Björn Ólafsson joins me on episode 250 (yay, arbitrary milestone!) of the Sentientism YouTube and the Sentientism Podcast.

Björn Ólafsson works in research and research communication for the animal protection movement, bridging the gap between academic researchers and on-the-ground advocates. He writes the Substack “More Than Meats The Eye,” has worked with Sentient Media, the Better Food Foundation, and Spain’s Animal Welfare Observatory, and has spoken at VARC and the AVA Summit in Nairobi.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and “how can we make a better future?”

Sentientism answers those questions with “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” In addition to the YouTube and Spotify above the audio is on our Podcast here on Apple & here on all the other platforms.

00:00 Clips

“We need both the compassion and the emotion and then the evidence and the rationality. If we’re too unbalanced, we’re either going to be working on the wrong cause or working on the right cause in the wrong way.”

“Most people mistake social norms for morals instead of actually doing that work internally.”

“I had to slowly expand to animals that I couldn’t understand as well because I had to realize over time that my lack of understanding for them wasn’t a reflection of their worth.

“Now we’re talking about shrimp sentience. Now we’re talking about protecting insects. The arguments – they make sense because it comes down to… I’m on the right podcast here… It comes down to sentience.”

00:52 Welcome

02:46 Bjorn’s Intro

“I work in research communication… I try to connect activists, advocates, journalists, change makers, communicators, whoever with the data and the research and the strategies that they need to actually do the work as best as possible.”

“If we don’t understand what’s actually happening we’re not going to be able to change it effectively.”

“A lot of researchers don’t talk to advocates and a lot of advocates don’t talk to researchers. So, I do a lot of work bridging that gap.”

“I also have experience in writing and communication and formal research experience as well.”

“I have work in lots of different animal advocacy nonprofits, Sentient Media, Better Food Foundation, Te Protejo. I’ve given speeches at VARC, AVA.”

05:15 What’s Real?

“Both my parents are Christian. My father’s Lutheran. He’s Icelandic, hence my name. My mother’s American, hence my accent and she’s Catholic.”

“I was raised very religiously… I went to Catholic school for several years as a kid. I was taught by nuns, the whole thing. Went to went to mass every morning before school.”

“I just remember asking questions as a kid that I didn’t get answers to about religion.”

“Those were very formative questions. Some of them were very nitpicky… we read the Bible in class… I would ask, if Adam and Eve only had sons, how did humanity reproduce after that?”

 “We’re on chapter two of the Bible here. And I apologize to any Christian listeners, but there’s a couple of plot holes in there, right?”

“There’s moments where religious people would… modulate between literal analysis of religious texts and then more metaphorical analysis.”

“These were the answers I kept getting… ‘Cain and Abel were not the literal only children. It’s more about a metaphor of how humanity is expanding after Genesis.’”

“This kind of wavering juxtaposition between literal and metaphorical just never quite sat right with me and never really made sense.”

“As I grew up, I started asking more fundamental questions like ‘How does evil exist if God is all powerful and all knowing and theoretically good?’”

“What happens in purgatory, heaven, and hell?”

“All these questions I just couldn’t quite get answers to in a way that satisfied me.”

“I was raised very religious but it never quite clicked.”

“It [questioning] was not welcomed.”

“I had good experiences in those years in Catholic schools. I had other experiences as well in including that asking questions is not always seen as good… sticking out in general is not seen as good.”

“Partially I understand because these nuns had to teach and the classrooms were like 55 students… These were huge classrooms… this poor lady didn’t have all the time in the world to work with me even when I was being this precocious little kid.”

“’Don’t question things too much’… there’s definitely a vibe of… when we’re doubting… just kind of go with the flow… talk to your priest… work it out… that didn’t really satisfy me.”

“So after a while… it just wasn’t a fit. I moved away from the church pretty early on in my life and I haven’t really looked back since.”

“Psychologically it [the transition away from religion] was fine… I never truly believed. It wasn’t like I had a lack… There was always a missing puzzle piece in my psyche and I tried to put the religion one in and it just didn’t fit. So it wasn’t hard to disregard it.”

“Socially I would say… more difficult but… it wasn’t horrific because some people in my family view church and religion as more about community and socializing and the cultural aspects.”

“I think in my Icelandic side of the family, it’s much more about that than true belief.”

“Some individuals don’t quite see it that way. It has created some problems here and there, but… we can’t choose the families we’re born into… We can’t force people to have different perspectives. All we can do is decide what matters to us. And those are the decisions I’ve made and I don’t regret them.”

“I wish I could say I believed in spirituality or magic. I just don’t think it quite works.”

“If something presents itself to me that’s new that I didn’t understand before, I would try to learn about it and understand it. But so far, I haven’t. I’ve never seen a ghost. I’ve never seen magic. I’ve never seen a spirit. I’ve never seen the dead talk to us or anything like that. So, there’s no reason for me to believe that.”

