The Vegan Persuasion Problem: What Actually Works to End Animal Consumption?

Uh, so before we get into our interview... and I might sneeze in the middle of this, trying to make it go away. Watermelon. Watermelon, watermelon. Okay. It worked. Just a quick reminder about the, Our Hen House podcasts, Rising Anxieties comes out on Tuesdays, The Hen report on Thursdays, and the long form interview, which is this, on Fridays. And bonus for Flock members comes out on Mondays. So we are a podcast and we're on YouTube, so please subscribe and hit like wherever you listen.

Today, we're so excited about our two guests. Seth Green is a research scientist at the Humane and Sustainable Food Lab at Stanford, a research group dedicated to accelerating the end of factory farming.

He lives in Brooklyn and blogs on Substack at Regression To The Meat. We will link to that in the show notes, but it's regressiontothemeat.substack.com.

Mariann Sullivan: That is a, that is a great name. I don't even know what regression to the mean means. I know it's some sciencey thing that people say, but

Jasmin Singer: Love it.

Mariann Sullivan: Obviously that's a very clever, very clever title.

Jasmin Singer: We can find out more about that as well. And Benny Smith is the programs manager at Allied Scholars for Animal Protection, where he was the first full-time hire after graduating from Brown University in 2023. Welcome to Our Hen House, Seth and Benny.

Seth Green: Hey, thanks for having us.

Benny Smith: Thank you.

Jasmin Singer: Super excited that you guys are both here and we of course have the pleasure of hanging out with Benny on the reg because he is here in Rochester, as all the cool kids are. Uh, so we're just so delighted. So let's start by...

Mariann Sullivan: Of course Seth is only in Brooklyn and there are just no cool kids there.

Seth Green: There's nothing happening

Jasmin Singer: No, none.

Seth Green: here, so don't worry.

Jasmin Singer: You know what? Mariann and I did live in Brooklyn for a while. Uh, I think it was pretty cool then.

Um...

Seth Green: Yeah. But then you, when you left, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jasmin Singer: Yeah. And then it was like.

Seth Green: Where were you?

Jasmin Singer: What's left? Uh, at that time we were in Park Slope. I also lived in Brooklyn Heights, uh, in the nineties. Um, but yeah, love Brooklyn. How can you not love Brooklyn? It's like, it's like its own universe.

Seth Green: Yeah.

Jasmin Singer: We actually, uh, had an Our Hen House TV show for a while and it's shot downtown at Bric, BRIC, which is, uh, like a TV studio and community center, uh, right by, uh, the right by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, I think.

Anyway, I digress.

It's pretty cool there. Very much so. Alright, so let's start by just telling people about this, this fascinating study that we're here to talk about and then we'll go back and cover some background. So, Seth, can you start us off? First off, this study is a meta analysis. What does that mean?

Seth Green: Yeah. Okay. Great. Questions. So, you introduce this by saying this is the central question, and I just want to point out here that it's so central that we are not the first people to ask it. Um, there are many different ways you can try to approach this. The way we do this is by meta-analysis. A meta-analysis is a study where you take the results of other studies and you come up with a weighted average of those studies.

Like in the ideal case, let's say you add 10 studies that are all about the effects of, I don't know, insecticide treated malaria nets on malaria, it's really easy to do a meta analysis. You just like put those studies into the blender and you come up with an average answer on malaria cases. That just gives more weight to studies with more people in the sample.

The question we're doing is a little more complicated because there are so many different approaches to reducing meat, consumption. You could do like. Um, norm studies or you could change the way people see meat, or you could try to introduce them to, um, this fake product called Elwood Dog Meat, which Benny has done some of with ASAP or before ASAP, I guess.

And then, but like averaging those results together is hard because like, what's the average of those two things? Like the dog meat thing and the psychology thing, like it doesn't really mean anything when you average those two very unlike things together. So we do is we look at all the best studies that's like defined a certain way, and then we group them up by their category.

So we try to get like the average effect of psychology experiments and persuasion experiments and like compare those head to head. That's the paper in a nutshell.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, I mean, it sounds almost impossible, like almost like comparing apples and oranges, but absolutely vital because, because none of these studies actually on their own are really that big as far as I can tell. Can you just give us an idea of, and, and I think you've summarized it in, in a few different categories, the types of interventions the studies you were looking at were considering in how to achieve this goal?

Well, the goal may not be exactly the same, but the types of interventions that you considered, um, to, to include in your meta-analysis and why why

Seth Green: sure. Okay. So as I said, this question has been asked a lot before, and there have been a bunch of previous meta-analyses and literature reviews. The approach we take is we ask, so what are the good papers, say? Like, if we look at just papers that meet the following criteria, what do we learn? And those are like, they had to have basically at least 50 people in the whole study.

So we didn't wanna look at these like tiny studies. There are a couple, like an example of a tiny study is one dorm gets a message saying meat is bad, or something like that, and the other doesn't, and you just compare dorm to dorm. That's effectively having like one sub, one subject in each treatment pool because you're only like assigning at the level of like one dorm's output versus another.

So we try to like not look at any of those studies. We look only at randomized control trials as opposed to observational stuff or things that, like things that watch people do something and then say, okay, now what happened to you? Instead, we try to look at things that assign people to some treatment or not.

Um, and they have to actually measure meat consumption as opposed to what do you feel about meat? Or like, what do you plan to eat in a week or whatever. And they have to measure that at least a single day after treatment starts. We wanna get like some delay. When we do this, when we like limit to just these studies, we started out with thousands of studies, we like really did review thousands of studies and we ended up with 35 and they all basically fall into the following categories. This is actually your question, sorry for all the preamble. Um.

The big one is persuasion, which is trying to talk to people about why they should eat less meat and animal products. We also do a little bit of, most of it, mostly we're talking about meat, but there are a couple things that are like fish sauce or dairy or cheese or whatever. Um, persuasion comes in, i'm gonna ask you like, what would one guess here?

You know, how would you try to persuade people about animals?

Jasmin Singer: Uh, I would, uh, physical violence probably.

Seth Green: Oh, you, that, that's kind of intervention did not make it into our analysis for

Jasmin Singer: Oh, okay. I mean, you know, I think the, Our Hen House is sort of built on the, uh, foundation that we don't know how, that there is no one right way that like, you know, for someone it might be handing them a cupcake and for someone else it might be like, um, open rescue.

Mariann Sullivan: And personally, my bent is always to just try to tell people that there are these really terrible things happening to animals. But I, I, I know that I now know from reading your paper that that's a total waste of time.

Seth Green: Yeah, well, sorry about that. But that, that gives away that, yeah.

Mariann Sullivan: Uh, but you know, what are you gonna do?

Seth Green: I mean, okay, so those three answers were give a cupcake. I would call that like kindness or, or give someone vegan food and see if they like it.

