that happened is for years these producers would say we couldn't possibly do anything differently it's completely impossible it's and then the moment that mcdonald's said we want to do things differently they immediately fell in line i mean it was it was just like Like, so at every point of the way, particularly in the US, where the legislative process has really not worked for farmed animals, we have consistently seen that when corporations make a move and actually require it of their suppliers, they can do it overnight.

1:08:11I mean, they can immediately tell these guys they have to do it because these suppliers are completely dependent on them. So they're the ones who have the power in the food supply chain and they're the ones who ultimately need to take that responsibility. So like McDonald's, are they working with a company like Tyson? Well, in the case of eggs, my understanding is they are primarily working with Cargill. And so Cargill is then either producing the eggs itself or working with other egg producers and saying, we'll ensure that you have this many cage-free eggs available on these markets by this time.

1:08:41So technically, there's a logistical challenge, but it's not that challenging. But again, if there's no transparency in what's actually going on inside the farms, how do they know? Well, again, I think this is where I feel good about the companies making these proclamations public because I do think there's a real liability for them that if they came out and said it's verified at the home of the cage free and someone went and did an investigation on their farm and said I can tell you otherwise that would create real issues for them and you know the other thing for what it's worth is having talked to a lot of people in the industry this is a real transformation going underway in terms of cages so I've been to industry trade shows where they have you know I've talked to the cage suppliers who sell cages and they've said we're no longer selling cages in the US.

1:09:23We haven't sold them in years in the US. And instead, we're only selling cage-free systems. That's the only thing egg producers are interested in now is cage-free systems. And that's not out of the good of their heart. It's because the retailers and fast food chains have told them that's the only thing we'll have. And in turn, you can follow local news reports. They are building huge new cage-free farms. They're converting cage facilities into cage-free facilities. These are big construction projects. So I think, yes, it is possible that in certain cases there will be fraud and I think in particular people need to be really careful around ambiguous labels like you know we discussed all natural means nothing but if they are making a really specific commitment and particularly if that is being verified by a by a big company is standing behind it then I think we can we can feel better about it yeah it's interesting because it's like working within the system yeah um another interesting thing I learned about was that there's you know there's one you often hear about when there's like a big environmental thing there's often like the divest movement where people are like that's it don't invest you know everyone should divest their funds and that will make the company but there's actually another approach which is working within the system working within the incentives where actually you can invest in a in one of these companies and then have some shareholder pressure because there are like tighter laws there where companies can't like ignore what their shareholders request um you talk a bit more about that yeah absolutely i mean yeah i i think divestment is a silly idea in this space because in some ways that's what these companies want.

1:10:51They want all the investors who care. They want the annoying investors to go away. Yeah, they want the annoying investors to go away and just have the investors who really don't care about this issue. And one great case study of investors exerting pressure was actually Carl Icahn, the sort of billionaire investor. He personally cares about pigs. And so when he learned about the horrors of gestation crates about a decade ago, he went to McDonald's and he said to them, you've already done this in Europe. You've gotten rid everyone you can't possibly do it in the u.s it's impossible and no matter how much your consumers pressure you them you you're ignoring them and so he said i'm going to put someone on the board on your board i'm going to do do a proxy battle put someone on your board who will actually care about this issue within days the CEO of McDonald's called up Carl Iken and said we'll do it we'll do exactly what you want on this issue and it just took one person who actually had some power over the company and in turn McDonald's then really slow tracked on actually implementing that pledge so a few years ago Cali can went back to McDonald's and said hey I see that you haven't haven't followed through on that thing you said I'm now going to put some people on your board and again McDonald's freaked out and now they're actually following through on it and now hopefully we're about to see McDonald's very soon have a crate free supply chain so there is a huge role for investors here in catalyzing the interests of consumers and other investors who often don't have the power individually to move corporate decisions in the way that some investors do.

1:12:15Are there any like clever sort of legal pressure campaigns or like techniques that investors can do? Yeah, I mean, I think that we've seen, for instance, a number of SEC complaints or Security Exchange Commission complaints over the years, looking at what companies are telling their investors versus what they're actually doing. And so for example, one thing that companies will routinely say is when we've done our materiality analysis, when we've looked at what is actually material to the risks to the company, we have found that consumers are really worried about our animal welfare standards. So, I mean, a crazy thing like this was even Tyson Foods, a senior executive there told me they had done internal surveys of when it comes to sustainability, what do consumers care about?

