 Hello everyone, thank you so much for tuning in to the first episode of The Carb Strong Cast. I hope you like this longer format, there's plenty more of these to come, but for now, enjoy the first episode. Peace. This is a long time in the making actually, this podcast, so I've been always wanting to do something more longer form and I had this opportunity to have this little studio here so I thought you know what, we'll get in there now, we'll get it recorded the first time. I always have this philosophy on starting something. You should always start where you are, use what you have and do what you can, never wait till things are going to be perfect, because they're never going to be perfect, it's never going to be the right time, the right time is now. So if you're going to start a YouTube channel or start a podcast, it's best to just do it. Don't wait for things to be, you know, in the perfect scenario, it's never going to be like that. So I hope that audio comes through okay, but we can tweak things as the podcast series goes on. I just thought I'd do a little introduction to start off with. We're going to have some guests in here in the future. If you want to see some guests, let me know, let me know. Either comment down below, these will be posted on YouTube, so comment down below or send us an email who I should get on as a guest, preferably someone who's in the UK, but maybe we can do like a, you know, online Google Hangouts podcast with people that are overseas, so we'll see how we go. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Joey Carbstrong, a animal rights activist, an ex-gang member, and a recovering addict actually. So I've turned my life around and now I spend my time speaking up for animals and promoting a message of peace and justice. And it takes up all of my time. I'm extremely committed to this. I feel like it's my purpose. I've actually been quite successful in making it into the media through my actions and through the controversial way I speak, the truth about what's going on to animals. It's interesting how people see what I say as being extreme when all I'm doing is objectively describing what happens to animals and I'm seen as the extremist. So that's the way society is culturally indoctrinated into eating animal products and seeing that as normal, but seeing vegans as extreme for speaking up against what's happening to animals. So that's what I've been faced with. And many other vegan activists face that same adversity. So I thought I'd spend this podcast talking about my transformation from even the last year I've transformed a lot. In my life I've had evolution after evolution and epiphany after epiphany. While I was going down the wrong track in my gang life and drug using life for around 12 years, I had many epiphanies and like I was shown many sort of signs that this isn't the right path, but I never really took action and changed. When you're immersed in a environment like that, you can't see outside of your own sort of bubble. And I had a very clouded view of things and I lacked awareness. So I didn't really see the full impact of what I was doing and the consequences that had on people around me. But when I was imprisoned, I had a period of sobriety, the longest period of sobriety I'd ever had since before I was 14. I'd always been on some type of substance for at least, you know, never have at least a week off like of any type of substance. So yeah, this was a moment of clarity, epiphany and I've seen the gang life or what it was. I started to see my life from a bird's eye perspective. I started to analyze everything and go like, you know, my life is this collection of all these mistakes I've made and it's led me here to this point in prison. These were very strong signs for me and you know, after being released, I made the conscious choice to go vegan after having a seed planted on house arrest. And since I've been a vegan, I've always felt compelled to speak up about this injustice. It just come naturally. Some people say, well, why are you an activist? It's just not even, it wasn't even like a real hard decision to make. It was just a reaction to the abuse and cruelty that happens to animals. I mean, if you've seen something happening to anyone, that being bullied, being abused, animals being literally, you know, sexually abused, having their children stolen from them and them being butchered. I just was compelled to speak about it. I mean, it shouldn't even be a question. Like for me, I was just like, well, and you know, obviously my style of advocacy has improved or let's just say it's gotten a little bit more friendly in the way that it's more approachable and it can land a little easier and it's more about sort of unraveling that conditioning. But when I first started advocating, I was angry. I was angry and I was obviously an ex-gang member who was around violence a lot. So the way I reacted to anger was with aggression and that's how I sort of spread the message. I used to say some pretty hectic things and I didn't think it was the most effective way after sort of analyzing my advocacy and I've changed and evolved in the way I advocate and I've changed and evolved as a human being generally, not just in my animal advocacy. Obviously being in that type of world that I was in for so long, I suffered many traumas, many traumas, trauma after trauma. So I just recently found out that I have complex PTSD. So it's just sort of amalgamation, like a netting of multiple traumas over my life from starting from childhood, which led into my addiction. And then the world that I was immersed in was just, you know, day after day. It was always in this survival mode. There was always something happening and always had to be on my back with my back against the wall because it's such a dangerous environment. Always had a weapon on me and there were some very harsh things happening a lot. I've