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Well, I want to welcome all my guests back to another episode of Inside Personal Growth. Thanks everybody out there who listens to the show regularly and supports us. I truly appreciate you. We're in for a really, really interesting discussion today about a new book called the Omnivores Deception.

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So, John, good day to you. Thanks for being on Inside Personal Growth and spending some time with, our listeners. Thanks so much for having me, Greg. Appreciate it. Well, the Omnivores Deception is what we get wrong about meat, animals and ourselves.

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And I'm going to let listeners know a tad bit about you, today. Dr. John Sanbonmatsu. He's a professor of philosophy at Worcester Polytech Institute and a leading voice in critical social and political theory.

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John has dedicated his career to exploring the moral foundations of our modern society, and he is here to challenge one of our most fundamental unexamined cultural practices. His groundbreaking new book, the Omnivore's Deception, what We Get Wrong About Meat, Animals and Ourselves, delivers a comprehensive and I would say, uncompromising case for ending our exploitation of animals.

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We'll, be diving deep into why the idea of humane and sustainable meat is, as John argues, a profound contraction. And what is the realization means for the future, our ethics and a very nature of the human identity.

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Well, welcome to the show. Appreciate having you on, and I appreciate you coming on to speak about what. Personally, I believe in many of my listeners because they listen to this show as a result of their focus on, what I'm going to say.

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Vegetarianism, Veganism. We get a lot of those kind of listeners. So let's just start off with kind of the first premise, the book the Omnivores Deception as a powerful and provocative title, obviously. Can you start by defining what Omnivore's Deception is and why you believe it is the foundation to our society's structure?

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Well, thanks so much, Greg. Many, listeners, or some listeners may, may understand or recognize the title as a reference to Michael Pollan's 2006 bestseller, the Omnivore's Dilemma. And Pollan was, when he wrote that book, he was riding on a kind of wave of popular sentiment around the animal economy, a kind of defense of the animal economy.

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And the idea is that because we're biological omnivores, we are permitted to keep and raise and kill animals for food. So that idea is central to our identity as human beings.

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But it's an unexamined idea. That is to say, it's not an idea that people stop to question. Because although we can consume just about anything, including other humans, anthropophagy or cannibalism has been part of human culture for thousands of years, many, many different cultures.

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That doesn't give me the right, say, to kill and eat my neighbor. So we have to look at the premises that we start with when we think about the self evidently natural, status of meat eating.

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Because it's a cultural practice like any other. And I think the reason that people have a hard time with this is that most people don't want to think that they're participating in harm against other beings, other animals. But that's, it's so odd though because of course whenever we participate in the animal economy, we're contributing to extreme harms against billions and indeed trillions of animals every year.

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So that, so the book is really about questioning that mass violence that's at the core of our identity as a species. Well, you know, we know that millions of animals are being slaughtered every year to feed people around the world.

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Whether it's cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, it's, it's everywhere. And in the introduction you state that exploiting animals is a radical evil around which our society is organized. We're obviously going to get a lot of pushback from the farmers who raise cattle and do this for a living because this is a, a huge industry.

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I mean it's monumentally huge kind of feeding our world. And I think you mentioned to me also too that if we really look at it deeply, much of the crops that are being grown are being used to feed these animals as well.

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So the water that it's wasting and the rest of it. So that's a strong indictment, that you call. So what core historical or philosophical insights led to the kind of this conclusion for you? I think that in my experience most people really don't have any idea of the scale of what we're doing to other animals.

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But we're killing about 80 billion land animals every year and up to 3 trillion marine animals every year. And that all of that violence causes enormous suffering to the animals involved and there's just no way to do it kindly or humanely.

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It's just a common sense idea. If you have a cat or a dog. How of your own say, you know, if someone came in and killed your cat or dog, it would be a trauma for you. And all of those animals are just as sensitive and intelligent as the animals that, we invite into our homes as companions.

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The history of this idea goes back thousands of years. The idea that maybe we ought not to do this, we ought not to kill and eat other animals goes back to Pythagoras and even earlier, 2,500 years ago. So as a philosophical idea, it isn't new, but what's happening is the scale of this, system, of this violence, which has subordinated all of the natural world to animal production.