1:12:57And, you know, you might assume it's climate. Number one, it's not. It's animal welfare. It comes ahead of all the environmental concerns. And so that's really, that's a material concern for them. And it's a risk because if consumers find out how they're actually treating their animals, they could desert the company in droves. You know, that could pose a real risk to the company. And so where actions have sometimes been effective is in going to the SEC and saying, look, this company's saying this is a risk, but they're not doing anything about it. And particularly in cases where the company has actually made a public pledge and said, we're going to get rid of crates, we're going to get rid of cages.

1:13:28And then it's tried to forget about it, has tried to say, oh, we'll just stop reporting on how that's going. That's also presented a real opportunity for people to go in and say, either through the SEC or just going to investors as a whole and putting forward a resolution at their shareholder meeting, for instance, saying, hey, just update us on how you're doing on that, because that alone, that public exposure is often enough to embarrass the company into action. What are some of the lessons that can be drawn from successful campaigns to pressure governments into making, for example, improved standards in slaughter methods?

1:14:00Because again, like some countries are actually, you know, I mean, there's no especially nice way to slaughter an animal, but there's a huge gap between like, for example, stunning them prior or like, you know, making it so they can't see what's happening before they get sent. You know, you described it as like there's this thing called the stairway to heaven where, you know, you can, the cows sort of go up and the one gets stunned and then drops. And they don't see until it's about to happen to them. And like, OK, that sounds as ways to go, not too bad. So that's been enacted a lot in Europe.

1:14:35what what how did that you know what were the campaigns that made that happen successfully that can be then copy pasted into for example america yeah so i mean when it comes to slaughter this is actually one of the few areas where regulation goes back a long way so even before we had factory farming we often had humane slaughter regulations i mean some of these have religious roots in terms of uh halal or kosher slaughter uh those were motivated by humane concerns originally really i thought the whole the whole thing was that you can't stun them and you have to let them bleed to death yeah which now in an industrial setting is a terrible way to kill an animal but in the original setting the idea was we had no way to stun them originally at that time right there was no electrical stunning around right and so the idea was use a really sharp knife cut them really quickly and then let them fully bleed out before you do anything else which is the most humane way to kill an animal if you have no future technology and if you're killing them one at a time by hand by hand right person who actually cares now unfortunately as with all methods of slaughter when you end up in an industrial setting it goes horrible and that's when you need to be able to use stunning exactly that's when you need to be able to electrically stun the animals or do something else because you have this incredibly fast throughput you can't provide that kind of individual care to an animal that is dying uh and so the the adoption of these humane standards came with the slaughterhouse industry kind of industrialized first.

1:16:01So well before we had factory farms, we had industrial slaughterhouses. And people started to see the horrors of that. I mean, in the US, we had The Jungle, Upton Sinclair's book on the Chicago slaughterhouses. It was mainly about the abuse of workers and about food safety concerns, but it also talked at length about how horrible the way we were killing the animals was. And in Europe, similarly, we started to see real humane concerns develop around this. And so I actually think it was a lot of popular mobilization. I mean, this is a fascinating case. So in the US, the Humane Methods of Slaughter Act, which is actually, it's a very strong law as far as mammals go.

1:16:33Unfortunately, it has been interpreted by the USDA to not apply to chickens, which is by far the biggest group of animals slaughtered. But this law was passed in the early 1950s. And when President Eisenhower signed it into law, he said, if I went based on the male, I would think that people didn't care about anything other than humane slaughter. So I mean, even in the 1950s, there was a huge popular outcry about this and there was a real motivation to change it and i think the other thing that has aided that is the development of better technology so you mentioned the stairway to heaven that was something that dr temple grandin uh developed initially actually developed in the u.s with mcdonald's so the only way she got that implemented originally was mcdonald's told its suppliers to implement it but it's now spread globally and it doesn't cost a ton more than inhumanely killing animals and so i think that's a big part of how we've managed to get these.

