“We're all just participating in a culture that really isn't of our choice… we just grew up in this culture, but we can start questioning things and just not be afraid to say that we love other animals that they're astounding, and that we care about the environment and we want to be less impactful… you just have to be willing to say things that maybe other people haven't heard you say yet.” -Carrie P. Freeman Carrie Packwood Freeman is an associate professor of communications at Georgia State Un...
Apr 08, 2021•24 min•Season 6Ep. 2
We're creating a new system. When you look at it in that way, that's activism in itself. And that's actually fighting against a system that has billions of dollars, that has been spending billions of dollars, and not even asking people what they like to eat. They're not even considering the health. We're in the middle of a pandemic and who gets hit the hardest, black and brown communities with underlying conditions. Those underlying conditions stem from what they're eating. I get to go into thes...
Apr 01, 2021•40 min•Season 6Ep. 1
“I was doing really well in cardiology. I loved my role. I loved the work I was doing. I'd say except for two or three people, everybody said, ‘this is crazy, why are you giving up a career that is on an upward trajectory and that you're doing really well in?’ The two or three people who heard me, they said, ‘Uma don't look back. If you have even a fraction of the impact of what you're thinking of having, that'll be a million-fold more impactful than what you could do as a cardiologist for the n...
Mar 04, 2021•49 min
“I sat down, did some number questing and said, okay, 85% is going to be given away during my lifetime and the rest of thereafter. I sleep much better at nights. I do live comfortably, but there's a limit. I'd rather that money go to save lives.” - Jim Greenbaum Jim Greenbaum is the Founder and Managing Director of The Greenbaum Foundation . After college, Jim entered the workforce with one goal in mind - to make as much money as quickly as possible in order to use those funds to help make the w...
Feb 25, 2021•23 min•Season 5Ep. 22
“I usually live day by day. I always live every day like it's going to be the last day. We learned that during the war. We don't know when we're going to die. So, you live every day like it's going to be the last day. That's what I do.” – Helena Husseini Helena Husseini is the vice-president of BETA, Beirut Ethical Treatment for Animals. BETA is the first and largest shelter in Lebanon with 850 dogs, many cats, a few horses, and a couple of monkeys. Helena is also an architect. She has been with...
Feb 18, 2021•42 min•Season 5Ep. 21
“…I just remember walking around this room in total shock and then backing into a cage and feeling something touch my shoulder and realizing, ‘Oh my gosh, you know, I’ve come too close,’ and thinking I was going to be hurt. Then, as I turned around [I saw] what had touched me was the bears paw through the bars of the cage. She just had her paw there and was holding it out. And I did something ridiculously stupid. I took her paw, because it was there, reaching out and she just squeezed my fingers...
Feb 11, 2021•40 min•Season 5Ep. 20
“…people were treating us like two crazy guys from Spain that were trying to change something in a country that loves meat... And now we see in these supermarkets, our product there… it’s crazy. I get very emotional when I think about that day that with Marc. We were working in a library for free because we did not have money to pay for an office. We just had this idea. We had these first prototypes for a product… let's try to sell it in few shops and let's see the feedback. And now we are in mo...
Feb 04, 2021•37 min•Season 5Ep. 19
“… it was quite a big change… when I was growing up, I even used to like hunt and fish, to be honest. I mean, that was part of our family tradition through generations, I made friends through those sorts of activities. My father and I used to do those things and my grandfather [too]. So, growing up around animal cruelty… it was very natural for me. …saying, “no, I'm not going to continue to participate in those sorts of things,” was actually quite a big transition and a scarry one. I didn't know...
Jan 28, 2021•30 min•Season 5Ep. 18
“We're not even talking about the barriers of having a plant-based company. There are still so many countries that they don't even support plant-based innovation, for every Israel and Singapore that’s making leaps and bounds, there's a France that's trying to push a meat diet. So, to be in an industry that is here to disrupt the mainstream and is here to disrupt a lot of what people hold dear, that’s a lonely journey. We need to make the effort to drive the conversation in the direction that we ...
Jan 21, 2021•41 min•Season 5Ep. 16
“We spent 50 years fighting industry and I mean, fighting industry. And we were poking a bear and poking a bear and poking a bear. And then one day that bear came up and just nuzzled us under the neck and said, “okay, we're interested.” …It was industry, it was the big players that came in and said, “why are we fighting this? If consumers are asking for plant-based, we can sell plant-based.’” – Chris Kerr Chris Kerr is on a mission to upend the entire food industry. Chris is the Chief Investment...
