Kip Andersen and Keegan Kuhn expose animal agriculture’s hidden environmental toll—55% of U.S. freshwater, 2.5 planets’ worth of resources, and ag gag laws like the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) silencing whistleblowers—while critiquing industry-funded green groups ignoring livestock’s role in deforestation and wildlife slaughter, such as Brazil’s cattle-linked murders or the USDA’s Wildlife Services program killing tens of thousands of predators annually. Their follow-up film What the Health ties meat/dairy to cancer risks, though Joe Rogan counters with diet complexity, genetics, and urban pollution. Andersen and Kuhn’s data-driven approach clashes with industry "merchant of doubt" tactics, mirroring tobacco-era misinformation, yet billionaires like Bill Gates now back plant-based alternatives profitably. The episode underscores systemic suppression of truth as a threat to progress, urging transparency over ideological dogma in food, health, and sustainability debates. [Automatically generated summary]
This episode of the podcast so appropriately is brought to you by Blue Apron When you find out what this podcast is about you're gonna be like what the fuck Joe?
Exactly.
Um let me say before I even do these ads because I just did the podcast with the gentleman that made the documentary Cowspiracy and enjoy it.
It was a really good conversation.
I enjoyed talking to them.
I think they're very cool guys but I did not have an opposing point of view that was represented on the show.
Now some people from the National Cattleman's Beef Association contacted me and they sent me an email saying that these guys their statistics are wrong.
This is from the same website that they're quoting.
Okay.
I don't know who's right, but I enjoy talking to these guys.
So let me just get that out of the way before I say anything.
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All right.
Now, as I said, these guys who are on the podcast, they made an excellent documentary.
It's called Cowspiracy.
I think it is my responsibility whenever interviewing people like this, and this is something that has sort of been forced upon me over the last few years of having controversial guests, is to try to at least play devil's advocate when I can, although I'm not that qualified to do that in this regard, but I try to do it a little bit.
But I think what's really important, there's a lot of undeniable stuff that they brought up that I think affects all of us.
And I think in that regard, regardless of the arguments, pro and con and a lot of the things that these people are saying they got wrong and whether or not they did, there's some undeniable shit involved in our connection with food.
And I am fascinated by that as a person.
And as a person who has a podcast where I can spread information, I'm fascinated by it.
Fascinated by it.
I think these guys are on to a lot.
I think their documentary is very important.
But like all documentaries, Google it and find out what you believe and what you don't believe yourself.
But I enjoyed it.
I enjoyed their documentary.
I enjoyed talking to them.
They were very cool guys.
And I think everybody should watch it because I think this discussion is an important discussion.
And it's one that we really aren't having enough, not just in this country, but in the world.
So without any further ado, I was done with it.
I was done with it.
I had decided today.
Someone even tweeted me today.
Not even just one person.
A couple of people tweeted me.
Don't say without any further ado.
And I was planning on listening, but I fucked it up.
I'm sorry, folks.
I'm sorry.
Next week, we'll get it right.
They found Nibureu.
You hear about that?
They found the fucking 10th planet.
They did.
It's real, you fucks.
All you people that hated on me for believing Zachariah Sitchin.
The old man was right.
Several thousand years it takes to come near us, but fucking Neil deGross Tyson was tweeting about it.
It's over, bitches.
We came from aliens.
They fucked with monkeys.
They made people.
Whatever.
What am I rambling about?
Please welcome Kip Anderson and Keegan Kuhn from Cow Spiracy.
It's one of those questions, you know, hey, what's up, man?
What's up, man?
Like, neither one answers, but it's acceptable for whatever reason.
We've got to change that.
We've got to change a lot of things.
Your documentary freaked me the fuck out.
Let's talk about it.
Cowspiracy.
If you haven't seen it, pause this podcast.
Go to Netflix.
It's only on Netflix.
I tried to find it on Apple TV and I was like, what?
Only Netflix.
Netflix continues to kill it.
But your documentary is very scary.
It's one of those documentaries where you can look at a lot of documentaries and go, well, there's a bias in this documentary.
And these guys, you know, they're thinking that the negative aspects of this outweigh the positive aspects of it, but it's debatable.
When you look at your documentary, it's one of those things where you go, like, I shut it off after it was over.
It was like 1 o'clock in the morning.
I was getting ready to go to bed, which is not a good idea to plan the fucking rest of your life, think about the future of the world after you see a documentary like yours.
And I'm sitting there going, well, there's nothing, there's not much you can say.
Like when you look at the devastation that's being done with livestock in this country, when you like soberly look at it, you soberly look at the numbers, you soberly look at the amount of land they need to graze, you soberly look at the amount of people that we smush into these little areas where we don't grow shit and we call them cities.
We have to truck everything in.
When you soberly look at the amount of methane that's being produced by cow shit and cow farts, and then the reaction that you guys got when you tried to bring up that aspect of it.
That was the weirdest part of your documentary.
I expected going in that the documentary would sort of highlight some issues that people have already with factory farming and show you, you know, what effect it had on the environment.
I didn't anticipate it would be that much of an effect, and I didn't anticipate that you would get the kind of resistance that you got from activists, activists that are scared of that industry.
That was actually more of the motivation was that these environmental groups, the Green Pieces, Rainforest Action Network, Sierra Club, that they didn't address this issue was more of inspiration to make the film and pissed us off to the point of making the film more than actual facts themselves.
The facts are so overwhelming when I found them out.
But the fact that they didn't talk about this, I felt betrayed.
And then once I started calling them, it became really kind of pissed off.
And also, too, imagine the American Lung Association and you're sitting around board of director meetings, you're all smoking cigarettes, and then you're telling somebody not to smoke cigarettes.
And that's a huge part of it.
We walked in a couple organizations' groups during lunch, and here they're in front of a slaughterhouse eating their lunch, and they're discussing how to save the rainforest.
And it's like, wait, what?
Is there a connection here?
unidentified
They're eating burgers and shit, talking about the rainforest.
You know, another thing that really disturbed me about your documentary was when that gentleman who was a former cattle rancher was talking about his being sued and how the industry sued him and he got in some real deep legal trouble, cost him a ton of money.
But how now, today, with the Patriot Act, he would have never won the case because it doesn't matter if you're correct now.
Now, if you have an action, like you make a documentary, you do something that adversely affects that industry or any industry where they can prove they're losing money by the Patriot Act, you're legally complicit, or you're legally guilty, right?
Yeah, well, so there was a law created called the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, and it was focused on just animal rights activists and environmental rights activists.
And the law says anyone who disrupts a business of an animal enterprise is committing an act of terrorism.
It's so wrong and so dangerous when you let an industry just dictate just by sheer money what people can and can't protest things that people find morally reprehensible.
There's a reason why there's these ag gag laws.
What ag gag laws, if you're not aware, if you listen to this, there's laws against taking film footage of those pigs that are shoved into those cages and chickens shoved into cages and cruelty to animals.
Have you ever watched any of those disturbing videos that PETA puts up where they'll show like a guy like shearing wool and kicking the shit out of the lamb?
