 to Healthy Planet, the show for people who care about their health and the health of our planet on the Think Tech Live Streaming Network series. I'm your host, Dr. Grace O'Neill. Joining me today is Jane Velez Mitchell, founder of Unchained TV, and we are going to be talking about Unchained TV today. So Jane, I am interested in how you became vegan and how you became interested in animal rights. Well, thank you for having me, Grace. I grew up in a mostly pescatarian household. We actually kind of thought we were vegetarians, but the word vegan wasn't really around at the time. So I had a knowledge from childhood that hot dogs didn't fall from hot dog trees. Hamburgers didn't fall from hamburger trees. That there was an animal involved that we didn't have those animals in our house. Although we did eat dairy and eggs and fish, so I majored in journalism at NYU. When I graduated, I worked around the country, Fort Myers, Florida, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, then back to my hometown, New York, where I worked at WCDS TV for eight years. And then I came out here to LA as a weekday anchor at Paramount Studios, K-Cal. It was very exciting. And I still really didn't have a clue. Around that time, I got sober. I'm now 27 years sober. And soon after that, a man named Howard Lyman, a fourth generation cattle rancher, turned animal activist who had been on Oprah and revealed the horrors of the cattle industry to Oprah, which got her sued, but she won the lawsuit. Anyway, he walked into the newsroom and I did an interview with him. And he explained the horrors of the cattle industry. And afterwards he walked up to my cubicle and said, we hear you're a vegetarian. By that time, I was actually a vegetarian. He said, do you eat dairy? And I hung my head because, yes, I still was eating dairy. And he told me all about the horrors of how they don't have any use for the boycabs and they either shoot them or leave them on dead piles or put them in veal crates, how the mothers are separated from their babies and the mothers grieve and the babies grieve. And so I hung my head and I said, yes, I do. And he pointed his finger right at my nose and said liquid meat like that. And that was the moment I went vegan. There were a couple of things to that. One, I was sober at the time, newly sober, but I had clarity. I realized, hey, I want to align my actions with my values. I'd always thought of myself as an animal lover. I had a dog I loved. So that was the first thing. The second thing is that he was very direct. If he had said, well, we think maybe you should consider luring your finger. I wouldn't have heard it. I heard what he said loud and clear. He shamed me into going vegan and I thank him from the bottom of my heart. So when people say never confront and, oh, baby, guess what? We don't have time. The planet is dying. We are barreling toward a climate apocalypse with snow bombs on the east coast that are creating crazy temperatures here. We just got through a flood in the west coast in California. It's still going on. So we don't have time to be, oh, so very polite. We've been trying that for 20, 30 years. We need to be direct with people. There is one underlying false assumption that is behind 90% of society's problems that is responsible to a large degree for climate change, habitat destruction, wildlife extinction, human world hunger, preventable lifestyle, human diseases, antibiotic resistance, drought, water pollution, and pandemics. Yes. Despite conspiracy theories, the overwhelming evidence is that the pandemic COVID-19 started at a wet slaughter market, a retail slaughter market, where other pandemics have also started. So all of those problems, you add them all up? Guess what? If we just made one simple change, we could eliminate 90% of society's problems. And yet when you say this to people, they laugh at you, they get angry, they ignore you. We have to hit bottom on our addiction to meat and dairy as a society. And that involves hitting bottom on fast food and junk food as well. Or we are all very possibly going to go into extinction. Let me say this, when the planet gets too hot, it's game over. Yeah. Well, I mean, I feel like people are killing themselves with what they're eating as it is. I mean, we have some medical advances that have helped some people, but there's some things that you just can't save everybody from these chronic diseases that they are having. So this is another issue. So after Howard Lyman kind of convinced you to go vegan, where did you go from there in your broadcasting career? And what did you start doing? Did you start? Well, I started taking the glue traps out of the newsroom, which got me into fights with people. I started refusing to read the rodeo story as a fun kicker story, which got me into trouble. Yeah. So, you know, the news director would call me and stick to the copy. Oh, really? Well, you know, we live in a carnous society where the assumption is animals are property, they are there for us to be consumed. They can be traded and sold and tortured, and that's okay. And you have nothing to say about it. And the way society changes is by people speaking up. I'm no hero. The heroes are the people who risk their lives going undercover in factory farms and slaughterhouses and vivisection