 I'm in it for the long haul so I don't care how many people I've got to call out and I'm brazen in a way I'll go and I'll go on anybody's channel I'll go and call them out to the face I'll go and call them out in any way that I need to because I am utterly committed to taking that message forward. Okay so welcome to another episode of The Carp Strongcast and I have a special guest here today Dr Michelle Lowe. Now she is a psychologist and a vegan YouTuber. First come across Michelle she was doing some response videos to carnivals on YouTube and then I saw her do a live stream with Vegan Gains after a debate that she had so thank you for coming in. Thank you very much for inviting me I feel very honored to be here. I know you come a long way so it's really cool to have you here in The Carp Strong HQ. So first of all four people that don't know who you are can you give like a little outline of what what you do where you come from what you do for your career. Yeah so I'm a charter psychologist that's what I do for my day job I teach psychology mainly forensic and social psychology I also teach research methods and statistics so I feel when I do critique people who make honorous judgments about statistics that I do know what I'm talking about okay I've been a PhD since 2002 and my PhD was in social psychology and I see a lot of ways in which social psychology can be applied to vegan activism okay so that's what I'm starting to do now on my channel I mean introducing more and more psychology into my channel so my channel is very broad like I do I do fun stuff I do taste tests I do response videos but I also want to I want to encourage people to understand how activism actually works in the mind and how it how persuasion techniques I've got a video coming out very soon on the social psychology of persuasion on what vegan activists need to know about persuasion so yeah I've got a lot of good plans for my channel wow we can get into all of that stuff because that sounds super interesting I think this is going to be a great podcast how did you go from a psychologist to a vegan on YouTube how was that transition okay well I've been a vegetarian since I was 11 years old wow at the age of 11 me and my friend we loved animals and we couldn't understand why we ate animals and no one no one seemed to bat an eyelid about it she lasted four weeks before she fell for the dramas that her family put forward to her but I'm still here I haven't I haven't eaten meat or fish since was 11 wow as an older teenager I did veganism for four and a half years but I was too young too immature I used to cheat and I kind of see myself in some of the younger cheating vegans yeah that are on YouTube today and I probably if I you know if I was that age now I may have even been one of those but I stayed vegetarian I dropped off veganism after about four and a half years didn't like eggs really so it was just dairy it's only dairy that has been the thing that was my downfall okay and I was in complete denial complete denial I knew I knew what cows and their calves went through but I was in denial and I allowed myself to be in denial until the beginning of 2016 when one of my co-workers who was new at the time she's vegan and she just had a chat with me and it was a chat over a cheese sandwich and she said oh you're vegetarian and she was totally non-confrontational um another psychologist okay and she said um you know vegetarianism's great and you're saving animals however do you know about the dairy industry and I said I do and it hit me I went away and it hit me like a like a light bulb came on and I thought I've been in denial for years and years drinking milk eating cheese eating chocolate and thinking oh it's only a few things I don't have it every day that kind of thing you know and um and so I I started to transition I ate the food that I already had in my house um and because I don't like waste and I transitioned into veganism so I've been a vegan now completely vegan for three and a half years so um I wanted to start a youtube I started a youtube kind of early end of last year and I was talking about veganism and but not seriously I was just vlogging my life just vlogging whatever I felt like it um but I've been watching vegan youtube and I was commenting on vegan videos and and I thought do you know what I want to I want to do this seriously I want to do this as as a activist kind of move movement and I think I've got a lot to offer the activism movement um in terms of the academic side so slowly I've gained followers and I've found my feet I've you know I've found people are willing to listen to me um I think that's in part because of the other response videos I do to the carnists of course um and I think that is important I think they need calling out at every single opportunity and I don't think they call that enough to be honest um and the bullies um that you know the my comment section is plagued plagued with trolls yeah um but they spur me on they absolutely spur me on because I know I'm making them I'm making them think they don't know it but I'm making them think yeah and the more they kick back the more I know they're desperate yeah and some of their arguments are just completely insanely desperate they are very illogical there's not much logic going on there in the carnival movement I feel um you know sometimes you have the people that are you know they're just eating the standard diet of plants and then when you go these carnivores they they rely completely off anecdotal uh just opinion and you don't there is no scientific evidence to back up any of their claims but there seems to be a movement of these this information that's been repeated between them and they feel like that's evidence enough and what is it about these uh you know carnivores that are just following someone's opinion or someone sounds good on camera so they're taking that over the mountains of scientific evidence that is out there I think there's several things going on there um firstly at the most simple level people like to be told good things about their bad habits yeah um you know if uh if some you know newspaper article comes out saying oh smoking isn't so bad you get the smokers who say yeah I'm not doing anything too bad to my body so it's easy it's easy to have a situation where if you if you're told good things about bad habits you are going to believe them you might not really believe them you want to believe them you want to believe them exactly thank you I'll take that yeah I'll take that one yeah um but on a on a deeper level I think what I've seen is those those carnivores and those that are close to carnivore what they're doing is science denying and I think there's a deeper almost like a societal issue that people feel that scientists lie to them that everybody's in it together the government's in it with the scientist and the scientists are funded by big big big big farmer big big broccoli I got you and and I think people fall into like like the flat earth movement for example people have fallen into that because they want to they want to feel that they're they're not falling for the the mainstream lines about science yeah there's being um you know discerning and but not throwing the baby out with the bathwater just because there is corruption in a certain you know institution doesn't mean the whole institute is corrupt and they account for this bias in in research don't know they peer review it they make sure it's legitimate yeah um there is ways around that though maybe like certain studies can be designed in a way that they favor a certain outcome absolutely yeah but that doesn't mean all