It's fucking, it's hard to watch, man.
It's weird.
Is it a sheep or a lamb?
Lamb is a young one, right?
Is that what it is?
Yeah.
These guys, like you think, oh, I'm wearing wool.
It's just, they just give them a haircut.
Bullshit.
They beat the fuck out of those things because those things don't want a haircut.
And they bleed because they're not gentle with those shears.
Ugh.
Obviously, I don't know if it's just one time that they filmed this and it's just one asshole.
But there's laws against filming those things now.
So the only way that ever stops, the only way people ever go, hey man, I'm only going to eat free range this or grass-fed that, the only way that happens ever is you have to know what the consequences of not doing that are.
You have to know if you're buying this factory raised meat, this is how it lives.
Are you cool with that?
Most people are not cool with that.
So instead of fixing it and making it better, they make it illegal to report all this unethical, fucked up, dark shit they're doing to animals.
That is, that's so fucking anti-American at every level.
That's the thing about pit bulls is the real, the ones they use for fighting, they breed them to not have any animal aggression.
You could beat the shit out of them.
They don't fight back.
They're bred to never sort of go after people.
It's very weird.
Anyway, that doesn't, beside the point.
The point is this industry has so much fucking money that they're able to do something that I think pretty much everybody would disagree with, and that's stop you from letting people be aware of the consequences of their purchase power.
They're buying.
Like if you want to buy the cheapest meat, you want to buy the cheapest meat possible.
Thing is, too, it's not only, you know, even if you have organic or the free range or, you know, all these other, more than anything, the marketing terms, they don't let you into these places as well.
How the fuck did human beings get to this position where, I mean, I think it's wonderful in terms of our ability to innovate, create technology, educate each other.
You know, I mean, wow, what a gigantic relief it's been to remove the daily necessity of gathering food.
It's been a gigantic relief, and it's caused the human race to accelerate, to technologically innovate at a before, never seen pace.
I mean, what we've been able to do over the last hundred years has been nothing short of insane.
But the consequences seem to be not thought out and not planned for and no solution in place to mitigate it.
Yeah, and that's the thing is that when we talk about population in the film, you know, and was it 1800 is 1 billion?
1900, 1.5, 2000, 2012, 7 billion just exploded.
And then not only that, the necessity to the meat consumption and dairy consumption and just in the last 50 years.
So a lot of these people have this notion of, you know, even the grass-fed, that's what we get into, and the organic, but they're living in a time where it's 50 years ago, 100 years ago.
Well, that's one thing that's looked at in the film is that, yeah, how do you feed 7.2 billion people?
And the only way you're really going to do it is to eat as ecologically as possible, and that's a plant-based diet, or getting as close to a plant-based diet as you can.
Yeah, it seems like, like, what I like to do, I grow a lot of my own vegetables, and I've been, the last few years, I've been hunting, and this year, eating, trying to at least, exclusively stuff that I've killed myself.
But everybody can't do that.
You know, you can't preach that as an ethic.
You can't, because it's just not possible.
First of all, time-wise, it's not possible for most folks with families or with jobs.
They just don't have the time to gather that much meat.
To feed your whole family for a year, if you eat meat, you know, three or four days a week even, you're not going to be able to do it.
And then, two, the other thing is there's just not enough animals.
There's just not.
There's not enough white-tailed deer.
There's more white-tailed deer right now than there have ever been ever in the history of this continent, just by management, by wildlife protection agencies and fish and game departments, making sure that these animals have adequate habitat and they only take a certain amount per year and things along those lines.
So there's more white-tailed deer than there have ever been in North America, but not enough to feed everybody.
Yeah, I mean, hunting really, because people have brought that up.
They say, well, what about sustainable hunting?
And the truth is that we've replaced most of the wild animals on the planet with our domesticated animals, and we've taken the wild animals' land, and we've, you know, used it to grow, feed, to feed livestock or to graze livestock.
And so, yeah, just as you said, I mean, we've literally replaced 90% of wildlife with our own species.
Yeah, I mean, there's obviously like megafauna, but it's also, I mean, you'll have to look at timberwolves, eastern timberwolves were basically wiped out primarily for fur trade and because they preyed on cattle.
And so then you have other species that move in.
And so you see an explosion of, for example, yeah, white-tailed deer, but that's because we've eliminated all the other species around them.
We've eliminated all the predators because the predators are a threat to the livestock.
And so once you eliminate the predators, now you have all these deer running around and multiplying, and then that's where wildlife management comes in, which is complete bullshit because true wildlife management is getting rid of the cows and getting rid of all the other wildlife.
You know, because elk population has been decimated, but then they've also attacked some livestock in British Columbia, where my friend Mike lives, his neighbor's cow was taken out by a wolf.
Like they were all sitting around from the fucking bedroom window watching a pack of monsters tear a cow apart, like right in this little pen.
Right, and so that's what happened is that, I mean, because that's going back to these environmental organizations, Sarah Club's got a big campaign about save the wolves and all these organizations, save the wolves, save the wolves, but they're not talking about why wolves are on the verge of collapse again.
It's like we got these species off the endangered species list, and now they've opened it up to hunting in Idaho and, you know, the states that the population bloomed again.
And it's because of the cattle industry.
It's not that the wolves have exceeded the ecological capacity or carrying capacity of the ecosystem.
It's the fact that they're competing with livestock.
They've passed a number where the scientists, the biologists, wildlife biologists deemed they would be a healthy, sustainable Population and not be a problem.
And when they get to, you know, what we call a problem, of course, it's when they interfere with agriculture, it's when they start eating livestock and people's dogs and occasionally joggers.
You know, shit goes wrong with wolves, man.
You really, the issue is management, right?
And what does that mean?
To some people, it means like leave nature alone, let nature sort it out.
But to people in indigenous areas like Native Americans and people in Canada, like a lot of them rely on moose and deer to feed themselves.
Like this is where they get their meat from.
And they have to keep wolf populations down.
If they don't keep wolf populations down, the wolf, they already, as it is, wolves and bears kill something like 50% of all calves and the fawns that come out of deer and moose.
So they do, since there's nothing that kills wolves, like you have to kill them, otherwise they get to the point where, have you ever been to like upstate New York and drive through those areas where there's so many deer you have to drive like 20 miles an hour?
Because at nighttime, they're just darting in front of your car.
They're like fucking rats.
They're everywhere.
It's nuts how many deer there are in some places.
And one of the reasons for it, because there's no population control.
There's no predators.
And these are areas where there's just not that many people and not that many people hunting.
So you just get a fuckload of these fucking deer running around everywhere.
Wildlife biologists, though, do believe that the way to balance that out is you have to keep populations of predators down.
And that's why if you go back to history, all the fairy tales, the big bad wolf, Little Red Riding Hood, all that stuff, Three Little Pigs, were all wolves.
Wolves are fucking dangerous.
They're real dangerous.
In terms of recent history, in World War I, the Russians and the Germans had a ceasefire because they were trying to kill each other and wolves kept killing them.
They were getting so many soldiers killed by wolves, they literally had a ceasefire and just went on a wolf-killing rampage.