labs. But I use my skills as a journalist. I've written four books, including two New York Times bestsellers. I've been a journalist for, well, I was professionally employed as a journalist for 38 years. After I left K-Cal, I ended up working at Celebrity Justice, which was the precursor to TMZ, actually. It was a tabloid TV show. That was when I first got a chance to do animal rights, because we would have a meeting every day that says, where's the celebrity? Where's the justice? Well, celebrities didn't like us. They would literally run from us. I've chased a few, I'm not proud to say, in my lifetime. So I had started getting involved with PETA and going to their galas. And I saw, oh my God, they have so many celebrities. And then I went, bingo, what if I work with PETA to get some of these celebrities to talk about their passionate issues? And that's exactly what I did, because I could provide the celebrity, provide the justice. And sometimes these celebrities would just literally knock their publicists out of the way to talk because they're so passionate about something happening to animals that they were willing to talk to a tabloid show that they would normally ignore. My penultimate example was when I got to interview Robert Redford. And I'm telling you, his publicist did not want him to talk to me, but he cared about the military sonar impacting the whales. And I had gotten a mass letter from him. And I said, Mr. Redford, I got your letter about the whales. And he looked at me funny. And then later it was at a news conference for the opening of the Natural Resources Defense Council Green Building in Santa Monica. And I kind of snuck my way in as a, oh, I'm doing a story about the green building. But I really wanted to talk to Robert Redford. And such a nice guy, he actually came up to me and said, you know, I will answer your question after the news conference. And to true to his word, he came out and he answered my questions. And I got a one-on-one interview with him about the military sonar. And so that was my start. I started getting a taste for, wow, I can use my skills to let people know about animal rights. And then ultimately, I ended up on CNN headline news. When I got hired there, it was kind of a fluke in the sense that I had been doing a lot of work covering the Michael Jackson trial. And I was on Larry King Live, which is a CNN show. And I was filling in, I was filling in for Nancy Grace, which is a CNN show. And so I heard that one of the anchors walked off the set, and they needed to replace him quickly. And they called me and they said, would you like a show? I said, yes. And they said, we're going to call it issues with Jane Velez Mitchell. I said, great, because I've got a lot of issues. So it was like this fur the moment thing. I moved from LA. First thing I did was go to the vet and get my dog certified to fly. I had two dogs at the time, who unfortunately have since passed away. But I said very casually, I said, would you mind if I did a little animal segment once a week? And they went, that's okay, I guess. They probably thought I was going to do pet adoptions. Very short order. I was doing pig gestation crates. Pigs are kept in crates. Pigs that are smarter than dogs are kept in crates the size of their bodies and never able to turn around. They go mad. They break their teeth on the bars. It's mass torture, plain and simple. There's no other way around it. If you can look at a giant warehouse, and that's what most farms have become. They're just concentrated animal feeding operations. They're warehouses. They don't let the animals move around much because when you move around a lot, guess what you do? Use up calories. They want to fatten them up for slaughter. These animals are killed quite often as babies. The pigs are six months old approximately. It's a moral horror show from beginning to end. And the vast majority of Americans call themselves animal lovers. But yet, they're paying somebody who's getting PTSD, alcoholism, carpal tunnel syndrome, depression to do their killing for them, eight hours a day, five days a week, people at the lowest rung of the social order who, according to Oxfam, have to wear diapers because they get so few bathroom breaks. Oh, gosh. Who died disproportionately during COVID. That's true. Who are mostly people of color almost exclusively. Yeah. We let them do the killing, but we walk around saying we're animal lovers. Hypocrisy. It's complete hypocrisy. And it's coming back to haunt us. So anyway, that's how I got my start. And I had to show for six years on CNN headline news to their credit, they never stopped me from doing my animal segments. And I interviewed almost all the leaders of the animal rights movement along with people like Josh Tetrick, who was starting Just Mayo, now Just Egg. So I was able to do it. He even said to me, I used that interview to go out and raise some funds when it was just starting. This company nobody even hardly knew about it was quite a while ago. So when that show ended, I actually went on to one of the executives and I said, what do you think I should do? Because I was at the point where I knew that was kind of like the end of the road professionally. I better to end up on top than to start the circle, the drain. And she said, look, you're