Chapter 1: What moral weight does animal suffering hold compared to human suffering?
How many cows dying is as bad as someone getting gassed in Auschwitz? The pain of the cow is worth just as much as the pain of the human being. In terms of pain, it's one for one. I think quitting meat's a lot harder, a lot easier than like not consuming pornography or not smoking. I think not consuming meat is way easier than those things and people just need to go like, right, I'll stop.
That's kind of crazy to me, but... Dr. Jack Symes, welcome back to Jubilee for the Surrounded follow-up. How are you feeling after your episode?
Feeling great. I really enjoyed it.
Chapter 2: How does quitting meat compare to other lifestyle changes?
It was good fun. I always love chatting about veganism. The first time I've done like... a debate probably at that length in that style. They are a chef with it. And it was good to see you on the opposite chair as well. Defending, defending meat-eating or at least posing some questions. So there are some first times for everything. And I really enjoyed it.
Yeah, no, it was, I really enjoyed that episode. For whatever reason, veganism is a topic that sparks a lot of fire and fury on the internet, from my experience. Do you, as you know, an advocate for the cause, does that ring true to you?
Yeah, people don't like to be told that what they've been doing for the whole life is wrong, and why would they? I think it taps into an evolutionary thing. If me and you were out hunting and you were chasing one boar and me the other, if I said to you, why are you chasing that boar? You best have a good reason for it.
I don't want to be out hunting with somebody who just does whatever the body feels. I want someone to act on reason, to be sensible. So you offer this justification after the fact. And so I think veganism is really interesting because it captures so many of like... different philosophical problems with people knowing what they should do and then doing otherwise.
Because everyone sort of agrees on the big main point, which is let's stop factory farming. And, you know, I'd stripple to find anybody who says, no, I love factory farming. I think you should carry on. but it's a view I never encounter. So yeah, people don't like being told that they've been doing something wrong forever, but I think that just brings out a certain emotion and exciting debate.
Yeah. All right, so I'm going to pull up the first clip. Are you ready to react? And I think you would... I got my cow mug.
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Chapter 3: What sparked the debate on veganism's impact on health?
It's a happy cow as well. I thought this was appropriate.
Yeah, it's cute. I like it.
OK, so the first clip, this is going to be with you and Nicole. And so I think this was I couldn't tell if you were enjoying this, but this is you and Nicole. And she's kind of she's poking fun at the debate. I think so.
Killing plants is murder, though.
Oh, dude, don't do this.
Come on, you're joking. You're tripping.
You're ripping it from the ground. You're ripping it from its mother. It's murder. And I enjoy the trivial pleasure of doing what the lions, what the hyenas, what the tigers have done for history.
So you think plants can feel pain?
Yes, they can.
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Chapter 4: What are the arguments for and against the moral implications of veganism?
And so she was sort of, you know, poking fun, like caring too much about animals' feelings is the same as caring about plants' feelings. I'm curious, is that how it landed for you?
I don't think she really believed it sincerely. It's hard to know what Nicole actually believes. It was great, though. I thought it certainly brought something different to the debate. I suppose, in hindsight, when someone's
doing that maybe it's just better just to to play along with the bit than it is to sort of give serious philosophical points and responses um but my brain just sort of goes straight into like there might be people who sincerely have this objection um
Really, it seems to be more of a reductio ad absurdum argument, right, that people are given, that they're going, well, suppose you think that reducing suffering and pain in all instances is what you ought to do. If plants feel pain and suffer, then you ought to reduce that as well. And that's the argument, right?
for the reasons i sort of gave in the try to give him that aspect of the debate um i don't use any evidence to suggest that plants can feel pain or suffer and i think as i said the hannah ritchie study said that you get a 75 reduction in all of agricultural land if you switch to plant-based and so you consume significant 75 less or significantly less than
plants on veganism than you do on meat-eating because it takes a lot to feed these animals.
So if you actually cared about plants... So if somebody truly cares... And that's because animals eat the plants that we're raising?
Yeah, exactly that.
Yeah, and I agree with you. I don't think she actually cares about the plants. If you rewind in your own life, because I assume you weren't raised vegan, so at some point this was a conscious decision. Do you remember a time where caring about animal suffering felt kind of absurd to you? Do you remember that mental construct? What was that like and what broke that for you?