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I mean, most of the arable land on the Earth is devoted to animal agriculture. I'm, sorry. To agriculture. And most of that is devoted to animal agriculture, as you say, either raising animals directly, for human consumption or growing crops in order to feed them. So it's a radically. First of all, it's a very inefficient way for us to get our protein and, caloric needs.

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How much in the way, John, of the crops that are grown worldwide, if you know the answer to this, actually are used to feed cows, pigs, all the animals that are going to be slaughtered.

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Do you know you have a number? Yeah, no, I apologize, I don't have that number off the top of my head. I believe that it's about something like 40% of arable land is devoted to agriculture, and something like 70% of that is devoted to either raising animals or growing crops to feed them.

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But I can say that the vast majority of the monocrops that we raise, soy and corn and so forth, are not fit to humans but to, animals. So there's a kind of conversion process that's inefficient and a waste of resources.

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Horses, which people don't realize. People think that. I mean, I've had students, that say, well, if people became vegetarian or vegan, well, we wouldn't have enough land to grow crops on. It was actually the opposite, that we're, you know. Yeah, yeah.

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So you, you know, the text suggests that the treatment of animals is not just a moral issue, but an existential one linked to climate change and human. On human violence. How are the, you know, everything that we speaking about this contributing to the ecological crisis intertwined to form what you call a double helix of destruction?

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I mean, obviously, this is creating climate change as well, let's face. But there's still deniers of climate change out there, which I don't know how they could be, but they're there. Including. And just a political commentary, because this is my podcast.

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Our president, our current president. Yeah. You know, animal agriculture is estimated to be causing up to 30% of greenhouse gas emissions. That's CO2, as well as methane. And, that. That is believed, to dwarf the entire transportation sector.

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You know, cars and planes and boats and trucks. And So. But what I argue in my book is that the animal system is actually the most lethal force on the Earth in terms of its ecological impact.

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If you read the World Wildlife Federation, Wildlife Fund reports, the London Zoological Society, and the WWF put out this living, planet report every couple of years. And if you read that carefully, you'll see that animal agriculture and the fishing industries together are the leading causes really of mass species extinction, of pollution of the seas.

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Most of the plastics in the ocean are from discarded fishing gear, erosion of topsoil, and so on and so forth. So the ecological context is super important in understanding the impacts of this system on all of life, including our own species.

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And I don't think, there's enough, awareness of that. Furthermore, global warming is only, I would call it, the second most important ecological crisis today. And the most important is actually the extinction crisis.

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We're seeing the. All the animals of the Earth are dying, essentially. Reptiles, mammals, amphibians, insects. Scientists refer to this insect apocalypse. And as you know, what I say in the book is that we have these two structures. One is capitalism, the global capitalist system, which reduces nature to a commodity to be exploited.

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Right. And then the system of what scholars call speciesism or human supremacism, which is the idea that humans alone have value on this Earth. That's kind of the fundamental view. And that all the other animals can be destroyed over and over and over, trillions of them.

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As in, you know, these individual beings can be destroyed, forever without it being considered an ethical problem. You know, all this violence is at the root of the system that we take for granted.

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And it's everywhere. It's in every community, it's in every society in the world. But just because a society accepts something as normal or natural doesn't make it right. We've seen other systems of power and authority, like human slavery, last for thousands of years because of its supposed natural status.

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And so we need to take a step back and say, look, is there a better way of being human on the Earth? Is there a better way of organizing life and society? And economy. And, and I argue that there is these two, two structures, capitalism and speciesism are destroying the means of life.

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Simply that's, that's a fundamentally what would you say, or why would you say our human species is ignoring these elements? It seems to me that the way our brains are programmed is we have to wait for a disaster to happen before we actually make some fundamental changes.

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So, I mean I've been on this planet for 71 years. I have never seen many of things I'm seeing today. I am, how do I want to say? Just appalled at Much of what is happening.

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I don't know if in the end it's going to be for the better, because I don't have a crystal ball and can't predict that. On the other hand, you're asking people, or you're at least teeing up, that people ought to consider, how they consume these animal products to make this a better place for everybody.

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So why do you think, you know, as somebody who's a philosophy professor and speaks with young people all day long in the classroom about what's going on, how this shift can occur, what can we do to mitigate this, current not only problem, but something that could be extremely disastrous in my point of view.