obviously very passionate about animals, Jane. Do that full time. So I said, okay, great. Good advice. And that's what I did. I left on great terms. They gave me all my social media. And I started going to protests and going to animal rights events. And I noticed at the time that a lot of them weren't being documented. And so I said, oh, I found my niche. I can document all these and put them on my social media. And that's how Unchained TV started. Yeah. Wow. I didn't know that. So did you at any point in your career feel fear that somebody would, you would lose your job? Someone would fire you because of the work you're doing for animals at any time? I mean, I know you said. I always, I always was in fear of getting fired for a variety of reasons. Anybody, anytime's executive calls, you wouldn't do his or her office. You're like, oh boy, here we go. I think most, in fact, I was being interviewed by a news director who had a show after all this. And he, and I said, this is so great. Because the first time I've ever talked to a news director where I'm not quaking my boots, so you're going to fire me. So, you know, it's, it's a tough business. You're afraid to go on vacation. Whoever's filling in for you is basically auditioning for your job. But I stuck it out for 38 years. And yeah, I mean, I don't think I got, you know, pushback comes in a variety of forms. I think the thing that I experienced most was condescension and ridicule from people who were too smart to care about animals. Not so smart, you know, the term, the best and the brightest, the title of that book, it was a sarcastic title. The best and the brightest brought us the Vietnam War quagmire. Yeah. So if you think back in history, what were the best and the brightest doing in other times in history? Terrible things. Yeah. Enslaving other people. And so we, I believe there's different kinds of intelligence. There's moral intelligence. And then there's other kinds of intelligence. And a lot of people who are very smart don't have a high degree of moral intelligence. And that's a big problem in our society. So people would laugh at me. They would say, oh, I love your passion. I had pets when I was a child too, you know, really condescending things. And I realize that's a defense mechanism because they say, you know, first, what's the order? First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they get angry at you, and then they join you. Yeah. So I mean, that's wonderful that you have so much courage that you're able to, I mean, I think I would have probably been very afraid and not been so outspoken as yourself. I mean, but it's wonderful all the work you've been doing. How did you end up writing the books that you did? I know you said you wrote several books. Was it just from getting very interested in a certain topic and then just kind of feeling like people need to know more and then the book came about or? Well, I was, two of the books are issues that I'm interested in. One was my memoir. I want my journey from addiction and overconsumption to a simpler, honest life. I should have said a simpler, more honest life. I don't know if I'm entirely honest. And I don't know if I'm entirely simple, but I'm simpler than I was. And that was my three miracles. Getting sober, coming out as gay and going vegan. And that's kind of the book. And that one, thankfully, was a bestseller. And then the other one that I wrote that was not a bestseller was addict nation and intervention for America, which I think still holds up. And the premise is we live in an addict culture. There's no better customer than an addict. They come back again and again and again, whether it's coming back to for pills and working, working doctors to try to convince them to give them pills that are mood altering or narcotic, whether it's fast food. They pack with sugar, salt and fat. Three ingredients that we are biologically pre-programmed to crave. So we get addicted to fast food and also addicted to meat and dairy. Dairy is particularly addictive. And Dr. Neal Barnard wrote a great book called The Cheese Trap. Nature puts an addictive morphine-like substance in cheese and dairy, but it's concentrated in cheese because it's a concentrated product that is to get the baby calf to drink the mother's milk. But what happens is it makes us, because we steal the mother's milk, we steal the breast milk of another species. I mean, when you think about that, that's extraordinarily gross. But it's concentrated in cheese and people often say, oh, I could never go vegan because I can't give up the cheese. Well, yes, you can. One thing I've learned for myself personally as a recovering alcoholic is that it takes 28 days to do anything, to change your taste buds, to form new habits at the very least. So you've got to give yourself at least a month and sometimes more than that. But for me, I love cheese. And then about 30 days after Howard Lyme had said liquid meat, I was at a restaurant and somebody sprinkled cheese on my salad. I didn't notice it. I tasted it. I spat it out. My taste buds had returned to their factory settings in those 30 days. And I found it repulsive. So give yourself a little time with cheese. And there's great vegan cheese. It's Miyoko's cheese. It's incredible. Violaife cheese is