science is then null and void you know deny all evidence and work off what what what evidence do they work off well when I had a the debate with Bart Kay a few weeks ago that was what I wanted to get through to him um he feels that I lied to him and I got on got on his channel under false pretenses but he can think that if he likes but I started off wanting to talk about the some new research that had come out in the annals of internal medicine saying that meat is actually quite good for us and there's no evidence to suggest meat is bad um and it's not true I read those papers and they're not saying anything new they're not saying anything novel so I started off with you know I wanted to get Bart's opinion on that um but what I really wanted to do was get him to admit on camera in front of me that he has no evidence because he's you know he's bullying people he's accruing followers under false pretenses and he'll probably try to sue me for slander for saying that what he is and he said there's no evidence there's no evidence that meat is good there's no evidence for any nutritional nutritional science throw it out throw it out of the water so saying there's no evidence on either side on either side there's no evidence so I said well why then are you you know supporting a carnival diet and he said well we've got anecdotes we've got anecdotes we're collecting explain what an anecdote is for someone who's listening who might not an anecdote is the equivalent of a story so normally if you look at the dictionary definition of anecdote it's an amusing story so the difference between an anecdote and science is it's the difference between collecting data under controlled conditions from thousands of people and potentially carrying that study on in a longitudinal fashion for many years so you can get like you can track people's health outcomes and asking someone on the train how they're feeling that's the difference between an anecdote and saying you know oh yeah I feel like this today and a scientific study that has got thousands of people thousands and thousands of data points and statistics to and it's been peer reviewed and published in prestigious journals are supporting the plant-based lifestyle so that's the best available available evidence we have on nutrition is these big population studies yeah so they're like a cohort study where they they either go backwards in time and track people or they follow them yeah um because a lot of people might not understand research and how it's collected and how statistics are collected and how you know they find these differences in health outcomes yeah can you explain like what a cohort is and how like let's just say um the Adventist study how they would do something like that okay so what they might do is take a cohort so a group of people a large group of people and they might want to let's say for example look at colon cancer as one of their potential outcomes so at baseline they'll take a lot of data so they'll they'll get medical evidence from records so they'll make sure that nobody at baseline has got colon cancer they'll take measures to do with the current diet and things like that so that's one of the criticisms of these cohort studies that some of them have only looked at what diet people are on once and then once they start following them for years well people might change the diet so that's an obvious criticism but there are some studies that have actually consistently tested diet and got people to do not just one a one questionnaire but food diaries and things like that so no it's not perfect but it's the best we can do whilst being ethical what do you mean by that being ethical because you can't a lot of people in the room and do work exactly yeah do like an rct exactly you can't take people out of their everyday life say right you guys don't have colon cancer you guys don't have colon cancer either so we're now going to lock you up for 10 years give one of you colon cancer but through diet when to force feed half of you a carnivore diet and force feed half of you a plant-based diet you can't do that it's unethical so the next best thing is to track people through their daily lives take measures of what they're eating and they also take into account things like alcohol you exercise yeah other health possibilities social sort of setting or sometimes didn't the event to study account for the most variables it was a very comprehensive study yeah so the more comprehensive a study is the more well planned it is the more variables that you can account for throughout the entire study yeah then the less limitations that study has okay so there's no one perfect study every single study that's ever been published in any field whatsoever not just nutrition or psychology or biology but physics and all of it there's always going to be limitations and that's why when authors write up papers they always have a section in their discussion addressing the limitations and then suggesting future ideas for research how such limitations might be overcome in the future okay so in terms of cohort studies what if it was just one one cohort study that had ever been done and that was it on one population one sample say the adventist study and they'd collected it you know over a few years and it was just one I wouldn't be convinced by it the thing that convinces me is although these studies have their limitations what they are doing is collecting data from many different parts of the world different types of people asking different types of questions using using statistical methods that are the most robust that they possibly can be so taking taking into account lots of possible confounding variables and the data comes together as a consistent body of research the other thing about scientific research is that if you you find what we call converging lines of evidence so we've got the cohort studies like the epidemiological datasets but we've also got more mechanistic data we've also got however cruel they might be we've also got animal studies so we can we can look at models of how things might might be playing out in the body yeah mechanistic data just explain mechanistic to people mechanistic data is how something works yeah so because you can't you can't look inside the box you can't look inside the body what you've kind of got to do is again it's about compromise because you can't rip people open to look at their insights unethical to do that so there's other ways you can do it you can do in vitro studies which are in the test tube you can you can develop animal models and look at and look at animals but mechanistic data is just how something works and tracking like putting together a model sometimes it's theoretical because sometimes you don't have all the evidence but you like like for example the role of cholesterol in atherosclerosis yes um that's a big thing that the the carnice are denying at the moment and they say that you know we should only look at the mechanistic data but we know how atherosclerosis develops and we know that LDL has got a role in that development it's not this sole cause but we know from converging lines of evidence through many years of different studies so how can that be denied so they can overall in terms of nutrition what we what we've got at the moment and we can pick studies apart we can look at the different flaws in individual studies but because we've got we've got replicative findings we've got different populations different locations different time points looking at a variety of different like illness outcomes cancer heart disease strokes etc etc and then we've got the mechanistic side we have