Species Unite

"I can drive my car off a cliff and just leave it where it lay, the most I'll get is a littering fine, and if you throw your dog off the cliff the punishment is actually pretty similar. That's because they're the same type of thing to the law. So, unless you change that status, and you have people of course, who are thinking that there should be a status of kind of living property that might give them more attributes than my car has or my chair has; and then there are individuals who think they should be given the status of legal persons, which isn't to say being people, but having rights of some sort. I think both of those are pretty intriguing offers. I think we're a little ways off from doing that, but boy, either of those would be a massive improvement in our societal treatment of these creatures. And of course, I don't think it's just restricted to dogs… It's been terrific to work with dogs for all these years, but I think this way about lots of non-human animals that we interact with, were we kind of get to use them sort of, for our sake. I would love to see some kind of sea change in thinking such that we don't get to use animals in the ways we do now, which are really abuses of animals." – Alexandra Horowitz If you have any questions for your dog, Alexandra Horowitz is a pretty good place to start. She's spent much of her life researching and writing about what it's like to be a dog. She is the #1 New York times bestselling author of Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know; Our Dogs, Ourselves, Being a Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell; and On Looking. She is a professor at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she teaches seminars in canine cognition, creative nonfiction writing, and audio storytelling. As Senior Research Fellow, she heads the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard. I wish this conversation had lasted all day long as I had about 5 thousand more questions for Alexandra - mostly, everything I've ever wanted to ask my dog. Although, the time we did have together was pretty amazing and felt like an absolute gift.

"…there's this disconnect between our beliefs and our behavior and part of what can be useful for overcoming that is to change the behavior first, which sounds really counterintuitive." - Jo Anderson Jo Anderson is the Research Director at Faunalytics, an organization that empower animal advocates with access to research, analysis, strategies, and messages that maximize their effectiveness to reduce animal suffering. Jo is an advocate for animals and empirical research. For over ten years, Jo has investigated key social psychological issues such as persuasion, judgment, and decision-making, exploring how these concepts can be used to make the world a better place for humans and animals. That is what happens at Faunalytics, they do the research and enable real change. I learned a lot from Jo – mostly, that research changes the story and so often, reveals that the opposite of what seems obvious is in fact the truth.

"We see 84% of moms in the U S convert to infant formula partially or entirely in that first six months of life before the recommended period of exclusive breastfeeding ends. We see two thirds of moms express extreme shame and guilt and stigma for the way they feed their children. And, we continue to see that the infant formula industry in general has really pillaged and plundered in a lot of ways on parents wanting to do what's best for their child, but really not having better options and having very little innovation to really think about how to better nourish a child." Michelle Egger Michelle Egger is a food scientist and the CEO and co-founder of BIOMILQ, a woman-owned, science-led, mother-centered startup that is creating human breast milk in a lab, by culturing mammary cells. This has the potential for disrupting the infant formula industry forever; and will give families a more nutritious option for feeding their babies. Michelle founded BIOMILQ with cell biologist Lelia Strickland in January 2020, and soon after they received $3.5 million in funding from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Bill Gates' investment firm. I'm beyond excited that BIOMILQ exists. They are creating a revolutionary product that will one day be on grocery store shelves across the world. It will be a game changer for mothers who struggle with breastfeeding, for the planet and for a whole lot of cows.

"…gazing up to the night sky saying, 'are we alone?' …well, wait a minute, look around, there's tons of fascinating life forms. We're so lucky to have all this amazing panoply of life on the planet. I get the question… are there other humanoids out there? Or, are there other conscious beings? But we ought to be pretty grateful for what we have on this planet… there's a lot of amazing creatures and phenomena that we get to enjoy living with, if we can." - Jonathan Balcombe Jonathan Balcombe is a biologist with a PhD in ethology, the study of animal behavior. He is the author of four books on the inner lives of animals, including the New York Times bestseller, What a Fish Knows. He has published over 60 scientific papers and book chapters on animal behavior and animal protection. Jonathan has spent his life studying animals, how they think and feel and why they matter. Quite often, he focuses on the ones that most of us tend not to think about very much, like fish and in his newest book, Super Fly, flies – it comes out in May. I thought I knew a little bit about fish, but after reading Jonathan's book and after this time spent with him, I realized that I knew very little. There are 33,000 species of fish and what many of them are capable of is absolutely mind blowing . For eons, we have categorized species by who we deem worthy and who we don't. Fish are almost always very near or at the bottom of that list. Clearly, that is because most of us know so little about them. Jonathan knows a lot. If you haven't read his book, read it. It will astonish you. Jonathan can most recently be seen in the Netflix documentary, Seaspiracy.