“And this gets to the epistemology… if I can’t see it or the impact of it, I can’t put it into my worldview.”

“There’s a difference between believing something and wanting to believe something and I choose to believe something.”

“Supernatural doesn’t really exist because what isn’t natural?… Everything is natural because it’s in the world.”

“Unless we’re talking about maybe like the multiverse… something that’s beyond our world. But if there is something in our world that we don’t currently understand, we would label it supernatural. But in 50 years, we’ve understood it.”

“We’ve seen this throughout history, right? Like the stars were considered supernatural. Magnetism… all of this stuff that now we take for granted was seen as supernatural.”

“I’m not so arrogant to say that we solved every single problem. Obviously we haven’t. There are probably supernatural forces that we don’t understand right now but then we’ll later understand with the development of humanity.”

“I work primarily in sociology and psychology and in the social sciences… we are looking for patterns. We are looking for things that don’t really exist. A social norm doesn’t exist. You can’t see it. You know, a personality doesn’t exist, but you can study it. It’s not something that’s visible in front of you like in the hard sciences.”

“So, we have to look for the reverberations of these phenomena, the impacts of them.”

“Some of these questions… might involve data sets of tens of thousands of people asking them 70 questions in a row. And you’re trying to see if is there an association between this thing and this thing? Is there an association between gender and income?… between immigration status and access to education?”

“You can’t just find them out by talking to one or two people. You have to really look at the whole picture and then find individual patterns. And then each time you find a pattern, it unlocks it unlocks another question.”

“Okay, there’s a gender wage gap… Why? Where does this come from? Is it due to explicit sexism, implicit sexism? Is it due to differences in gender? Is it due to a combination of factors? Is it modulated by industry?”

“So we constantly have to be looking… nobody’s going to say outright where’s the answer.”

“If you talk to somebody and say… ‘do you think there’s a boy’s club in the STEM industry?’ a lot of people might not say how they truly feel or they might not even know how they feel because it’s not a question that people tend to think of because these are implicit patterns happening… across tons of people.”

“Psychology is understanding one mind and sociology is understanding thousands and thousands or millions of minds… It’s so difficult to find the patterns there.”

“We constantly have to be looking for the traces and the impacts of these questions and it’s tricky… That’s why people have to study a lot of statistics.”

“You have to study lots of research methodology to make sure that we’re right… I’ve seen a lot of researchers just buying conclusions that kind of suit their worldview but not suit the data.”

JW: “Scientists and social scientists are humans too, right? Subject to all of the same biases and fallacies as everybody else.”

JW: “That’s particularly challenging… in the social sciences because the subject matter is so complex. There are so many factors and you’re dealing with quite abstract patterns.”

JW: “It’s not like you’re looking at, electron scattering on a chart or even a chemical reaction… There’s a level of complexity and richness and difficulty to it that is really hard to wrestle with.”

JW: “You can see how that’s played through where science makes mistakes… historical examples of where science has been warped and twisted in pretty horrible ways to justify terrible things.”

JW: “And even in more recent years with a less insidious motivation behind it… psychology has gone through a replication crisis… a lot of the psychological findings that tend to find a way into a TED talk or popular science magazine… other researchers have looked back on and said ‘Hold on we’ve tried to make that run that again and we don’t get the same results.’”

JW: “Some will criticize, when I’m talking to them about epistemology and the value of science, they say ‘look at all the problems in science!’ My response is ‘the fix for bad science is better science!’”

JW: “Is psychology and sociology getting better? Is it learning from those challenges?”

“It’s definitely getting better… look at psychology, sociology [in] the 60s and 70s… even before… You could look at some of those old experiments and, this is not a technical term, but they’re psychotic… they’re horrible.”

“The realization is researchers are people too and people have biases… when we’re kids we always think of these scientists and all these academic smart people as infallible… The journalists are always right. The politicians are always so thoughtful about the issues… and then you grow up and start talking to them… Oh, sometimes people have biases. They want to confirm what they believe. They have worldviews.”

“This idea of people being completely objective is completely false. Nobody is completely objective because every single person is a subject. We are all subjective.”

“It’s important to lean into the subjectivity and acknowledge it as opposed to pretending to be objective.”

“They hide behind this veneer of fake objectivity to distract from potential biases they may have used in their work. I see this all the time.”

“I see this in journalism. Journalists always say that it’s just the facts. But the way the facts are presented, the order, the facts you choose to omit, that’s a subjective opinion.”

“With research, the questions that you choose, the methodologies that you choose, the way that you present your findings, that’s subjective.”

“Even if you use third person voice in your research paper… you don’t say ‘I did this’ or ‘I did this.’ You say ‘this was done…’ to imply objectivity.”