That's how scary wolves are.
They can stop armies from killing each other.
So I think we all, as compassionate people who love nature, we have some beautiful ideas of what nature is and some beautiful ideas of how North American populations of animals should be managed.
But wildlife biologists look at this with a very sober eye.
And the reason why they're opening up hunting for wolves in Idaho and some other areas is not just to protect agriculture.
It's also to keep these motherfuckers from getting out of control.
Because they are wolves.
They're beautiful.
They're amazing.
I love them.
I love that they're here.
Even if they do jack a giant percentage of the elk population and it's fucking cool, man.
Wolves are cool.
You know, to be out and hear, oh, and see like a fucking pack of them, there's an electrical living beauty in all that.
That if it's gone, it's gone forever.
And you can never bring it back.
And right now it's here.
And I think we should enjoy it.
But you got to keep a fucking eye on them, man.
And when the wildlife biologists, the sober ones, go, hey, you've got too many.
If human beings come in and start jacking and killing people, that's what's called war.
And that's why we have armies, to protect against human beings when human beings do get out of control.
But if wolves were cool and they were hanging around like squirrels and they never killed your dog and they never threatened your children, yeah, it would be a totally different experience.
I mean, look, not that many people are wandering through the woods by themselves, and wolves are usually aware that when they see human beings, they're either in cars or they have rifles.
But I've had friends that were stalked by wolves.
I've had friends that were on bow hunting expeditions where they thought they were going to die because they were stalked by wolves.
Because wolves, if they can get away with it, they will fucking kill you.
Speaking like, say, about Idaho, you know, the wildlife in there is cows.
It's cows and a few wolves, you know.
And the cows take up so much space.
If you remove all those fences, all those millions of miles in fences, millions of acres, and you let the wolves have that land again, and then you let the other predators come back in, then you have a balance going on.
But it's the fences, and that's the, you know, you talk about the wildlife management.
It's bullshit because just by killing some wolves and not addressing the cows and the fences, that's the problem.
But we still, we don't have that perspective of that 200 years ago, the biodiversity and the amount of animals was that much more.
And 500 years ago, it was even that much more.
I mean, living in the Bay, and we talked about the indigenous people literally didn't go more than 10 miles from where their village was because there's so many animals, there's so much food.
Well, the bears and cougars and wolves are not getting destroyed.
They have very strict numbers of how many you can kill, whether it's cougars or whether it's bears or whatever.
And bears are extremely hard to kill.
In California in particular, they've made it so it's almost impossible to kill bears.
You can't use bait and you can't use dogs.
So you have to go find them.
And wolves, I mean, bears are way smarter than you give them credit for.
They smell things a mile away.
They hear things you're never going to hear.
And if you start coming through the woods, they're just going to not be there.
It's not like there's this overwhelming idea that we have to go out and decimate all of the coyotes and all of the bears and all of the wolves and all of the cougars.
That's not going on.
Coyotes are the only one out of that whole list.
You can shoot as many as you want.
Like, people worry about coyotes encroaching upon urban areas and killing cats and dogs.
And my neighbor's dog was killed by a coyote.
It happens all the time.
But it's not like they're out there killing all the bears.
Like, there's fucking serious jail time if you kill a bear and you don't have a tag.
And you can't even kill them in California, cougars.
You can't even kill them.
So mountain lions in California are just running all over the place killing cattle.
The reason why they did it, though, was like when they started killing all these wolves back in the day, when they started poisoning them, they did it because they were dangerous.
Like they had gotten to high numbers and they had realized that as soon as people start stockpiling livestock, that this is an easy place to hit.
And so they would just keep coming back to them.
I'm sure you've heard of the Russian super PACs of wolves that they've had in issues with in Siberia, where these guys, they can't do a damn thing about it because there's 100 wolves tearing apart a horse.
And that happens.
It does happen with wolves.
So I don't think this is something...
But I think we have to be real careful when it comes to just letting wildlife be wild.
I think there's a certain amount of predators that you can have before things get dangerous.
The big one, you know, that the film addresses is the livestock.
That's what's got out of control, and that's what's literally destroying and taking over the wildlife.
So if you're really concerned about wildlife, if you're a real wildlife person, the last thing you do was not only consume, say, factory farm, but that's the whole thing about our film.
People think it's about factory farm.
We don't even talk about factory farm.
We talk about the grass-fed beef.
We talk about the organic grass-fed milk.
And that's what's killing the wildlife.
And that's the whole point of what we jump past the factory farm because ironically, for wildlife, if you care truly about wildlife, and that's what they discussed when we talked to the Animal Agriculture Alliance, they say, they say, people think we're living somewhere 50 years ago, 100 years ago.
We're not.
We're living in a place with 7 billion people.
The only way to efficiently feed people who want to eat meat is to put them in factory farms.
They're factory farms because they're efficient.
They only take around two acres per cow, whereas the grass-fed cow, you're talking about your buddy in Wisconsin.
The guy in our film, he had cattle in Wisconsin.
He said 50 acres, 50 acres for one fucking cow.
One cow, 50 acres.
50 acres.
Think how big that is.
No other wildlife can enter that.
So that's the last thing you would want to eat is grass-fed beef.
The last thing you'd want to be fed with beating is these organic dairy farms that is destroying all our water resources, polluting the rivers, and destroying all these predators and these other wildlife that you talk about.
So that's the last thing you want to be eating is grass-fed beef if you really care about the environment, if you really care about wildlife.
You need to say, either I fuck the cow, screw the cow, the cow lives a miserable life, but you know, I care a lot about more like, you know, about the elk and the moose and the wolves.
I care more about wildlife than I do about this cow.
You got to choose one or the other if you're going to do it.
And if you really care about wildlife, you got to say screw the cow and let's go with Factory Farm.
And that's the whole irony of this whole grass-fed myth that's happening.
And that's what's kind of ironic about the film, and people don't expect that.
If human beings right now stopped growing, like if the population of the United States stayed at 300 million, can we feed ourselves right now with how we're doing it?
Yeah, that's an issue, right, that you guys also addressed that maybe some people aren't aware of is that you can't just keep pulling the same plants over and over again from soil.
When you do that, you deplete these farmlands.
And there's a guy named Dr. Joel Wallach.
I don't know if you've ever heard of him.
A controversial character, but he had this fascinating book called Dead Doctors Don't Lie.
It's all about mineral deficiencies and about these farmlands in the United States have been minerally deficient since like the 1930s.
And they've been aware of it forever.
And so they have to supplement the farm, the ground, with minerals.
But it's barely enough.
It's not good.
It's not good for your health.
The kind of vegetables that you get from those places, they're not the healthiest.
And then we have the greenhouse gases, and then when 50% is cleared away, imagine 50% of that land reverts back to actual wildlife, to actual fauna growing back.
Like, it's one of the things that I realized as an adult, and I used to have a bit about this, is there's just no grown-ups.
There's just a bunch of people that got older.
Like when you're a little kid, you think that one day there's going to be a grown-up and you're going to be grown up as well and it's going to make sense.