"A friend of mine in Germany is called Dr. Tofu. He was the first who did tofu on a commercial scale, in the eighties. They arrested him… for cooking something suspicious… He was arrested a couple of times. So, when it started in Nigeria and we opened the first vegan restaurant and there were also no vegetarian restaurants, people were saying, that's crazy. Why do you do that? But I knew kind of that time was on our side. - Hakeem Jimo Hakeem Jimo is the co-founder of Veggie Victory, Nigeria's first plant-based food tech company. Hakeem and his partner, Bola Adeyanju also founded V Café, Nigeria's first vegan restaurant in 2013. V Café is in Lagos and serves veganized Nigerian culinary delicacies to vegans, meat eaters and everyone in between. A few years after opening the restaurant, Hakeem and Bola began producing VChunks, a seitan-based meat alternative that was created to pair beautifully with most Nigerian cuisine. VChunks are dehydrated so that they can be kept on shelves for months and do not need refrigeration, which is not an option for many in parts of Nigeria. Hakeem is Nigerian-German, was born and raised in Germany and has lived in West Africa for the past 27 years. Before becoming a vegan food and tech entrepreneur, he worked in journalism and public relations.

"We're all just participating in a culture that really isn't of our choice… we just grew up in this culture, but we can start questioning things and just not be afraid to say that we love other animals that they're astounding, and that we care about the environment and we want to be less impactful… you just have to be willing to say things that maybe other people haven't heard you say yet." -Carrie P. Freeman Carrie Packwood Freeman is an associate professor of communications at Georgia State University. She's a critical cultural studies media researcher and has published in over 20 scholarly books and journals. She's also the co-author of Animals and Media, a style guideline web resource for media professionals. Animals and Media and In Defense of Animals recently partnered to call for an update to the Associated Press Stylebook's recommendation on the use of personal pronouns for nonhuman animals, so that animals in news stories would be identified as, "she/her/hers and he/him/his when their sex is known, regardless of species, and the gender-neutral they, or he/she, or his/hers when their sex is unknown." The letter is signed by Jane Goodall as well as 80 other leaders, scholars, and advocates fighting for a better world for animals. Carrie is here to talk about why it's so important that we change the way that we talk about animals in the media, in entertainment and in regular everyday conversation.

We're creating a new system. When you look at it in that way, that's activism in itself. And that's actually fighting against a system that has billions of dollars, that has been spending billions of dollars, and not even asking people what they like to eat. They're not even considering the health. We're in the middle of a pandemic and who gets hit the hardest, black and brown communities with underlying conditions. Those underlying conditions stem from what they're eating. I get to go into these people's apartments, look in their fridge and then look at their medicine cabinet and see all of these drugs that they're taking because of ailments that they got from food. Meanwhile, if they were to change up how they eat, we were able to reintroduce that in a public sense, because with the fridge it's like we're telling people, listen you deserve to have access to this." -Power Malu Power Malu and Eloísa Trinidad are the team behind Overthrow Community Fridge, New York City's first plant-based community fridge that sits outside of Overthrow Boxing Club. A community fridge is a form of mutual aid to address food insecurity. They supply food to people who have limited access to fresh groceries, and since the pandemic began, people have even less access – especially to nutritious food. In addition to being a longtime community organizer and activist, Power is also the Director of Community Affairs & Special Events at the Overthrow Boxing Club. Eloísa is the executive director of Chillis on Wheels, a nonprofit that focus on making veganism accessible to communities in need. She's also the executive director of the Vegan Activist Alliance, a New York organization that fights to end animal exploitation.

"I was doing really well in cardiology. I loved my role. I loved the work I was doing. I'd say except for two or three people, everybody said, 'this is crazy, why are you giving up a career that is on an upward trajectory and that you're doing really well in?' The two or three people who heard me, they said, 'Uma don't look back. If you have even a fraction of the impact of what you're thinking of having, that'll be a million-fold more impactful than what you could do as a cardiologist for the next 30 years in practice.' Essentially, even if I had continued in practice for the next 30 years I would have probably saved about two or three thousand lives. But if the innovation that we're working on becomes mainstream or even a fraction of mainstream, we're literally talking about trillions of animal lives, but also billions of human lives…" - Uma Valeti Uma Valeti is a cardiologist, entrepreneur, and the CEO and co-founder of Memphis Meats, the world's leading clean meat company - meaning they produce meat directly from animal cells. There is no slaughter involved. Uma's mission is to feed the world's growing population with meat that is delicious, affordable and sustainable. Memphis Meats has already pioneered the world's first multi-species cell-based meat platform and made history by unveiling chicken, duck and beef grown directly from animal cells. I think it's the most exciting thing to happen on the planet in my lifetime. Uma is quite possibly going to go down in history as the man who changed the way the world eats forever. As soon as cell-based meat is regulated, scaled, and available in restaurants and grocery stores (which is coming sooner than you think), the demand to slaughter of billions of animals year after year will diminish and at some point, it will be gone forever.