Jasmin Singer: Mm-hmm.

Seth Green: The other ones are animal welfare based. So in the persuasion category, I'm looking at we, we looked at things that tried to tell people about animal welfare, the environment and health.

I think these are kind of the obvious, like conceptual approaches if you're trying to get someone to eat less meat. Although I wanna get back to the cupcake point because there's not nearly enough giving people good vegan food and seeing if that does the trick. I would love to see this studied more. Okay, most studies are persuasion.

We have these three categories, and some things do a mixture of two categories like health and environmental reasons to cut back. Then there's choice architecture, which how meat is served and presented to people. I'll give examples of this. The one is, okay, so you're walking into a university cafeteria and there's like a big billboard menu of all the options. The treatment is that the vegetarian thing is at eye level, like it's not rocket science, this stuff.

It's just like they just put the, they just make the vegetarian thing more prominent at your, at your field of vision. Um, and another one, I love this study. It's a university in Thailand, it's a cafeteria, and they're trying to discourage people from eating fish sauce because people are apparently are eating too much fish sauce for health reasons.

It's like, has too, it's like crazy amount of salt in it. The treatment is that there's this spoon you put into the fish sauce and then the spoon gets a hole in it. So it just becomes literally more inconvenient to serve yourself the fish sauce.

Jasmin Singer: Wow.

Seth Green: That's a, that's a strategy. I don't know. I

Jasmin Singer: I mean, sure. Unleash those ticks that make everyone allergic to meat. I bet you didn't test for that one.

Seth Green: No we did not see any, uh, mass releases of Alpha Gal, although there is a Dan Brown novel with a very similar, uh, plot line, which is like,

Jasmin Singer: Really?

Mariann Sullivan: So far your approaches have been outright violence and and causing a disease.

Seth Green: Yeah. What's going on with that? Why, why, why is that what you wanna do?

Jasmin Singer: I, you know what, uh, I'll, I'll call my therapist right when we're done with this interview, I'll get back to you. I actually don't have a therapist, so I'll get a therapist. I'll call them.

Seth Green: that

Jasmin Singer: I'll get back to you.

Mariann Sullivan: So with choice architecture, I mean, we've had the people from Greener by Default on a couple of times, and that's, that's a more common kind of, uh, or, or more familiar kind of type of choice architecture than putting holes in the spoons. Right?

Seth Green: Yeah, so fun fact about that. Most of those studies don't meet our criteria because they're not randomized control trials. They're like, you know, one hospital gets it and one does'nt, and then we just compare and contrast. Um, they, a lot of Default studies are like one-offs, so it'll be, sorry, sorry...

context, Greener by Default does what their name sounds like. They make things green by default. Okay. And, um, so imagine that like it's a university catering event. The control is you get a choose between a meat option and a veggie option, blah, blah, blah. The treatment is, it says this conference is vegetarian, please email us if you want meat.

And like that's enough of a barrier that people just typically don't bother and they get the vegetarian option, but then there's no delayed outcomes. Back to our, like our inclusion criteria, it's just get the thing you get like the moment you make that choice.

And this goes back to my newsletters, subtitle. What if there is, um, regression to the meat? Which is to say, what if people are like, oh, I didn't have any meat at lunch. I should have twice as much meat at dinner. 'cause I have to like,

Mariann Sullivan: Only, you only wanna look at studies that have, or, or, uh, interventions that have some kind of lasting effect?

Seth Green: Yeah. Or like some evidence that the effect lasts just beyond like the minute that some researcher is looking at you.

Mariann Sullivan: Okay.

Seth Green: Yeah. Okay. So we've covered persuasion, choice architecture.

And the last one is like psychology. These studies try to make people, they change how people think about like what other people think about meat opposed to what they think about meat.

So an example is it'll be a sign at a university cafeteria that's like 95% of your peers agree the veggie burger is a tasty choice. Or like meatless, like our garden burger is on the rise. It is very popular. And then that's supposed to just make you think that this is happening. Like other people are vegetarian.

Mariann Sullivan: Kind of manipulating people.

Seth Green: Yeah, I mean there are a couple psychology studies that aren't quite so manipulative. They're like, we want you to take a pledge and then we're gonna send you daily text messages to make sure that you're actually doing it. And that's kind of like motivational, but I would still call that like psychology broadly.

Mariann Sullivan: Right. Okay.

Seth Green: So those are the studies. So.

Mariann Sullivan: Those are the studies. And as far as I understand, and correct me if I'm wrong, you found that nothing works.

Seth Green: Um, yeah, sorry. We did. I mean, like, so let's all go home.

Jasmin Singer: Just saying you haven't tried my ways of

Seth Green: yeah. We have a

Mariann Sullivan: All right. Give me the, a little better overview of the results,

Seth Green: Yeah, I'll do that.

Mariann Sullivan: I, I wanna set people up for the fact that, that this is not, uh, this is not a question that has been answered by your study.

Benny Smith: I will say just, I'm gonna make the claim in this interview that, like, despite most of these RCTs not finding huge effects, it is still extremely important to try to make ethics appeals and convince people to eat less animal products. And I think there are, there are other types of evidence that, uh, that, that we can turn to, to see that, that this is very important.

Uh, but yeah, I'll let Seth, uh,

Mariann Sullivan: all, I definitely

Benny Smith: Mm-hmm.

Mariann Sullivan: into all of that actually.

Seth Green: We, we can talk about this.

Mariann Sullivan: Seth, maybe you could just summarize quickly what you see as the results in maybe a tiny bit more positive, um, view than, than I've taken of them. And then Benny, I, I really wanna, um, I really wanna talk to you about the moral persuasion issue.

Benny Smith: Mm-hmm.

Mariann Sullivan: that's kind of where I'm at.

Like, like, and, and I wanna hear more about your thoughts on that. But

Benny Smith: Yeah, absolutely.

Mariann Sullivan: Do, I don't wanna just leave everybody with my conclusion. Nothing works. Uh, go into the, go into a little, few subtleties than that, Seth.

Seth Green: The main takeaway I would say is that these things probably do work, but the effects are just small. Like my, we, we want to end factory farming. That's what our live is about. And the best intervention, I would mean, my personal opinion in this paper, reduces undergrads meat consumption by 5.4% over the course of three years.

That's not like nothing. I mean, it's great that's, you know, however many animals that is. But that's maybe the most effective, most let well measured intervention. And it's just a few percentage points. Like my main takeaway from this literature is that you should think of the average intervention as having effects on the order of a few percentage points.

Jasmin Singer: Hmm.

Seth Green: Maybe you get like one, you could get like a hundred people to cut back 1% or like 52% or whatever. Or like one person becomes vegan and these all basically amount to like 1%. And it's not nothing. It's, it means something, but it's not transformational.