Like, oh, one day I'll be all grown up.
But no, you get grown up and then you realize, oh, nobody knows what the fuck is going on.
And we're all operating on momentum.
And somehow or another, the momentum of these greedy cunts has created this environment where you can't even talk about what they're doing to animals.
And you can't talk about how far gone we are.
And we're so disconnected.
Most of us are just, as long as we can go to the store and buy some food, we don't have shit to think about, dude.
Okay, fucking Game of Thrones is on.
I don't have time.
And because of that, these guys have gotten away with it.
I mean, intellectually, not that I'm ever, but if I was intellectual, I would say that ultimately this whole thing is happening.
Life is taking place and it's moving at this very strange and bizarre pace.
I think that ethically, though, one of the bigger issues, maybe perhaps the biggest issue, is how did we allow laws in place like laws where you can go to jail for filming cruelty?
That doesn't make any sense.
As Americans, as human beings, as people that are living in the age of information of 2016, to deny information, shouldn't you know if you buy a pair of pants that that pair of pants is made by fucking slaves?
Shouldn't you know if you went to the pair of pants factory and you saw a guy whipping the people that were making the pair of pants, wouldn't you want to be aware of that?
So how is it any different?
How is it any different?
How is it any different that it's illegal to film someone being cruel to animals?
But really, what's going to come down to is that as long as this industry has money and has money to funnel into the government, things are going to continue.
And so I think it's undermining the baseline of that.
And the little thing, too, is when we tour around with the film, people talk, the politicians are the bad ones, or the animal culture groups are the bad ones, the government.
And once again, it goes back to those environmental groups.
Those are the ones.
Those are the ones that need to be held accountable.
That's why they make their billions of dollars collectively, and they're not doing it.
And that's why they're here.
I mean, that is the one that the animal culture, they're just doing their business.
They're good businessmen.
They got their lobbies.
They got the government.
They got the infiltration now to these environmental groups.
They're doing a good job.
So how about hold people accountable to step up what they're doing and hold themselves accountable whilst rather than saying, Screw you, screw you, screw you, say, you know what, look in the mirror and what can I do?
What can I do to make a difference?
And what can I do with these environmental groups that are actually palpable?
And just from the making the film, they're actually now starting to address it.
Well, it's interesting because if you look at the agriculture business, if you look at factory farming business, like as a business, you look at just the raising of livestock in this country, there's a gigantic diffusion of responsibility aspect to it all because each person is one part of this enormous industry.
And this industry has existed before they came along.
So, you grow up and it seems normal because everybody's buying steak at the butcher shop and everybody's getting their cows from this fucking guy and their milk from this store.
It seems totally normal.
But as you get older, you become a part of that system yourself.
You start becoming a farmer.
So, you take on a job that already exists and it's acceptable.
It's a normal part of your community and your culture.
And then, you know, you run into some problems and you need some loans.
So you get a loan and you expand your business and then you get involved with lobbyists.
And then the lobbyists come by and they say, hey, listen, we've passed a new law that makes it illegal for people to film you while you're beating the fuck out of your pigs.
All right, cool, I guess.
Shit, fuck, whatever.
As long as they can't run me out of business, I got loans.
I got loans from the fucking government.
I got to pay off.
And this is a lot of it was going on.
You're not dealing with individuals that are evil.
You're dealing with almost like an evil concept.
And the evil concept is to be able to take life and to turn it into something that's profitable.
Like to take life and to smash it into the small space possible, feed it the most fattening shit possible, pump it full of whatever chemicals we have that make it grow quicker, and then chop it up.
And I think that we, in the film, we don't demonize people who are involved in this industry because they're all trying to pay their bills, feed their families.
Whoever's made those laws is definitely responsible.
Whoever let that happen, like, whoa.
Having that put into, like, this one thing, if you have people that are fucking, I've seen people that interrupt restaurants and they, you know, you've seen videos of those people.
They get in and they just fucking start screaming about meat is murder.
And like, this is not the place for it.
It's just not.
It's like you're interrupting people's business.
You're making a moral judgment and you might be right in your eyes, but in this person's eyes, you're wrong.
It would cost $10, yet we are the ones paying the taxes on this through the- Vegans aren't annoying?
Because some of them are very people are annoying.
There's a percentage of people that are annoying.
There's no getting around it.
And when you ever met somebody who just started fucking doing something, like, you know, just started, you know, playing tennis, and all they want to do is talk about fucking tennis?
Like, Jesus Christ, man, enough about fucking tennis.
That's how a lot of people are with everything, including becoming a vegan.
You know, I'm guilty of it with things that I get into because when I get into things, that's all I want to talk about.
And when people find that moral high ground in particular, they tend to fucking plant a flag and blow trumpets.
And so when you say to someone, hey, you know, it's not because I'm paying taxes on your burger, they're like, oh, dude, fuck off.
You know, this is not the way to talk to people because they don't want to hear it.
Even if you're making sense with your facts and your statistics, most people, first of all, if they haven't seen your documentary or many other documentaries, whether it's Food Inc.
or whether it's King Corn or whether there's a series of them that you can watch that sort of give you this complicated, multifaceted picture of what's going on with food in this country.
Well, yeah, you don't really have to put a spin on it.
You know, when you break down the actual numbers as far as like how, well, that was the other thing that was incredible, when you show how much area you need to grow plants versus how much area you need to grow livestock to feed the same amount of people.
In the U.S., we have federal lands that's managed by the Bureau of Land Management, BLM, and that land belongs to all of us.
So you can get a permit to mine on that land.
You can hunt and fish and shoot guns and ride ATVs and all that sort of stuff because it's owned by all of us.
But you can also get a permit to graze livestock.
And so ranchers get these permits to graze livestock on federal lands.
They pay a fraction of what they would normally pay.
So they're basically subsidized by all of us.
And so then Bundy and his cronies all wanted to have, they're saying, no, you know, they hadn't paid their, they're basically their fees.
And so BLN took their cattle and said, hey, you haven't paid.
You know, you're basically stealing from the U.S. citizens, you know, by grazing animals illegally.
So they did their whole coup and, you know, trying to overthrow the government.
I mean, it's just, it's nuts.
But so again, this is, and what's going on right now in Oregon, same sort of thing is that they believe that this land is for them to use because no one else is up there and so they can graze their cattle.
And it's like, well, right now they're cutting down fences and wildlife refuges to graze cattle.
It's like, I mean, it's just the, it doesn't benefit ecology in any way.
Now, this federal land, when you say that their animals can graze on it for a fraction of the cost, a fraction of the cost of doing it on private land.
Is that what you mean?
Yeah, exactly.
But federal land is owned by all the people, so shouldn't it be kind of a fraction of the cost if you do hand out permits?
Like if you want to, like you could use that land to go camping, to hike, to do, because it's all, this is where Theodore Roosevelt, when he was in office, he was very controversial because one of the things that he did is he wanted to protect gigantic chunks of land in this country and make them public land and make it so that people will always have the great outdoors.
You could always go and enjoy these.
You can't overdevelop them.
He had a very amazing foresight in that regard.