“We should be avoiding that… just acknowledge that we’re people and sometimes we’re going to be wrong and sometimes we’re going to have our opinions and it’s better to acknowledge that than to avoid it entirely.”

JW: “I run worldviews workshops in schools… I’ll ask a group of six or seven year olds… ‘Who here thinks they’re always right about everything.’ And there will always be a couple of little boys… who’ll put their hand up and go, ‘Yes, I’m always right about everything’.”

JW: “Anyone who thinks they’re always right about everything is definitely wrong.”

23:25 What Matters?

“I can’t remember ever not thinking about right or wrong. I just feel like I’ve always had the same perspective. I think it might be somewhat innate.”

“It’s very simple, right?… It’s wrong to cause harm and it’s good to cause pleasure and good things and love and joy and all the good stuff.”

“It sounds so cliche to say… but that’s what all right and wrong conversations usually boil down to in their simplest forms… Avoid harm as much as you can to other people and other individuals.”

“I never really understood why other things that didn’t actually hurt people were considered bad.”

“If you just keep asking why does this hurt somebody?… If the answer doesn’t satisfy you, then… this isn’t actually wrong. This doesn’t actually make the world a worse place. So why are we caring about this so much?”

“This is where the church’s obsession with certain social issues comes into play.”

“I would question why do I have to wear a uniform every single day to go to school and nobody could answer the question… why is it wrong to express myself in class with the way I want to dress?”

“It was always about rule following or social norms and nobody could explain why the rules mattered so much.”

JW: “From the people who were religious around you, did you get the sense that they were also intuitively compassionate people… Or was it more a sort of divine command theory authority thing… that you follow the rules because God says.”

“I think most people mistake social norms for morals… when we see everybody else around us believing something to be good or bad, we instinctively associate it with being good or bad instead of actually doing that work internally.”

“Most people on this planet want to be compassionate. They want to treat people they love with respect. Maybe their moral circle is smaller, maybe it’s larger. But with the people, with the individuals within their moral circle, they usually want to treat them with compassion.”

“But when they’re deciding what that moral circle is or what compassion is, I don’t think they’re actually deciding for themselves… they’re looking to the people around them…”

“Try to think of a moral belief that you have that the people around you don’t have. And a lot of people can’t answer that question… it’s wrong to hurt people. It’s wrong to kill people… Everyone believes that.”

“The people who can answer that question, even if we might not agree with them, at least have done the work to decide for themselves what morality is as opposed to adopting the social norms around them masquerading as morality.”

JW: “The default human is driven more by compliance and fitting in than by either being truth seeking or by being moral in a foundational way,”

JW: “I sense your almost embarrassment giving that really simple answer about don’t harm others and pleasure is good… But I think it’s a brilliant answer… that is the core of an intuitive morality or ethics which is ultimately about a concern for others. And I think if you have a moral system that doesn’t have a concern for others, I don’t think it’s moral, frankly.”

“I think I’m leaning in the utilitarian way most of the time. Not exclusively… but if we could cause as much good as we can to as many individuals as we can, to me that makes sense.”

“But it’s not like I go through my life thinking in that way. I go through my life… is this a good thing to do or a bad thing to do.”

“A lot of the time philosophy is different than everyday moral decision making.”

“Sometimes philosophy is helpful with these larger decisions that aren’t intuitive where there isn’t a clear answer.”

“But I feel it is strange to go through life thinking every single decision just maximized the amount of good to the maximum number of people.”

31:46 Who Matters?

“I don’t think it’s changed that much for me over my life. I’ve been vegetarian since I was 10.”

“Since I was a kid, I thought humans matter. We should treat everybody with respect.”

“My maternal grandfather is a trophy hunter… whenever I would go to his house… which was quite frequently, there’s trophies everywhere… deer and birds… gorillas and elephants and jaguars… exotic animals.”

“When I would see them, I would always have this strange introspection… I would be caught between an appreciation of the beauty of the individual who used to be there and then this horror and revulsion and disgust… this is a body!”

“It would flicker between these two different sensations… they look real… there’s an uncanny valley aspect to it.”

“I have this sensation, looking in the eyes of these animals and feeling these really complicated emotions.”

“That led me to understand them as individuals… there’s something so beautiful and precious there that was also lost.”

“When I was 10 I was in the dentist office… there was a magazine article… about what a teen vegetarian is… I didn’t even hear that word before and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s me.;”

“It wasn’t, ‘Oh, I want to be that.’ It was, ‘…that’s me.’ It I felt like I was identified and seen in this stupid article that I read somewhere.”

“So then of course I went vegetarian, I think the next day.”

JW: “What was your family’s reaction?”

“They started laughing. They thought it was funny. They thought it was not going to stick around.”

“Well, they can’t force feed me, right?… The pressure is there… my mentality… I control what goes into my body.”

JW: “I like you now but I think I would have liked you as a 10-year-old as well.”