We didn't see anything.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, we're trying to change the world here.

Seth Green: Exactly.

Mariann Sullivan: That's not changing the world.

Seth Green: That's.

Mariann Sullivan: So Benny, let's, let's take us a a a trip down the moral persuasion route for a moment.

Benny Smith: Yeah.

Mariann Sullivan: Because I, my understanding is, correct me if I'm wrong, you concede that the moral persuasion studies are not, it, it's not like you're making the claim, this is the way, these are really working, all this

Benny Smith: No.

Mariann Sullivan: But you're, you just haven't given up on them because, because one thing, one reason you think they haven't been adequately studied.

But are there other reasons as well?

Even though we may not have the data, uh, think there are effective strategies that maybe haven't been tried yet?

Benny Smith: I think there are effective strategies that haven't been studied as much yet. I also think we do have data. So there are lots of historical examples of large numbers of people being convinced to reduce animal uh, consumption. So for example, uh, the provinces of Rajastan and Gujarat in India, 60 to 80% of the population there is vegetarian. In Japan, most uh, animal products were illegal for over a thousand years before the Meiji restoration. There are many major world religions.

Mariann Sullivan: My God, I don't think I've ever heard that. Wow.

Benny Smith: Because of the Buddhist government, there were illegal, uh, for hundreds of years. Um, and there are major world religions, right? So Hinduism, uh, many are vegetarian. Buddhism, Jainism. Um, Manichaeism was a major world religion for like over a thousand years, and they promoted vegetarianism, and many smaller religions. There are just tons of historical examples of large numbers of people being convinced, uh, to reduce animal consumption. There are also other things, uh, there, there are parallels we can look at with other behaviors, right?

Where, uh, it maybe is very hard to convince people to reduce alcohol consumption, right? But there are still parts of the world where alcohol consumption is very rare or illegal, right? Um, there, there have been times in history where there was like massive upheaval in terms of people, how people live their daily lives and their world views and their values. It is extremely hard to do that, and I think that's what these RCDs show is that this is a hard problem. Um, but there are many hard problems that have been solved before, to some extent. And, um, I think it speaks more to, um, the level of challenge that, that we're facing and the level of intensity and resolve that is required than, you know, I think we just look at this and we say, well, it doesn't work, so we shouldn't try.

Well, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Seth Green: You make me feel like such a hater, Benny. This was the, this was such a great little interlude. Yeah, I know. I agree with all that. The only thing I'd add is that, um, it's also partly about the kinds of designs we looked at. Randomized control trials are good at looking at very concrete things like how much meat did you eat on the Tuesday following?

They're really not good at looking, it's much harder to design a study that looks at like, did you watch the movie Babe? Or were, are you James Cromwell, who was in the movie Babe, and then became a vegan and then like, you know, became an activist?

Jasmin Singer: Then glue your, glued yourself to a few counters and saved 75 cents on soy milk at Starbucks, which I am grateful for. I just wanna go on the record.

Seth Green: Did he, was he involved in the soy milk thing?

Jasmin Singer: Yeah. Wasn't he, am I imagining that.

Mariann Sullivan: Oh yeah, yeah.

Jasmin Singer: Yeah.

Mariann Sullivan: He glued his hand to the, um, counter.

Jasmin Singer: Counter. Yeah.

Mariann Sullivan: He got a lot of press. Yeah.

Seth Green: I just...

Mariann Sullivan: He is a great guy.

Seth Green: He's a great guy. You know, Starbucks recently eliminated the upcharge for

Jasmin Singer: Yes.

Seth Green: Yeah,

Jasmin Singer: Okay. Can I just have a moment? Another digression?

Seth Green: Yeah.

Jasmin Singer: My birthday was yesterday as we're recording this and I missed my Happy birthday Starbucks

Mariann Sullivan: Oh,

Jasmin Singer: comp.

Mariann Sullivan: you're

Jasmin Singer: Do you know how how sad I am right.

now about?

Seth Green: It's like the

Jasmin Singer: No, it's on your birthday.

Seth Green: Oh man.

Jasmin Singer: I know.

Mariann Sullivan: Can we go, back to the, to the topic at hand?

Jasmin Singer: Yes.

Mariann Sullivan: I, I, mean, I, I wanna, I wanna go deeper into this, and from what

I understand, uh, you like the terms, values or worldview change to behavior change, which is the way we're usually looking at it. Can you drill down a bit on, on, on what that means?

Benny Smith: Yeah.

Mariann Sullivan: and can we talk a little bit, can we get a little bit into, I hadn't planned on doing this until later in the, in the interview, but it's the topic I'm most interested in. Sorry, Seth. Um, religion, like, I really would like to, because ev almost everything you just mentioned had to do with religion of some sort. and I just think there's, you know, That's a really fascinating topic if we're talking about taking this more, not, you know, not drilling down into the details view of, of change, but, you know, broad worldview kind of view of change. So. Alright. I'm ta I've talked enough. Tell us a little bit about, about what a, what is the difference between a behavior change and a worldview change and, and what the worldview change is that you're looking for?

Benny Smith: Sure. I think with a lot of these R RCTs that we're looking at, what they do is they say, well, we tried one specific intervention. We showed this person a video, we handed them a brochure, we had a conversation with them, and then we measured whether their animal consumption reduced over a certain period of time after that. That is a measure of behavior change, right. Um, I'm gonna make the claim, this is I think, a controversial claim that convincing people to go vegan is much, much more important than convincing a large number of people to marginally reduce their consumption. Uh, so I think you will often hear people say, well, if you convince a hundred people to reduce their consumption by 5%, that's the same thing as convincing, uh, 10 people to reduce by a hundred percent. And so, you know, it's easier to convince one person to reduce by 5%. So you would think that if we just focus on those 5% reductions, that, that should be the main focus. Uh, think in fact you want to focus on getting more people to go vegan, which does not just mean not eating meat or eating animal products.

It means rejecting the exploitation of animals and believing that animals matter. And that takes a lot more than convincing someone to just reduce their consumption. Right? So it, it's much more similar. So, so some of these studies, they'll compare going vegan or not going vegan, they'll compare reducing their consumption to, you know, buying an electric car or recycling or something. And there are studies that look at, well, if we show someone a video, well they start recycling more. And often yes, that's the case, right? Because, it just isn't that hard to recycle, right? And if you start recycling more, you don't get a ton of people getting all offended because you're like doing this very personal thing very differently three times a day, right? Um, but with veganism it is like that. Like if you go vegan, if you're, even if you're not trying to convince people at all, people will think you're weird and make fun of you and all this stuff. And Clare Mann has written a lot about, uh, the psychology of being vegan, right? And so, um, you know, I'm not trying to say that veganism is like a religion in all senses, but in the sense that it impacts your world view as a whole and your daily life and how you interact with the rest of society is much more like radically changing your entire world view and outlook on life than, you know, buying an electric car. Uh, and I think for this reason, it's also much more important. So what I was originally saying was it's, it's important to be convincing more people to go vegan because if someone goes vegan, then they will also go and try to convince more people to do so. And so you have much more potential for like, exponential growth in the movement than if you just convince a bunch of people to marginally reduce their consumption. And that's not really a visible behavior change that doesn't influence anyone else. But, if you convince, you know, two people to go vegan, and those people both convinced two more people to go vegan and onwards, you can actually get exponential growth in the number of people, uh, that support this.