witnessed a lot of things. I've been involved in some, you know, pretty violent altercations and I carried around a lot of shame and guilt and these events caused these instances of trauma which I held inside. So the past year, I've been doing some PTSD therapy and it's been, it's been amazing. I've really gotten to the root cause of this. Otherwise you just suppress it. If you don't get any, if you don't go deep into the depths of yourself and with a professional and sort of analyze why you have these sort of, it's almost like impulses from within or like reactions to your environment that trigger flashbacks from your past. You know, if you don't analyze and deal with those things or sort of get to the bottom of them, they will stay with you till you're in your 70s. And you know, there's people that have been in the war and they never deal with their PTSD and they carry these demons around with them, you know, well into their old age. And I wasn't a soldier, but I was part of a, you know, it's kind of like the war on the streets. So you're always in fight or flight mode. You never know who to trust. It's always like one up or one down, kill or be killed sort of survival mode. And that's how my mind was kind of conditioned. So I've spent a lot of time trying to uncondition that part of myself, but being an animal rights activist on the front lines, you really, it's like the perfect environment to trigger all of those sort of defense survival mechanisms that like sort of ingrained into me. So like, I thought if I got sober and started speaking for animals, that would be the be all and end all of my evolution. But that's just not true. I simply am growing every single year. And I wanted to actually speak about this. So I want to make this a really strong topic was, it was recently my two year Patreon anniversary. So my Patreon page has helped support my advocacy for the last two years. And it's been the main reason I've been able to reach so many people, I've been able to focus on my activism full time. And it's, I've been able to put 100% of my heart and soul and physical mental emotional energy into this movement and this message and into my YouTube channel and into my activism. And I didn't really, I did it at the cost of everything else sort of thing. I did it at the cost of human relationships of friendships of, you know, my mental physical health, I stopped exercising and exercising was a big fundamental part of my change in my sobriety and keeping my mental health in place. But I sort of focused 100% on activism at the exclusion of everything else, my family and my friends. And if you ever met me on tour, this is one thing I want to get people to hopefully see from my perspective, because if you ever met me while I was on a tour and I was stressed, then I was anxious and I probably just had a debate on the radio with a farmer and then I've got another debate that night. And you know, I've got journalist ringing me and I'm out the front of slaughterhouses and seeing pigs be butchered or like, and you met me while I was in the midst of something like that knowing and without knowing sort of my personality and how in fight and flight mode I was, I probably could have come across as a little bit, you know, well, I definitely would have come across as a little bit short and a little bit not focused on other people because I really wasn't I was I was trapped in my own heads, you know, and focused so streamlined focus that I didn't I didn't leave room to be relational. And my schedule was always so tight that I'm just like, okay, I've got to get this workshop done. And yes, I speak to people after the workshop, but I never really went out and socialized with anyone. It was always just work, work, work, activism, activism, activism. And I actually realized that, you know, I could have been making people feel a certain way by my energy, you know, because people might be really excited to meet me and I'm just really streamlined focus that I might have, you know, been having some caffeine to deal with the stress of the like to deal with the early mornings and late nights and high workload. And, and yeah, so I've just been reflecting on being more relational generally. And that all comes from being a better friend to myself and showing myself more love. And that was a pretty big step for me is actually trying to show myself like care. I was always my harshest critic, my own harshest critic. And I that sort of was spilling out. My therapist actually said this to me and I thought it was fantastic. It's like love yourself so deeply that it spills out onto other people. And if you're your own worst critic, then that's going to sort of spit out spill out onto other people too. And I was so hypocritical of myself, nothing I ever did for the animals was good enough, not no speech ever did was good enough, no TV appearance ever did enough was good, was good enough, no video ever made was good enough. The impact that I made wasn't big enough. So I was always striving to make a bigger impact. I always put myself under this pressure and had this high level of expectation that I could never reach. And that put me under a lot of stress. So I was under a lot of stress and I'm putting myself self imposed pressure that I wasn't doing enough. So this is how my mind was, I basically want to give an apology to anyone who's ever met me while I've been in that state in that mind frame. That and I hope you understand from my perspective, I didn't even know a year ago, I had this complex PTSD and I need to be careful of like stressful situations. And it's been an internal battle. And coming out the other end of a year's worth of this PTSD therapy and really analyzing myself and really having these personal evolutions, I started to look at my advocacy as a whole and wanting to always move forwards and say like, okay, I've taught around the world, I've put