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Yeah, so that's the hardest question that you've just thrown me. We're early in the interview. Yeah, yeah. Well, I want to speak to the impediments, okay. To thinking about the question you've raised, which is how to create this social change. Right. That's so urgently needed.

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The subtitle of my book, I'm sorry, the title of my book is the Omnivore is Deception. Well, why do I use that word? First of all, because the meat, dairy, egg and fishing industries have created this whole elaborate system of propaganda to keep us addicted to these products.

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People think that, oh, you need to have animal products in order to be healthy to have enough, get enough protein. Which is just complete and utter garbage. I mean there are just dozens, hundreds of medical nutritional studies about this. It's just a fact that vegan diets on average, are healthier.

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They lead to greater, better health outcomes like lower heart, disease, rates, stroke risks, cardiovascular, disease. In fact, vegans seem to live longer than so called people on an omnivorous diet.

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So that's the first thing where you have the bill. As you pointed out at the start of our interview, there's this massive industry out there that encompasses the globe but in addition to that I go into these other modes of deception, namely by people who are promoting the myth of humane animal agriculture so people to believe they can have their meat and their conscience too.

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And finally, there's bad faith, there's a self deception involved where we, we don't want to examine the system because we don't want to give up our, what we think of as our advantages. In fact it's to our advantage as a species to stop this behavior.

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It's to our advantage not only practically or what we call prudentially in terms of our own self interest, but it's to our advantage morally. Now. So you've asked what can be done to mitigate this? Well, I need not tell you Greg, that we're seeing the rise of fascism all around the world in our own country and elsewhere.

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Populist right wing authoritarianism. We're seeing a global collapse of the ecosystem Here in Boston where I live, I'm sweltering here in this jacket in October and I grew up here. And I can tell you that after Labor Day in early September it gets cold.

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It has not gotten cold. In fact it's going to be in the 80s probably this week. So there's something really, really wrong. And the question is how to fix it. And I don't want to minimize the complexity of the issues, or the depth, of the structures that have kind of surrounded us and acculturated us to a certain way of living a life.

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But, but we can't continue to have to shop on Amazon to eat animal products, to organize our economies around the profit motive and expect to have a livable world. So that's a tall order.

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How to overcome a form of economics and a form of a way of relating to other natural beings that we've been accustomed to for a long time. But that is the task. And that can be accomplished in theory in a variety of different ways by people changing their diets, but also challenging systems and structures of power that keep humans disempowered.

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Most people do not feel like they have power over their own government, let alone corporations like Meta or OpenAI or Google and so on. These are very powerful players and unless we resist them and find a way to overcome them, we will never have true democracy or the kind of equality that would lead to a sustainable world.

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Well, I think one of the ways people can do is whatever behavior begets the kind of outcome we're talking about truly modifying those behaviors Just an example. And you and I can speak about this openly.

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The FCC and Jimmy Kimmel and the whole thing that came up. This is pretty, you know, freedom of speech. And then Disney taking it off there. I chose to vote with my money. We canceled our subscription. Disney lost $3 billion.

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So they immediately put Jimmy Kimmel back on the air. This is a great example of what we're talking around in fascism, right? Like, let's control what people do. That little move that I made times millions of people costs Disney a lot of money.

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Okay? Now they're one of those big companies that you just mentioned. They're like the Google and the Amazon and the whatever, but they're delivering media, right? They're delivering movies, they're delivering entertainment. And I like what you said here, and I want to get to.

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This is. The book dedicates significant attention to dismantling the myth of the enlightened omnivore, particularly the ideas promoted by figures like Michael Poland. Okay, so why is the concept of humane and sustainable meat inherently a contradiction in terms?

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Now look, I eat. I was just in Australia. I was probably a weirdo. I asked for an impossible burger. I did find one at a restaurant, okay? But when you look at Australia, those guys are meat eaters.

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That's, that's the whole, the whole country, right? That's, you know, they're, they're kind of, in a sense like cowboys. Okay, so my, my question for you there is. Is that question why is the concept of humane and sustainable meat inherently a contradiction in terms of.

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Well, first of all, in terms of Australia and so on. I think that's a great example of the way there's a kind of culture industry that keeps us attached to certain behaviors, as you name them, and, shibboleths and myths about what it means to be human and what it means to be healthy and what it means to be a man, to be honest.