got some randomized control trials they tend to be small scale they tend to be again flawed but putting the body of evidence together all of it together what we can say is eating meat is one of the worst things you can do well for your health so you're saying all of these collectively according to the same thing they're collecting they're all supporting bits of data and then they do something like it's a meta analysis where they analyze a group of a large group of like a few hundred studies yeah see if there's anything consistent yeah so what they do in meta analysis is they they start off with what we call a systematic review of the literature okay so they might want to look at all the different studies that have been done on colon cancer and meat for example right so they systematically review the literature they make sure they don't miss anything and then if they have enough studies that have used broadly the same measures then they can do a meta analysis so as well as the systematic review which is a systematic review of the literature they do a meta analysis which is a statistical technique which looks at the magnitude of the effect overall so it pulls the data from all of those different studies and it looks at the effect sizes and how strong the effects are so meta analyses are considered the pinnacle of the hierarchy of evidence the scientific hierarchy of evidence again the hierarchy is something that the carnists deny and I've I've done a video on the the hierarchy of evidence and I'll readily admit that just because it's a meta analysis doesn't mean it's good okay because there are some terrible meta analyses out there it might be that the research area doesn't lend itself terribly well to meta analyses because the measures aren't really very consistent would would you say that the worst meta analysis is better than the best anecdote in terms of oh without a shadow of a doubt the anecdotes don't even make it on onto the hierarchy of evidence because they're not science they're just not science they're just having a conversation you can say anything and that would be considered evidence and this is what I said in the barcay debate I said well all right then if you're collecting anecdotes I could go along and collect anecdotes from a hundred of my friends who happen to be vegan and they'll all say veganism is great you know my health has improved I feel so much better anyway yeah you could do so it sounds like someone's they're very fixed in their belief system and don't want to accept the other way or they're really fixed in it and denying evidence and putting their blinders on and not yeah so that's really interesting let's talk about the psychology of social change yeah and how activism actually works because you do get people that you know the three stages of truth first it's ridiculed and then it's accepted so I get people you know getting angry and you know I've been an activist now and just felt the repercussions of saying something people don't want to hear it's usually something uncomfortable that they feel is true at some level and they have all different types of reactions they might ignore I don't the ones that ignore I don't even feel are close to ready to change yeah but what is it about activism techniques that creates this stir in society and causes this change well there's there's there's many ways we could look at this in social psychology um the the anger that you might be confronted with when you tell someone an uncomfortable truth it's it's possible that once that anger dissipates you can have that person can have what we call the sleeper effect happen to them so when you are confronted with a um a new truth a new a new revelation something that you haven't looked at it that way before and it might be a persuasion technique it might be someone's trying to sell you something it might it might be a political movement and you go away and you think about it but normally that potential for change that they might have once their anger dissipates normally it dissipates over time unless it's prompted again but actually the sleeper effect in social psychology is really interesting because instead of the potential for attitude change dissipating over time the sleeper effect makes it stronger it makes them more likely to change and the thing that instigates the sleeper effect is discounting information so if somebody gets angry because maybe they're in a group of people and they don't want to feel embarrassed they're out on the street and they don't want to feel embarrassed that they count that as discounting information so they discounting what you're telling them because it's too uncomfortable it's too uncomfortable for them to even confront what they're doing okay right so it's the equivalent of me although I wasn't angry about it but it's the equivalent of me denying what I knew about cows and calves when I was through those years drinking milk and eating cheese right that denial was there but it was so deep-seated and nobody confronted me on it that's the thing no one ever confronted me on it if they had then maybe I would have felt some anger and I would have felt some resistance but yeah I think the sleeper effect would have kicked in because all of that discounting information that I could drum up in my head I know it's not real I know it's not true so the force for change that that resistance dissipates over time and the potential for attitude change gets stronger over time so I think with activism the in your face confronting people I think although it doesn't I mean it might do sometimes but it doesn't instantly get people to say yeah I'm going vegan I'm going vegan right now what it does is it gives them the food for thought yeah and once a movement starts to take hold then it's like exponentially and I think we're beginning to see this now with the vegan movement and we can thank we can thank the big businesses we can thank the big companies for putting veganism into the media yeah you know like the McDonald's new burgers and things like that I mean Greg sausage rolls and Piers Morgan bad media for veganism but it's actually helped into the discussion exactly exactly that you know these things are dreadful they're not they're no more healthy than junk food that's got meat in it really um a little bit maybe um but if you couldn't live on McDonald's vegan burgers and Greg sausage rolls but as a treat to show people that actually you can have some treats actually you can go out with your friends actually you know veganism is not this hippy-dippy nonsense you know like people wearing flowers in the hair or anything like normalizing it it's just every anybody can be vegan so it doesn't matter whether you're fat thin it doesn't matter whether you're a bodybuilder or you're a school teacher or you're a family oriented person it doesn't matter who you are or how old you are or where you come from there is a way to be vegan and if you want to go down the junk food vegan route then do it because the chances are you're probably living on the junk food diet anyway and it doesn't that doesn't matter what we want people to do is is stop killing animals so to to show people all of the potential I think the media is helping us and that ferrari that happens every now and again with people at Piers Morgan what they're doing is adding discounting information into the argument and remember what I said about discounting information actually it makes attitude change stronger over time wow so that again it's about converging converging lines of evidence that if you're confronted with someone who who might be in your face on the street or they might be