"I sat down, did some number questing and said, okay, 85% is going to be given away during my lifetime and the rest of thereafter. I sleep much better at nights. I do live comfortably, but there's a limit. I'd rather that money go to save lives." - Jim Greenbaum Jim Greenbaum is the Founder and Managing Director of The Greenbaum Foundation. After college, Jim entered the workforce with one goal in mind - to make as much money as quickly as possible in order to use those funds to help make the world a better place. In 1985, Jim founded and became CEO of Access Long Distance. Less than a decade later he made the decision that he would leave the corporate world at the age of 40. Keeping true to the plan, he sold the company in 1999. Jim has committed to contributing in excess of 85% of his assets to charitable projects ending human and non-human suffering during his lifetime, and the remainder of his estate soon thereafter. The foundation's assets will also be spent down during his lifetime. The Greenbaum Foundation focuses funding on effective and efficient projects working to bring about the end of human and non-human suffering in areas of the highest need and where they the most impact. During the early years the foundation focused solely on human rights, but have since shifted their efforts toward non-humans, and toward moving the world to whole foods plant-based diets and ending factory farming. Their portfolio also includes projects aimed at increasing the awareness, protection and improvement of the lives of all animals. Jim is also an Executive Producer of several documentaries, including "The Game Changers," "What The Health," "Cowspiracy," and "Not My Life." "Being a bystander to suffering is not an option." – Jim Greenbaum

"I usually live day by day. I always live every day like it's going to be the last day. We learned that during the war. We don't know when we're going to die. So, you live every day like it's going to be the last day. That's what I do." – Helena Husseini Helena Husseini is the vice-president of BETA, Beirut Ethical Treatment for Animals. BETA is the first and largest shelter in Lebanon with 850 dogs, many cats, a few horses, and a couple of monkeys. Helena is also an architect. She has been with BETA since 2006, a few months before the Lebanon War started. As bombs dropped nearby, she drove around in her Jeep saving the injured and abandoned dogs throughout the city. Since then, she has been rescuing animals during the too many crises and catastrophes that have plagued Lebanon, including the 2019 financial collapse, the riots, COVID 19, and the blast that decimated Beirut. This conversation is really one that's about resilience, about grit, about what it means to show up every day, even when bombs are dropping, when there's no access to money, when people are starving, and no one knows what tomorrow will look like. It's a conversation about what it means to choose the meaningful life.

"…I just remember walking around this room in total shock and then backing into a cage and feeling something touch my shoulder and realizing, 'Oh my gosh, you know, I've come too close,' and thinking I was going to be hurt. Then, as I turned around [I saw] what had touched me was the bears paw through the bars of the cage. She just had her paw there and was holding it out. And I did something ridiculously stupid. I took her paw, because it was there, reaching out and she just squeezed my fingers. That's all she did. She just rhythmically squeezed my fingers. And I just looked into her eyes and I just knew it was one of those amazing moments that you can hardly describe. Because you just know at that point, everything in your life is going to change. Well, indeed, that's exactly what happened." - Jill Robinson Jill Robinson has spent nearly 30 years of her life fighting to end bear bile farming, one of the world's darkest industries that most people have never heard of. She is widely recognized as the world's leading authority on bear bile farming and is the founder and CEO of Animals Asia, an organization that has been rescuing bears since 1994 and is devoted to ending the entire bear bile industry. They are one of the few organizations in the world that is close to reaching the goal that they originally set out to achieve.

"…people were treating us like two crazy guys from Spain that were trying to change something in a country that loves meat... And now we see in these supermarkets, our product there… it's crazy. I get very emotional when I think about that day that with Marc. We were working in a library for free because we did not have money to pay for an office. We just had this idea. We had these first prototypes for a product… let's try to sell it in few shops and let's see the feedback. And now we are in more than 3000 points of sale, more than 10 countries. And, what's coming is big. It's huge." – Bernat Añaños Bernat Añaños is the co-founder of the Spanish plant-based startup, Heura by Foods for Tomorrow. Bernat and Marc Coloma founded Heura in 2017 with the goal of disrupting the unsustainable food system by bringing a solution that will accelerate the shift to a world where the animals are out of the meat production equation. Since they launched, Heura has become the fastest growing European startup in the plant-based industry, with 450% growth this year despite the pandemic. 4 years ago, Bernat and Marc could not get their products into supermarkets. That's because people were unwilling to believe that meat loving Spain would ever embrace plant-based products. But, like in every other country where it was assumed that the public would be resistant to plant-based foods, especially in chain restaurants and grocery stores, the assumptions were wrong. Heura's products are now sold at over 3000 locations (grocery stores, restaurants, and online) and they've expanded into ten other countries with many more coming. "I'm seeing a huge change. And the good thing is that it's not just in Barcelona and Madrid. It's also happening in villages and small cities. …my grandma, for example, she does not even eat meat anymore and she is using Facebook to introduce Heura to her 80 year old friends… and the response of these 80 year old friends of my grandma, it's crazy… I think we are on the right path… We were and we still are a meat lover's country, but maybe… it's a plant-based meat lover's country in very few years. " - Bernat Añaños

"… it was quite a big change… when I was growing up, I even used to like hunt and fish, to be honest. I mean, that was part of our family tradition through generations, I made friends through those sorts of activities. My father and I used to do those things and my grandfather [too]. So, growing up around animal cruelty… it was very natural for me. …saying, "no, I'm not going to continue to participate in those sorts of things," was actually quite a big transition and a scarry one. I didn't know what that meant for my relationship with my family." - Frohman Anderson "You know, he's a very wise young man and he knew exactly how to get us, which was through education… for Christmas, he actually said, "I don't want any gifts. I don't want any presents. I just want you to watch these movies and give me the time to talk about them." …my husband and I watched Forks over Knives and Cowspiracy. And if you told me that morning that I would have been vegetarian, I probably would have said no. And then the next morning it was, it was just so obvious." - Kim Anderson Kim and Frohman Anderson are partners in Everhope Capitol, a fund that invests in entrepreneurs and businesses that replace animals in the supply chain. Kim is also the creator and co-founder of Plant City, the world's first and largest vegan food hall. It's located in Providence, Rhode Island. Kim is Frohman's mother. Frohman went vegan in college and his family soon followed suit. Soon after, the family business became a plant-based investment fund, and Kim founded Plant City with Matthew Kenney, one of the top plant-based chefs in the world. In their first year they served 450 thousand guests. This is the story of the power of one family, and how that one family is changing the future around how and what we eat.