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Chapter 5: How does the discussion address the environmental impact of meat consumption?
And if it's bad, it should be. It was just the philosophical framing or the ethical framing itself. Yeah. No, in this episode more than others, I felt a lot of people were kind of...
playing jester with you um and we'll see some more clips come up but it there's just something really interesting about what this brings up and i wonder if it's also because like food is tied to emotion so much so like we all you know have memories i mean i i honestly one of the earliest memories i have is like my dad making bacon in the kitchen just because it's such a The smell.
Yeah, the smell. And it's just a very visceral experience. And so I don't think that's an argument against what you're saying, like the ethical argument. But I think there's something about the ritual of eating and the fact that so many of us eat it that it's attacking all of that in our minds. Yeah.
Yeah, I think that's beautifully put. They lash out at you. Yeah, maybe there's like, I guess hunting taps into that evolutionary part of your brain as we spoke about on the show where it just makes you, it feels good just as having sex, staying warm feels good. Like hunting for food might feel good. And there is like so much of our aesthetic cultural experience tied to meat eating.
Like the idea of like the idea of being on a lake with my old man fishing genuinely sounds like a great day. Right. It sounds wholesome. It's like it's the sort of stuff from storybooks. But at the same time, there's obviously that suffering. But I can see the appeal, right, if you didn't know about the nature of fish and their capacity to feel pain. Yeah, so I can see why people sort of do it.
And the motivations aren't unclear to me. I just don't think they're strong enough motivations to do it.
yeah okay i'm gonna pull up the next clip this is gonna be now this is gonna be a little bit more of an argument nathan was a med student he's trained to become a physician and i want to just kind of dig into the the supplements and you know uh vitamin deficiency concerns 95 percent of people in the 95 percent of people in the u.s are vitamin d deficient
Yes, that is fair. And we do prescribe that. But the thing is, as I've seen patients, as I've been rotating through different things... Can you rank the diets in terms of healthiest? Would you go pescatarian, vegan? I'd go Mediterranean first, and then pescatarian, and then vegan. Okay. So we're not too far away from each other. We're not too far.
But here's the thing is that I think about my patients and I think about what is achievable for them. And the problem with and I think it's affordable for them. What's affordable? So affordable, but also expensive. Can I? Of course.
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Chapter 6: What philosophical arguments are made about the value of human versus animal life?
The other thing is I've seen medication noncompliance. Like I myself take a medication for blood pressure and I suck at it. And a lot of other people, one of the biggest things in America is that some people, just a lot of people actually are just not compliant with their medications. So they don't take it. They don't take it. So it's either we have them high BMI, take a bunch of medications.
We do a vegan diet. We give them a lot of supplements, like five or six, actually, that you would need. Or you can have the Mediterranean diet where you can just have a good diet without those supplements or added things in it.
So you're pushing back. You're saying you don't need those supplements. You only need... What are you saying? You only need B12? Is that the only one you think?
Take B12 and maybe keep an eye on your iron. There's just like, there's a few like little just nutrition shots you can take each day, like, and that will give you everything. But typically, you know, I've just been taking B12 ever since I've been vegan. I'm absolutely fine. So I think some people seem to keep an eye on their iron.
But yeah, so you don't need to take, I think, did he say six or seven there? I don't know where he's getting that from.
Yeah. Well, I mean, chat GPT is not the end all be all. But, you know, if we just did a quick, you know, question with them, they said vitamin B12, vitamin D, omega-3. And then it said those were kind of the big ones. And then the lesser ones, but something to keep an eye on were calcium, iron and iodine. Yeah.
But what do you think about his argument just like, hey, if we're asking millions of people to do this, we're introducing a large risk of vitamin deficiencies to a huge group of people.
Yeah.
I think before, when I first started going vegan, I thought perhaps this would be one of the best arguments. And even then I thought it didn't outweigh the sort of suffering and pain and environmental damage that it caused. So I was motivated thinking like, suppose like it did have some negative effects on our health. Well, I still think it would be better to go vegan on the whole.
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Chapter 7: How do personal experiences shape views on veganism?
And we'd hunt this person down properly and kill them if they were doing that. This makes me think of Let the Right One In.