And, and that's really what we need if we want the level of change that is needed in the world.

Jasmin Singer: So is it, is it, uh, a matter of encouraging. The development of like a new moral framework in which animals matter, or just tapping into a moral framework that many people have already adopted, in which somehow they accept that animals matter, but that eating meat doesn't violate that principle?

Benny Smith: I mean, I think everyone, I think most people on some level recognize that animals matter. Most people, if you ask them, if you show them a video of what happens to the animals that they eat, and you say, is this okay? They're gonna say no. That's obviously not okay. Most people, in fact, if you ask 'em to watch one of these videos, they will say, no, no, I don't wanna see this, because they already know that it's not okay. and I think that is the only leg up that our movement actually has. So if we talk about choice architecture, if we talk about, uh, any of these other interventions to reduce consumption, these are things that the meat industry can also do and can do at a much larger scale than us, right?

Of course, McDonald's knows about choice architecture.

Seth Green: Right.

Benny Smith: It knows how to convince people to like eat marginally more chicken, and it's not that hard for them to just start an ad campaign, right?

I mean, with, we've seen alternative proteins, uh, just tank in the last couple years because it just wasn't that hard for the meat industry to run a bunch of campaigns convincing people that Beyond Burgers are terrible for you, uh, and get everyone to be scared of alternative proteins. The only leg up that our movement has is that we're actually right about this, and a lot of people on some level will know that we're right about this.

And so we have the ability to appeal to people's capacity for reason to choice in their behaviors and their like compassion for others. And, and that ability to actually make choices, ironically, is the only thing that distinguishes us from animals, right?

The meat industry has everything else on their side, right? They can appeal to people's sort of physical de desires. They can appeal to people's, uh, social con conditioning, their traditions that they're sort of robotically following. They can appeal to peer pressure, they can appeal to, you know, lust for power. Um, the only thing that we can actually use that, that gets us a leg up on all of that is that we have to just want it a lot more than them, and we have to be willing to push a lot harder, uh, to grow the movement.

Seth Green: Okay,

Mariann Sullivan: I mean, you're speaking my language. Oh, please, Seth. Go

Seth Green: Okay, so Benny, uh, um, the question you, the questions you're asking here were at the heart of the Reducitarian Summit, which was this conference I went to last weekend in Atlanta. Reducitarian movement is like exactly what you just said you're not down with. Like lot, a lot of small reductions, widely spread.

Um, at that conference, there was a talk about blended proteins or whatever we're calling them, like balanced things. There's like 50% beef, 50% whatever. like for me, that was my line. Like I'm down with  Reducitarianism, but I hit that talk and I was like, oh man, like this is gonna... this has like a normalization aspect that bothers me.

Where's your line? Actually all three of you. Where do you have a line where it's like, this might work, but it makes me feel bad or queasy? Does it, does any of you have like a thing in mind that

Jasmin Singer: Oh my God,

Seth Green: elicits this?

Jasmin Singer: Dude, you need a podcast.

Mariann Sullivan: I think my line has changed over time and, and I, I, I, I'm not sure it's a line really, but I, I don't think I feel... I mean, I, Benny you're speaking my language, definitely. I mean, the passion and the, you know, just, just the fact that we're right for some reason. Like, we're right about this. We may not be right about everything.

We may not be better than other people in other ways, but this is what we got right. Uh, that's that. But I do think that, I tend to think that all of the other, and this is... all right. Now, i, I don't want, I don't wanna hijack this interview. I want it to be, and now we're getting into the stuff I'm, I really feel strongly about,

Seth Green: I wanna know, I wanna hear. I.

Mariann Sullivan: I'm not, I don't have clarity about totally. But, you know, this movement has been so divided, and I've been doing this for a long time, and about the whole question of whether welfare reforms not only aren't the way forward, but actually putting us back and, and making people feel more comfortable. Like real... people have been very, very divided about tactics.

And, and I tend to think there is value, not just in the one that you're talking about, Benny, like just, just making the case. Making the case for why this is, this is the wrong way to live and this is a terrible thing. But also, I mean, the food matters. Like people are a lot more likely to pay attention to their morals if the food is delicious. And, uh, and, and almost everything that people are doing and even the welfare reforms, I do not tend to see them as setting us back. And I don't think, I think there's been very few studies about that, but, but to the extent there have been, it has indicated that they're not setting us back. And that doesn't surprise me because I don't think most people are thinking when they buy, when they buy meat, oh should it, you know, is this more cruel than that?

They're just buying it. I mean, the vast majority of people. So I have a hard time believing... it may be poor use of resources, but you know, we can't really always decide what other people's resources are. I'm not closed to that argument, but I would want much, much better evidence. So I think that almost every intervention is, is at least not doing harm and might be doing some good.

But the one that really lives for me is, yeah, somehow, some way we have to like reach this, like this insane conflict in, or no, maybe it's not a conflict, this lack of conflict within people who care about animals, which isn't everybody, but it is a lot of people who care about animals and, and, and just, uh, do not associate it with, with what they're eating.

It's like, it's unbelievable. It's unbelievable that people go

Jasmin Singer: I just,

Mariann Sullivan: I mean, it's weirder than people voting for Trump. It's just bizarre that, that people actually who care. I actually, I'm just gonna tell one little story, I'm sorry, jazz, but just one little story. I won't say who it was, but I was talking to a couple, um, a, couple weeks ago.

They're relatives of mine and the woman is vegetarian, the man is not. And we were talking about, about, um, for, because of a article I'm writing about a, a legal case about animal sacrifice, chicken sacrifice, santaria, that sort of thing. And I was talking about how, um, the Supreme Court had a problem with it because it only focused on killing animals for religious reasons and not for killing, killing chickens for other reasons. And the man, who was somebody I respect and is a thoughtful person, said, well, what other reason do people kill chickens for?

Seth Green: For pleasure, obviously eating.

Jasmin Singer: Wow.

I just wanna, I.

just wanna go back to what you just asked, but I, I do wanna hear Benny's answer to this. I, I, when I hear you, Seth say like, where's your line of, that's not okay. The way that I interpret it is the, like a difference between strategy and, you know, um, personal philosophy. Because I personally am not comfortable with welfare reform, but that's just not something I would focus on.