"We're not even talking about the barriers of having a plant-based company. There are still so many countries that they don't even support plant-based innovation, for every Israel and Singapore that's making leaps and bounds, there's a France that's trying to push a meat diet. So, to be in an industry that is here to disrupt the mainstream and is here to disrupt a lot of what people hold dear, that's a lonely journey. We need to make the effort to drive the conversation in the direction that we want it to go, because if we're not actually making the effort to build this path in this direction, it's going to default to the status quo and we know what the status quo is. So, we need to push against that." – Jennifer Stojkavic Jennifer Stojkovic is the founder of Vegan Women's Summit (VWS). Jennifer built her career as a community relations leader for the world's largest tech companies in San Francisco. During her career in tech, Jennifer became increasingly interested in blending her passion for change in the food system with her experience and network in Silicon Valley. In early 2018, Jennifer launched a "Future of Food" series of partnerships bringing together CEOs and founders from leading tech brands, including WeWork and Airbnb, with emerging CEOs from the burgeoning food tech industry to establish food as the "Tech 2.0". Quickly, Jennifer became aware of the inequities facing female founders in the food tech industry — and the unfortunate parallels drawn from the same experiences she has combatted in her career as a woman at the intersection of tech and politics in the Valley. Drawing on these experiences, Jennifer launched VWS in early 2020 with a sold-out global conference, the Vegan Women Summit. Focused on building equitable and diverse representation of women leaders from around the world and partnering with major tech brands, VWS is the world's first events and media organization dedicated to empowering, educating, and inspiring women to bring compassion to their careers. With a thriving, fast-growing community of energetic female leaders around the world, VWS features programming with the world's leading vegan CEOs, celebrities, investors, Olympians, and more. In December, VWS launched VWS Pathfinder, the world's first female founder summit and pitch competition dedicated exclusively to plant-based innovation.

"We spent 50 years fighting industry and I mean, fighting industry. And we were poking a bear and poking a bear and poking a bear. And then one day that bear came up and just nuzzled us under the neck and said, "okay, we're interested." …It was industry, it was the big players that came in and said, "why are we fighting this? If consumers are asking for plant-based, we can sell plant-based.'" – Chris Kerr Chris Kerr is on a mission to upend the entire food industry. Chris is the Chief Investment Officer at Unovis/New Crop Capital, a venture capital fund that invests in entrepreneurs whose products or services replace foods derived from animal agriculture. He is also the co-founder and CEO of Gathered Foods, known for its Good Catch plant-based seafood products, the co-founder and Director of Wicked Foods, and the director of Cultivated Food Labs. Chris is one of the first people that helped direct early-stage investments for plant-based food companies. He's been focused on impact investing with a concentration on the plant-based food sector since 2007, when he worked with the Humane Society of the United States to manage their investments into the plant-based food industry and played a key role in helping Daiya cheese secure distribution in Whole Foods Market. "You can't rescue your way out of the animal protection world, you just can't. So, what can we do to actually do to change it at its base? If we can change people's opinion about eating plants, eating something other than animals, then maybe we wouldn't have to keep hitting them over the head with the ethical and moral baseball bat." – Chris Kerr Chris is helping some of the top plant-based companies through investment funding and mentorship, all with the goal of accelerating the plant-based food industry and moving the world away from eating animals. I hope that you learn as much as I did from Chris and are as excited about what's happening with the future of food. Please listen and share.

"There's $5 billion of debt collectively from contract chicken farmers. It's enormous. You're just treading water. You're just paying the bills and it starts off great, in the sense that you think you're going to make enough money. But you end up just paying bills and never getting ahead. And that's very typical." – Leah Garcés Over the past few decades, people have become increasingly aware of the that factory farming is destroying the planet and most know that its abhorrently cruel and inhumane for animals. But most people still don't realize that many farmers are also exploited, in massive debt and living far below the poverty line because of it. The Transfarmation Project aims to change that by freeing farmers from the confines of factory farming and the cycle of debt by helping them transition to plant-based farming. "The project is about creating constructive solutions, where we come in and work with communities, with farmers, finding alternatives. Especially alternative economies or alternative ways of farming that move farmers away from factory farming to something that's regenerative and sustainable and is creating a compassionate food system." – Leah Garces Leah Garcés, the President of Mercy for Animals and Michael Pellman Rowland, a financial advisor and a Mercy for Animals Board Member spoke with me about Transfarmation at a live event in December. Please listen and share - this project is going to change the world for millions of animals and for farmers across the planet.