1:17:22But, you know, I think it was that combination of there needs to be public pressure, but there also needs to be a technocratic solution that is actually viable. What about the role of government subsidies? Because, you know, as you mentioned, the farm bill is billions of dollars. What portion of subsidies are currently spent on improving animal welfare conditions? Or, again, like the actual quality of the meat, you know, such that it's not full of antibiotics. Right. Yeah, I mean, I think our subsidy system is deeply messed up. I mean, basically in the US, it was a response to the Great Depression.

1:17:56And there was this dust bowl crisis where really small family farmers were going bankrupt. And so as part of the New Deal, FDR said, we'll give them some money. And so it was almost a welfare scheme at the time. Over time, as all those small farmers disappeared, and as you ended up with a whole bunch of big factory farmers, it became a corporate welfare scheme. And you now have the average recipient of farm subsidies earns hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. So it's this subsidy scheme for quite wealthy corporate farmers. Primarily what they subsidize is the inputs into factory farming. So primarily they subsidize the really cheap production of corn and soy.

1:18:33And they've encouraged the monocropping of those crops in very large volumes to feed into factory farms. They also provide a whole host of other subsidies to factory farms. So for instance, they get heavily subsidized insurance so that if anything ever goes wrong, the government basically picks up the bill uh you see that for instance with the with abbey and flow there are even deals where if the industry overproduces one year the usda will often buy up their surplus so they do these commodity buyback programs where you know we're sorry the chicken industry produced too much we would hate for them to have to suffer the market outcome that any other industry would suffer and so we will just buy that extra chicken and we'll we'll foist it off on local school districts or something you know to force them to eat it and so yeah this is how this has been dropped.

1:19:15As a result, the standard tradition has been there is no money for higher welfare farming. And in fact, the subsidies have had this perverse effect where because they subsidize these huge commodity crops, they've dramatically increased the price of farmland. It's incredibly valuable to own farmland because you can just get subsidies for owning farmland and planting it with corn or soy. And so as a result, pasture-based farming is way more expensive. You don't get subsidies for pasture-based farming. And so now if someone wanted to buy a few hundred acres to do pasture-based farming. The farmland price is way higher than they used to be.

1:19:48They won't get any subsidies on their feed because their feed is the grass. They won't get any other subsidies. So they're operating at this huge disadvantage relative to the industrial operators. And the solution, I think, is, I mean, first, we should probably provide fewer subsidies in the first place. But the subsidies that do remain should be redirected toward things that are actually good for society as a whole. In particular, animal welfare is one of those social goods. and we're starting to see this in Europe. So we're starting to see the European Union and progressive nations like Denmark and Netherlands adopting subsidies for animal welfare improvements.

1:20:19So saying if you want to get these subsidies, you actually need to do something better than you were doing previously. And there is enough money out there that we could fund a huge transformation in these industries. I mean, it's something like$800 billion a year globally in farm subsidies. Just a fraction of that could end crates, could end cages, could subsidize a huge transition away from the worst practices. You say just a fraction. Give me a bullpog. Yeah, well, it's hard to know because the industry inflates the price of any potential reform they don't want to do. So, you know, one estimate for getting rid of battery cages in the US is it's about a$10 billion transition.

1:20:55For getting rid of gestation crates, it would probably be a bit less than that. Now, there would be slightly higher operating costs, but really slightly. I mean, you know, it's heavily disputed, but the estimate for pork raised without gestation crates is it would be somewhere between 0 % and 5 % more expensive at the farm level, which when you pass it through to the retail level could be a pretty tiny increase. And again, the government could even cover that. I mean, you know, the government could provide 0 % to 5 % subsidy at the farm production level for not using crates and essentially solve that.

1:21:29Yeah, because I mean, I think sort of the argument against all of this is like, yeah, but people are already struggling to buy, you know, to feed themselves. People have less like liquid income. Who are you to say, you know, to pass on this cost to the consumer? But your point is that it doesn't actually have to pass on through a more smarter allocation of these billions of dollars of funding. that the government is, you know, taxpayer money, essentially, is just being very misallocated. That's right. Because again, like coming back to like the EATS Act and so on, like, you know, part of the new campaign, sorry, the new administration's push is like, we're going to bring down the costs of everything.

1:22:11Food is going to be cheaper again, and so on. But it, there's a, by the sounds of things, a better way of doing that by just making the allocation of subsidies be less, you know, captured by corporate cronyism, which is what the current situation is, and more effectively spent. Is that a true statement? Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think that's the simplest solution in many ways to avoid consumers having to bear the burden of this. I think, I mean, there's another funny thing that it's not always the case that factory farming has brought down the price of products. So in the chicken industry, this is true because they just have these crazy efficient birds and it has brought down chicken prices.