I think part of being an effective activist is, is speaking to your own authenticity. And for me, that wouldn't work. However, there was a point like 20 years ago when I did focus on welfare reform, um, and I see welfare reform making differences. It, you know, it like certain activists, certain groups that are working on it from a holistic perspective, meaning veganism is their bottom line, or they're strategically trying to drive up egg prices.

Uh, but it, to me, that is a line that I wouldn't cross.

Benny Smith: So I guess, Seth, the question was relating to blended meat, you have a feeling of queasyness from this, but maybe you think it works, and how do you weigh those two things?

Seth Green: Or I forget the, the weighing is hard. Let's ask the simpler question. Where is the thing where you think like, this might work, but like eehh get a cringey thing about it.

Benny Smith: So I think the feeling of queasiness and cringiness about something being wrong is what works. That is how you get people to change their behavior and their view on this stuff. Uh, and I think this is kind of a, like false dichotomy or something.

I, I think, uh, it, I, I think with the blended meat, I specifically, my question would probably be, well, why do we think if they could run all these campaigns to get everyone to not want the plant-based burgers, you know, why is it different gonna be different with, uh, you know, a half beef, half, uh, to, uh, tofu burger or whatever it is? I mean, if it works, it works, right? Any reduction is good. That, that, that is true. Just the claim that I'm making is that if you want the maximal reduction in the long term, we need to increase the number of people that are ideologically aligned with the vegan movement. And so, you know, we can talk about lots of different types of campaigns and tactic tactics and strategies. None of those things happen if there aren't people who want to run the campaigns. And the people who want to run the campaigns are the people who are ideologically aligned and those people are, are generally vegan.

Seth Green: Okay. So our meta-analysis finds that on average appeals to animal welfare reduced meat consumption by 3/100ths of a standard deviation. The materials produced, this is in the supplement, sorry. If it was in, if I should have, uh, highlighted this. Materials produced by animal welfare organizations like Mercy for Animals, et cetera, actually have a small, a tiny backlash effect.

The average effect is like plus four standard four hundredths of a standard deviation increase in meat consumption. So I guess I'd ask for you all, like, does this update your beliefs? Do you like see the world in a new way in light of this finding? Or is this something you already knew?

Mariann Sullivan: Well before be, before I answer that, 'cause I'm not sure how to answer that. No, it doesn't change my beliefs because i, I don't think that, you know, I I'm not convinced that the ultimate intervention has been tried and the ultimate data has been gathered. So, I, I'm not willing to change everything I believe based on, based on that.

And

Seth Green: ask if you would change everything. I asked if you would change anything.

Mariann Sullivan: but, but, uh, I'm sorry, what?

Seth Green: I mean like has it updated any of your beliefs? Like have you like learned anything new about the world or are we just sort of like all going?

Mariann Sullivan: But

Seth Green: Yeah.

Mariann Sullivan: I, I mean, I'm not sure it's anything new about the world because it doesn't surprise me. I mean, we all know. We've been doing this a long time. We

Seth Green: Yeah.

Mariann Sullivan: That I mean, I think I, I recently wrote an article, I wish I had a quote from it. I, I listed all different types of, of, of theories of change of different, uh, animal groups.

And the, the thing I concluded was that, um, so far none of them have worked. I mean, that's like,

Seth Green: Mm-hmm.

Mariann Sullivan: so this doesn't surprise me. And I'm not surprised that there's a, a backlash effect because we all know people who, who, whose response to, um, being told that they shouldn't eat animals is to like, ha ha, I'm going to eat even more animals.

I mean, that, that's not that uncommon a response. But there is something I wanna ask you, which was in your notes that you submitted to us, you know, before this interview. And that was that, um, uh, that, you know, basically nothing works as far as we know, but you also asserted that, that, that campaigners should use tried and true methods like showing Dominion.

Seth Green: Mm.

Mariann Sullivan: Why is that tried and true? And you do have some evidence that that is tried and true. It's not extensive evidence, but there was one study. And isn't that like kind of saying like, well actually if we can actually, if we could get anybody to watch this and we could get anybody to actually see something that actually proved to them, may made it enter their brain somehow, like forced it into their brain, that would be effective.

And it was based, even though it was based on animal welfare.

Seth Green: Okay. It's a subtle and interesting question here. I would say, okay, so what, for context for listeners, there is a ongoing study by Peter Landry and Lisa Kramer at the University of Toronto. It's, it's title is How the Sausage Is Made, and basically they sat Toronto business undergrads down and had them watch either a documentary about mushrooms or one about, or they had them watch Dominion or at least like 10 minutes of Dominion that are about pigs.

And a, outcome measure is in, or... like as compensation for participating in the study, you get, um, some probability of having a meal compensated for you at the dining hall or whatever, canteen. And the asked, they asked students before they watch the movie, right after they watch the movie and a week after they watch the movie.

And according to this study, which is like, you know, it's, it's, it's preliminary to your point. Um, watching Dominion reduces consumption of meat by about 13.5%, which is like two to three times larger than just about anything else in that we looked at. And it is a week later. It's not perfect, but it's like, it's something, and I did update my beliefs about this question and if I've been thinking about it, what Peter Landry would say if he were here is that Dominion is probably the best of all the available documentaries in terms of like IMDB ratings.

And like, if you personally watch it, it's like this really powerful, impactful thing. Part, I think what he would say is to try to try and true methods is like, a lot of groups wanna like reinvent the wheel here. They wanna like, this is our branded documentary, like we made it. And then you get like you, that's, I mean, there's a lot of reasons for that.

Like, you win a grant, so you have to do something and then you have to like show that your funders that you came up with a video. Peter would say, stop doing that. Just do Dominion. Just focus on getting Dominion out to people. I'm not saying I like, this is the hard thing to do. I'm not saying, you know, that's what I agree with.

Mariann Sullivan: Because that is kind of the hard part.

Seth Green: Yeah. Yeah. And then I would say that there's this other problem that like, you just, you, you already hit it. Like how, how are we gonna do this? Like, what people like about the choice architecture studies is that theoretically you can just like whoosh, blow, blow 'em up and have them be everywhere. How are we gonna like force everyone to watch Dominion? I don't know.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah, and, and you know, the choice architecture too. Like I don't, I, I, I don't, my feeling is I, I think I already said this, but you know, apparently you guys are interviewing me instead of me interviewing you.

Seth Green: I don't,

Mariann Sullivan: So I'll just continue.

Seth Green: I wanna hear what you think.

Mariann Sullivan: I think that's important too. Like actually getting somebody to try a vegan meal, even though they didn't know they were doing it, is actually a good thing.