"Scientists have made this study and experiment… people would actually feel bad for the butterfly because now it's ready to come out of its cocoon, so they would open the cocoon for it. They would slice it open to make it easier for the butterfly to come out. And it turns out that even doing that weakens the butterfly, because that effort of breaking the cocoon and spreading your wings is a necessity to become more resilient and stronger in life" – Daniel Fox Daniel Fox is a photographer, solo wilderness explorer, author of FEEL THE WILD, founder of Feel the Wild VR, a LEXUS ambassador, SANDISK Extreme Team member, SENNHEISER Artist, publisher of the Proust Nature Questionnaire, and founder/mentor of WILD.ECO, a non-profit with a mission to foster resilient, empowered, adaptable, curious, and empathetic students of life, using Nature as a framework for personal transformation. Daniel and I spoke early in the pandemic – mostly about nature: how it heals, how it teaches, and why we so desperately need it right now. On this very last day of this very strange year, this episode serves as a reminder to connect. To connect with ourselves, with one another and with nature. Because in nature we can heal, start over, and remember who we are and why we're here. In nature we can remember that we are all one.Happy New Year! Let's hope for a better one.

"…From everything that I'd learned and from everything that I'd seen, I came to realize that our food and how we produce it, particularly products of industrial animal agriculture links to almost every issue I'd worked on from biodiversity loss to climate change to food insecurity." – Thomas King Thomas King is the founder and CEO of Food Frontier, a food innovation think tank dedicated to diversifying the world's food supply through the development of alternatives proteins. For the last decade Thomas has driven food systems and environmental and poverty alleviation initiatives across five continents. Thomas is 24 years old. At 13, he launched an awareness campaign about deforestation caused by unsustainable palm oil production, which catapulted him right into the deep end of advocacy where he has lived ever since. At 18, he was named Victoria's Young Australian of the year for his environmental and humanitarian work.

"I think that when the animal protection movement really started gaining hold in the seventies... in the United States at least, I think there was a lot of harm done in the ways that we messaged the connections between humans in marginalized communities and animals. And I think that there's also a dynamic where… communities of color are often struggling for basic rights, basic needs to be met. And so, fighting for others is kind of a nice to have." - Aryenish Birdie Aryenish Birdie is founder and Executive Director of Encompass, an organization that is fighting to increase effectiveness in the animal protection movement by fostering greater racial diversity, equity, and inclusion while empowering advocates of color. Before founding Encompass, Aryenish was a federal lobbyist at the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine. She was part of a four-woman team instrumental in reforming the Toxic Substances Control Act to ensure that animal protection language was integrated into the law. Thank you, Elizabeth Novogratz

"Even the first morning we saw a toughness, a certain toughness that I hadn't been experienced to. What we didn't realize with selection criteria that we're putting out there, is that we're actually getting the toughest in those communities. Not only in these communities, I mean, you're talking about one of our poorest places in one of the harshest areas on the planet, The Zambezi Valley and the life of a woman in rural Zimbabwe in the Zambezi Valley is it's not an easy one. And so we thought, with all this military selection, we were going to put them through what we perceived to be torture - putting them through the, what we in the military term, the four pillars of misery: to be hungry, cold, tired, and wet for extended periods of time and physical and mental strain. The thing is, the harder we pushed these women the more they smiled." Damien Mander Damien Mander is the founder and CEO of the International Anti-Poaching Foundation (IAPF). He is a former Australian Royal Navy clearance diver and a special operations military sniper who became an anti-poaching crusader and an environmental and animal welfare activist. In 2009, while traveling through Africa, he was inspired by the work of rangers and the plight of wildlife. He liquidated his life savings and established the International Anti-Poaching Foundation. Over the past decade the IAPF has scaled to train and support rangers which now help protect over 20 million acres of African wilderness. In 2017 Damien founded 'Akashinga - Nature Protected by Women,' an IAPF program that has already grown to over 240 employees with 7 nature reserves in the portfolio. They are the only group of nature reserves in the world to be protected by women. And, these women are changing the game in terms of what it means to fight poaching. Damien was featured in the James Cameron documentary The Game Changers and has now released another documentary with James Cameron and National Geographic about his work with the women of Akashinga – "The Brave One's." He is a resident on the National Geographic Speakers Bureau, has spoken at the United Nations, featured in June 2019's National Geographic Magazine, and has been featured three times on 60 Minutes. And, if you haven't seen it, watch his TEDx Talk at the Sidney Oprah House, it's just awesome. It was an honor to spend time with Damien. He is a warrior, a hero and a man who understands what it means to never stop evolving

Nicole Rawling is the co-founder and executive director of the Material Innovation Initiative (MII), a game-changing non-profit that is helping to remove and replace animal materials with high-tech, near-identical materials that are all made without harming an animal. The goal of the initiative is to remove the farmed animal from materials such as leather, wool, silk, down, fur, and exotic skins - and instead use cutting-edge tech like cultivated and lab-grown cells to make kinder and more sustainable alternatives. Growing next gen materials like this is going to change the world – for animals, humans, and the planet. And by partnering with scientists, start-ups, and retailers, the institute is at the forefront of bringing these critical innovations to market. The future is here and the hope is that in the next decade, animals will no longer be used in materials in the fashion, automotive, and home goods industries. And, Nicole and MII are making this happen fast.