myself in these situations that have been so hectic for many years now. And sometimes I feel like maybe my output was, it wasn't as effective as it could be. So in terms of my output, just like going balls to the wall and killing myself, you know, jumping on planes, going across the country and, you know, doing speech after speech and going to slaughterhouse and filling up my days so that I'm so stressed and about to burn out every and then when I go on to do vegan outreach, it's like, I'm talking to them and I'm really stressed and it's the advocacy isn't coming across very well. And I'm not, you know, I'm really stressed and short with people that I meet. Instead of that, then I could have taken all of that energy and focused it into a more sensible schedule without so much traveling and made probably a bigger impact without the, the absolute, you know, mental exertion that actually it kind of at times it kind of it downplayed my advocacy a bit. It was like, well, I was reacting out of my emotion and stress in some of my situations. And I just know that I could probably do better. And if I was having good self care, self care is interesting because like self care is probably important to people. Well, it definitely is important to people who are, you know, doing animal advocacy every single day or if you're watching slaughterhouse footage all the time or if you're like, having really late nights and just working around the clock, you know, seeing all the suffering, then yeah, so self care is important. But I think before you think about self care, you got to think about, are you doing enough activism? So if you feel like you're really doing enough activism, like you're getting out there a lot, you're speaking a lot and doing it in whatever way resonates with your skillsets and abilities, I suppose. But for me, I've always just gone super hard and pulled back, super hard and pulled back and kind of rested and edited and did the social media thing. So self care for me has been a big part of my self care has been this therapy has been not putting as much pressure on myself, but still maintaining a good internal audience to make sure that I'm still, you know, maintaining, you know, this level of expectation that I have for myself so that I feel like I'm contributing and I'm not, you know, I'm not undercutting my own ability. So I think that's different for everyone. I think a big thing is comparing yourself to other people can make you feel a little bit like, oh, am I doing enough? Am I doing enough? But I think the only person you should compare yourself to is yourself. So I've got an internal audience that goes, am I doing enough? Am I doing enough? Am I really overworked right now? And I think I've got a lot more in the tank. It's just, I think I'm just going to make sure that I'm designing my schedule so that I can get maximum effectiveness out of that. And, you know, and making sure that I'm taking care of what I have to internally and spiritually. So this podcast here was basically just a check in and obviously launching this off the ground as well. But just a check in with you guys and just let you know where I'm at in my life. I feel better than I really ever have at this stage in my life. I feel more just in control and more grounded and I feel more empathic really to human beings and I'm more aware of the way I handle stress. I've learned patience and I've learned about listening to other people, being conscious of my surroundings and not so trapped in my own world all the time and just like making sure I'm, you know, thinking to myself, have I listened to someone else? Am I being or am I trapped in my own, you know, thoughts of focus and activism and my YouTube channel and there's everything, you know, so I've got to be careful of like being in my own bubble but I really do feel like I'm doing better than I ever have. So I always start off every single series of evolutions as a blank canvas sort of thing. I don't really look back as to how much I've achieved but I feel like, okay, I'm starting fresh again and I think that's a really good way to look at, you know, your life like every each time you come back around you're starting fresh again, you know, and but it's from a different level. You're always progressing and learning and even if you don't actually look, it doesn't look like in reality that you've progressed, you've still learned something even if you've failed. So I've learned a lot about myself about, you know, it's truly learned a lot about my limits and I had to look in the mirror a lot and go like, am I really the person that I want to be right now? You know, because coming out of, you know, the gang life, if I wasn't committing an act of violence on someone, if I wasn't, if I didn't have a gun down my trousers and, you know, if I wasn't assaulting someone or I felt like I was doing good, you know, I felt like, well, I'm doing a lot better than what I was, but it doesn't, it doesn't take like Mother Teresa to not have a gun down your trousers. Like that should be just like the norm. But for me, there was a lot of other things in my personality that I really had to learn. I had to learn to be relational. The environment I'm from, there's surrounded by a lot of aggression, a lot of deception, a lot of, you know, violence, a lot of traumatized souls in my world. There was a lot of drug users and a lot of, you know, sad depressed individuals that would lash out. And there's a lot of people that suffered trauma through their childhood and that they were acting out. Like, and that's the environment I was from, a very hectic, aggressive, violent sort of environment. So pulling myself out of that and then trying to promote peace and copying so much hatred and getting death threats and, you know, seeing animals being stabbed in the throat and then a group of people saying bacon though and laughing at it and laughing