like my co-worker who just had a word with me who just talked to me about you know have you thought about the dairy industry have you and it's like yeah I have yeah yeah I have and then I went back to my fist and I was like and that was it right so it could be something like a likeable moment but for most people who've never considered veganism and you've got to remember I was a vegetarian since I was 11 yeah um somebody who's never considered veganism might take a long time it's going to be a process exactly a lot of conditioning there and yeah exactly because you've got a lifetime like like we've all had a lifetime of not even not even equating kids are not told that that lamb on their plate is the lamb that two weeks ago was was in a field or in a in a shed or it was alive it was a living sentient creature and it's even called the same yeah you know and people just don't make that connection and I think once they do make that connection then it can be a long process of having to admit to themselves that they need to change and it's because of the conditioning because of the taste pleasure that people have been conditioned to get from meat from dairy from egg products and then all of the derivatives you know there's just so many foods out there that have got egg powder in yeah milk powder in and things like that so you think oh well to be vegan I've got to I've got to check packets and I've got to do this and I've got to do that inconvenience yeah so you can say actually yes you do you do have to check packets but you very quickly learn what things are vegan when you're shopping what things are vegan and what what isn't and it's not a newer product so things you've never had before that you need to check yeah you build a habit over time and it's kind of fun at the start like exactly you know all these cool things you call it and so like I got over the vegan junk food sort of thing at the start I still promote them because it's I believe it's good for animals to let people know that these exist yeah but at the start I was like oh my god this and this and this now I predominantly whole foods vegan I try to keep my health under wraps because long term I think predominantly a whole foods plant based diet and I check my nutrients I mean I'm not that rigorous it's really easy to collect a bunch of different minerals and vitamins when you're eating whole plant foods I mean exactly so that's interesting so like let's just look at other social justice movements and there was a bit of anger when these first started hey and like they were doing a lot of direct action stuff which was getting people talking and getting people angry and you know maybe even that people in their own movement were saying oh that's too extreme that's too extreme I've been called an extreme as the terrorist militant you name it I've been called it so a couple of years ago about January 2018 I did a tour around the UK and it just there was a lot of media attention I did a few in the paper all the time for using words like rape and murder and all these things and what you're saying is initially it might look on the surface like people are angry and this isn't working but fundamentally we're getting the conversation started and it's causing this effect to start exactly and I think we've gone we've gone a little bit beyond getting the conversation to start now I think we've done that yeah and I think now we need to just keep up the momentum okay and yeah absolutely you know the direct action getting getting into the media because you've called something murder you know that's great and that needs to carry on because it keeps the media interested and it keeps the opposers interested it keeps them coming back with the counter argument because the counter argument is actually working our favor not only for the sleeper effect but because every single one of those counter arguments can be countered can be because there there is so much evidence there is so much evidence not just on health not just in science but ethically you know you cannot deny that the farming industries in the western world are horrific horrific absolutely horrific and you cannot deny these the the ones who talk about eating carnival for health they don't really want to talk about ethics as much exactly but when they do I've noticed they use crop deaths you can't cause no harm yeah so you might as well you know like basically everything has a cost everything causes some amount of harm your existence causes some amount of harm so there's no distinction between stabbing a cow and buying a table to do this podcast yeah how do you tackle the you can't cause no harm sort of it's kind of like the appeal to futility futility yeah how do you handle that I I've talked a lot about crop death on my channel because it's one of the main things that the carnists come back with you know on videos in my comment section it's constant so I've made quite a lot of videos about it and the thing I say is there is there is no such thing as harm free living so if you buy a new computer a new camera a new microphone all of these things we have in the western world have been made in a sweatshop somewhere and we can do things to minimize our use so you know just to um you know buy a second hand and there's lots of things you can do if you're concerned about that kind of um human rights issue but you cannot live unless you live in a cave in somewhere and you can't not make any harm at all so in terms of crop deaths and veganism I think as a psychologist I think the best way to deal with that is to admit yes absolutely harvesting kills insects it ruins the habitat at least for you know a period of time for mice you know harvest mice who are nests might get destroyed the mice might be able to run away a lot of them might be able to run away but there might be babies in nests that get killed absolutely we can acknowledge that but as vegans what we should be appealing to the farming industry to do is to make farming more ethical so there's the veganic farming movement for example so if these carnists are concerned about crop deaths well why aren't they joining us to appeal to farmers to produce more ethical plant foods so you can make the plant farming more ethical you can't really make slashing an animal's throat and breeding them more ethical can you like absolutely not yeah and and also in in addition to appealing you know campaigning for more ethical plant farming what do those animals eat exactly magnitudes more crops than we do exactly so the majority of the crops that are that are grown in the western world are for animal feed what about grass-fed cattle and in my notes it's grass-fed cattle and they've got these big blocks of like harvested grass and they feed it to them in a barn and i'm like well you harvested that grass off of a crop and you feeding it to a cow calling it grass fed and they're eating it and they're like i'm causing no harm to crop deaths so like i haven't heard people just say they're killing that one cow it's like what did that cow eat you think they there's free grazing cows in uk where are these free grazing cows they put them in a barn for six months or seven months exactly exactly so you know you've got the hay production but also on a farm you've got pest control yeah so farmers will shoot rabbits they'll shoot they'll they'll trap mice they'll poison animals in the uk we've got the badger cult that happens every single year and and badges are being killed by their thousands for the dairy industry that's for the for the the cow industry yeah basically beef and because supposedly they spread bovine tuberculosis but there's actually