“My parents can control a lot of things… they can control where you go to school… the financial situation… where you live… but what goes into my body… that is fundamentally my choice.”

“That’s their right to be annoyed, but I control what food I put in my body. So, I was very stubborn.”

“When I was a teenager, I was always more drawn to the charismatic megafauna… the cool animals… the mammals, especially cows and pigs. I love pigs so much.”

“I had to slowly expand to animals that I couldn’t understand as well because I had to realize, over time, that my lack of understanding for them wasn’t a reflection of their worth.”

“It was a reflection of our genetic similarity… most of the time it’s about how similar they are.”

“Psychology research shows us that the more we have in common with an animal in terms of ancestral trees… DNA… evolution, the more likely we are to feel compassion for it.”

“With some exceptions here and there, dogs obviously are number one… but most of the time it’s true… That’s why dolphins are more popular than fish… they’re mammals and they share more in common with humans than most fish do.”

JW: “That’s why we have dolphin friendly tuna but not tuna friendly dolphin.”

“It took me a while to go beyond that… learning about the peculiarities of certain animals and how they understand things that humans don’t understand was eye opening for me because their way of interacting with the world is so different than ours but it doesn’t mean it’s smaller than ours. It just means it’s different.”

“When I was a kid, I never liked chickens. I didn’t eat chickens because I thought it was wrong, but I never really thought of them as engaging animals because of the way they move, the way their heads move is just so alien… compared to a cow…”

“I had to realize, after spending some time with chickens and learning more about how birds interact… the way that they move is just a reflection of how they see the world… Just because it’s different doesn’t mean it’s less valuable than mammals or humans.”

“Now that I’ve been working with animal nonprofits… it’s getting even larger… Now we’re talking about shrimp sentience… protecting insects… this is all new to me.”

“The arguments, they make sense because it comes down to… I’m on the right podcast here. It comes down to sentience… can they feel pain? Can they suffer? Jeremy Betham style.”

“I don’t think that’s the only thing that matters, but I think that is the foundation of everything that matters.”

JW: “There might be other things that matter as well, but all you need to be included is sentience… that seems to tie up with your childlike intuitive sense that morality is about the feeling and pleasure and pain and harm…”

JW: “One of the challenges with sentience… It’s difficult to define the edges exactly… I think you’d find that defining the edges of life, or the edges of health, or basically any concept is always going to have some fuzzy edges.”

JW: “We love to try to impose it on reality and draw clean lines but often reality doesn’t care.”

JW: “The core of the animal advocacy movement in general is very focused on a particular class of sentient beings… the animals that are under human dominion and control in agriculture and labs and other forms of exploitation. What’s your thoughts about an even bigger class of animals… those that live free-ranging in the wild?… Arguably the vast majority of sentient beings are out there.”

“I don’t have easy answers… when we’re talking about the animal protection movement, it makes sense to focus on animals that are under human dominion because… animals have the right to not be exploited by humans.”

“A lot of people probably would agree with that, even if they’re not vegan or vegetarian themselves… animal advocates focus on that right more than others.”

“But then there’s also the question of do animals have the right to a pleasurable existence?… that’s where it starts getting tricky because we can’t control that all the time… we can’t be there for all animals in the wild.”

“Then there’s thorny questions like what happens when what animals pleasure causes another animal’s pain. I don’t know what to do with that question. I’m not going to pretend I do. There are a lot of theorists and philosophers and researchers who work on wild animal issues way more than me.”

“The animal protection movement is kind of human oriented because we’re focusing on human actions because we are human… that’s what we have to do.”

“But I don’t think there’s something inherently wrong with that because we can control our actions more than we can control the planet… focusing on what we can control first makes sense.”

“Then after we’ve established what our actual demeanour should be, hopefully causing a lot less suffering and harm in the future, then maybe we can start moving beyond thinking about how can we control the natural world to enhance the pleasure of animals as much as we can.”

“My personal belief is that we should focus on the ones we are interacting with first because we have the most ability to change their lives for the better.”

JW: “And technically it’s such an easy problem to solve. We could just stop and shift wholesale to plant agriculture… it’s right there in front of us.”

JW: “I’m completely sympathetic but I just want to make sure that doesn’t become an excuse for excluding wild animals from our moral consideration. The one thing I’m sure of is that they’re sentient, they matter. What to do about that is a tough question.”

 JW: “I’m interested in what else might matter… sentience is all you need to qualify to be, seriously considered… but you hinted that there might be some things that could matter on top of that as well.”

JW: “The environmental movement and the climate movement… very commonly in those movements… people actually want to go beyond sentience… so they might be biocentric, where they care about all living things or ecocentric, so they want to care about ecosystems as a whole…”

JW: “We are granting rights to nature more quickly than we are granting rights to animals.”