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Like you mentioned, use the word cowboys to describe Australia, right? And Australians. Think about Crocodile Dundee, if you remember that film from the 1980s. I mean, it's this idea that to be, virile as a man, you have to eat meat, right?

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So the right wing in the United States refers to liberals, as soy boys. This idea that if you express any, compassion for other beings, you don't want to participate in harming them. That means you're, you know, effeminate and weak and so forth.

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So that, that is really, that's part of this whole, this Whole apparatus. Now, the humane meat discourse really took off in the, early 2000s And became wrapped up also with the locavore movement, which is they did well, you know, we should only consume products that you know, farm products that are, grown or raised locally.

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And what this did is it kind of did an end run around decades of, activism and public education around what we call factory farming, industrialized animal agriculture. Everyone, not everyone, but many people understand that the conditions that 99% of all the animals that we keep captive, that they're in, those conditions are horrific.

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They cause enormous suffering. That animals are killed at a young age. They're often skinned and dismembered alive. Their heads are smashed in if they're not considered to be growing fast enough, as happens to pigs, and so on. It's really horrible. I mean, I urge, listeners to check out a film called meet your meat.

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Meet your meat. E e t. Your your e a t. Okay. All right, I'll make sure that we put a link below in this video. This, because this goes on YouTube. We'll put a link to that. We'll also put a link to your website so that they can get to you.

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Thanks so much. So if you watch that video, you're just going to see the tip of a very large, iceberg. So, about the way 99% of animals are treated. Now, what we want, but many people want to believe that there's a way to commit acts of extreme violence against animals, to exploit them for their bodies or their labor, and to do so in a way that is respectful of their dignity, their integrity as beings.

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Again, just. Just on the surface it's a ridiculous notion. All right? Because you can't, you can't raise a child for slaughter or for, you know, to exploit the child, and think that that will not lead to horrific abuses. And we see, quote, abuses that are even in an excess of what's considered normal violence in the animal system all over the place.

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There are always. I talk about these in my books. They're all, In my book there are a lot of cases that surface in the media of, animals, being tortured in slaughterhouses or, you know, brutalized even beyond what is strictly speaking necessary.

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But if you're going to say that animals, lives matter so little that we can kill them in unending numbers, in fact growing numbers in the billions and trillions, without causing harm to them, I mean, that's the peculiar thing. We're Saying it's okay to, to commit these acts against animals, but it isn't in a sense, as I said, raising any moral questions.

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It's not, not really harming them. But what I argue in my book is that other animals have consciousness, subjectivity and a kind of personhood. And we know this from our own cats and dogs, that they're individuals. They have individual temperaments, likes and dislikes, relationships.

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They have a sense of continuity in their lives. They age. And we see their personalities change in the way. That's similar to the way human personalities change over time, as you know, from, you know, being a puppy or youth to, you know, an elder.

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Those qualities of consciousness adhere to, are manifest in all other animals of complexity, by which I mean to say mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and so on. And fish, Fish are not. People think fish are stupid and don't have anything going on there, but they do.

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So part of the argument that I make is that other animals are worthy of our respect and love. And it's simply if you just reflect for one moment, you can't love what you seek to destroy. And that is really what we're talking about. We're talking about destroying, countless billions of animals.

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Well, you said 8 billion. That's 80. A lot. 80 billion. And that's just on land. That's even a hard, that's even a hard number for me to put my, wrap my head around. I, know there's 8 billion people on the planet. But then, you know, you're saying, hey, we're killing 80 billion animals, whether it's fish or pigs or cows or whatever it might be.

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Now you reject the common philosophical test for moral status such as mirror, self recognition, and argue that consciousness itself, what you call a someone, is the threshold for personhood.

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Okay, so people are going to have to wrap their head around this a bit. John, can you explain what you mean by persons not things and who this category includes? So the, the mirror test, is a test that's sometimes used to, test species for their ability to conceive of a self.

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For example, if you show chimpanzees a mirror, they will use it to explore parts of their body they can't normally. They don't normally have access to inside of their mouth or the back of themselves and so on. And we find that certain, species are capable of this, capable of passing the mirror recognition test and others aren't.

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Manta, rays and dolphins pass the test. Cats and dogs and macaque monkeys don't pass the test. I think there's just been too much emphasis placed on that. Because basically what you're testing is the ability to understand what a mirror is, and what a representation of oneself is.