"… we are trying to make something watchable that is just unwatchable. I don't want to be here and I don't want to see this. And every part of me wants to turn away, but you have to engage with it, and you have to come out the other end with something that hopefully can encourage other people to stick with long enough to have it land." - Kelly Guerin How we treat animals is how we treat humans. Kelly Guerin is a documentary filmmaker who has been making that connection for as long as she's been making films. She is a part of the extraordinary We Animals Media Team and has worked independently as well as alongside NGO's to direct, film, and edit dozens of short films spanning topics of animal protection, environmental justice, and human rights throughout the world. Her debut feature length documentary, Nations of Their Own is set to be released in 2021. The film takes place in occupied Palestine and follows an unexpected group of activists who are on a mission to rescue their country from the effects of decades of military occupation, starting with its animals.

"In a natural setting, these animals would be swimming maybe a hundred miles a day, diving deep. They have their social lives, their social networks, roles to play in very tightly-knit family groups. They raise their children. They have cultures, different ways of doing things in different populations. They can explore and play and come together. None of that is available in the concrete tank. None of it. They don't have any place to go. They don't have any place to dive… what you see is a lot of mortality, a lot of sickness, a lot of behavioral abnormalities. Everything that makes life worth living for a dolphin or whale is absent in marine parks and concrete tanks. None of it is available." – Lori Marino Lori Marino is a neuroscientist and an expert in animal behavior and intelligence. Much of her work is focused on whales and dolphins. She's currently the president of the Whale Sanctuary Project, which will be a seaside sanctuary for former performing orcas and belugas that have spent their entire lives in concrete tanks. Lori is also the founder and Executive Director of the Kimmela Center for Animal Advocacy, an organization that bridges the gap between academic research and on the ground animal advocacy efforts. She has appeared in several film and television programs, including the documentaries Blackfish, Unlocking the Cage, and Long Gone Wild, which is a 2019 documentary that picks up where Black Fish left off, and is also where the Whale Sanctuary Project begins. The Whale Sanctuary Project is going to change the world for the lucky orcas and belugas that will end up there. They will also be a model for future sanctuaries for cetaceans – as we need a ton of them, there are way too many of these animals living in captivity. It stuns me that even after documentaries like Blackfish, people all over the world (including many in the US) still visit marine mammal parks. Mostly, people go because they don't know. They don't know how miserable life is for the whales and dolphins and they don't know how intelligent and emotionally complex these animals are. Keeping them in tanks is cruel, inhumane, and unjust and it needs to stop. Lori has made it her life's work to not only study their intelligence, but to advocate and fight for their lives. This conversation is an important one, after listening to Lori, I think it'd be very difficult for anyone to give another dollar to a marine park anywhere on Earth.

"Because we're told of so many problems and issues around the world, we get overwhelmed. And if you tell someone, okay, this is what's going on and this is what you can do. That's a bit different, people are like, okay, that's actionable." - Amanda Hearst Amanda Hearst is co-founder of Well Beings, an organization that unites animal welfare and environmental protection throughout the globe - from closing down puppy mills in the American South to stopping deforestation in South America. Their most recent campaign is to stop the fires in the Bolivian Amazon; and because of COVID-19, they've also been campaigning to stop the next pandemic by preventing wildlife trafficking in the rainforests - which has been linked to the spread of similar coronaviruses. Amanda is also co-founder of the luxury, sustainable, fashion retailer Maison de Mode. Check out their cruelty-free edit – it's absolutely stunning.

"The core of this problem in the world in many ways. is the consciousness that we bring to the world. When we think of others in the world or ourselves as being more or less worthy of being treated with respect, that very thinking is what drives many of the social problems we see in the world." – Dr. Melanie Joy Melanie Joy is a Harvard educated psychologist, specializing in the psychology of eating animals, social transformation and relationships. She is the award-winning author of six books, including the best-selling, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows. She is the founder of the non-profit, Beyond Carnism, dedicated to exposing and transforming carnism, the invisible belief system that conditions people to eat certain animals. Melanie is a recipient of the Ahimsa award for her work on global nonviolence. This award was previously given to the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela. She also received both the Peter Singer Prize and the Empty Cages Prize for her work developing strategies to reduce the suffering of animals. Melanie's TEDx talk called, Toward Rational Authentic Food Choices has received over 800,000 views. No matter what your diet consists of, I hope that this conversation will inspire you to delve a little deeper into the systems and beliefs that quietly run the show when it comes to the psychology behind what (and who) we eat.

"When I moved my mom in, I certainly felt, okay, now I'm off the market. I've got a broken-down house, a crazy mother, a high-pressure job being a vegan activist at PETA… this is not really a good resume for finding Mr. Right." – Dan Mathews Dan Mathews is the Director of Campaigns at PETA. He's been there since the 80s when he was hired as a receptionist right after college. Dan's responsible for PETAs most controversial and outlandish campaigns including the "I'd Rather Go Naked Than Wear Fur" ads. He's been arrested more than 20 times, but all for good reason - having changed the world for millions of animals. He is also the author of two books, Committed and most recently, Like Crazy: Life with My Mother and Her Invisible Friends, a darkly funny memoir about the hardships and rewards of taking in a mentally and physically fragile parent. It shows the spectacular amount of expansion and growth that result from to choosing to do the right thing over the easy thing, from choosing the more beautiful life. Dan is brilliant, extremely funny, and a gift to humans and animals everywhere.