incredible. Follow your heart. I use them all. Much better for your health, too. Yeah, there's your cholesterol. There's your cholesterol. So yeah. The other two books were about crime, which I was in the crime... I was in the tabloid world in the crime world for many years. And don't ask me how. It's not something I'm interested in, except that I personally would like to avoid being a victim of crime. Aside from that, I'm really not a crime buff. I'm not into crime as I find it disgusting. But you find yourself in careers, sort of like the veterinarians, these kids who love animals who go to vet school, and then they find themselves sucked into factory farming. And we're having a whole crisis now with veterinarians. And I very much support Dr. Crystal Heath and Dr. Daniela Castillo, who are fighting to get the big veterinary association to come out against ventilation shutdown. With these horrible viruses sweeping through animal populations like the bird flu, they're doing these extremely cruel mass killings. And the veterinary associations need to come out and say, this is wrong. But instead, they've been so co-opted by the industries, particularly the meat industry, that they're not taking us... They're taking, I think, the wrong stand. And so there's a group called Our Honor that is speaking up and calling them to account. And that's the kind of thing that we showcase on Unchained TV. Yeah. In fact, we shared our booth at the Animal Vegan Advocacy Summit with Dr. Crystal Heath, the head of Our Honor, and really tried to introduce her to people at the summit to tell them, hey, we all need to get behind this because this is, I mean, it's all a bleep show what's happening to animals. Imagine animals in open-air trucks being driven to slaughter during our sub-zero temperature sweeping the nation. They literally arrived frozen solid. It's torture. You can't fool yourself and say there's humane meat. There is no humane meat out there, period. Yeah, it's just all not humane. How do you choose your content from Unchained TV? Is it just what you see and it strikes your interest? Because I see you have a lot of different things on there. And it must be a process where it's like there's some stuff that's copyrighted. So you have to propose that these people let their content be seen for free or how do you work that? Yeah, well, okay. I started Unchained TV, which is a global streaming network. You can download it for free on your phone. You'll literally just go to your app store and you'll literally put in Unchained TV one word. And I could show you right here. There it is. It pops up right. Oh, I'm blurred. There you go. There it is. You can see all the videos pop up right there. I mean, it's really, really amazing. We have more than a thousand videos. They're not all up exactly at once. We rotate them sometimes. And there's the website, UnchainedTV.com. And if you click on the top of it, watch now. You can go straight into the online version of the app. There you see, we have a bunch of really more than a thousand videos. There's sections like celebrities. We've interviewed James Cromwell many times, Kathina Jimmy, Elaine Hendricks, who is Alexis Carrington on Dynasty. We have all these nature documentaries we just got from Earthstream. Yeah, so we also did an original series, the world's first reality TV series starring pigs called Pig Little Lies. And it's a lot of fun. And it's just, it's really funny, but it's also poignant. And it shows just how emotional and intelligent pigs are and how they love their families. It really shows that. And what happened was, I wanted to get something to get people in the tent. Like we have incredible documentaries, like Dominion, like Earthlings, like Vegicated, The Invisible Vegan, all of these documentaries that are life-changing. I mean, almost everybody who's watched Earthlings has gone vegan. It's the number one movie. And Shawn Munson is one of my heroes. But it's difficult to watch. If you can watch 10 minutes, you can go vegan. Don't even, you know, just go vegan because it shows you just really what's going on, okay? And it's not easy to watch. But so many people, in fact, on Monday, we're going to interview a woman who went vegan after watching Earthlings and Dominion. And she's written two books called Earthlings and Dominion inspired by those films. And we're going to interview her on Monday. And she's in England. And we're going to do our monthly podcast. We do a weekly podcast, Voice America Radio, that's also on Spotify and iTunes and all that through Voice America Radio. But getting back to your question, what was your question again? How do you choose the content? Oh, oh yeah. So at first we just wanted to get content, okay? So I was talking to all my animal rights friends, you get a show, you get a show, you get a show, you know, kind of doing that Oprah imitation. But then I learned pretty quickly that not everybody can put together a show, okay? So we had to start like, I've learned a lot doing this. I've learned so much. So then we realized, no, we need high quality content. And so we started getting all these documentaries. You know, a lot of documentaries that were on Netflix, for example, they don't last there forever. So VEGICATED by Marissa Wolfson. Very fun, fabulous documentary