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That doesn't mean that one doesn't have a self, if that makes sense. You can have a self or be a self, have experiences, have a subjective point of view, have memories, be, susceptible to pleasure, pain, trauma, happiness, whether or not you can recognize yourself in the mirror.

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And I give the example in my book of my father who developed Alzheimer's disease. There came a point in the progression of his illness where he could not recognize himself in the mirror and in fact did not even know who he was. But he nonetheless remained this amiable presence, a very loving kind of person.

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He remained a, someone in spite of his losses. Now, other animals are extremely robust in their cognitive abilities. They even excel us in certain ways in terms of depending, on the species, in terms of intelligence and memory and so on.

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So if we look objectively at other animals, if we look at the science of what's called cognitive ethology, we know beyond a, reasonable doubt, and I say it that way because, of course, we're always putting animals on trial for their supposed idiocy.

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But we know beyond a reasonable doubt that other animals are capable of enormous cognitive complexity. I mean, that they have minds, that they reason, that they have complex emotions. We think that only we, for example, have empathy. That's been disproven.

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Many other species have empathy. Even reptiles and amphibians have, empathy. Rats have empathy. Rats will even sacrifice their own interests, like a reward, like chocolate in a laboratory experiment to save a stranger from drowning. So altruism, empathy, these things that we think of as unique to us are not unique to us.

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So when I refer to other animals as a someone, I mean that there's someone home. Let's say there's a consciousness there, a mind that's, looking out on the world. An embodied consciousness that's having experiences and that has a will and a desire and a preference to live.

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So when people say, oh, well, we're not harming animals, in essence, by keeping them mutilating their bodies and their subjectivity and then killing them in these ever growing numbers, we're not, not harming their interests. It's simply self deception. And we know this again because we can observe the, passion with which other species cling to life.

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They don't want to die. You don't have to be a human being to fear death. And we only tell ourselves that they consent in a way to what we do to them. And they don't consent. They fight back, they cry, they bite, they scratch, they try to escape. In my book, I talk about, different, examples of cows or octopuses, for example, in Aquaria, who escape their surroundings because all living beings, all forms of consciousness, seek freedom, seek liberty.

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You put a spot, like an ant in a glass, and what is it going to do? It's going to try to find its way out. If you look at a fish in a tank, what does the fish do all day? It's looking for the exit. So part of my argument is it's simply wrong to treat other conscious beings as things, as commodities for our purposes, to put them on display, to raise them in, in, unfreedom.

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It's, it's a fundamental disrespect of their personhood. Well, John, I don't disagree with you, but I guarantee people that might be listening could be disagreeing at this point, if they haven't already turned us off. Only because they do not have that fundamental consciousness themselves and belief about what you just articulated, which was all of these things have feelings, all of them want to live.

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I agree. I don't disagree with that. And that's one of the reasons why, you know, just recently we had Dr. Greger on the show to speak about what he does. And, you know, when you look at individuals like yourself who are trying to, set a path for people to shift their own consciousness and thinking about what they consume, how they consume it, to make this world a more sustainable and livable place.

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I 100% agree. Now, you connect the current state of animal agriculture to the legacy of slavery and dominion. You believe that the world without animal explanation, exploitation, would fundamentally change the structures of human inequity and oppression.

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That's a big one. How, how do you come to that conclusion? Right. And I think the listeners would probably like to know. Yeah, thank you. There are two different questions I think wrapped up in that.

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One is the question of, slavery, and my use of that term in my book. And the other is what it would mean for us, what the implications would mean for us as human beings to give up our dominion. By dominion, I mean our supremacism, domination over all the other beings of the Earth.

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I mean, we're the only animal, right, who kills all the other animals. Animals we think of sharks as dangerous, for example, and I give this, I talk about this in my classes with my students. If I ask my students how many humans are killed by sharks every year, they get that about right? It's between, you know, 12 and 15, usually year by year.

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And then when I ask how many sharks are killed by humans every year, you know, they often guess, oh, 2000, 5000. It's actually 100 million sharks being killed by human, humans every year. And yet we think of sharks as the dangerous, irrational, violent creature.

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But it's actually us. Now, the animal agriculture system, what we call animal agriculture, led to the creation of human slavery. That seems to be the consensus among most historians, anthropologists, that what we call animal domestication, beginning about 11,000 years ago in the Neolithic period, that is to say the keeping and breeding of animals for their labor and as a food source.