He really saw the future in a lot of ways.
And man, they've been trying to fucking sell that shit off forever.
And as recently as one of those guys running for president, Ryan, Paul Ryan, is that his name?
I believe he was one of the guys that was ahead of this idea to sell that land to pay off the debt that the United States allegedly has to some fucking invisible man.
I don't even understand the debt that we have, like to who?
Like what's going on?
The federal bank?
Why is it called the Federal Bank?
Is it a federal thing?
No, it's not.
It's just the name of it.
Oh, what the fuck is going on?
We owe how much?
How do we owe that much?
Why are we paying them that much?
What are we paying them for?
Exactly.
They make money.
What?
We can't make our own fucking money.
What's going on here?
So you can go down a rabbit hole, my point.
But if you do go down that rabbit hole, like shouldn't those people, like, shouldn't you, if you have chickens, shouldn't you allow your chickens to fucking run around on public land?
I mean, the hog industry in North Carolina, you know, we've read a report that said they wouldn't be able to survive if it wasn't for better subsidies.
Because, I mean, right now, chicken in the United States is cheaper, like, you know, astronomically cheaper than it was 50 years ago, even including inflation.
So that's, you know, again, that's just one aspect of it is that we, because people will say that, they'll be like, well, you know, it's really expensive to eat plant-based food.
And so, you know, I've traveled around the world.
I've lived around the world.
Plant-based foods are the cheapest foods around the world, except for extreme remote areas where they can't grow vegetables.
The reason why you can buy a 99-cent hamburger, though, is because of federal subsidies.
And we interviewed Lauren and Ellis from Food Empowerment Project, and that's one of the things they talk about is that we look at food deserts that are happening around urban areas.
People can't afford food, and it's because we don't have a living wage.
Yeah, well, really, it came from war, World War I and World War II as they started producing chemical nitrogen for mustard gas and for chemical weapons.
And they realized, whoa, you can grow plants with this stuff.
The guy who invented the nitrogen that's responsible for like 50% of the fucking nitrogen in your body right now has come from the Hopper method where they take, say, So instead of using fertilizer, they figured out how to get nitrogen out of the fucking air.
This same guy came up with the idea of gassing people.
He gassed the Allied troops in World War I and then created Zyklon B, that fucking gas that they, well, they use Zyklon A and Zyklon B. And he came out with Zyklon A and he figured out a way to make it so it has a very strong smell so you would know it was a pesticide.
So that you would know that you, if you smelled it, get the fuck away from it.
And then the Nazis turned into Zyklon B. So they just took out whatever element that gave it a horrible smell.
That's one correlation, though, but also populations go down in places that are more advanced and places that are high population areas with more affluent people.
Populations go down.
People where they're more career-oriented people, populations go down.
Right, but there's a lot of different factors in that, right?
It's just ridiculous that at this point in time, sex is the only way to make people.
Like, you know, you should figure out a way better and more obvious way to make people than do something that your body's urging you to do all the time.
I'm like, what are we, amoebas?
Like, god damn, let's get past that, will we?
I mean, that's one of the most important things.
Even as important as factory farming.
Figure out a way where it's completely sober and non-pleasurable to make a person.
Where it's not like a desire, like you've been holding your breath for an hour.
Like, That's what it's like with people and they have sex.
It's just such a fucking overwhelming feeling.
And that's how you make a person?
That's pathetic.
It's a biological trick of the highest order.
Mother Nature's a trickster.
Dirty trickster.
Well, you know, that's at least something that's addressed and people talk about.
The thing that I think I find the most disturbing about all this is how few people are aware of the reality of factory farming.
It sort of seems like a ghost that's whispered in the woods, you know, oh, factory farming, yeah, it's fucking terrible.
You know, no one really thinks about it too much because it's not really in our face enough.
And the idea that that now is covered by the Patriot Act, if you do put it in people's faces, that you, I mean, it's essentially like by way of creating a law like that, they've made it so that you'll never make it better.
There's no need to make it better.
And as soon as there's no need to improve the conditions that these animals live under, then it's just not going to get better.
If it doesn't help, I mean, businesses don't operate that way.
It doesn't help profits, it's not going to get better.
And then as far as feeding people, you know, one of the scientists on our film, they said, if everyone did just eat plants, you know, that would happen is that you could feed around 14, 15 billion people.
We're at 7 billion.
And the way we're eating right now, we need two and a half planets.
So right now, we're screwed, but it's more than a population issue.
Well, they have that YU fucking cow thing going on, which I never understand why people want to pay all that money for a cow that's basically like a job of the hut cow.
It's like going to die.
Like its body's just riddled with fat.
Like you look at that meat and it's just like that animal is sick.
Yeah, but the assassinations and everything that they're having in Brazil, it's all people that are trying to stop the deforestation of the rainforest, which is unbelievably devastating to the tune of, what was it, one acre?
And that's the thing too, you look at the environmental organizations, you would think this would be their forefront issue.
Right now you go to any rainforest action organization, they're going to be talking about palm oil and pulp in timber and dams and fossil fuels when still today the leading cause of rainforest destruction around the world is animal agriculture.
You know, when it was kind of the turn of all talking to all these groups and then finally it was this big long drawn out thing where she was kind of stumbling, stumbling, stumbling.
Finally she said, you know what?
You're right.
This is screwed up and this is the reason why we're not talking about it.
And then these interviews are two hours long and sometimes we go to these screenings and you have someone from Greenpeace or Sierra Club and they say, oh, you guys manipulated the editing of the film.
It's like, you know, you watch the full edits of the film.
Oh, all the time when we go on tour, some will stand up and they'll say the edits of our interviews, you know, the most bizarre part and the most funniest part.
They say you manipulated the edits to make it the most funny or the most cover-up and say, no, if you see the longer edits of that, it's worse than it appears.
It's very disconcerting to think that these animal rights are these Greenpeace activists and these environmental activists and all these different people that are involved in this campaign to save the rainforest are also maybe even taking money from animal agriculture.
I mean, I don't doubt that these organizations really believe in what they're doing.
They want to help the environment.
And they do good work.
You know, it's like the reason why we have a, I think a big part of why we have an environmental movement in the United States is because of Greenpeace.
And they've opened doors to be able to talk about things.
And I'm so thankful for that.
But to fail to talk about, you know, Kip has an analogy about the house on fire.
Well, the most bizarre thing was how many, you know, there's a guy named Dan Flores that wrote a thing about bison ecology.
It's really fascinating, and I've got to get him on the podcast.
But his assertation is that the Native Americans, just with the introduction of firearms and horses, they would have probably wiped the buffalo out even like, you know, without the Americans or without the Europeans landing and becoming a part of this buffalo.
It wouldn't have happened as quick because the overall slaughter was fueled by money.
You know, the hide slaughter, I mean, the amount of buffalo hides they were getting.
And this is insane.
We've all seen the stacks of bones.
But he believes that what had happened was there had been a massive decline in the population of Native Americans.
And during that time, the buffalo grew to staggering proportions.
That before that, they had kind of kept them in check more because they had eaten them.