about a bunch of people who were challenged to go vegan in New York and New York. And what happens? So she had been on Netflix and she wasn't there anymore. It's an older documentary, you know, relatively. So she said, sure. So we have it on Unchained TV. And so we do all that. We aggregate content from various sources, cooking shows, travel shows, celebrities. We also do a lot of our own original content. I like New Day New Chef. Like that seems, I watched a bit of it. It's very interesting because you have these celebrities and they're cooking and I like that. Yeah. Thank you. We did that. Well, actually New Day New Chef is really how we ended up starting the app. So we've also done a documentary called Countdown to Year Zero, which is on it and it's one slew of awards. But we were doing New Day New Chef, which is a vegan cooking show, 20 episodes. It was nominated for eight taste awards, it won two taste awards, which is considered the Oscars of Food. And our great producer, Aiman McChrystal, who's Irish? And he likes when I'm half Irish. I'm Puerto Rican and Irish, so I could imitate an Irish accent. But we had it on Amazon Prime and it was doing gangbusters. It was all over the English-speaking world. It was hundreds of thousands of views and I was like, oh yeah, with celebrities. Then one day I woke up and it had a really good run, but this is exactly what I'm talking about. One day I woke up and it's still on Amazon Prime to this day, but they had started charging 99 cents at episode. The views went down. So that's when Aiman said, we can start your own streaming network if you want. And I said, yeah, let's do it without even thinking that much about it. Yeah, let's do it. Let's start our own streaming network. Well, that's like somebody saying here, here's an airline, run it. It's a lot more complicated than I expected. But every day I wake up to challenges. I'm super, super jazzed about working from literally like six in the morning till 7.30 at night or eight at night. Just one thing, next thing, next thing, putting out fires, coming in and getting a new content. But yeah, so that's why we started the streaming network because let's face it, Facebook has become much more pay for play. Back in 2017, when we were doing live cooking shows on Facebook, we had like 17 million views. So we didn't need to start a streaming network, but a lot of people have experienced Facebook has changed its algorithms. So it's harder to get on the mainstream streaming networks like Netflix and Amazon. Facebook is not, I mean, unless you have a huge budget, it's challenging getting many views. So we have an obligation to use every technology available. And by the way, streaming has now overtaken broadcasting cable as the number one way people in America are watching television. So we are in there and it's still in its infancy. The number of people buying these devices. Gee, I've got one right here. I'll show you. This is my Apple TV device. The number of people buying these devices is skyrocketing and growing exponentially. So we're on Amazon Fire Stick. If you have an Apple TV device, all you have to do is put an Unchained TV, it pops up. If you have a Roku device, and then you can also get it on your phone and you can also just watch it online. Just go to Unchained TV and click Watch Now. So it's all free. Free is the number one search term of streaming device users. Just like most people, I have Netflix, I have Amazon Prime. I also have Britbox because I happen to like, even though I'm not a crime buff, I love Agatha Christie style things. It helps me unwind. So we want to give it away for free. This is not about making money. It's a nonprofit. I do not take a salary. I donate to my own nonprofit. It's simply that we are not going to have a planet, a livable planet. If people don't get this information, the mainstream media does not give people this information because who are the advertisers? Fast food and pharmaceuticals. And the pharmaceutical industry might as well be the fast food industry because guess what? If you don't eat fast food and you're not eating a meat and dairy laden diet, your chance of needing the erectile dysfunction pills, the cholesterol lowering pills, all of that diminishes radically. So the pharmaceutical industry needs people to get sick. Otherwise, they're out of business. Yeah. So we're actually out of time. So we have to wrap it up, unfortunately. But I'm Dr. Grace O'Neill. Thank you so much, Jane, for being on the show. This is Healthy Planet on the ThinkTech Live Streaming Network series. We've been talking with Jane Vales-Mitchell. Thanks to Eric, our broadcast engineer and the rest of the crew at ThinkTech for hosting our show. And thanks to you, our listeners for listening. I'll see you on January 20th. For more of Healthy Planet on ThinkTech, the show for people who care about their health and the health of our planet, my special guest will be Dr. McDougal. If you have ideas for the show or questions for my future show guests, please contact me at Healthy Planet ThinkTech at gmail.com. Check out my website at graceandhawaii.com or Instagram at Graceful Living 365 for more information on my projects, including future show guests. I'm Dr. Grace O'Neill. 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