"…when I say people had no idea, these were investors, right? These were people who thought they had a crystal ball on the future. And I was like, look, our world has to change for so many reasons. The fact that we're slaughtering animals and doing so in really horrific ways, that is not the future. And so, if that is not the future, what is? It's embracing biotech, it's embracing food science, it's embracing the things that will remove these animals and the environmental impact of this out of the system." - Ryan Bethencourt 30 percent of the meat consumed in the United States is eaten by our pets. That is a staggering number. Ryan Bethencourt thought so too, which is why is doing something about it. Ryan is the founder and CEO of Wild Earth, a sustainable, meat-free alternative to dog food. It's the Beyond Meat for dogs. You may have seen Ryan pitch it on Shark Tank – not only did the Sharks taste his dog treats, Mark Cuban invested. Ryan is a scientist, entrepreneur, and a biotech investor. He has led, built and advised more than 80 companies, including: Shiok Meats, Memphis Meats, Geltor, New Wave Foods, Clara Foods, and Finless Foods. He co-founded IndieBio, the world's leading biotech accelerator and was head of Sciences for the XPRIZE Foundation. He's currently a partner at Babel Ventures, a consumer biotech fund. Ryan believes that using biology as technology will solve some of the world's most intractable problems.

We are on the cusp of the fastest, deepest, most consequential transformation of human civilization in history, a transformation every bit as significant as the move from foraging to cities and agriculture 10,000 years ago. James Arbib and Tony Seba, Rethinking Humanity James Arbib is co-founder of RethinkX, a nonprofit think tank that explores how technology will shape the future and disrupt all levels of society, including information energy, materials, transportation, and my favorite, food – food that will not come from slaughtered animals. Jamie and RethinkX cofounder, Tony Seba are the authors of Rethinking Humanity: Five Foundational Sector Disruptions, the Lifecycle of Civilizations, and the Coming Age of Freedom. They predict that new technologies could wipe out poverty and solve climate change in the next 10-15 years, and bring in a new "Age of Freedom." Which sounds pretty phenomenal, but they also warn that it could pose huge challenges for a a world that still clings to outdated concepts such as democracy, capitalism and the nation state.

…not everyone can afford to donate a certain percentage of their money, not everyone can afford to volunteer their time because they're working so much. If you can, this is your generosity to the world, this is your generosity to all the people that cannot. And I think that's kind of our duty and our privilege. What is the max generosity that you can live with, with your food choices, with your time, with your money choices. - April Tam Smith April Tam Smith is the co-founder of PS Kitchen, a plant-based restaurant in the Theater District in New York City that gives away all of its profits and hires people in need of a second chance. By day, April is a managing director at a large New York City investment firm. While spending her days on Wall Street and nights at the restaurant, she still somehow finds an amazing amount of time to give to and serve in other communities throughout New York City, as well as around the world. April and I sat down at PS Kitchen to talk about what it means to give, to be radically generous, to live a life of service, and the insane amounts of energy that she has - not only to do all of the above, but to do it with grace, joy, and a boundless love of life. April is an inspiration. After hearing her story I couldn't help but rethink about what it means to be a human walking around on this planet and how we all can be doing it a little bit better.

There would be some mornings that the indigenous tribal leaders would take us out into virgin rainforest… [I was] like, "no human has ever stood here before." And it was alive with, I mean, you name the animal… and it was loud full and of life. And they would take us out the very next day and it was just smoldering because it had been slashed and burned illegally in the middle of the night. And it was just completely quiet except for what was left of the fire. And that that changes you. Liza Heavener Liza's story is one of my favorites. She spent a decade working in federal politics, grassroots and campaign strategy and with the United States Congress. Liza was a healthcare lobbyist for a large membership organization, running their national advocacy program to engage hundreds of thousands of advocates across the country. Then… she won a contest to work a documentary and tv series in Borneo. Liza went there for what she thought would be 100 days… but ended up staying for the next year. While she was there, her world turned upside down. And what came out of it is this force of a woman who has dedicated herself to creating a better planet for everyone who lives on it, not just the humans. Liza is the Chief Operating Officer at NEXUS Global and she chairs the Nexus Working Group on Animal Welfare and Biodiversity Conservation, which is dedicated to educating, empowering and connecting Next-Gen impact investors, philanthropists, and social entrepreneurs. She also serves as an Advisor to the Millennial Action Project and as a Vice Chair of the Alumni Council for Eastern Mennonite University. Liza had a feature role in the internationally-acclaimed documentary and tv series, "Rise of the Eco-Warrior," and has spoken at conferences across the country.