'Cause then they eat it and they're like, oh Yeah, that's fine. Um, so I, I don't think any of these are necessarily bad ideas, but Benny like this, I mean, I assume that getting people to watch Dominion is exactly the kind of intervention you you wanna see done. Is that right?

Benny Smith: Yeah. absolutely. And that's something we've worked on a lot at Allied Scholars is we do a lot of, uh, outreach where we're showing footage, and also we've run events where we, we had an event last year where we got 250 people to watch Dominion. Uh, and I think that kind of thing is yeah, definitely extremely impactful based on the internal results we have.

I wanted to jump back on to the point about backlash effects that Seth was mentioning. Where yes, there are studies that show that, that, that, that seems to have a very small negative effect in terms of the amount of animal products that people are consuming. I think it's important to, to like recognize that this could be true and it could be also true that those interventions are increasing the number of vegans. And I mean this is, I sort of made this point before, but like none of these studies are really looking at what is effective at convincing people to fully go vegan, increasing the number of people who are fully like, onboard with this stuff and, and ultimately going vegan is not the only thing we want.

We also wanna increase the number of like vegan activists, the people who are vegan and also speaking up to, to convince other people to go vegan because that's the real value of getting people, um, to go vegan. And I think, it would be great if we had a ton of RCTs and studies showing what gets you from,

Mariann Sullivan: Sorry. What are RCTs?

Benny Smith: Yeah. Oh, randomized controlled trials, which is the type of study that we were, uh, looking at in this meta-analysis.

Mariann Sullivan: Sorry. Go ahead.

Benny Smith: No worries. Yeah, so it would be awesome if we had a ton of studies showing this. Unfortunately we don't. And so maybe Seth can help us with that. Maybe other researchers can help us with that.

But for now that we just don't have studies and so we just have to act based on other, whatever other types of evidence we have. And so you can look at historical examples, you can talk to people who are vegan to figure out what convinced them to go vegan. I I would like to sort of, uh, suggest one point about how, how you... something that would actually work to convince more people to go vegan. Yeah. But, uh, we can, I don't wanna distract too much from what, what you guys were saying before.

Mariann Sullivan: Now I wanna hear, now I

Seth Green: Do.

Benny Smith: Sure. So, cool. So let, let's imagine, well,

Mariann Sullivan: Tell us

Benny Smith: this is, this is something that, that we can't actually do, but this is something that I'm a hundred percent sure would work if it were possible to do this. So, so let's say there were an island called Plantlantus where everyone on this island is vegan. There are like 30 million people on this island and all of them are vegan and like animal rights is completely woven into like the culture and the society. You know, kids learn about animal rights in like their civics classes. It's enshrined in the Constitution. There are like monuments of Peter Singer or Ingrid Newkirk by the government buildings and like just e every day if you drive down the street, you see all kinds of like vegan messages and animal rights stuff, right? So, and then let's say you take someone from America who grew up eating meat and Bob goes and lives in Plantlantis for a couple, for 30 years, let's say. Probably after 30 years of, of being like super exposed to tons of messages, and I don't know, seeing Dominion multiple times and all that stuff, probably after 30 years and Bob comes back to America, he's probably vegan or at least like more than 50% of the time vegan, or something. Right? Because people are just influenced by those around them.

Right? But the reason that it's very hard to convince people to go vegan right now is that our society's the opposite of that, right? You're constantly bombarded with ads for animal products. Everyone around you is eating animal products. It's like enshrined in our laws that it's okay to, to murder animals, right? Um, so the trick is to figure out how can we like, overcome that sort of brainwashing and conditioning? Um, but, but think it's, I guess I'd be curious what Seth would say about this, but, but I think like there are pretty like clear ways to convince people of things. Uh, it just requires a lot more than, than what has ever like been done before.

Seth Green: Um,

Mariann Sullivan: Well, what, what, I mean what about the things that have been tried? I mean, moral philosophy is certainly the, the main persuasion try. I, I think the main persuasion tactic that has been tried, but you know, most people don't seem to get their morals from moral philosophy. Uh,

I think most people get their, I mean, the intervention that you were talking about before, most people get their morals from, uh, from religion.

Benny Smith: Mm-hmm.

Seth Green: I don't know about America.

Mariann Sullivan: Did, did I, I feel like Benny

asked you a question

and then I, then I,

Seth Green: though I, that was,

Mariann Sullivan: on it.

Seth Green: but that's a great starting point. Okay, so this past weekend I talked to Josh Balk, who I would describe as a personal hero. He founded Just, uh, the, Just company as well as the, the accountability board. And he was, uh, involved with Humane World for a long time.

I was describing to him this study I wanna run, which I'm gonna describe to you now. Okay. Chickens are small, cows are big. When you eat chicken... or not you an American, not you guys. Obviously, you choose to eat chicken versus cow, you're playing a trolley problem game, which is this thing, which is like this moral philosophy experiment where it's like, would I kill one person to save five?

Because chickens are so much smaller, it takes like 200 times more chickens to feed, to create a given amount of meat than it does a cow. Um, we call this the small body problem. My lab is pretty focused on this, and I wanted this study in mind because the reason that we care about this is because, um, if beef consumption goes down in America because of climate reasons and everybody shifts to chickens and pigs and fish, we're gonna end up killing a lot more animals.

And yeah, so it's, this is the small body problem. I had this idea to like run a study where we talked to people about this and Josh was like, we were just having breakfast. He said, I don't think that's, I don't think that's how people make their decisions. Like those of us who actually do take moral philosophy seriously enough to like change our lifestyles based on this abstract reasoning.

We're weird.

Mariann Sullivan: Yeah,

Seth Green: We're not, yeah,

Mariann Sullivan: rare.

Seth Green: we're not the, it's not right.

Mariann Sullivan: It was an important step, but I think we got stuck in like moral philosophy for, for 20 years saying, this is the end, this is how we figured it out, and we just have to let everybody know. But

Seth Green: Well, I think there's a kind of,

Mariann Sullivan: right. Moral philosophy is not, and you know, like if you're going to like the whole idea that, that you worry about there being more animals than fewer, like, if you come to that conclusion, you just stop eating them completely.

Seth Green: Yeah, yeah. I talked to a friend about this and she was like, yeah, but I think that both of those things are part of the food chain, so it doesn't matter how many of them you kill. It's like, well, uh, a, that's foundational.

Mariann Sullivan: Find new friends.

Seth Green: It's, that's one friend. I, I hang out with plenty of vegans. Um,

Mariann Sullivan: I'm

Seth Green: but

Mariann Sullivan: was. I was, I was

Seth Green: yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Don't worry. I about, if I could, one, one follow up on this be would just be the observation that, like, my speculation about why we got into this, uh, rabbit hole about like moral philosophy is because vegan activists look inwards, see what convinced them and try to spread the good word. The problem

Mariann Sullivan: Totally.