at us and trying to mock people who stand up for justice and to people making fun of animal cruelty and like to come out of that world I was in and try to promote peace with that type of adversity is was a real spiritual lesson for me because you have to practice restraint and you have to practice understanding and you have to meet people like where they're at and you have to go, okay, well, you know, that was a truly insensitive thing this person said in the face of that animal's torture. I'm going to try to understand it from where his mind's out saying that or where her mind's out saying that. And, you know, farmers who have been indoctrinated to abuse and exploit animals, I'm trying to look at it from their perspective as well as the victims, but I never look at it from the victimizer's perspective more than the victims, but you have to analyze like when it comes to vegan advocacy, you can't just while out, like if someone was beating up their wife on the side of the road, you could step in and you could probably, you know, give the guy a whack or whatever like, but when it comes to these sanctioned legal practices against animals, you can't and it's actually socially accepted as well. You can't just go lashing out at people that are paid to kill animals. It takes a different strategy. We have to try to work into people's hearts and undo that indoctrination in their minds and that's what, you know, trying to be a strategic vegan activist is all about. It's all about restraint and keeping calm and staying logical and using facts and, you know, trying to speak to people's compassion and it's just a very bizarre state to have yourself in all the time, you know, trying to fight with peace and logic and socratic method and, you know, education where like it's so against what your intuition and what your nature would be when you see an animal be abused. Your nature is to run in and intervene physically, but that's just, you know, we don't want a bunch of vegan activists in prison for defending pigs who are being gas chambered when it's legal. I mean, that's just not going to, that's not going to work. So, you know, we have to work within the system and we have to try to, you know, reverse the indoctrination that's happened, dispel the myths of the humane, you know, dairy advertisement that people see since they're a child and this idea that, you know, free range eggs means hens aren't abused and all of this stuff is just so deeply ingrained into people. We have to really try to attack it at its root and try to just use the truth because the truth is so powerful, but so this has all been a big lesson day after day, year after year for me especially and I hope that my transformation can inspire some of you guys out there who are probably go through the same thing as you, you know, when you wake up to the horrors of animal agriculture and you realize that no one cares and they're making fun of you and ridiculing you for being a vegan or being against, being morally against the exploitation and harm of animals, you know, I hope that you could, like my transformation in a way that I've, you know, sort of deal with it can inspire you to sort of and make you feel like you're not alone in this because there's so many of us and we all go through stresses with family and people that don't understand in a society that's just apathetic to the torture that's been committed and so we're all not alone in this and yeah I mean obviously sometimes you have your down days and you know other days you're feeling really up and inspired and hopeful but we keep going because we have to sort of thing so and that's where I'm at too. I'm always, I'm committed and I'm driven, I don't just do this when I'm motivated, I do this regardless and as hard as that is, I believe it does make you mentally stronger if you keep at it sometimes even if you're not motivated because when you're doing something that's outside of yourself, when you're defending others, I feel like that you don't need motivation, that's what drives me because it's not about me. If I made this all about me, I would have definitely, if it was all about me, I definitely would have probably gone back to using drugs or something to to deal with my emotions but I'm always thinking outside of myself. If I know that my actions are causing someone to be upset or harmed or I and I'm made aware of that, I'm always trying to rectify that so I've made a lot of mistakes and I still do make mistakes but I'm trying, I'm striving to be better and that's the way we look at veganism, we're striving to be better. If we know that purchasing the animal product is going to directly harm some sentient animals and we wouldn't purchase that product, if we knew purchasing that product would kill a human but we do it with animals, we've got to analyze that hypocrisy in ourselves and go well, why do I have this distinction when it comes to cows but if I paid for a product that killed a dog, these are all questions that I was asking myself and we should never stop analyzing the reason, the motivations for what we do. If we are causing harm by our actions in some other way, let's just say partly one of the main reasons I went and got what's, I saw a counselor and got therapy for my PTSD is because it wasn't because of me because if I was by myself it wasn't, I wouldn't have noticed it, I wouldn't have noticed it was because I thought well the way that my behavior is in these stress situations could be affecting people around me in a negative way and I don't want to affect people around me negatively, I want to inspire people, I want people to feel like a good emotion when they're around me, I don't want them to take on all my stress and be like well Joe is really cold and he's really not listening or he's too driven doing what he's doing, I want to make sure that I'm a good human being, empathic and I'm standing up for