1:22:50I was looking the other day at how the price of bacon has changed since the adoption of factory farming in the 1970s. And it has risen 18 % faster than inflation. Really? Which is crazy. And so, you know, I don't know whether that has been effectively captured by these industries. One of the reasons why it might be is that it is an oligopoly, the system they have. There is a very small number of companies with very little competition. So, you know, it's the vast majority of pork in this country comes from three or four companies. and they have huge price-setting power. And so I think it is, you know, if you combine antitrust action at the same time with these reforms, I think you might see some pretty big changes.

1:23:33And, you know, an example of this right now, there have been major antitrust lawsuits going on against the biggest chicken companies. A number of them just settled out of court for hundreds of millions of dollars, effectively acknowledging that they had been price-fixing for years. So to me, the other crazy thing about this is whenever the industry says, you know, you can't possibly force these reforms on us, which would cost one cent more per egg or, you know, 5 % more on the pork. And then it turns out they were price fixing like 10 % up, 20 % up, you know, whatever. Like, it's like, well, we just got rid of the price fixing.

1:24:00Like, we could afford a whole bunch of reforms. So what about technological solutions to this? Because, I mean, by and large, I mean, in some ways, technology has made the problem of factory farming what it is. But, you know, technology can also be an incredible force for good. um so what what are the most promising methods to you know essentially like innovate our way out of this situation yeah i think there's some really promising methods and i'll you know i'll say like the industry often says the only way to reform this is to go backward and we're not going backward but i i don't think that's true what do they mean they mean it's it's to you know get rid of all the technology they've developed over the last 50 years and go back to what a farm looked like 50 to 100 years ago and you know they rightly point out that that was inefficient in many ways and that it didn't properly control disease and all these other things.

1:24:50And the point is, we don't need to go back to that. I mean, there will always be a market for people who want to do things in the absolutely traditional way, and that's great. But we can do large-scale, high-tech, high-welfare farming. So one example would be in ovo-sexing technology. This is a technology which holds the promise to sex the gender of a chick while it is still in the egg. so rather than saying we need to wait until the egg hatches and then we need to throw out the males just work out if this is a male or a female in the egg and get rid of the male eggs well before they've developed into anything that we would care about and it turns out that as this technology is getting developed it can be cheaper the alternative of waiting for the eggs to hatch using up space in the incubator and then having to have a whole bunch of people who literally go through and try and sex them based on what they look like and so the uh you know this is a new technology.

1:25:43Now that it's being adopted in Europe, France and Germany have been at a ban in this practice. About 20 % of European hens have now been, are now coming from these sexed eggs. It's now just coming into the US. So this year, the first US egg producers are adopting this technology. And I'm really optimistic that we will, within a decade or so, see the end of this practice of killing male baby chicks globally. I expect the reason why it will be adopted so quickly and easily in the US is because it actually aligns with profits. that's right that's right it actually costs the companies less to do this this is a it's aligned with efficiency that's right that's right it's a more efficient process and thus you know so so really like yeah once again like if you can align the incentives it's easy and and the key the key piece there is that you need to get the technology to a scale where that is first possible because this the industry is a commodity business run by people who are not tech savvy who are not innovative i mean factory farming leaders have straight up said to my face like look you need to understand the thing we're good at is doing exactly the same thing again and again and making it slightly cheaper year over year and we're only going to adopt a new technology when someone else has proven at scale that it is cheaper otherwise we don't take risks in this business like we just keep on doing the same thing because we're producing a commodity product and so what you need and what happened in the case of an obosexing is you need catalytic funding that came from governments it could come from philanthropies uh to fund the development of these technologies that the industry has no interest in developing themselves, and get them to a point, and again, government regulation can be really helpful here in subsidizing or mandating that transition to get them to a point where they actually are more efficient.

1:27:23Another example I'll give you is in the pork industry. It is common practice to castrate all of the males at birth. Now, the reason they do this is not actually because they're worried about them reproducing, because they don't let them get to puberty, so they don't actually. But the reason why they do this is because non-castrated males develop something called bore taint. Their meat tastes a little bit different because of the hormones in it. People don't like the taste. And so they have developed this process of castration. Now, it would cost minimal amounts to provide pain relief while doing castration.