“I don’t think that’s inherently a wrong worldview, but it is secondary to the animals, for sure… the only value of an ecosystem is that it can potentially allow animal individuals to thrive and flourish and feel all the emotions and pleasure that they can.”

“Let’s take the analogy to humans, right? Do we want to give humans rights or do we want to give houses rights?… The houses matter because people have the right to live somewhere and feel safe and secure and protected, but what actually matters is that the human is safe and secure and protected…”

“If we’re not going give the animals the rights that they deserve or the moral consideration that they deserve, I don’t think there’s any worth talking about ecosystems.”

“The reason people might gravitate toward that line of thinking… some of it is genuinely for conservation purposes and they might believe that it’s good to maintain these for the animal sake or for nature’s sake.”

“Some people might just be gravitating towards it for like more spiritual reasons. This kind of naturalistic fallacy… if it is natural then it’s inherently good. As opposed to thinking about the actual good or the bad that might happen to the animals in it.”

“I don’t think it’s inherently a bad thing to give ecosystems rights, but it’s not where I would start at all.”

JW: “So the houses matter because of the humans who live in them and ecosystems matter because of the sentient beings within them.”

JW: “The thing that frustrates me most is when people express this very broad, generous ecocentric thinking… they say ‘you’re not going far enough with sentience… we need to really care about the whole ecosystem.’ But while doing that they’re actually excluding all the obviously sentient beings in our farms from moral consideration.”

JW: “It’s supposed to be a moral circle, not like a donut with a gap in the middle. If you’re going to extend out, you have to include the sentient animals as well… And when people don’t do that, they have an ecocentric point of view, but they’re completely comfortable with animal agriculture and exploitation. It just exposes their ecocentrism as another form of human centricity.”

JW: “What they’re really interested in is pretty nature to walk around and to look at,  ecosystem services, a comfortable temperature, and reliable weather. That’s really why they’re interested in the ecosystems. They’re not actually directly interested in the ecosystem in its own right. And they’re not really that interested in the nonhuman sentient beings that share it with us.”

“I think a tell of this is when people’s interactions with nature are very aesthetically focused. So if people talk about being sustainable and they talk about picking up trash on a beach, you’re doing it for human purposes. You do it because you like the beach’s aesthetic, not because you’re trying to impact the animals or the nature there. Then again, picking out trash on the beach is a net positive for the world. Like that is a good thing to do, but you are not doing it for the sake of animals or the environment. It is still human focused.”

50:21 How To Make A Better World

“Utopias don’t really exist. It’s just about the moral arc of the universe getting closer and closer to where we want it to be.”

“I don’t think it’ll ever get exactly where we want it to be, but the closer we can get, that’s the utopian vision.”

“As little factory farming as possible is what we’re looking for. As little animal suffering as possible is what we’re looking for.”

“I don’t think about a future like Star Trek where they don’t interact with animals or farm or at all.”

“I focus on what are the steps we can get, step by step, to a better world instead of like a utopian world. And this is what I do every day for work eight hours a day. Actually, usually more than eight hours a day… thinking about these questions.”

JW: “Let’s zoom in on… nonhuman animals, our exploitation of them, the agricultural systems… you’re also researching the dark heart of these problems, which is human psychology and human sociology themselves. In a way you’re researching us as much as you are researching the technicalities of the problems.”

JW: “Has it led you to have a broad theory of change about human-nonhuman animal interactions and exploitation?”

“When I was vegetarian as a kid, when I was vegan as a teenager, I would always turn to moral arguments and I would always turn to what is right and wrong.”

“But I began running into walls because either people’s perceptions of right and wrong were different than mine or their understanding of how to enact right and wrong in the world is different than mine.”

“That’s a fundamental belief that you can’t change… in a conversation… maybe years of therapy or something could, but unless you have a truly deep relationship with a person, you can’t change that. That’s just inaccessible to you.”

“We’re never going to be able to snap a finger and just like make some vegans or snap a finger and get rid of the factory farm… We have to always be looking at what are the steps we can take to get there.”

“Instead of using our mindset and our morality and applying it to somebody else… We have to understand that people are flawed. People have biases. People don’t think about things all the time. And we have to understand where are the jagged edges of their reasoning and the jagged edges of their morality and how should we meet them where they are as opposed to applying our own mindset onto them.”

“The fundamental error most advocates make is applying their own mindset onto others… It just doesn’t work.”

JW: “Another lens… is thinking about who has the power… you can draw these maps… You can think about consumers… retailers… supermarkets… supply chain… producers… governments… pharmaceutical industries… veterinarian associations… the map can just expand out further and further…”

JW: “Do you have a sense in that power map of where the power lies and where we should be concentrating?… Some people will say… policy and regulation and law and taxation and subsidies… Others… focus on the corporations with pressure campaigning or shifting the economic incentives… Others… we need to focus on the consumers because that’s where most of the money comes from… or we need a systemic change in the public which will then ripple through.”