no evidence that bovine tuberculosis has reduced in severity or incidences because of the badger cult there's actually a vaccination for bovine tb that isn't being used so the badges you know the what have badges ever done to anyone you know they're not even considered a pest only to farmers just targeted and so anything they can throw at a vegan for crop deaths you can throw the magnitude of 100 back exactly animal products we're trying to minimize harm and but like what if i were to call you a hypocrite for buying a microphone or something like that that has these minerals in it how would you navigate that i mean are you a hypocrite uh but they might you know i always i'll get this argument a lot that you have an iphone iphone's contain these minerals from somewhere down the line there might have been some exploitation for that mineral but they're typing this to me on their own iphone while they're eating a steak burger and i'm trying to do my best exactly exactly so you know i'm i'm i'm mindful about what i what i consume both in terms of of not just food but everything yeah you know i buy second hand when i when i can but i've got tech i've got an iphone i've got a macbook right yeah absolutely i think where there is acknowledgement i think just kicking back and getting angry back at them is not productive i think opening a dialogue is is the way to go so you say yes it does it contains that all the tech we have has had a some kind of abuse connected to it probably possibly there's no definitive like with apple put out this big statement about um yeah minerals that they they were going to cut ties with the coal bat mining and you know this slavery there might still be something in this phone that is questionable right yeah definitely when we look at a steak there's no question about that exactly that yeah exactly it's it's about it's about degrees of um of potential harm so again it's like campaigning for um crop farming to become more ethical well consumers can campaign for tech companies to become more ethical which they did remember they suicide nets that they were exactly exactly so there is there is there's no excuse really for a company to continue unethical practices if it's very consumers want it to change so you know it's kind of like the plastic thing right yeah you want to buy vegan food to steer in the animal holocaust but it's all wrapped in plastic and you want to help the the oceans too so that's where we go hey we love your vegan food yeah can you make this plastic like dissolvable or recyclable or something like yeah we're making steps here yeah and it is it's like you can't you can't change society overnight we can't make every single company completely ethical overnight we can't change attitudes of farmers overnight but we can do it step by step and once that momentum starts and it already has in the vegan movement then we can draw people in so draw the environmentalists in who are concerned about plastics and climate change climate science again undeniable the climate science and absolutely undeniable that plastics are killing coral reefs the killing fish the killing seals undeniable again it's it it takes somebody who is in a huge amount of denial to deny that those things are happening and people do deny those things are happening absolutely but it's about drawing people in who are may not be vegan but they are our allies and making kind of like a like a united front on certain issues so supporting consumers who campaign for more ethical tech you know offering offering from a vegan yes I support this this is not a vegan issue on its own very good point because once once people you know think right to be a vegan you've got to be the hippie that and the hermit that lives in a cave no you can be a normal person because actually yes we we can draw allies from different campaigns and we can help those campaigns by supporting them but veganism is its own ethical movement exactly yeah veganism is not about protecting workers in in certain countries although it's horrible and and the mineral mines right potential for abuse absolutely but it's a that's a different issue than veganism so why do they try to attach all these issues to the animal movement because because it's it's desperate ways to be able to appeal to hypocrisy exactly to be able to throw things back because they can't throw ethics back at us they can try through crop deaths i've never heard anyone with a i've never heard anyone with a compelling argument against the ethics of breeding millions and millions of animals and stabbing them to death for a burger that we don't need for our survival and that's where the carnivores either one of two things they either say i'm not interested in ethics i'm only interested in my health i don't care how many animals i have to kill because i'm living my best life eating steak so that's some people do that and you think they're pretty much that doesn't appeal to popularity though it doesn't appeal to the majority so they're kind of doing advocacy inadvertently for us by saying that absolutely and i think the carnivore carnivore movement are acting as advocates because radical opposition they are so ridiculous on many different levels they are they are they solidify our argument they do people can make their own mind they do they do and um the other thing they say is yeah absolutely i agree with you factory farming horrendous and but i only buy grass fed yeah it's like yeah but that grass fed animal still died so that you could have your steak yeah but it had a good life did it did it have a good life you know and and it's like well do you just live on steak and there are so few people who literally just live on steak yeah maybe shorn baker and jordan and mikaela peterson knows the only only people that i know live on beef everybody else the carnivores they live on a wide variety of they're just looking for an excuse to eat that meat just an excuse yeah it's an excuse and as the carnivore movement has grown a little bit in popularity on youtube then you've got people who are um like frank to fauna for example he's on like 60 odd thousand subs now you know he's seen his channel grow over the last year and year and a half massively because people are having a look at what this carnivore movement's all about and they're like oh well here it is my excuse not to give my steak away oh thanks frank give that one a like i'm not going big and thanks frank no science don't need it just need you to tell me it's okay yeah yeah absolutely but remember that you know opposing arguments are good opposing arguments keep the conversation going whether that's in the media whether it's on social media i invite opposing arguments into my comments i don't i don't ban them unless they're incredibly abusive because what what we're doing in my comment section is putting those all of those arguments forward time and time and time again and then if there's certain things i'll make a video on you know just to make sure people are listening to it and that's how i'm inching forward with my channel um so you have a strategy behind yeah yeah yeah oh definitely i have a strategy yeah um i didn't start off with a strategy but it's developed of the the last few months in introducing psychology psychology videos that's one element of putting out there that actually psychology has a lot to say as as a lot of advocacy in psychology um that that can be used um but also in taking issues that are that come up such as crop deaths such as grass fed and and addressing them head on and calling them out so yeah i do some response videos are a little bit silly but it's just to draw an audience