the animals and defending them as well. So I think if anyone else has suffered any type of trauma or multiple instances of trauma or a whole childhood full of trauma and they feel like they haven't really got to the bottom of it or that you've been putting it off, don't put it off because you're going to, once you get to the root cause of it and you release that, you're going to feel a whole weight off your shoulders and you're really going to notice the benefits of it and I really have two. So that's where I'm at, I've just, I want to talk about just something logistical, we've just started a little office here in London so I've got a little, putting a little team together here and we've just recently started working together so I'm hoping to be putting out a lot more content and hopefully be a lot more productive. So that's what's happening, I'm going to be here in London for the next few months and there's some big plans in the making so I hope you're all excited to see what we put out. If you've got any suggestions, if you say, Joey, I really want to see you do this, hey, or have you ever thought about doing this, hit me up in an email, joeycarbstrongatgmail.com and just say, hey Joey, if you're in London, let's get together and do this event, have you heard about this on, you know, let's do it, let's do it, I'm really wanting to get as much done as possible and I'm open to ideas as well. I also want to say a big massive thank you to the Patreons who have supported me for, even if it's just been a week but I've been on Patreon now for two years, some of those Patreons have been with me for the whole two years so thank you dearly for your support. Thank you to everyone who's supported me through my journey because, you know, I'm not going to say like everyone is appreciative of the way I do my activism but for the most part I get a lot of support. There's always going to be people who don't resonate with me and that's fine, that's their perspective but, you know, I think just being open book for people like just, if you make a mistake just say it, you know, you look, I messed up there, I'm not always right but I'm just trying my best and we all are, we all just try our best so I think that's how you learn. Another thing is accountability, like accountability is in one of the biggest things, like being accountable and just being like, okay, well maybe there's a problem here and maybe I need to change that aspect of myself and maybe they're right, maybe I am, I could do better there or yeah, you know, but don't go the complete other way into self-critical mode to the point where you're just like over-hyper-criticizing yourself and it's just detrimental to you, like be honest with yourself if you're messing up, be honest and accountable but don't take it the complete extreme other direction like I was for a little while there. So, podcast, we're going to be doing more of these, we're going to have a guest in here hopefully very soon, I'm going to pump out a fair few of these, tell me if you like the format, do you like the long-form format, do you like me talking in depth, you know, obviously about be able to go into topics in more depth and into more length. We didn't plan this podcast, I didn't plan it, I didn't really know exactly what I was going to say, I did want to give people a little overview of where I'm at generally and I thought that might take a little bit longer than in the video but I really am great, super grateful and I don't talk about gratitude enough, I want to really make emphasize gratitude because when I pulled myself out of that lifestyle I could have, you know, I could very easily be doing a long-term sentence in prison or I could have died you know from a drug overdose, I could have been killed, you know, so many things could have happened to me, so I always have to reinforce the gratitude, so whenever I'm feeling down or feeling stressed or I always remember gratitude because stress can't live in the same body as gratitude does, I mean it's really hard to be sad and grateful at the same time, it's really difficult, I mean I'm not saying there isn't situations where people just have clinical depression and that they have, you know, other things going on but for me, I've, gratitude has helped me get through a lot and I'm just like wow, I've got every single day, I've got this opportunity to follow my passion and to help others, you know, and animals are others and really just, I can't drive that home enough with you guys, just remember to be super grateful, every morning I try to do a little gratitude ritual and just remember that, you know, I'm still here, I've gone through a lot and yeah, gratitude will help you through a lot of hard times like it has with me I hope but I'm going to try to cut this off now, let me know what you think about me starting this podcast, tell me, give me topic videos, let's get some people in here to discuss some interesting things, who do you want us a guest on, who should we get on, should we get just vegans on, vegan activists, should we get farmers on, should we get, you know, should we have debates in here, should we have big discussions with people with opposing views, I think that can be interesting, should we just do vegan stuff on this or should we do stuff about psychology and should we do like alternative topics as well, should we talk about politics, no, we don't want to talk about politics, that's one thing I don't want to talk about on here, oh my god, so we're just like but we don't have to always talk about veganism, we can talk about gang life, we can talk about you know drug addiction and what fuels it, there's so many things to talk about in this long format so yeah hit me up, say Joey let's talk, I want you to do this topic, get this guest in, he's really interesting and yeah we'll see if we can make it happen, all right thanks for listening guys, peace.