“You might not like my answer, but it’s all the above. Maybe it’s not helpful, but that’s what I believe.”

“I get a very similar question all the time… what’s the best tactic to use? And my answer is I there is no single best tactic because no tactic works in isolation.”

“Let’s say if you’re trying to get one person to go vegan. People might say, ‘Oh, a documentary… that’s changing their attitude and it’s giving them awareness and knowledge. But then if that person goes back to their home and their society and they’re surrounded by a culture of meat eating, that raising awareness isn’t going to go very far.”

“Then we have to step in and we have to make sure that they have access to vegan food in their supermarkets or their restaurants. And that might be where campaigners implement 10% vegan options in the restaurants in their city.”

“Then we have to change the social norms around veganism. That’s where journalism might come into play. That’s where talks might come into play.”

“Then we might have a vegan challenge like Veganuary that comes around at the right time… where they feel supported. They feel like a part of a community.”

“It’s silly to assume that any single one of these tactics is going to be enough on its own. 0.1% of people will ever make a life-changing decision based on one thing… so we have to be using all of them together so that the path that an individual is taking is well paved for them.”

“The same is true of ending factory farming… working with suppliers, working with retailers…”

“Let’s say an activist group campaigns really hard… they elect one of their own into parliament or Congress… they try to pass a law… reducing the amount of factory farms in their country. Let’s say the law passes…”

“The politician is amazing. They are the most convincing person ever. They persuade all of their fellow politicians to support this law. Then there’s a farmers’ lobby that starts protesting. Then consumers who don’t agree with this law vote them all out of office.”

“Then… companies start importing way more factory farmed meat… factory farms start popping up in other countries even more than the ones that might have gone away in the country we’re talking about.”

JW: “So you might have addressed the problem in your own country but you’ve basically exported the exploitation and suffering at even greater scale elsewhere.”

“So if you put all of your efforts into working on politics and nothing about the economics, nothing on consumer awareness… that change is not going to stick because it doesn’t have anything else to grip onto.”

“It’s like a little sticky tape onto society that it could be ripped away really fast as opposed to being like nestled in there, jammed in there, something that’s firm and going to last.”

“That only happens if we have different types of campaigns working… we need everything.”

“I focus more on ‘Is what you’re doing effective for the goal you’re working for.’”

JW: “The sheer breadth of your research… behavioural nudges and defaults… vegan challenges and documentaries… social media and celebrities (they be helpful in normalization but we shouldn’t take them too seriously)… alternative products… economic arguments you… we need to pull on all of these different levers… to get a cohesive sea change or shift across the entire system because one intervention in one place just isn’t going to be enough.”

“I think we don’t use economic arguments enough… because we are not motivated by economic arguments. If we work in a nonprofit, we are inherently not motivated by money… There’s a little bit of a selection bias going on here… money is not the driver.”

“However, most people we talk to are going to be motivated by economics, especially important stakeholders like politicians or corporate lobbyists.”

“We need to adopt arguments that are going to work with the people we’re talking to, not arguments that would work on us.”

“So, when it comes to economics, a lot of people will say that factory farming is good for the economy. The media says this all the time… in some ways it’s true… factory farming is intensive animal agriculture, meaning it is the most efficient way to make animal protein that we know of.”

“Hopefully, cultivated meat will surpass that at some point in the future, but it has not yet.”

“Factory farming is the most effective way to make animal protein. It’s also the most cruel way…”

JW: “It arguably has a lower environmental footprint than other forms of animal agriculture as well, because although the harm and the pollution is concentrated, per unit of output, the impact of intensive farming can actually be less environmentally damaging than free-range pasture or organic animal agriculture.”

“It can be a little bit tricky in the research because extensive animal agriculture has so many different types… but most of the time it is true that intensive animal agriculture is actually more climate friendly than extensive animal agriculture.”

“Even though people tend to think of cows and fields as being good for the planet, it’s really not.”

“The problem here is that that’s not really a mainstream opinion… They think about factory farming as being bad for the planet. I’m not going to go out of my way [to correct them]…”

JW: “You want to be careful about your messaging.”

 “I’m focusing on limiting the amount of animal agriculture in total on the planet… that’s why my Substack is about meat reduction. I’m not focusing on factory farming. I’m not focusing on other types of animals… I’m focusing on meat reduction because if we do not reduce the amount of meat that is consumed on this planet we cannot do anything else. That that is the foundational shift that needs to happen.”

“Surprisingly, as long as alternative proteins are in the mix, if we start switching from intensive factory farming and sometimes extensive animal agriculture to alternative proteins and more plant-based sources of agriculture, it can actually increase GDP, jobs, all of these good economic indicators that people like politicians are going to be looking for.”