in because once the audience are there and the audience are watching then they can they're more likely than to view the most serious stuff that will make them think so that's my strategy it's actually one of the best strategies because you're drawing in the opposite audience and exactly you're persuading them over but uh i think that's a very clever way to get your channel off the ground as well as target bigger channels that you have an opposing due to yeah bring their followers over to you you discuss your end of it and yeah it brings you up in the search so that's how i found your channel as well and i actually found you originally i think from vegan foot soldier he mentioned you and then you said you've been watching a lot of your video videos and i was like oh really and then i went and had a look and i was like oh wow and yeah then vegan gains had you on his channel for the live stream and what you said about research was just impeccable like the way you said it it's just like well you're just denying the solid evidence exactly that we have um so let's talk about like what would your advice be like as a psychologist um to vegan activists out there who they've all found their way that that resonates with them yeah like what would your advice be to them like in terms of being effective like saying conversations or let's just make it broad and then specific or i think broadly i think good activism takes many forms yeah that not everybody has the confidence to be able to go out in the street and confront people so they think i can't be a vegan activist because you know i'm socially anxious i'm shy and you know i don't know what to do if someone got angry yeah well leave that leave that form of activist activism to the people who are good at it because there are many different ways to be an activist so i've chosen to use my academic skills into activism so i'm not saying i'd never go out on the street and and you know and do that thing but day on day my daily life lends itself and my level of expertise lends itself to activism via social media in a persuasive psychological broad strategic way that's activism it's drawing people in it's asking it's getting people to ask questions if nothing else but in terms of advice for activists i think the on the back of that i think your activism is best served doing what you're good at because that's where you sit best that's where you're the most confident that's where your arguments will come naturally and um you know you won't feel like you're out on the street like a you know shaking in your boots in case somebody gets angry that that doesn't i mean it's great to have a try but that's not great activism but what you might be good at is something else yeah so so my advice would be in a in a broad sense would be to um to do the type of activism that suits you as a person fits with your life that you're the most confident with more specifically i'd give advice to activists by saying don't be despondent um keep going because it's very very easy to be put off by the what seems like reams of tolls yeah but let that frustration that you feel let that be the thing that spurs you on because ultimately those people are angry and they're shouty and they're ridiculous because they know we are right they know we're right and they just can't admit it so um don't be despondent keep going keep going with your message and um and embrace other allied movements as well and talk to those people too and and give the vegan message as broad a platform as possible yeah i agree with that like what do you think about the uh collaboration with uh vegan animal rights activists with the climate movement with the extinction rebellion then we had the animal rebellion think that was a good move i think i think it is a good move um again it's you know it creates anger it creates people um you know being um confrontational in a in an oppositional way yeah but it keeps them in the news and and having that having that uh media interest is is the impetus that will keep that will keep veganism and environmentalism in the forefront of people's minds and if people can think of one and not the other that's okay you know they might be interested in environmentalism but still not want to go vegan but it's still it's a it's a foot in the door it's what social psychologists call the foot in the door technique it's getting someone to think about something small you've got a real bigger motive but you think of something small get them comfortable with that and then inch forward so it's it's a it's a it's a movement that that is it's a progressive step by step rarely a lightable moment movement but it's something that we have control of because we have everything in our favor we have the science the research from different areas nutrition environmentalism we have absolutely ethics on our side and we have we have what is right on our side and if you think about it what is it 100 years ago that in the UK um bull baiting was legal dog fighting was legal cock fighting was legal those things are considered absolutely abhorrent today you know yeah they happen you know in underground you know dens of iniquity but the general population thinks they're abhorrent so something had to change at that point so we're now progressing on to well actually if you think that dog fighting's wrong because it cuts dog's throats and it makes them you know it gives them a horrible life and they're in pain and eventually they die well what's the difference between a dog being in pain and eventually dying bleeding out and a pig which has got an equal level of intelligence why what's what's the difference so what role obviously we're going into speciesism here which is really interesting psychology here um you've got much more of a chance to convince someone that stabbing a dog to death is wrong than you do with a pig or a chicken or a fish it's even further down the spectrum trying to get someone to connect with a fish yeah what role does speciesism play as a hindrance to the movement and how can we use it in our favor oh that's a good question um it is a hindrance because it's down to social conditioning that you know nobody remembers a hundred and nine years ago when dog fighting was perfectly legal and people were breeding dogs just to fight them you know so we grow up in a society where some animals are our friends and our pets and we can dress them up in silly costumes some of them are you know just out there in the wild and we can choose to leave them alone if we if we want to and then we've got those few species that we eat so in that way it's a hindrance but also I think it's potentially a good thing that we can use the species of argument just as we can use any other argument that it's a dialogue it gets people talking um and it you know it it it makes people think anything at all that makes people think is a good thing and that's why you know activists shouldn't be despondent when when you know they say well you know a pig it's bread for my food and I like bacon bacon though and but it's not the same as a dog and then you can say well in China dog meat is considered just like we think of pig meat right Chinese eat dogs oh yeah but that's disgusting why you know and they might come out with some kind of racist comment but you know it's social conditioning and social conditioning is um is a thing that will only change slowly okay really always not always not always okay because um if you have if you have official channels on your side okay I think then social conditioning changes quicker and potentially we have that potential with the BBC reporting on the climate and yeah yeah the