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That became the model, it's believed, you know, maybe five or six thousand years ago for human enslavement. And in fact, if you look at texts, as I do in my book of say, Aristotle almost 3,000 years ago, 2,500 years ago, we find the same justifications being used for enslaving non human animals and enslaving humans.

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They shared like a similar status. So already we see that the domination and enslavement of humans is based on something prior. But if you think about like genocides of the last century, in I think pretty much every case, you know, from the Armenian genocide to the Rwandan genocide to the genocide we see today in Gaza, the victims have always been reduced to animals, they're always referred to as animals who are therefore worthy of death, worthy of extermination, that is, that's a problem.

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So when I say that if we remove that idea, if we begin to approach other beings with a sense of respect and non violence, I do think that that would help us get along with one another because we would have to practice a kind of universal compassion, for all beings.

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And by the way, that too is an old idea. That was what, Buddha taught, you know, nearly 3,000 years ago, right, that we should have compassion for all suffering beings, not just human beings, but all suffering beings. That's the notion of ahimsa, in Buddhist thought, the Jainism in India also promulgated, that idea.

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So what I'm calling for in my book, and what others, and by the way, I'm not the only one calling for this, many other people are calling for a new type of human civilization that would be based on universal, fellowship with all the beings of the earth, including by the way, our fellow human beings who are exploited, crushed, under the wheels of what we call progress.

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Most human beings on the planet lack access to a clean toilet. So these issues are related in my view and the view of many other people in my field. That's to say our oppression of other animals and the oppression of, human beings. I can see the correlation now. The way that you explained it.

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I didn't see it before, but I certainly understand it a little bit better now. So look, in the book you talk about the visit to the Vine Animal Sanctuary, describing it as a glimpse, of a more advanced civilization.

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I don't know about this place. How, how do places like vine offer a tangible blueprint for moving beyond the system of domination? So Patrice and Miriam Jones, were the women who founded the Vine Animal Sanctuary in Springfield, Vermont.

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And what they have is a community of about 500 animals of different species, from pigs and chickens to cows, and birds, pigeons and so forth who've been rescued from the animal industrial complex. These are animals who experience trauma in many cases and violence and mutilation.

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And they give them an opportunity to live out their lives in a kind of multi species community. And the reason I call this a kind of glimpse of a possible future is, you know, at first glance it looks like any other farm.

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You know, they've got fences, they have an animal veterinarian who comes in to inoculate the animals. But it's qualitatively different because the animals are there not to be exploited, not to be subjected to violence, but to cared for in a, in a real, a meaningfully, deep way, out of compassion and love actually.

[36:34.6]
So what this shows us is it's possible, for humans to live in a multi species community, without wanting to harm them, without wanting to get something from them, but simply to acknowledge that each being is a unique individual, which is simply irrefutable.

[36:52.8]
Right. You know, we think of when we look at sheep, for example, we think, oh, well, they're all the same, they're not the same, and in fact they recognize the faces of other sheep that they've seen even years later. So, this crude notion that we have of other animals as kind, of mindless and emotionless beings is again, it's refuted by the science.

[37:15.8]
And I want to also say, Greg, it's refuted by our own senses, our own capacity for empathy. If we, if we open ourselves up to this relationality, if people Open their consciousness to understanding that. I would, I would agree. And I, I, you know your position, your postulate, the arguments that you make in the book.

[37:40.6]
I concur. I think this example of this podcast is an opportunity for many listeners who have a completely different viewpoint to at least open the window a little bit or change their perception or view about what's going on.

[37:56.5]
And that's the best thing that this podcast could do, would at least get people to re look at it. Now question for you, kind of off the wall. If we had some monumental shift in the way in which people nourish themselves and went from being omnivores to being vegans, is there enough agricultural land available to actually feed people a vegetarian and vegan diet?

[38:32.6]
Well you know that's a common misconception that somehow vegetarianism or veganism would require more land. It's the opposite that most of the land that's being used, utilized in agriculture today is to feed animals.

[38:48.3]
And it's a very low conversion ratio. So the most efficient way for us to get our calorie and protein needs met is by simply eating plants. That's simply scientific fact. So my friend Troy Vitese, who's an environmental historian has done the math on this and as he points out, if the world moved to a plant based diet, we could actually reforest millions of hectares of land that's now used for animal agriculture.