1:27:54Anesthetic. Anesthetic. But the industry doesn't want to pay minimal amounts. They want to pay zero. So they do this with a scalpel without any pain relief. And that's probably not going to, that part's not going to change. The good news is there is now what's called immunocastration, which is you can inject the piglet with something which controls the hormones in the same way that physically castrating them would and gets rid of the need to castrate them at all and in fact the entire brazilian well almost the entire brazilian pork industry which is the third biggest in the world has now adopted this technology and so they've basically ended castration in brazil the u.s pork industry is behind the times it hasn't adopted this technology at all uh but there is the potential for these kinds of technologies to get rid of these these trade-offs just just to sort of steel man the other side a little i could i could see people being like oh but that's that's unnatural right like oh you're you're you're using a sort of medical intervention like by injecting some kind of hormone to stop them uh you know a puberty blocker essentially uh is that is there any evidence that that is bad for health there there is no evidence this has been around for two decades now the population of brazil has been eating this pork for a long time and we're not seeing any of those outcomes for what it's worth though you're absolutely right it i a conversation I had with a senior leader in the pork industry, I won't say who he is to embarrass him, I explicitly asked why was his company, had his company not adopted this?

1:29:10And he said that was why. He said that the marketing folk, he said he thought it was a good idea and the marketing people had vetoed it because they said people are going to think there's some weird hormones in the meat and that's going to be bad for them in some way. So that's exactly what happened. Even though the meat is already full of... They're all full of crazy shit. Antibiotics, hormones, that's the thing. They don't talk about that. It's already pumped full. That's right. And that's because that stuff is perceived as necessary. They can't imagine pulling that stuff from the system. But when you've got this thing that's only there for welfare reasons, well, that's unnecessary.

1:29:41We don't need that. What about cultivated meat? Yeah. So I mean, I think the alternative protein category in general. So the idea of can we grow meat and other proteins from plants, from fungi, from animal cells, I think there's huge potential. And it doesn't need to be an either or with meat. I know there are people out there who are going to say, I want real meat. I want this. And if they're getting that meat from a real natural process, fine. Where I see cultivated meat or plant-based meat and things competing is with meat that is already coming from a factory. So people will say, oh, this is lab-grown meat.

1:30:16And it's like, well, you're kind of already eating lab-grown meat. You're eating the product of a number of products from a lab that were put into an animal in a factory and sent to another factory in a processing plant and popped out the end. And so wouldn't you rather, if it were possible, wouldn't you rather have that meat that came out the end of that processing process and yes it is processed just as regular factory farmed meat is came out the end of that processing process but had fewer of the additives you didn't want in it so it had doesn't have antibiotics it doesn't need to have all these other crazy things along the way it doesn't need to be bathed in chlorine it doesn't need to do you know you don't need to do those things right it's not full of salmonella yeah exactly you can vastly reduce someone vastly reduce foodborne contaminants that's already the case by the way plant-based meat has vastly fewer uh foodborne pathogens than regular meat has uh they're held in part because they're held to a far higher regulatory standard um and so the promise of these is the world wants more protein i mean both because people are getting richer because people are obsessed with getting more and more protein the world is going to want more protein we need to produce more protein and i think you know the the current default trajectory for doing so is let's factory farm more animals.

1:31:24I think one thing we should do is bring in reforms and improve the wealth of those animals, but realistically, to provide the protein at the scale that the world needs it, we need other sources of protein. And this is where I think there's this huge potential of these alternative proteins to provide at least some of that mix of protein that we need. Again, though, there's regulatory capture happening before this technology has even had a chance to be fully explored. Alabama. has banned it. Florida, you know, Ron DeSantis is like proudly saying, I'm banning this, this cultivated meat thing. Uh, I don't want people to be buying this.

1:31:59It's like, how, whatever happened to like freedom of choice for your consumers. And again, it's, you literally see the poor, you know, the, the meat lobby standing behind him smiling like, Oh, you know, um, Italy has banned it. And again, like, it's not like it's already there. Like it's, It's not on the market anyway. It's in the R &D phase. And it's insane to me because it's like, talk about like cutting off your nose to spite your face because nations are going to be increasingly moving into food insecurity. Yeah. So we need to be looking into as many different methods of producing proteins as possible and see what actually works.