I've let the right one in. It's a vampire movie. Oh, no, I haven't seen it.
The plot is vaguely similar to what you're saying. I've been forced to watch the Twilight Shams at the moment, hence why I'm using that for an example. And also, I'm confessing that for my sins as well.
That's an entirely different experience. But anyway, keep going with your vampire. So they're taking a hit because they're eating the old blood.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's fair enough. The puppy example I always give as well. Say you had a shed in your garden and you had loads of little puppies in there and you grew them fat quickly, their organs fail, their legs break, you slit their throats. And you eat them and I say to you, John, why the hell are you doing that? You're a monster. That is monstrous behavior.
And you went, oh, but it helps me get my vitamin D and my omega-3. And then suppose I went, you could take a tablet for that. And you went, oh no, but I like getting it from the puppies. And I'd be like, well, that seems wild. But even then.
The studies that I've seen have said that you can absorb the vitamins better if it's in the form of a supplement because it's already detached from the fibers. With vitamin D, as I said to him, nearly everybody in the US is vitamin D deficient. So I'm not addressing arguments where it doesn't track across them.
And when it comes to- And let me actually break that down just so that I understand it and anyone listening could better understand it. So what you're saying is, yes, veganism may have some risks of deficiencies, but those risks are no greater and would be no more frequent than the deficiencies that exist in Americans diets or people's diets on average currently.
Yeah, a hundred percent that, but it goes further because the health benefits are greater. When we look, we want to look at overall health outcomes. And as I said, a bunch of times throughout this debate, when you look at the Oxford Epic survey, looking at half a million people and the Adventist Christian one, looking at about 70,000 people, the Christian one's great.
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Chapter 8: What practical steps can individuals take towards a plant-based diet?
I actually bought a little bit of stock in those companies because the argument in my mind at the time was, oh, this is a no-brainer. If we can make meat artificially, no one's going to opt in for real meat because it's just, you know, the comparison's going to be so obvious. Those investments have gone down to basically to zero. And so, I mean, that's something I'm interested in.
You make the case like, hey, ChatGPT is going to make this easier. There's going to be information. We are having technological breakthroughs that make an animal-free diet more and more accessible. But why, you know, if anything, I've seen me almost become more prevalent in our culture, like with the RFK Jr. cultural sphere and this sort of like.
Jordan Peterson's daughter advocates for, and I would love to get you and her in a conversation someday. She advocates for this meat only diet. And so it really has blown my mind because it seems counterintuitive. The technology has made it feel like it's within reach, but then the culture seems to be steering the other way. What's going on?
Yeah, you put that nicely. I was supposed to have a conversation with Michaela at some point. I hope we do get around to it because I think she's a really interesting case and offers some of probably the better arguments against feminism. The first thing is... agricultural lobby, meat lobby in the US in particular. You've got appalling animal welfare standards in the US.
And that's in comparison to Europe. And it's still very far behind. Hundreds of millions are spent. Making sure that they're free to produce animals as quickly and as efficiently and economically beneficial to the farmers as possible. That's one reason. But then that's not new, right?
That's been happening for a long time and they've upped the ante in the wake of some of these plant-based alternatives. I think there's a lot of problems with lobbying and it's not unique to animal agriculture. And the thing you mentioned, the one thing that rings to me is that meat eating can be very tied to masculinity.
And we're seeing lots of stuff on the Manosphere and sort of like it's becoming cliche to speak about in the last few weeks. Yeah, just like. Having a big steak and having a cigar and driving like a flash car or something. There's a sort of image to it. And to be fair, when you study people, when you look at the surveys, people, they do report meat-eating being tied to the concept of masculinity.
And that doesn't surprise us, right? There's cliches we hear in everyday life that speak to the same. And there's that growth of that. There's growth of that conservatism. There's a growth of return to tradition. Veganism can get thrown in with like wokeism and liberal values and stuff. And the liberals and the woke, if no one's keeping up, lost the culture war a couple of years ago, in my view.
So we're unfortunately get siding with that. It's not unique to liberalism or wokeism. You know, there are heaps of when I've spoken to Jordan Peterson about animal rights, when I've spoken to Joe Rogan about animal rights, when I've spoken to it sounds like I'm flexing now. Sorry, I'm just naming people.
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