[39:20.0]
For example, the Amazon is being burned down, burned to the ground, by JBS and its suppliers in order to provide cattle, cows, beef for the international market. So if we reforested all that pasture land that's currently used and feedlots are currently used for raising animals, we could sequester 215 gigatons of carbon, thereby cooling the planet.

[39:49.1]
So that's one of the best ways that we could geo engineer a way out of the climate crisis. That's just an example though. Animal agriculture takes up multiple times the amount of water usage, land usage, energy usage, that plant based agriculture does.

[40:08.1]
So what's interesting to me is that everybody has these myths that have been inculcated into them from birth. You know the idea that it takes more land to grow vegetables or that it's okay to kill animals as long as you pray to them the way that Native Americans did or the idea that plants are alive too.

[40:27.8]
So what's the difference between killing a plant and killing a chicken? Or I could go and Deconstruct all of these arguments, but it's kind of like whack a mole to be honest, because they're just. I've studied this issue for 40 years and there are just, it's almost limitless the number of really, really dumb arguments that are presented, in response to the ethical critiques of vegans and animal advocates.

[40:53.3]
But the message of my book, which I really urge people to just give a chance message of my book is this is not about self sacrifice. We stand to gain everything by abolishing animal industries. We have fewer zoonotic diseases like COVID 19 and AIDS and Ebola and so forth because 75% of all emerging diseases are from other animals.

[41:18.3]
We stand to gain more efficiencies in agricultural production. But most importantly, Greg, what we gain is the ability to look ourselves in the mirror with a, good conscience. Because what we're doing is we have organized our entire existence and our identity around mass violence against defenseless, vulnerable, sensitive, suffering beings.

[41:38.9]
That is a horrible way to behave on a planet. And it's time for a new approach because the old one is literally undermining, as I've said, the conditions of all life on this earth. Agreed. So now look, we want all the listeners to go out and get a copy of the book, then go to Amazon and look it up.

[42:01.6]
They also can go to your website which is, we're going to put in the show notes below which is certainly just very easy to, to get to John, he's got a wonderful website. It's just his name dot com. So we'll put all of that in because of the spelling.

[42:20.0]
It'll be below here for people to click on it and get to your website and get to you. Now look, if a reader goes out and gets your book and agrees with that animal exploit exploitation is a radical evil. Right. What's one of the most important non gradualistic steps you hope that they will take immediately in their own lives to make a shift?

[42:47.5]
Well, I think. Thank you for that question. I think there are. I'd answer this in two ways. One is to say that individual action is important, but it's not enough. So one action that people can take is to transition to a vegetarian and then a vegan diet.

[43:02.7]
Now it took me three years to go from vegetarian to vegan. I've been a vegan now for 40 years actually. So that's one thing that everyone can do. And that may seem daunting, but trust me, once you understand the nature of this problem and you see the limitless food choices available to us, as vegans.

[43:24.4]
Not a big deal. The second thing is what, I would ask readers of my book and similar works to do is to reflect on this structure of violence and inequitable power relations that characterize human society and to challenge that it's not enough to make individual lifestyle choices or to vote with our pocketbooks.

[43:45.5]
Yeah, that's a part of it. But to be honest, we're losing our democracy inch by inch, hour by hour. Right. And the only thing that will stop that is collective action. I've studied the history of social movements over the last 200 years. That's the only reason why women got the right to vote is collective action.

[44:03.6]
That's the only reason why by 1993 all 50 states had, outlawed the rape of women within a marriage by their husband. That was because women organized, about that and so on and so forth. Right.

[44:18.8]
Abolition of slavery. That didn't just happen. As Frederick Douglass, the former slave and abolitionist, famously remarked, rattlesnakes don't commit suicide. Now that's an aspersion on rattlesnakes who actually are emotional, you know, intelligent. But the idea is those in power do not relinquish it of their own free will.

[44:38.9]
It must be taken from them. That was the lesson of Martin Luther King Jr. And the Southern Christian Leadership Council, conference as well. You can be non violent, but principled in opposing relations of power. And the number one form of power relation on this earth is humans hurting, dominating, killing all the other beings of the earth.