But there was like, I believe there was like a 90% decline in the populations of Native Americans.
It probably was linked to Europeans moving here and giving them diseases that they didn't have immune systems for.
Well, his flores is backs historical recollections of different people who had come before the decline in Native American populations, and they really didn't discuss bison herds.
They'd never seen these million herds of bison like they described in the 1700s.
People had gotten there and been like, what in the fuck?
Just thunderous hills of...
So our idea of that being like, it used to be a million buffalo for a very short period of time, and that was a mistake.
And that was just an imbalance that probably would have been corrected by the introduction of guns and horseback.
But buffalo, they eat even more grass and require even more land than cow do, right?
When I lived in Alaska, you'd see tourists all the time going up to bull moose.
Just think they're going to get a picture.
I mean, literally, they've seen people walk up to black bears just like they're in a zoo.
People don't really understand the fact that animals, and that's really kind of all animals, are potentially very dangerous, particularly wild animals.
We're just so used to this civil environment where people can come up to other people and say hi.
Bears don't just come up to bears and say hi.
They have to know the bear.
They have to be reasonably sure the bear is not going to bite them in the face.
And they know each other.
When a new bear comes into town, there's a fucking war going on.
It's chaos, just like it used to be with people.
So that's the world that a fucking moose is living in.
You just can't walk up on that moose, dude.
That moose is fighting off bears all the time.
I mean, imagine being a moose in Alaska, and you have to deal with some potentially 10, 11 foot tall, gigantic, furry monster that just eats everything it can.
I mean, what does a bear weigh?
A thousand fucking pounds?
A grizzly?
And you think of that thing as just running around looking for you?
You'd be on edge.
You'd be a little on edge.
Some fucking fat guy with a Las Vegas visor on comes at you with his iPhone.
Fuck him.
They're going to trample that dude.
Think you're cute?
You're going to take a selfie with me, bitch?
I live in a different world, motherfucker.
Stomp.
Yeah.
They're gigantic, man.
I saw my first moose a couple years ago in Alaska.
Yeah, it's very strange when you see the diversity of wildlife, and you have to think that all of this stuff...
All this stuff came from single-celled organisms that eventually evolved and changed and mutated and adapted and Random mutation, pressure from the environment, and then they became what they are now.
What a bizarre world we live in.
And I think that that's also a big part of what's wrong with factory farming and what's wrong with our disconnection from our food is that we're very rarely around animals.
And to the point where I think most human beings think of it as like people and animals.
But it's not.
It's life.
It's all over the place.
There's a lot of different life.
We've just cleared off most of it to like all you see is like birds and squirrels.
And you don't even think of them because they're around so often.
They're like, there's another fucking bird shit on my car, asshole.
And you drive off.
But when you're around wildlife, like if you've ever been in the woods, seen like, you know, a population of fox walk by and you see like the mama bear or and a couple cubs and you see these kind of animals like in in the wild and you realize like these fuckers are here they're they've been here they're staying they breed here this is normal they've been this way since lewis and clark like hundreds of years ago they were just like this and they're just like this right now we just never go into that world so we forget that world's even
I think we have a huge disconnect, you know, as you said, from our food and from the natural world.
It's like we live in concrete boxes and we drive in cars and it's like we forget that we are part of this whole system.
And that's, I think, a big part of what Cowspiracy does too, is that remind people that you're part of this system, you know, whether you want to or not, it's like you're part of the system.
You're dependent upon the atmosphere for your air.
You're dependent upon the ground for your water.
It's like you're dependent on the soil for your food.
Well, this is the first time I think our generation, or I'm older than you guys, I think, the generations of the last 20 years, the people that are alive today, let's just call it the people that are awake and alive and paying attention today, this is really probably unprecedented amount of understanding of the consequences of the way we're living.
I really don't think it's ever been like this before, where so many people are so aware of what has been set up in this system that we're born into, this system that we just, you know, we went to school and we got out of school and we got jobs and we became a part of it.
And then as adults, we start looking around and going, who fucking designed the Democrats and the Republicans?
That's it?
These fucking two people, the only people?
And their idea, what is this fucking, where'd this meat sandwich come from?
How can I just go through this spot and I can reach my hand out my metal box with rubber tires and hand this guy paper and he gives me a ground meat sandwich and I just drive off?
The film ends as a real inspiring way is that people are turning on now, you know?
So something just in the past couple of years, you can just kind of feel it, like this transformation of just information passes so fast, you can't hide things from people.
Well, do you think that, do you worry at all that something like that Patriot Act thing could be somehow or another applied to people who make documentaries that expose realities like that?
When we made the film, it was kind of how it went down, you know?
When I, we really took a step back.
We, after we talked to Howard Lyman, that, uh, the rancher, he scared, he scared the shit out of us.
He really did.
And we were talking, once we released the film, should we go to Cuba for a couple months?
Like we were, we were, he scared us and he says, you know, watch out, you know, this is serious shit.
And then, so we realized finally, you know, what are we going to do if we just stand, stand back and do nothing, stay silent?
We're all screwed.
You know, the fear of not doing something has to supersede the fear of one individual doing something.
You know, we have to step up and all do something because if not, what are we going to live in?
In a world full of cows, you know, and that's in a monoculture of cows and destruction and we're not going to be around anyway.
So it was scary, but now at the point, it's been, you know, a year and a half since we released it and we're already on to our, uh, you know, our new, new project coming along right now too.
from the cattle industry like what kind of what kind of threats are you getting oh i mean it's you know you guys should fucking die um you know i hope somebody fucking shoots you guys you know that sort of stuff whoa i hope somebody shoots you guys boys for in the yalka y'all Qaeda Ya Al Qaeda So why do they say why?
But, I mean, again, it's about providing information, let people make up their own minds.
But so we had concern, major concern about the film.
We just kind of let it go.
We just feel like, hey, we're protected by all the people who back us up, who supported the film.
and then leonardo caprio saw the film and got super excited about it they caught in touch with us and they his one of his producers, Jennifer Davidson, said, Hey, Leo saw your film, loves it, wants to be executive producer, wants to take it to Netflix.
Actually, he took it to Netflix already, and they're interested in taking the film on.
But so they, you know, of course, they had major concern.
Like, hey, here's Leonardo Caprio, like A-list celebrity, biggest name.
Like, he's putting his name on a super controversial film.
And so we went through the film again, and we, you know, just scoured it for all of our facts and backed everything up.
So, like, on our website, all the stats that we've thrown out through this podcast and in the film are on our website, calspiracy.com.
There's a fact page and it has linked to every single study and reference.
But so that was a major concern.
Like, hey, once a huge name and this hits totally mainstream went on Netflix back in September and it's just blown up.
Are we going to get even more pushback?
And so far, I think the industry, if the industry's smart, which is questionable, they'll continue to ignore us as best they can because it's only going to draw more attention if they come after us.
Well, that's the awesome thing is that Silk Soy Milk is owned by one of the largest dairy companies in the U.S. because they looked at it and they said, hey, look, we're losing part of the market to plant-based milks.