Guardian like prestigious they're credible sources yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah we have that potential I don't think we're quite there yet to get big change fast I think we're still in the impetus building stage well we've got a lot we've got a lot against us that we have industry against us we have financial ties we have the government they're all eating meat as well so we have to change them at the top as well exactly so I think we've got this is like a really big tough they're not human beings as well these aren't human beings um they're pigs as well they're not dogs so like um what do you think about like so the other movements of justice to do with women's rights and gay rights and um you know the abolishment of slavery there's all human issues now we've got human beings fighting for animals that people are just discriminate against obviously they've always been food do you think this is a huge barrier to do you think this is going to slow down this change even further what that they're animals that we're not fighting this movement isn't fighting for other humans it's we're fighting for another species now and like it's and not just any species not elephants so we're talking about chickens yeah yeah um yes and no it's it's a similar kind of thing to to the speciesism argument that initially you can kind of say well human rights comes first so any human rights movement comes first but no because you know you might you might have not even thought that actually at one time you know women were dying to get the vote yeah we don't remember that it's not part of our kind of social memory and unless you're gay or you have gay friends or gay family members the gay rights movement can just kind of almost like pass you by you know you can choose to say oh I don't care what people do or identify as or I do care you know you can choose whether or not to to impart your time and resources into thinking about it but with with meat with veganism it's everybody's issue because what 90% of the population in every country in the western world eats animal products consumes animals so it's everybody's issue I get it so it's not just about a human versus an animal issue it's it's an in-your-face issue so it's all the more reason for people to get angry to become a little bit conversant in the way that they can justify their denial because it's there every single day and they have a very intimate connection with it they're putting it in their mouth they're chewing it up it's passing through their body so if you make them disgusted with that piece of flesh you know they're gonna be like I'm you're gonna I used to be afraid to see slaughter house footage because it would spoil my dinner you know and this is what people are I'm not going to change my whole lifestyle because you showed me the truth you know yeah yeah and and again that's why that different ways to engage people is really really important that showing people slaughterhouse footage is incredibly powerful yeah because there is absolutely no way the the only thing you can do confronted with slaughterhouse footage is to wince and to you know to just become you know like like just stressed would you say it's the most powerful way to get this the ethical issue into someone's consciousness by showing them exactly what goes on with without a doubt however there may be a caveat to that that if you if you are showing them slaughterhouse footage and they are one of those people who will just say I don't care you're never going to change that you've got to out you've got to you know acknowledge that there are some people who will never change and whatever they can they can do what they want but there are many more people who when confronted with the realities of the farming industry and the slaughter industry they it might take them a while as we've discussed but they will eventually think I I did not know this was happening and I cannot endorse this anymore so I'm going to give up this that the other like my mother for example she's never eaten duck she's never eaten venison and she's never eaten rabbit because she thinks those animals are cute yeah but she'll eat chicken she gave up red meat quite a while ago because she had high blood pressure she'll eat chicken and she eats a little bit of fish and she drinks milk and eggs right but she justifies the fact that well they're not cute yeah which is an easy argument to extrapolate out to a human being they're not cute enough for me kill them bash them not not cute exactly exactly so there are some animals that even though they're eaten by by some people they're they're like they've got this unusual position that they're not just the food stuff they're also something that's cute and something that you could possibly you know keep as a pet like a duck you know what we could bank on um is that from from my experience now you know four years out on the street so the majority of people are morally against it yeah yeah but they're in their practice they it's not convenient enough they don't know what to do just yet they're not willing to put that energy into changing but they're morally against it yeah so if we've got enough people who are morally against it then we can get the vote to get these things outlawed so if if we like let's just say like don't be disheartened if you don't turn someone vegan if they're morally against it because at least we've got them on our side even if they're consuming the products yeah yeah that that i would consider people like my mother who understands she understands what she's doing is is illogical but i consider her not quite an ally but somebody who i can talk to and i think i think she's resistant because it's me but i think if she heard arguments from someone else someone else and those arguments repeated i think she'd go vegan wait wait one second one second because i bring this up in my this is the main question i always get sorry to interrupt you but this is really important when you said if it was someone else now when people go joey my friends and my family they won't listen to me and i'll say there's some psychological barrier because you know they've always known you you haven't been right the whole time what is this psychological barrier between you and close friends or you and parents or family members that makes it so much harder for them to listen to you it's either really easy or impossible i can only speculate but what i would imagine it's because it's even more in your face okay when it's someone that you live with or you love and you you spend a lot of time with it's absolutely in your face and it's not just in your face one time in the street it's in your face all the time so i think people can put up a consistent level of resistance okay to that and it's easy to say to somebody who you know very well oh well you know i'm not going to do it and and feel some level of justification for saying that okay like for example i've got a son who's 22 he's uh wait you've been away at universities and doing his master's degree now and when i went vegan at the beginning of 2016 he ate meat and he laughed you know he used to laugh at me for being vegetarian and he was like oh my god you've gone vegan oh my god he went away to university because he didn't live with me um anyway but um he went away to university came back after his first semester for christmas and he went oh by the way i've gone vegan and it wasn't my argument i think maybe you planted a seed i planted a seed okay and he went away to university met lots of people joined a vegan society learned all about it in his own time in his own space with his own