[45:02.9]
So it's a collective project and will take years, but that. It's an urgent project. It's an urgent project. Well, I like the fact that, that you know, after reading your book, people can choose to take an action or choose to at least shift their perception about what's been happening to them and how they've been, probably in my estimation, brainwashed over all these years.

[45:31.6]
Brainwashed might be a kind of an out there kind of term to use, but in reality we, we all get caught up into a system and we were, it's hard for people to break from that. Right now people are, I'm not going to say fighting, but choosing to, you know, with all the battles that they have to look at daily, John, like our rights of free speech, this whole stuff that's going on with, with ISIS and you know, rounding up people that are, believe it, in my state, California, actually growing all these crops that we need.

[46:16.9]
Right. I Mean, we're, we're dealing with some fundamental issues that you know, are just monumental at this point. Seems monumental to a lot of people, including myself. And I've been doing this podcast show for 18 years talking to people that are professors like yourself and thought leaders and intellects and you know, I, I think the world at a whole, the ambiguity that we're dealing with requires some flexibility.

[46:48.2]
The flexibility needs to come into, in how you think about what you consume. And I think you mentioned about Amazon. How often do I consume? Am I buying sausage this morning?

[47:03.3]
No, I'm going to substitute that and I'm going to have fruit. You know, am I going to kill another chicken and go have a chicken sandwich at Chick Fil A? Right. It's just, it's on and on and on. But you have billions and billions of dollars, which you mentioned earlier, in huge corporations dependent upon how we consume.

[47:26.5]
And at its real level, it's about how people have chosen to consume. And I think they need to relook at what they consume and how they're consuming it. Would that be an accurate statement? Yes, with the proviso that changing our consumption patterns won't be enough, that there are actually structures of institutionalized violence and oppression throughout human societies.

[47:51.0]
And those have to be challenged and overcome otherwise, because it's not an accident that despite the fact that there are more vegan products forever on the market. Right. And that's the truth, per capita meat consumption is up and the number of animals being killed is up.

[48:08.9]
So we can't consume our way out of this problem alone. And we need to challenge the meat industry, and find legislative remedies partly to these problems also. So. Well, you're tackling a big challenge in society and a big challenge in our world and I want to commend you for that.

[48:30.4]
You've written a book that gets people to challenge their thoughts about the way they think. And I think for everyone, go to John Sanbonmatsu.com, that's the website there you're going to learn about the Omnivore's deception, other books, articles and essays, talks that he's got debates, interviews and op ins, and you can learn more and you can reach out and contact John directly.

[48:55.7]
I'm sure he'd appreciate being connected and learning more about what it, where you might want to book him to speak, so definitely do that. John, thanks for being on Inside Personal Growth and sharing your new book and an opportunity for people to you know, hear another side that they probably haven't heard.

[49:17.4]
And I think that's extremely valuable. So namaste to you. Thank you for being on my show. Thanks for sharing your insights and wisdom. Any last words? Well, thank you so much for having me. And, you know, I'm a fan of the show and of your efforts to get people to reflect on what Socrates called the examined life.

[49:37.7]
As I say, we can go through life thoughtlessly, without questioning society or values or the things that we take for granted as being true that may not, might not be true. So what your program does is give people, a challenge and an opportunity to rethink their lives and what ought to matter, both in their lives and in society.

[50:00.4]
So I thank you for that and I thank you for having me on the show. I appreciate that. And just for my listeners, they need to know, what John speaks about here and what I just talked about, about freedom of speech. I'm so blessed to be able to do this.

[50:17.3]
Although I will say, some of the big companies that are behind actually delivering these messages and how it gets to the airwaves have actually censored our show. So, I won't go into the particulars, but I have had, certain shows, where they would not allow us to run ads.

[50:44.5]
So that's their way of saying, we don't want you to get this to anybody else. I think you have to look at it that way. So just for everybody listening, I think you should know that most people don't know that. But that is something that I think some podcasters are dealing with so well.

[51:03.9]
You must be doing something right if they're coming for you. Greg, that's a good one. That's a good one. John, thank you so much. I appreciate you. Thank you for listening to this podcast on Inside Personal Growth. We appreciate your support.

[51:20.5]
And for more information about new podcasts, please go to inside personal growth.com or any of your favorite channels to listen to our podcast. Thanks again and have a wonderful day.