1:32:40Yeah, I agree. Like cultivated meat needs long-term studies. Like, you know, but at least can we treat it somewhat evenly as like you know where are the long-term studies on eating factory farmed meat that's like scraped off the bottom you know sausages pumped full of like absolute crap like the bottom of the barrel type slop that we're feeding humans um like let's like at least be somewhat balanced with this what do you think are the most promising things in terms of preventing the regulatory capture machine from also stopping this potential solution. Yeah, well, I mean, as you say, it's been crazy to see the political roundabouts that people will go on on this.

1:33:24I mean, the idea of banning cultivated meat started with European socialists who said, this is harming our food tradition. This is harming the farmers. This is not, you know, we don't like change, basically. And then it was picked up somehow by the American right. And you ended up with these free market Republicans tying themselves in circles to explain why they wanted to ban a product. And literally coming up with things like, well, the FDA review is not stringent enough. As if that was the thing we really needed. Half the time they're saying they don't like the FDA anyway. Exactly. I mean, it's totally crazy stuff.

1:33:58Inconsistent. Yeah. And so, I mean, look, the good thing is we are seeing a lot of principled conservatives and even ranchers opposing these laws. so the institute of justice which is a prominent free market conservative think tank has been suing is suing currently the state of florida is suing other states with these bans uh we're seeing a number like in in wyoming and south dakota bills to ban kota baby money have actually just died in the last couple of weeks and they were killed off by rancher groups they were killed off by ranches who came and said like this is crazy and by the way this kind of sets a precedent for banning me you know like if that's right if you're worried about like the things like you know our argument for years has been, don't you dare ban any of this stuff, leave a free market, let people decide.

1:34:39And now you're coming and doing this. I mean, the other thing is, even where countries are not, and states are not banning this, the other thing the industry has tried to do is pass these onerous labeling regulations, where they want there to be some kind of defamatory label on the product. So, you know, this was made from sales as an imitation product. It is nothing like real meat, blah, blah, blah. And I mean, the irony is, for decades, the meat industry has been opposing accurate labeling you know that you can't even get literally you can't even get them to put on accurate country of origin labeling because the meat industry has said it'd be too hard for us to work out if we're making a sausage where all the different meat came from it might some of it might be from an animal in canada some might be an animal in the us some might be an animal mexico like you know and we don't want to have to label on there that it's made from a mix of animals from talk about frankenfood yeah right like people's cool cultivated meat frankenfood meanwhile a sausage is literally like they can't even track what they can track what animal meat like it came from where i even saw some crazy thing someone was telling me about uh hot dogs there was some tests done and they found human meat traces of human dna at least traces of human dna within it yeah like that's just one example because like that's like when you come to the bottom of the barrel meat like it's just yeah so it's it's like labeling you know it's one one rule for me another for thee when it's convenient like they're they're pro labeling and when it's anti you know it's not convenient they're against it yeah and i mean you know i absolutely like i think that all of our food should be as labeled there should be maximum transparency for everyone whether it's you know ranched meat factory farmed meat cultivated meat plant-based you know pretend meat i absolute maximum transparency people deserve to know what they're putting into their bodies and you know it's hard to sense make in today's climate and I'm sure there will be so much propaganda from each individual industry but by denying like but at least with labeling like that's a huge step one that people know and see yep so again yeah that's funny that they're trying to use that any um any other sort of potential levers there to help like you know I from what I understand one of my previous guests I had on um it was Uma Valeti who's the CEO of uh Upside Foods which is is a cultivated meat company.

1:36:56And I tried their chicken. I'm still alive, doing fine. In fact, I'm healthier than ever. And it tasted basically like, to me it was indistinguishable from a natural chicken breast. But at the same time, not only are they facing all these regulatory hurdles before they can even join the race, preventing them from sitting down and getting in the starting blocks, but they also have the disadvantage, of course of like it is a new technology it is hard to scale um any promising areas there that you think like what would you if you if you had a bucket of of like you had a hundred billion dollars how would you deploy it well uh i mean yeah i think alternative proteins have immense promise and they still have a long way to go so you know the the factory farming industry got a 50 to 100 year head start.