“It’s the same thing with the climate movement… 10, 15 years ago, there was this idea that ‘Oh, sustainability is great, but what about the coal miner? What about the people who work on the oil rigs?’”

“Then people start looking into it and they realize that by developing these alternatives, it could actually create more jobs… it could actually boost the economy. And the same is true in our in our movement.”

“That’s not a message we’re promoting… So why not? That worked for the climate movement. It’s going to work for us.”

“I was surprised when I did this research. I thought it was going to be a little bit better… every study I looked at, a plant-based diet shift, a plant-based production shift is better for the economy.”

“We might have to have more job training programs… there might be things you have to take in consideration, but the research is pretty sturdy.”

JW: “I was fascinated because my assumption, going into reading your piece, was that plant-based agriculture is radically more efficient than any animal agriculture because of feed conversion ratios… depending on the type of animal you’re farming, you’re taking on average roughly 10 times the nutrients and inputs for the output you’re getting… In that sense, animal agriculture destroys more food than it creates… So my simplistic assumption is that if we do transition agriculture… we would need a lot less of it.”

JW: “There would be an economic transition we’d have to manage… when you move to a much more radically efficient way of producing something for roughly the same sort of output. You don’t need the same workers or money, which would be wonderful for cost of living but there would be a transition for the industry itself and for the economy that we’d have to cope with.”

“That’s where alternative proteins come into play, because to scale up alternative protein is going to take a lot of jobs. It’s going to take scientists, marketers, new companies… The scaling of this industry is where a lot of that growth is going to come from.”

“Most of the studies I looked at… didn’t look past I think like 30 or 40 years… There might be a point in the future in which the number of jobs, the GDP, would decrease because of the efficiency is kind of caught up to the scalability. I suspect that would be the case, but I don’t think it’s inherently a bad thing.”

“This happened in animal agriculture… we used to only have extensive animal agriculture like pasture and grass-fed… that was the default system for most of human history. And then in the 20th century when factory farming started to explode it did increase jobs as these systems started to be built up. But now the number of workers that are needed to make the same amount of meat has decreased as compared to 150 years ago…”

JW: “So, it’s a similar sort of pattern.”

“It’s just a more humane, more sustainable, more ethical pattern. And it’s one that we should be going towards.”

JW: “… one of the themes of your work… understanding the mindsets of other people… thinking about whether, as animal advocates, we can play into more conservative value sets… think about the psychology of farmers and people working in agriculture who often do happen to have a slightly more conservative mindset.”

“We should be willing to work with people that we don’t agree with because that’s how change happens.”

“I’m not a conservative. That’s not how I would identify myself. But if there’s a conservative government in power in a country and I’m working with a lobbyist to figure out a set of policy proposals, I’m not going to say no to that.”

“If I can get a conservative government to make something good for animals, I’m going to do it because it’s going to be good for the animals.”

“The same is true of working with farmers. I don’t have to agree with every single thing they do to work together to get part of the way there.”

“There’s a foundation that has to happen before we do those things. That’s understanding the point of view of the other person. That’s what empathy is… where is the person coming from? You don’t have to agree. You could think to yourself, I would make completely different decisions if I was in their position. I would have approach this a totally different way. Their values are not the same as my values. That’s fine. But you have to understand what those values are and where they’re coming from if you want to work with them… we need to be doing this a lot more.”

“We need to be thinking about where can we meet in the middle, maybe not forever… maybe we work together for a little bit, get 20% of the way there, and then we part ways, go on different paths… But understanding those individuals has to come first.”

JW: “Are there things about their perspective that might surprise a traditional animal advocate? And are there messages you think will resonate with those groups that people might not be using?”

“Yeah, there was a survey… from Bryant Research… They surveyed animal farmers and a surprising majority of them have a lot of emotional distress when they have to send their animals to slaughter… they feel all these negative emotions when they think about the ethical questions of their work. That surprised me a little bit because that’s not how I have conceptualized farmers myself.”

JW: “There were different types of response… but from memory… the people who said ‘I’m totally fine with this’… was only in the teens somewhere… 14 or 15%.”

“If I was in that position I just wouldn’t do that… This conflicts with my values… it would change my behaviour but it doesn’t change their behaviour for many potential reasons. Maybe they’re culturally tied… Maybe it’s in their family. Maybe they rationalized it in a way that I would never rationalize it… there’s a billion reasons why. But that ethical disgust exists most of the time and we can capitalize on it.”

“Maybe knowing that they feel morally conflicted, at least with some practices of animal farming, could give us leeway to work with them on some things.”

“We don’t have to see eye to on everything, but the things that we do see eye to eye on, we can work towards a better future together.”

JW: “You talked about substitution earlier… there’s some great work going on in the UK at the moment with CAFF… making it really hard to establish new factory farms. And some of the work they’re doing is fascinating because they’re not doing it as classic animal advocates. They’re actually enabling local communities, many of whom aren’t animal advocates at all, but have other reasons for not wanting a factory farm in their backyard… working at grassroots level with those local communities.”