Jan 14, 2021•31 min•Season 5Ep. 16
“There's $5 billion of debt collectively from contract chicken farmers. It's enormous. You're just treading water. You're just paying the bills and it starts off great, in the sense that you think you're going to make enough money. But you end up just paying bills and never getting ahead. And that's very typical.” – Leah Garcés Over the past few decades, people have become increasingly aware of the that factory farming is destroying the planet and most know that its abhorrently cruel and inhuman...
Jan 07, 2021•27 min•Season 5Ep. 15
“Scientists have made this study and experiment… people would actually feel bad for the butterfly because now it's ready to come out of its cocoon, so they would open the cocoon for it. They would slice it open to make it easier for the butterfly to come out. And it turns out that even doing that weakens the butterfly, because that effort of breaking the cocoon and spreading your wings is a necessity to become more resilient and stronger in life” – Daniel Fox Daniel Fox is a photographer, solo w...
Dec 31, 2020•40 min•Season 5Ep. 14
“…From everything that I'd learned and from everything that I'd seen, I came to realize that our food and how we produce it, particularly products of industrial animal agriculture links to almost every issue I'd worked on from biodiversity loss to climate change to food insecurity.” – Thomas King Thomas King is the founder and CEO of Food Frontier, a food innovation think tank dedicated to diversifying the world's food supply through the development of alternatives proteins. For the last decade ...
Dec 24, 2020•29 min•Season 5Ep. 13
“I think that when the animal protection movement really started gaining hold in the seventies... in the United States at least, I think there was a lot of harm done in the ways that we messaged the connections between humans in marginalized communities and animals. And I think that there's also a dynamic where… communities of color are often struggling for basic rights, basic needs to be met. And so, fighting for others is kind of a nice to have.” - Aryenish Birdie Aryenish Birdie is founder an...
Dec 16, 2020•34 min•Season 5Ep. 12
“Even the first morning we saw a toughness, a certain toughness that I hadn't been experienced to. What we didn't realize with selection criteria that we're putting out there, is that we're actually getting the toughest in those communities. Not only in these communities, I mean, you're talking about one of our poorest places in one of the harshest areas on the planet, The Zambezi Valley and the life of a woman in rural Zimbabwe in the Zambezi Valley is it's not an easy one. And so we thought, w...
Dec 10, 2020•48 min•Season 5Ep. 11
Nicole Rawling is the co-founder and executive director of the Material Innovation Initiative (MII) , a game-changing non-profit that is helping to remove and replace animal materials with high-tech, near-identical materials that are all made without harming an animal. The goal of the initiative is to remove the farmed animal from materials such as leather, wool, silk, down, fur, and exotic skins - and instead use cutting-edge tech like cultivated and lab-grown cells to make kinder and more sust...
Dec 03, 2020•34 min•Season 5Ep. 10
“… we are trying to make something watchable that is just unwatchable. I don't want to be here and I don't want to see this. And every part of me wants to turn away, but you have to engage with it, and you have to come out the other end with something that hopefully can encourage other people to stick with long enough to have it land.” - Kelly Guerin How we treat animals is how we treat humans. Kelly Guerin is a documentary filmmaker who has been making that connection for as long as she’s been ...
Nov 26, 2020•50 min•Season 5Ep. 9
“In a natural setting, these animals would be swimming maybe a hundred miles a day, diving deep. They have their social lives, their social networks, roles to play in very tightly-knit family groups. They raise their children. They have cultures, different ways of doing things in different populations. They can explore and play and come together. None of that is available in the concrete tank. None of it. They don't have any place to go. They don't have any place to dive… what you see is a lot o...
Nov 19, 2020•42 min•Season 5Ep. 8
“Because we're told of so many problems and issues around the world, we get overwhelmed. And if you tell someone, okay, this is what's going on and this is what you can do. That's a bit different, people are like, okay, that's actionable.” - Amanda Hearst Amanda Hearst is co-founder of Well Beings , an organization that unites animal welfare and environmental protection throughout the globe - from closing down puppy mills in the American South to stopping deforestation in South America. Their mo...
Nov 12, 2020•27 min•Season 5Ep. 7
“The core of this problem in the world in many ways. is the consciousness that we bring to the world. When we think of others in the world or ourselves as being more or less worthy of being treated with respect, that very thinking is what drives many of the social problems we see in the world.” – Dr. Melanie Joy Melanie Joy is a Harvard educated psychologist, specializing in the psychology of eating animals, social transformation and relationships. She is the award-winning author of six books, i...