1:37:51They got all of their R &D funded by the government. And so, I mean, literally all the processes were funded by land grant universities in the US or otherwise funded by governments. And so I think there's a really strong case for philanthropy and government to, as it subsidized the adoption of higher welfare alternatives, also subsidized the development of alternative projects, also subsidized the development. And indeed, that's happening outside the US. So the Chinese government's doing that. A number of European governments are doing this. UAE is doing this. Singapore is doing this. So a whole bunch of Israel is doing this.

1:38:21A whole bunch of particularly governments that are concerned about food security are investing heavily in this. And that really gives me hope because I think we will, in the same way that factory farmed meat is not going to get any better. I mean, it's basically they have optimized every last possible thing out of the system. Cultivated meat will only get better. It can only get better. And it may take a while. It may take a long time and it may require a lot of funding. I mean, this is It's high risk. It's not on the kind of timeline. High risk in terms of financial. High risk financially, and it's on a long timeline.

1:38:50And so the challenge of relying on the private market, as we currently are, like venture capitalists, is these very short timelines. And in reality, this is a decades-long endeavor. This is something where we need to keep working on. A lot of that will need to happen in academic labs, whether it's supported by governments or philanthropies or whoever else. So I see a lot of potential on that in the long term. And again, it's also not an either-or. You know, I think so many people get in this thing where they get grossed out. They say, well, I don't want cultivated meat. Therefore, we need to shut it down.

1:39:17And it's like, look, like that's fine if you don't want it. Like, you know, no one. Don't buy it. Yeah, don't buy it. Like, you know, this is. That's fine. No one's forcing you. It's a very easy thing. Don't let your personal biases affect my freedom. Right. That's right. Exactly. And so I think we need to have on the market, you know, a number of different options. And people will choose different options based on what they care about. And that's great. And if we have accurate labeling and people actually know what they're buying, whether that is from an animal, whether it's from plants or cells or whatever else, that will take us a huge part of the way in terms of getting away from the current system where almost everyone is eating factory farm meat whether they want to or not.

1:39:52What advice would you give to people watching this episode who now feel inspired to actually go out and try and move the needle on this in some way? Because from what I gather, there are many different approaches. Obviously, everyone thinks, oh, I'll just tweet about it. I mean, that's my own weakness. I'm like, I have a big platform, so that's enough. It's a start, but it's nowhere near sufficient. yeah um there are you know i'm also fortunately i you know i came into the money recently and i'm donating a bunch to various philanthropic uh areas but could you sort of like list through the most potential you know there was promising approaches for different people whether it's like you know contacting their congressperson or donating money what what are the most promising things yeah well look the first thing i say is if if someone's not convinced go and do their own research.

1:40:45The thing about this issue is the more you learn, the more forward you'll be. There is nothing to hide on our side. There's a lot to hide on the other side. And so I would definitely encourage people, if you're skeptical about the things we've talked about today, go and research it yourself. Look online, find the information. The next thing is get the word out about it. Because just as you're doing with tweeting about it and posting about it, this industry thrives in the darkness. It thrives when no one has any clue what's going on. And so if you have a big platform, great, talk about it. But even if you don't have a big platform, Talk to your friends about it.

1:41:13Get this discussion going. Then we need to let the people in power know this is something we care about and that we're watching. And so that starts with politicians, for sure. So letting your politicians know, hey, this is something I care about. I'm watching what you do on this issue. Letting corporations that you give money to know about that too. So whether that's the supermarket chain, the fast food joint, whoever, letting them know, hey, this is something I really care about. And again, I'm watching what you do on this issue. And if you have the means, donating. I mean, there are some really effective groups out there doing work to end some of the worst practices.

1:41:43They are funding-starved compared to other causes. I mean, this is a fraction of 1 % of the world's philanthropy goes toward this work. And there is a real dire need for more funding. So people who have the financial means, that one of those impactful things you can do is definitely to donate. Can you mention any? Or would it be better if we just provide a list? Well, I'll mention some and we can provide a list too. So, you know, I would check out, for instance, the Humane League is a group that has been doing campaigning to get companies to adopt better standards. So harnessing that consumer pressure to push companies to make the kind of changes they claim they're going to make anyway.