JW: “But as you mentioned in your economics report, one of the problems is that you just displace that and you end up importing loads more stuff. So there’s another initiative working with the UK animal agriculture industry to make it harder to import… to make welfare standards [of imports] go up.”

“It’s brilliant. I think we need more of that…. these multi-pronged approaches that work with different cohorts… is always a good thing.”

JW: “One final question… if you live in the industrialized west as an animal advocate, you have a sort of classic story about how this change might happen… consumer change… political change and subsidies and taxation and regulation… institutional change and pressure campaigns because we have a large scale industrialized animal agriculture system that actually involves quite a small number of people… but it has outsized political impact.”

JW: “There are countries around the world where a very large percentage of the population might actually be day-to-day involved in animal agriculture… there will be communities around the world that are almost completely dependent on forms of animal agriculture… if you go to a fishing village in Kerala and say ‘you’ll need to go vegan’ you’re going to have an interesting conversation.”

“It completely depends on the region… in most countries in Africa, meat consumption is extremely low compared to western countries… most agriculture is not factory farming. It is extensive agriculture, more pasture oriented, when it does exist.”

“I went to the AVA conference in Nairobi earlier this year and I learned a lot about the issues that people are working with.”

“…It’s not entirely the same, but there are similarities that make it meaningful to talk about as a constant… the challenge is building up an alternative to factory farming before factory farming can take root.”

“Factory farming companies are trying to take root right now especially in the fastest economies in Africa like Nigeria and Kenya and South Africa and Egypt.”

“So, if we can get in there and build something else, maybe alternative protein oriented, maybe more plant-based, whole foods, plant-based oriented, depending on the culture, before the factory farming comes in, I think there’s a lot of mitigation work that can be done.”

“Alternatively, in Southeast Asian countries, animal farming is huge… I plotted the amount of [animal movement] funding that goes per continent and then the number of animals… in Asia, there are so many more farmed animals than there is funding.”

“The opportunities are there, they have so much fewer resources compared to people in the United States and far more animals… it’s very challenging for them… Not because of a lack of skill or motivation or anything, just because of lack of resources.”

“They’re trying to dismantle an already existing system and people have already have their own different connections with meat eating that are going to be difficult to work on.”

“Thailand is one exception. They don’t eat as much meat as similar countries.”

“I don’t have any easy answers… just they’re trying to fight a much harder battle than people in the United States or Europe are… we need to be concentrating on those regions a lot more.”

“Animal advocates are people too and we’re people who have biases…  we’re probably more likely to think about challenges closer to us. That’s why richer people tend to focus on issues closer to them which often is in North America and Europe… that’s a shame because there’s a lot more work that can be done in other regions.”

JW: “One of the hopeful aspects of the global picture is that in many cases… the culture or the consumption pattern is much closer to a sort of vegan future than the industrialized west is.”

JW: “So you’re not working against something that’s so culturally deep set. In Africa, you don’t have the scale of the industry with like the JBS’s or the big firms and the political power, the lobbying and the entrenched interests who can resist. Maybe preventing the growth is easier than scaling it back once it’s established and entrenched.”

JW: “Maybe the more hopeful thing is this idea that some of some of those regions where these systems aren’t yet embedded could just bypass the horrific path we’ve followed.”

JW: “There’s an interesting example in Kenya about mobile money. Instead of following the path of going down the traditional banking route that the industrialized west has done with bank branches and wires and old fashioned technology, they just went straight to mobile money on a digital phone and just completely leapfrogged… many decades of the path the western industrialized nations have followed.”

JW: “If you could do something like that about protein production… there’s the dream. Maybe the industrialized West could then learn from what they’ve done.”

“I think there’s a huge opportunity, but we are not currently prepared to meet that… Maybe in a couple years we will be. There’s not enough money and there’s not enough research, not enough funding. And the activists in Africa need more support.”

“So if we’re going to meet it, we need to start shifting our priorities now.”

“I mean my main message is if you are an advocate… I strongly encourage you to constantly be asking yourselves the questions ‘what am I doing? What are my goals? Is this effective? How can I be making this more effective?’”

“Those questions are not easy to answer, but you have to start by asking those questions on a consistent basis because if you’re not, you’re going to be going down the wrong path. without even knowing it. And you might look back in a couple of years and think, ‘Oh, that was a lot of hard work that I spent on the wrong thing.’”

1:22:20 Follow Bjorn

Bjorn’s “More Than Meats The Eye” Substack “I publish an evidence-based analysis every two weeks written for a practical audience. So if you’re thinking about how do I actually apply this to my work, I always focus on making it easy to understand… Nobody has the time to read 25 scientific papers on an afternoon. I’ll do that work for you.”

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