peer group yeah so instead of just listening to his mum preaching at him yeah he actually heard all of the arguments that he'd heard me say yeah by his own peer group yep and that's why activism should come in all shapes and sizes in all forms yeah because what type of person will reach bill won't reach Martha yeah you sometimes need somebody who is more like them and separate and separate that they choose to associate with yeah who they feel understands them maybe because like me going over to india and trying to advocate to that culture they're gonna be like who are you exactly what are you doing here exactly but i'm not for going over to there like that's not for me i'm i mean i have to like it wouldn't maybe an indian activist could resonate with his own people exactly um you know this a certain gender might resonate with another gender like a certain political ideology a certain you know but people resonate with who they're going to resonate with like yeah you don't have to be the activist that tries to resonate with everyone no even though i try to be as broad as possible you just can't reach there's always going to be a group of people that don't don't like you don't don't appreciate what he said it's you're putting you're pushing me away you're pushing me away um but that's interesting my friend omri paz from vegan friendly in israel calls it the hundred points effect so it's like oh you know you might have been that 20 points to get him started and then you hear another comment or you know piece of information that might be 15 points sees something in his facebook feed it's you know baby male chicks being ground up alive for the egg industry that's 25 points and when he reaches this hundred points he becomes full vegan maybe yeah that's it's a good good way to look at it because again it's it's about the impetus of a social movement and that impetus has started so anybody who you know has had that seed planted and who is maybe a little bit in denial still but willing to hold it there it's there knowing away at them easy to push it back for now but it's knowing away at them like when i was consuming dairy for years right it was there i could push it right back of my mind it came back occasionally and gnawed at me a little bit and i pushed it back and that one thing so maybe i i already had maybe 70 points maybe yeah you know um that i was that i was holding back and then that one conversation like i've been waiting for this for years and it could be and i think if that conversation had happened 10 years previous i think that would have been the point where i would have oh really i think so yeah i mean it's it's well it's an anecdote um and it's just me but that but that makes so when people say uh you know you shouldn't be talking about this keep your mouth closed about it just lead by example you could be missing a potential michelle and going vegan just from having a conversation polite discussion about it exactly and and that's why we should never miss opportunities to to advocate and you know if you feel that you know you've said it a million times to a million different people and you've had absolutely no effect it's what i said before don't be despondent because you don't know what affect you measure your effect exactly you don't know whether that person is going to go away and have that light bulb moment you don't know whether that person is going to go away and start searching on social media for information and a year down the line actually the final thing falls into place and they do it they go vegan so really it's activism as i said should come in all shapes and sizes lots of different arguments and use the arguments that you've that fit best with you that feel the best for you but but but you know practice arguments if you if you're a brand new vegan right you know you might not be ready yet to go out and advocate for animals or at least you think that but actually say what it's like for you as a new vegan get people talking about what it's like as a new vegan having to look at packets and and learning about stuff and is it is it fun is it is it a pain is it easy what apps are you using yeah those conversations you know make videos about it put it on facebook yeah tweet out that you found this product that product the other product it's tiny it takes seconds and it doesn't feel like you're doing anything at all but you are yeah because you don't know when a michelle will come along who actually was probably ready for that conversation 10 years ago but nobody had that conversation with me so i i was never never needed to be uncomfortable i never needed to have that little nugget actually come right to the front when he said no i can't do this anymore but i've got to do it and like my son you know that it took him going away to university to make his own mind up in his own space so all of those people whoever they are his friends whatever it was they were the final straw wow i was just a tiny part of the sea planter they actually made the difference amazing yeah so that's a very powerful message for anyone out there he's like i see earthling edin he's just doing all these things all the time i can't do that every little bit counts and there's a movement of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of us millions i'd say across the world yeah every little conversation counts it does and every little conversation you don't know whether your little conversations that you have with people have actually converted or at least sow the seed or have been the final little straw that was needed for the next activist for the next you know you might have done that for more people in a month than earthling ediston yeah you don't know because we can't we can't track that progress so what we can do is know what we're doing is right know what we're doing is the right thing to do for the planet for the animals for everything and stick to the message amazing amazing great way to finish now how can everyone find you and your channel i'm excuse me i'm michelle low on youtube just michelle low that's my name i'm dr msh low on instagram and twitter okay and i will be very very happy if you come along and say hello wow so everyone go check out michelle's channel and what's what have you got forecasted strategy is it going to come further into fruition as you go are you just getting started what's to come i mean essentially i make a video every single day um 365 baby that's one little straight line that's great um so it's consistency yeah so what you'll see from me is a consistent message every single day so sometimes it's going to be little bit silly and i like like that might be a taste test or a cooking video the next day might be something about psychology the next day might be a call out video but it's it's all adding up so the strategy that i have is consistency and um i'm in it for the long haul so i don't care how many people i've got to call out and i'm brazen in a way i'll go and i'll go on anybody's channel i'll go and call them out to the face i'll go and call them out in any way that i need to because i am utterly convicted to taking that message forward not just to grow my channel to get to get ad sense money i i started vegan youtube to make a difference and that's exactly what i'm i'm going to do that wow sounds like you've got a very thick skin so you can handle the trolls in the comment section and so inspiring i'm looking forward to things to come and thank you so much for coming on the carp strong cast you are very welcome thanks for thank you so much that was great really well done i really enjoyed that yeah you had a lot of steam in you