1:42:19And, you know, then I'd look at other groups like the Good Food Institute, if you're excited about alternative proteins. That's a group that is promoting the alternative protein industry, trying to develop and trying to push back on some of these state legal efforts. uh there are a whole host yeah we could do what we could do a long list of other groups out there there's mercy for animals animal equality a whole bunch of these other groups that are doing really really effective work in this space are there any lessons to be learned from like previous social movements that have either been successful in raising awareness and like making change or actually unsuccessful uh or like caused even a backfire effect um you know like the not that i like to make the comparison between slavery and and factory farming but like there are clearly lessons to be learned because like there was a social movement to stop slavery in america and it took way too long but it eventually worked so like what lesson yeah like what what what did those successful movements do right and what are the ones that caused backfire effects doing wrong yeah well you know the slavery abolitionist movement is a great example because on the one hand i am deeply inspired by the british abolitionist movement which was really one of the world's first modern social movements and they took a practice that was deeply ingrained in society accounted for a significant portion of britain's gdp was integral to its colonies and its global security and they publicized it and once they publicized it and once they started organizing people and once they started lobbying their their members of parliament they created more and more pressure and eventually in bits and incremental reforms they got rid of it and And by contrast, the U.S.

1:43:55abolitionist movement was actually a lot more polarizing. It was a lot less focused on incremental reform, a lot less focused on what was politically possible, inadvertently helped bring about a civil war that abolished slavery. But that was not what they were trying to do. I mean, they were out there. And I think part of the lesson there is the British abolitionists were incredibly focused on this one narrow goal. They worked across party lines. So a number of the most prominent abolitionists would be considered conservatives. in our modern political parlance. Whereas the US movement, as is often the case, sort of radicalized and became about 100 different issues, many of which had nothing to do with slavery, and also didn't find that kind of broad political consensus.

1:44:35And again, accidentally contributed to the abolition of slavery, but not intentionally. One thing that both of those movements have in common is they didn't obsess over individual personal purity. So there were campaigns to boycott slave, grow, and sugar, but those never took off, and those did not play a major role. It was not that, you know, there were people at the time who said, oh, well, you know, it's just an individual consumer choice. You can just choose to not buy sugar or cloth or coffee produced by slaves and that's how it all went in. And that went nowhere. By contrast, when they organized for political change, that was what actually did it.

1:45:08And I think similarly in more recent times, we've seen a number of movements be very effective in mobilizing corporate change. So I think that's also focusing on those biggest levers of change. political change, corporate change, and increasingly new technology. And to me, yeah, the greatest lesson is we need to mobilize at that level. We need to ignore petty differences. We need to also appeal to everyone across the political spectrum and not make this into some kind of radical movement that doesn't appeal to half the country. So final question. Tell me why solving factory farming is a win-win in your view.

1:45:47I mean, this is something that would unlock so many other problems. We talked about antibiotic resistance. This helps push back against the antibiotic resistance crisis. We talked about human health. This will produce food that is healthier for people to eat. We talked about clean air and water, and this will provide cleaner food and water. I mean, at the end of the day, to me, it's just kind of crazy that this is how we're producing our food, and this is the model for how we're going to produce our food in the 21st century. Like, we're going to have AGI before we abolish gestation crates. And so the thing that gives me hope, though, is that it is.

1:46:23It's such an anachronism. It doesn't belong in the present day. It doesn't belong with our modern moral attitudes in today's society. And so I really think that the fact that almost everyone already disapproves of it, the fact that people are learning more about it over time, the fact that we have better alternatives, gives me a lot of hope that we will be able to end this. and when we do end it, that it will be better for our health, for our environment, and for future generations. Thank you so much for coming. I really, really appreciate it. As I said, the fact that there are people like you who have dedicated their lives to understanding it and figuring out the best ways to move us past this is just so inspiring.

1:47:04So thank you so, so much. Thank you to all of you guys who have managed to make it through today because I appreciate this was not probably an easy episode to listen to, but man, is it important. So yeah, thank you for following. Please give Lewis a follow. Do read the show notes because there's going to be a lot of info beneath in this one, particularly with like calls to action of what we can do, particularly around pressing ones. So yeah, thank you for joining Lewis. And yeah, thank you, Win Winners. Thank you. Thanks for having me on the show. And thank you for everything you're doing on this issue.

1:47:45you