Seth Green: is that we're weird and we forgot that part.

Mariann Sullivan: Even if it wasn't just moral philosophy, it is clear that is hard for any of us to understand why people hear about this, hear about what's happening, and don't say, oh, okay, I'll go vegan. 'Cause that's what we did for whatever reason. It would be nice to think it's because we're finer human beings, but we know that's like, there's a lot of vegans who are total assholes and, and not total, but you know.

Seth Green: Yeah.

Mariann Sullivan: Not great people.

Uh, and also that there are many people who aren't vegan who really do seem to be great people, like much better than I am in many ways. So that's not the only answer. One of the things I did wanna get back to with you, Benny, was this idea of religion. 'Cause this is something that I always think of, like, I, I don't, moral philosophy is not where people get their moral compass.

It's mostly, I think, religion, which also v. Not all animal rights people, but religion is not really popular among animal rights folks, by and large. Do you think that that's a route to, to creating this worldview change that you wanna see?

Benny Smith: I guess, what do you have in mind?

Mariann Sullivan: Well, if I had in mind I might do it, but I just feel like all of the major religions even Buddhism, uh, you know, ones that have like actually thought about the issue, totally give themselves a pass on the issue of, of animals. I mean, they exist to, to guide people. The, the, the, um. Catholicism, which the religion I grew up in, that's not why I know this.

It's because I looked at, it actually has, you know, it has catechism, which it's kind of, it's boiled down, like explanation of the 10 Commandments, what you're supposed to do with your life and all of that. And it specifically says in there that you shouldn't cause animals to suffer unnecessarily. I mean, it says that, and yet they do nothing, absolutely nothing.

They never even talk about it. Uh, so it, should this be the campaign? Um, I, I've noticed that Wayne Hsiung is now in divinity school, of all things. Are other...

Is this the direction that we should be headed into to proselytize for animals? Maybe this isn't something that... i, I just thought this might be something you had been thinking about, but if it's not what you wanna talk about, that's fine.

Benny Smith: Yeah. No, no. I was, I chatted with Wayne Hsiung recently. Um, yeah. That's interesting. I don't have a lot of good insights on how you necessarily engage with current, like established religions. I think you would want to talk to someone who has like a lot of ins with those. And I think that's a very hard problem to solve.

I think there are parallels between this and, and growing a religion, right? So I, I do think like Catholic, so you, you talk about Catholicism as, as an example, right? Um, Catholicism has had a huge impact on the world over the last 2000 years and they didn't do that by sending a few people to the Roman Senate and trying to convince them to like marginally change a few policies here and there.

Right? So for example, uh, infanticide was very common in the Roman Empire, right? And the early Christians were against infanticide and they did not go to the Roman Senate and convince them to do infanticide more humanely or something. What they did was they slowly over like 500 years grew their numbers and eventually Christianity took over the Roman Empire and infanticide was, uh, you know, abolished in, in much of the west. Um, now I think that's probably a better model for how you grow animal liberation, uh, than trying to take something that has less than 1% of the population right now and sort of tricking the other 99% of the population into doing a bunch of things that they don't actually agree with or they, they don't really want to do.

Jasmin Singer: You've also said that moral persuasion efforts have many other benefits besides directly convincing people to go vegan. I'm curious about that. Like what?

Benny Smith: Yeah. So I think one of the biggest benefits is the effect that moral persuasion has on the people who are doing the persuasion, right? So if I think we wanna be thinking about how the message that the movement sending to itself is impacting the movement, right? So if you tell all of the vegans not to advocate for veganism, if you tell everyone, no, no, we need to make sure that we don't have any tiny, you know, lashback effects on on people who consume animal products. We need to make sure that nobody says, wow, I'm mad at you. I'm gonna eat an extra burger today. What we're telling people is to not say what they believe. And, you know, we were talking about, I, I think someone alluded to the fact that beliefs follow actions.

Actions don't follow beliefs. And so if the action that you're taking is constantly self-censoring and not saying what you think, you're actually gonna think something different eventually. Uh, the more you self-censor, the more you don't actually say that you care about animals, the less you're ultimately gonna care about animals.

And it, it, it ultimately sort of helps the meat industry brainwash more people, right? Uh, and so we can remain a movement of, of private vegans who don't sort of say anything and who don't actually advocate, or we can actually try to grow. And you know, the cost of trying to grow is that you have to say unpopular things.

You have to be willing to have people sometimes dislike you. I think in the long run, if, if we want to grow, we really need to be doing that. We really need to be getting more people to be comfortable actually speaking up and saying what they think. And uh, America's a great place to do that, right?

Because we have really strong free speech protections.

Seth Green: I don't think Benny's kidding about that.

Mariann Sullivan: For the moment.

Seth Green: Yeah.

Mariann Sullivan: Uh, Yeah. And you're speaking our language, Benny. I mean, that's really what Our Hen House was founded in order to do, to help people find their way to, to change the world for animals and, and to, and, you know, to, uh, even when it's hard to speak up. Of course, you know, people choose their battles, and I understand that, but, but not choosing them at all is definitely a mistake.

Uh, I, I think that we've, we've gone way over here 'cause I, but I could talk about this shit for all the whole day.

Seth Green: Can I ask him questions?

Mariann Sullivan: Should.

Seth Green: I have some questions. I have some questions. Can I, may I?

Mariann Sullivan: Oh, please go.

Seth Green: If we got time, we can always edit it out or whatever. Um, I'm now coming to understand that my worldview is actually pretty different than the three of yours, which is interesting to me. And I loved dissention. I feel like that's where we're gonna find what works.

I have a question for Benny here. Um, was this... so context in this story, I'm gonna out you Benny, sorry about this. Benny and I met in an effective altruism conference, which is kind of this like, which is this movement organized around like hard nosed, like do what works, don't worry about the, you know, how it feels or whatever type thinking.

Um, and I'm now like, this paper reflects those commitments. I'm wondering, was it hard for you to like, swallow some of what you believe as we were writing it?

Benny Smith: Um, so I'll say I went vegan as a result of engaging with effective altruism. I was involved with an EA group in college and they had me watch Dominion. and I a hundred percent agree with the perspective of feelings don't really matter. You just have to do what works. Uh, that's absolutely true. It's just the question of, well, what actually works, right?

And, um, I I think the, the paper that we wrote is like saying a true thing, which is that the RCTs didn't find strong effects. And that that's absolutely true. And it's important to be looking at the evidence, very clear-eyed and uh, be willing to update our beliefs in the face of new evidence. And so all the hard truths, um, I think that's true.

Seth Green: I guess my next question, sorry, go ahead.

Mariann Sullivan: I wanna add too, Seth, that I don't, um, not sure our worldviews are, are that different?