We should buy plant-based milks.
Because, hey, they're not really interested in hurting animals.
Kind of like when you said you visited your buddy's farm, we thought it was going to be nice and like, wow, this is going to be kind of a weird part of the film because you can see these beautiful cows and it's just one of those, they know their kids are up on the hill, face the other way, and they hang out by them, kind of stare at them, and just this, this, you know, a thousand cows, the visceral, the feeling you can feel in the air of just sadness.
Super stoked that we are making our new film and it's called What the Health, that the exact same thing is happening to the health industry.
The leading cause of diseases, heart disease, diabetes, cancer is from eating animal products and the same thing is happening.
The American Cancer Society, the American Diabetic Society, all these organizations are not telling the information that's coming out of all these facts.
That's, you know, countless medical studies of what's really killing us and causing diseases.
So there's been a couple studies that show, I mean, there's the obvious ones like the World Health Organization just announced that the processed meat is linked to colon rectal cancer.
And that was after thousands of studies, and that blew people away because they cannot believe they actually announced that.
It was one of the biggest things.
And then now all these other organizations, they're slowly, you know, kind of putting it in the back of their website, maybe mentioning it, maybe not.
So we're doing the same thing in this film is that we're interviewing these organizations and uncovering, and it's so crazy how it's like the exact same thing as cowspiracy.
Because we also add in the link that we didn't have to deal with in the first issue.
You're talking about like fear and stuff.
The pharmaceutical company, how they're tied into this trinity.
You have the animal agriculture industry, you have the lobby group, you have the government, you have the health organizations, then you have the pharmaceutical companies that profit off people getting sick from eating their products.
So you're saying the pharmaceutical companies that profit off of people getting sick from eating meat support meat because they are aware, willingfully are aware that people are getting sick from them and they want to make sure that they have unhealthy people to treat.
Again, you look to these health organizations, that's what you look to to tell us the truth.
You look at the environmental groups, they're suppressing this information of the thousands of thousands of studies upon studies that have this information over and over, yet it's not being told to us.
Right, but the pharmaceutical companies, do they even have to suppress information?
Most people willfully ignore information.
So why would they go out of their way to suppress information when it doesn't seem like there's any sort of pressure or trend for people to get healthier?
A ketogenic diet also prevents not diabetes, epilepsy.
That's a huge issue in children.
When they start giving them high-fat diets, they're finding that low-carbohydrate, high-fat diets that introduce a state of ketosis is actually very good at preventing symptoms of epilepsy in children.
What about all the different factors that come into play with keeping a person's body healthy?
Like, I've heard that one of the primary factors in cardiovascular disease is sedentary lifestyle, is the fact that your body atrophies.
As much as your muscles atrophy and your back deteriorates, your heart does as well.
And that a lot of that could be mitigated with exercise.
And then one of the correlations that people are ignoring when they study diet and the diet in relationship to people's health is what are they doing with their body?
What is the physical daily activity level of their body?
And how much is that factored in?
Because you can't just factor in a person's diet.
Like your body is a machine.
Your body is this biological, diverse machine that is a whole ecosystem inside of it.
And if you don't stress it and if you don't force it to work, it gets weak.
It just does.
It just does.
If you don't demand resources, it will slowly deteriorate.
But we explore that too, you know, how much exercise has a role and it's huge, it's massive.
But you still have to clean your engine out.
You have to clean your pipes out, you know, and that's what it's doing.
It's pumping the engine.
But when you have clogged arteries, it comes to a point where it can be dangerous.
And if you just do a clean diet for even, you know, try 30 days or something, all that flushing out of you when you're sitting on the toilet for four or five times a day, or 10 times a day, it's just flushing all the shit inside of you.
And even if your ex starts exercising every time a day, that's trying to process this food that you're putting into it that it can't do just through exercise.
There's definitely plaque, but again, that speaks to a person's level of physical activity.
There's different nutritional demands for someone that has a rigorous physical activity schedule than someone who doesn't.
And when you give your body the same amount of food as someone who's like, say, a fucking sprinter or something like that, or a marathon runner, someone who's constantly burning off fuel, if you give your body, if you have a sedentary lifestyle in front of a computer sitting in a cubicle all day, and you give your body the same amount of food that the person who's a jogger consumes, you're going to get fat and fucked up because you're taking in too many calories and that's a contributor, a massive contributor to heart disease.
That has to be considered always when you're talking about what's going on with a person's body.
Then you've got biodiversity.
Like where are these people from?
Like what part of the world are their ancestors from?
Because your genetics have different biological requirements.
Genetics was only as far as diseases, but as far as diet too, I mean, that's another subject that we get into.
So that's one of the aspects of it.
But going back to the lifestyle and exercise, there's a huge study that just came out.
It's 40,000 people in Sweden.
And they showed that having a being active versus the difference between someone who exercises all the time, who's overweight, and someone who's skinny, who's sedentary.
You're less likely to die from being sedentary and skinny than being overweight and active.
I mean, well, also, you're dealing with someone whose body has gotten to a point where it's deteriorated so poorly that the actual stress of exercise can be detrimental.
Exactly.
Like, there's some people that they actually say, like, look, before you engage in any sort of exercise, you're going to have to lose weight.
You're going to have to change your diet and give your body a lot of nutrients.
Like, you have a really nutrient-deficient diet.
But, of course, osteoporosis, there's a lot of different diseases that people get from having nutrient-deficient diets.
It's a big contributor to it.
That's why when women have osteoporosis, they give them calcium.
But my point about this disease thing, like saying that it causes cancer and all these things, it's not just trying to be skeptical just for no reason.
It's that what is stopping these people from eating nutrient-rich vegetables and really a broad variety of nutrient-rich foods as well as meat?
And if you did that, would that be bad for you?
If you had a rigorous exercise schedule and you took care of your body, drank a lot of water, and you ate nutrient-dense foods as well as meat, what kind of cancer are you getting there?
Because that's really how people are supposed to live.
Like, it's not necessarily that the only problem is that they're eating meat.
That may be a problem, but it may not be.
It may be a problem just because your body's just shit because you're not doing anything with it.
We've been editing non-stop, so it's like running on three hours of sleep that I want to share about how just eating once a week when you already have cancer, was it diabetes, how just like once a week, how it raised a certain percentage of coming back again, just one time a week.
So for example, like eating, if you have a woman who has had breast cancer, by eating one serving of whole dairy a day increases her chance of dying from breast cancer.
Or eating two servings of processed meat a day increases your chance of developing.
It's just, I mean, yeah, a day, though.
It increases your chance of dying from colorectal cancer by 40%.
I mean, just huge, huge correlations.
It's, you know, again, it's a huge, whole complex issue.
Just in the same way with cowspiracy.
When we went into doing cowspiracy, we went in, you know, just looking, looking at the information and just presenting it all and just finding out where's these studies coming from, what are their sources.
then we're doing the same thing with this film.
It's really shaping up to be, It's scary.
It's got comic aspects the same way cowspiracy does.
Well, also in consuming nutrient-rich foods, like in saying that meat is the issue.