Nov 05, 2020•36 min
“When I moved my mom in, I certainly felt, okay, now I'm off the market. I've got a broken-down house, a crazy mother, a high-pressure job being a vegan activist at PETA… this is not really a good resume for finding Mr. Right.” – Dan Mathews Dan Mathews is the Director of Campaigns at PETA. He’s been there since the 80s when he was hired as a receptionist right after college. Dan’s responsible for PETAs most controversial and outlandish campaigns including the "I'd Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur"...
Oct 29, 2020•25 min•Season 5Ep. 5
"…when I say people had no idea, these were investors, right? These were people who thought they had a crystal ball on the future. And I was like, look, our world has to change for so many reasons. The fact that we're slaughtering animals and doing so in really horrific ways, that is not the future. And so, if that is not the future, what is? It's embracing biotech, it's embracing food science, it's embracing the things that will remove these animals and the environmental impact of this out of t...
Oct 22, 2020•42 min•Season 5Ep. 4
We are on the cusp of the fastest, deepest, most consequential transformation of human civilization in history, a transformation every bit as significant as the move from foraging to cities and agriculture 10,000 years ago. James Arbib and Tony Seba, Rethinking Humanity James Arbib is co-founder of RethinkX, a nonprofit think tank that explores how technology will shape the future and disrupt all levels of society, including information energy, materials, transportation, and my favorite, food – ...
Oct 15, 2020•39 min•Season 5Ep. 3
…not everyone can afford to donate a certain percentage of their money, not everyone can afford to volunteer their time because they're working so much. If you can, this is your generosity to the world, this is your generosity to all the people that cannot. And I think that's kind of our duty and our privilege. What is the max generosity that you can live with, with your food choices, with your time, with your money choices. - April Tam Smith April Tam Smith is the co-founder of PS Kitchen, a pl...
Oct 08, 2020•37 min•Season 5Ep. 2
There would be some mornings that the indigenous tribal leaders would take us out into virgin rainforest… [I was] like, “no human has ever stood here before.” And it was alive with, I mean, you name the animal… and it was loud full and of life. And they would take us out the very next day and it was just smoldering because it had been slashed and burned illegally in the middle of the night. And it was just completely quiet except for what was left of the fire. And that that changes you. Liza Hea...
Oct 01, 2020•36 min•Season 5Ep. 1
“Bearing witness is difficult. It does hit your emotions... I think you've got to remember, these images that you take are not yours to keep… it's your duty to put them out there or let organizations get them out there. I think that's how you cope - it’s thinking, okay these aren't going to stay in my head. These are actually going to go out into the world and are going to create change.” - Gemunu de Silva Today’s episode is a special one. It’s with Gemunu de Silva. Gem is a filmmaker and an act...
Sep 03, 2020•54 min•Season 4Ep. 23
What's allowed the Beyonds and Impossibles and JUSTs of the world to do what they're doing was not subsidies, it was investment that they put into science and technology that allowed them to create things that weren't creatable before, because they just hadn't been tried before. - Michael Pellman Rowland Michael Pellman Rowland is back. He was on the podcast in the early days of the pandemic to talk about the happenings in the alternative protein space and to explain the Beyond Meat IPO – the mo...
Aug 27, 2020•37 min•Season 4Ep. 22
"We kept going through this logical exercise of how do we help more and more animals. And every single time the logical end point was - it's not dogs and cats, it's animals in the food system. It’s not a matter of tens of millions of animals. It's a matter of tens of billions of animals and hundreds of billions of fish." - Nate Salpeter What do you get when two tech geniuses start an animal sanctuary? The first non-profit sanctuary in the world to address the global impacts of factory farming ac...
Aug 13, 2020•38 min•Season 4Ep. 21
The only way to help animals is to help people. Its humans that need to change, not animals. And I think it's the same way when we're talking about other issues in our society. It's about healing those who are causing violence, and it oftentimes can be easy to judge and persecute and sort of push aside people that are causing harm. It's more challenging to love them and to lead by example and to believe that everyone is doing the best that they can with what they have and what they know in that ...
Aug 06, 2020•41 min•Season 4Ep. 20
Beings who've succeeded on earth for millions of years, don’t seek, and should not require, our approval. They belong as well as we do. We do ourselves no favors by asking whether their existence is worth our while. We are hardly in a position to judge, hurdling and lurching along as we are with no goal, no plan except: bigger, faster, more. If we had the courage to be honest about it, we would have to admit that whales and birds and apes and all the rest live fully up to everything of which the...
Jul 30, 2020•59 min•Season 4Ep. 19