Seth Green: That's because I haven't really shared what I think. I think. I I

Jasmin Singer: Well, what is it?

Seth Green: Yeah. Um, I think that a lot of this stuff, a lot of the things that I see in the vegan movement have the net effect of flattering the sensibilities of vegan people, but are not actually aimed at expanding the movement.

Um, I think that the fundamental, like the big truths that I try to struggle with every day are one, people like meat. It's not like a moral thing or a religious thing. It's just, it tastes good, it feels good. Um, and as incomes rise, meat consumption goes up. So this past weekend at the Reducitarian Summit, was saying that like, we need to learn in America, what Germany was doing is doing to like cut down on meat because apparently meat consumption has leveled off in Germany.

I, resident hater, was like, isn't income growth in Germany negative right now? So doesn't that like just totally explain why they've stopped eating meat at the same rates? 'Cause they just don't, they can't afford to eat anymore. This is like such a simple unfun story of the world. I think that income,

Mariann Sullivan: that's, I, I'm perfectly willing. I'm I'm sorry I interrupted you. I got

Seth Green: I was just saying sorry for being such a hater. Go. Please go ahead.

Mariann Sullivan: No, I, I'm, I, I'm not objecting to anything that... uh, like Benny said, it's not like whatever, whatever works is, is fine with me, um, I'm not sure that's true. Meat is Unbelievably cheap. Like it's not, the world has changed in that.

I mean, because of factory farming and because of, uh, the way farming works in grain production, I, I, I don't think that meat is really a hu, you know, beef may be very expensive. There might be certain types of meat, but certainly chicken is, is not, and it's also extremely convenient. It's also very easy to cook.

It's very, like, there's absolutely very few reasons for poor people, maybe we're not talking about like rural people in, in, uh, in Africa, in, in, in, particularly deprived areas of Africa where it's difficult to obtain meat. But I, I just don't think that's so true anymore. So I'm not sure that's the reason for what's going on in Germany.

I, I doubt that Germans are, are so, uh, that their incomes have dropped so much that they're thinking, well, let's, let's have beans instead of wienerschnitzel this week. So. I, and I am, I am totally on board with doing whatever works. I'm just not sure that we've established what works.

Seth Green: Yeah, we, I agree with that.

Mariann Sullivan: Do vegans sometimes piss people off and make them, uh, less likely to be vegan?

You know? Sure. Like vegans are annoying. People hate us. Um, some of 'em are, some of us are better than others. And I'm not saying I'm one of them at, at being persuasive, but, but I think we started off this conversation with the idea that, yeah, nothing works. And I, think that we're, I'm concluding that, you know, we're still there.

Nothing works. I'm not willing to give up on, on the idea that people who care about animals might, if, if the right intervention is made, actually say, oh, I'm not gonna eat them anymore.

I'm not willing to give up on that.

Seth Green: Neither am I. I

Benny Smith: One thing I would just add on some of this is that, uh, I think the current state of the movement is that we're very, very small, right? We have almost no money, almost no people, uh, almost no like history of, of success in terms of like the vegan movement of the, the like, modern, you know, late 20th century, early 21st century vegan movement. Uh, and I think we can look at that, at the fact that we're a very, very young movement that we haven't won big yet and say, well, nothing works. We don't know what we're doing. But I think that's not like sort of the winning mentality. Um, I think like the mentality that we want to have is that it's like a startup and, we're gonna come up with an idea and we're gonna go all in on it, and we're gonna try it.

It's probably gonna fail and we're gonna try again. And that's fine because we're starting from basically zero. And it's not that hard to rebuild from zero to zero again. And you just keep trying things until you find something that works and eventually you win. And there are historical examples of people winning, right?

And it, it, it is possible. And, uh, if we have this, you know, it, it, I think there's some level of contradiction between saying, well, nothing works, but we're still gonna try. Right? Like, why would you try? If you know, if you really know that nothing works, why would you try at all? Right. I think the only reason anyone is trying is because they do believe that something can work.

And like, if, if you're in this fight, like, I think we have to be willing to like believe that something is gonna work, even if it's not what you're doing right now. And just keep updating based on evidence and, and keep trying things.

Seth Green: I'm not saying we disagree about any of that. I would say that between us, probably if I had to identify the cleavage, it is that like whether we think things that are coded vegan are going, are likely to be in the future, the most effective ways. Um, I'm totally agnostic about this question.

I have no idea. It seems like, I think the rest of you believe or want to believe that this is true. By contrast, I would say at the Animal Welfare Economics Conference in 2024, Tyler Cowan gave this keynote speech where he was like, he's an economist and a firebrand. He, uh, gave this speech where he was like, this is probably about as much moral concern as there is ever going to be for, uh, animal welfare.

If you look at other moral issues that animal welfare advocates wanna compare to, like slavery, you would say they like won the fight. But in fact, there are more slaves alive today than there ever were in the past. So like we can expect something similar to happen. Even if we win the fight and that the most the things we should be investing in are like totally not vegan coded.

For instance, Ozempic. Like anything that reduces appetite across the population is like also has a reduction effect on meat and like this is way better than watching, making people watch Dominion. We should just try to make Ozempic cheap.

Mariann Sullivan: Uh, you know, I, I, I think that's great. I think that, you know, all of these interventions are great and, and I, I guess one of the things that I just wanted to end with was saying that, um, what, what we've always thought here is that it's not that we have the, the right way or that anybody has the right way, but that different people are gonna do different things.

And that's okay. And it's really great to think about, I, I'm all for free Ozempic, uh, not just for the animals, for the people too. I'm all for it. Uh, so that's a great intervention. I don't think that we have to be at odds about what the right intervention is because different things work on different people, and different people are drawn to different ways of life and different ways of advocacy.

So, uh, today has been a really huge insight into, into both of your, your thoughts. I, I feel like we could do this all day, but we're not going to.

Seth Green: Okay.

Mariann Sullivan: Uh, and, but we can continue the conversation a little bit for our, our, our flock on our bonus episode. But, uh, thank you so much for, um, for, for doing this and for sharing all of these thoughts, it's really been fascinating.

Jasmin Singer: Yeah, we really appreciate it, you guys. Uh, I'm, I'm ready for your podcast. I would tune in every week.

Seth Green: Thank you.

Jasmin Singer: Uh, for, for those of you who are listening, Thank you

so much for being here. Uh, the, the flock, our darling flock, you will get your bonus content with Seth and with Benny. That will come out on Monday. And if you are in the flock, thank you so much.

If you're not, maybe you wanna join us. We're in our end of year fundraising right now, and it is when we do the vast, vast majority of our fundraising for the year, all of the dollars that you are able to donate are tripled between now and the end of the year. So thank you so much. You could go to ourhenhouse.org/support and we'll talk to you next week.