Well, no one dairy is.
Dairy is just not fucking good for you.
It tastes awesome, though.
Unfortunately, it's great with cookies.
But it's just not good for you.
It creates a lot of phlegm.
Raw milk is better than homogenized or pasteurized milk, but it's not the best shit for you.
But my point being, how can you isolate that it is the consumption of meat that causes cancer and not the lack of nutrients from nutrient-dense foods along with meat?
And is it an imbalance in the diet or is it meat causing cancer?
There's so much correlation to the tobacco industry that happened about 20 years ago to the meat and dairy industry.
Kind of like how Keegan was saying.
You see these other studies that you'll hear of, you know, the butter fat is good for you, the cholesterol is good for the brain, the brain, grain brain.
And then you see who it's funded and you look deep into it.
Is that where these studies come from and what the, you know, there's a movie out.
Yeah, so it basically explores, and that's a big part of this film.
It's happened in the tobacco industry.
You don't have to prove that cigarette smoking is going to kill it.
You just have to just put a little bit of doubt, just a little bit of doubt, and just like, remember when butter was on the cover of Time, and then everybody, oh my God, butter.
Or, you know, just recently about how lettuce or bacon was more, lettuce was more unsustainable than bacon.
And it's like, oh, God, thank God now I can eat bacon.
And just that little bit of doubt.
And if that's all you have, then boom, you got them.
So the tobacco industry did that for years and years.
And just like you're talking about, how do they know these studies?
Because there's thousands of studies and then there'll be one, two, three of these other ones.
And those one, two, three, oh my God, that's the one I want to see.
Well, I think we could all agree that as human beings, what we need for sure is access to information about things that affect us.
When it comes to health, and when it comes to diet, when it comes to, when you find out that studies, like I used to do this joke about, I'm sure you're aware that the partnership for a drug-free America was funded by alcohol and tobacco companies and pharmaceutical companies.
That's where they got all their money from.
And they would do these commercials against pot.
And I said, that's like hookers doing commercials against strippers.
It's the most ridiculous fucking shit ever.
But if you ever watch those preposterous commercials, like the girl with the talking dog, she comes home from school and her dog's telling her to stop getting high.
Like, that's funded by pill companies.
And the idea behind that, that that could be legal, that you can do that, and then you could put that commercial on television and not say, hey, the pill company, partnership for a drug-free America.
Like, what does that mean?
Drug companies stopping other business.
That's exactly what it is.
And we need information, and we need it to be really clear.
And if you are trying to stop information, like that stupid fucking part of the Patriot Act, if you're trying to stop information from getting to people, that is un-American, okay?
That is non-progressive.
That is something that we shouldn't allow in this age of information.
You can't stop information when it pertains to the health and the ethical considerations of an entire population of a country.
Well, wherever there's money, right, you're going to have someone who's trying to make more of it and trying to stop any information that gets out that's going to prevent them from making more of it.
And money just sort of finds holes and cracks and leaks through.
And that's sort of, you know, like a river or something, you know, like streams of water.
That's what's so cool, like at the end of the film, where we show that it was so dark in the making of the food, of actually making it.
We said, you know, let's look if there's a glimmer of hope.
And then we saw these, you know, these plant, what's it, Beyond Meat and the Beyond Egg.
And then we found out Bill Gates and the guys from Twitter, they're putting their money into these new plant-based foods because they see this as the future.
You know, these billionaires look five years, ten years down the road, and that's where they're putting their money.
So now the money is going there, not ethically, not even for the environment.
They're doing it because they see it's making money.
What they're saying is that you should eat what we've eaten up until now.
Like all the thousands of years of human development we've developed specifically for certain diets.
That's why biodiversity, when you talk to people from different parts of the world, they might require different nutrients because their genetics have adapted to the nutrients that are in their environment.
Well, they're saying, I think what they're trying to, sorry to interrupt you, but I think they're saying to optimize, to optimize your performance, your health, your vitality, that animal-based proteins are more efficient.
And that's the part our film goes into, like efficiency, efficiency in long-endurance athletes.
So you're talking about Scott Jurek, the biggest, longest, the most healthiest, long-endurance athlete right now, Scott Jurek, he's strictly on a plant-based diet because it's the most efficient form of converting.
Right, but you're talking about endurance athletes.
You're talking about skinny guys that run a long time.
You're not talking about explosive athletes.
If you looked at like mixed martial artists, for example, or boxers or explosive athletes that have to optimize the physical capacity of their body, there's very, very, very, very, very few that have vegan diets.
And few have tried it and they felt weak.
John Fitch was one of them.
John Fitch, who did it, I believe, for ethical reasons, also because he wanted to try to optimize his health.
He just found himself to be much weaker when he was on a vegan diet.
We're actually looking into that because, you know, depending on what you're looking into, long endurance, like when Carl Lewis, when he was at his peak, he said he was completely vegan when he was at his peak.
It was at the same time that Glenn Johnson was caught, or Ben Johnson rather.
You know, when Ben Johnson was caught with steroids, Carl Lewis was caught with something too.
And Carlos had been caught with other things before.
Like, you know, when I had Victor Conte in here, it was with the Balco guy, and he sort of explained all the different modalities and methods that these.
He's like, every track and field athlete's dirty.
He's like, they're all dirty.
And he was saying the same thing about Tour de France.
He's like, this idea that these guys are doing it clean, bullshit.
They're all dirty.
So when you say, these guys are doing amazing, they're on a plant-based diet, and EPO, and testosterone, and HGH, and blood doping, and everyone else's, too.
But the idea of people eating things that are easily digestible, that's normal food, like lettuces and grasses and vegetables and meats and chicken and fish.
Because, you know, people always complain that I have these one-sided conversations with people like you guys, and I don't bring anybody in to, and then I'm stuck trying to do it myself, and I'm ill-equipped.
I think you guys did a fantastic job with this documentary.
I really do.
And I think I hope that, you know, as I said, that I think information is the most important thing.
And when people are trying to deny information or restrict information based on the worry that they're going to lose money because they're doing something unethical, that should be a fucking crime.
It shouldn't be a crime that you film that.
That shouldn't be a crime.
It shouldn't be a crime that you show someone kicking a fucking cow or beating it over the head with a sledgehammer like we have seen if you watch those videos.
It shouldn't be a crime to film that.
It should be a crime to do that.
And it should be a crime to support that.
It's fucked up.
It's against what people want in this day and age.
And I think the analogy of finding out that slaves make your genes is like, it really is.
I mean, it's probably worse because you're eating it.
It's a different thing because it's actually becoming a part of your body.
It's just as bad.
Or not worse, or whatever.
It's bad.
Why am I quantifying?
Is there anything else you guys would like to say before we wrap this up?
Encourage people to go to our website, cowspiracy.com.
Again, it has all the stats and statistics, has a link to where you can watch the film on Netflix.
We had a book that just came out called The Sustainability Secret that covers even more statistics and information and behind-the-scenes stuff that happened in the film.
You can get that through our website as well.
And then check out our new film, What the Health.
You can find that through our website, cowspiracy.com.