"Bearing witness is difficult. It does hit your emotions... I think you've got to remember, these images that you take are not yours to keep… it's your duty to put them out there or let organizations get them out there. I think that's how you cope - it's thinking, okay these aren't going to stay in my head. These are actually going to go out into the world and are going to create change." - Gemunu de Silva Today's episode is a special one. It's with Gemunu de Silva. Gem is a filmmaker and an activist who has been investigating and documenting animal rights abuses since the eighties, before there was even such a thing as a camcorder, instead he covertly filmed inside of factory farms with a video camera and a VHS recorder attached to his back. He was the first person in the UK to film in and expose the atrocities that happen every day on industrial farms. He directed and produced programs for UK national television, including the documentary, Meathead. Watch it – it's absolutely spectacular. He left the film and television world to set up and run the Investigations Unit at Compassion in World Farming. Gem also lead the unit's pioneering work on long distance animal transport. In the early 2000's, Gem went to work as the Director of Research and Investigations at Cruelty Free International, where he specialized in exposing the vile international trade of primates for research. In 2006, Gem co-founded Tracks Investigations. They have just completed their 250th investigative film project. That is an enormous number of investigations. 35 animal rights and protection organizations have benefited from their work in 57 countries. The work that Gem has done for the past three and a half decades has changed laws, minds and the world for millions of animals. For most of that time, he has laid low and stayed under the radar and has not done any media in decades. It was an absolute honor to have Gem on the show to tell his story.

What's allowed the Beyonds and Impossibles and JUSTs of the world to do what they're doing was not subsidies, it was investment that they put into science and technology that allowed them to create things that weren't creatable before, because they just hadn't been tried before. - Michael Pellman Rowland Michael Pellman Rowland is back. He was on the podcast in the early days of the pandemic to talk about the happenings in the alternative protein space and to explain the Beyond Meat IPO – the most successful IPO since 2001. Since then, I have heard from a lot of you, asking who is next? So, I asked Michael to come back and talk about the next five plant-based companies that will most likely go public in the near and not as near future. He graciously gave me an in depth look at the companies that are on the verge of exploding as well as a couple that you might not have ever heard of. Michael knows and loves this space. He has been writing about it for years, primarily for Forbes. His articles are about the future of food, sustainable food startups and technologies, and all of the happenings in the plant-based food.

"We kept going through this logical exercise of how do we help more and more animals. And every single time the logical end point was - it's not dogs and cats, it's animals in the food system. It's not a matter of tens of millions of animals. It's a matter of tens of billions of animals and hundreds of billions of fish." - Nate Salpeter What do you get when two tech geniuses start an animal sanctuary? The first non-profit sanctuary in the world to address the global impacts of factory farming across animals, the plants and the planet. Nate Salpeter and Anna Sweet are the founders of Sweet Farm, an animal sanctuary in Half Moon Bay, California, that links veganic agriculture, farm-animal rescue, and technology that is revolutionizing food and agriculture production. The technology initiatives that are happening at Sweet Farm are going to change the way that we eat forever. It's the future of food. Everything that is going on at Sweet Farm is pretty astounding, but not terribly surprising when you learn that by day, Nate is a nuclear engineer and Anna is a computer scientist and the CEO of Bad Robot, JJ Abrams gaming company. Sweet Farm is also the home of Goat-2-Meeting, which Nate and Anna started when the sanctuary had to close to visitors because of the pandemic. Instead of going in person, people can invite the farm animals into their video conferences. Llamas, goats, cows, and others are still making appearances at meetings all over the planet.

The only way to help animals is to help people. Its humans that need to change, not animals. And I think it's the same way when we're talking about other issues in our society. It's about healing those who are causing violence, and it oftentimes can be easy to judge and persecute and sort of push aside people that are causing harm. It's more challenging to love them and to lead by example and to believe that everyone is doing the best that they can with what they have and what they know in that moment. - Milo Runkle . Some humans come out of the womb with a mission imprinted into their very being. Not often, but it happens. Milo Runkle is one of those humans. He was born in rural Ohio, delivered by his veterinarian father, and from the very earliest of his days, he knew he would change the word for animals. He was one of those kids who had a deep empathy for any creature that he encountered, an empathy that I think most of us have as children, but sadly are talked out of by well meaning (and very well conditioned) adults. Instead of being talked out of anything, Milo held on tightly, and rather than experiencing the slow, albeit unconscious, leak of animal-connected compassion that too many humans experience, his only grew. He became vegetarian at 11, and vegan at 15, which was the same year that he founded Mercy for Animals; which would later become the world's largest farm animal and vegan advocacy organization, an international powerhouse that has indeed changed the world for millions of cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, and fish. It all started because of an animal abuse case at his local high school. He saw abuse and injustice and did something. Milo ran Mercy for Animals for nearly two decades, and is still involved - he is the Board Chair, but since he left his role as President, he's started a new chapter, one that involves deep exploration – of the planet, of himself, and of what it means to live a life of service – one that is deep rooted in joy, love, and compassion. He is also the cofounder of the Good Food Institute, an organization that works to build a sustainable food system by supporting the development and adoption of plant and cell based proteins. And, he is the author of Mercy for Animals. One Man's Quest to Inspire Compassion and Improve the Lives of Farm Animals. Milo and I spoke a few weeks ago about what it was like to sustain decades of activism on the frontlines and what his life has looked like since - the expansion, exploration, and his ever widening circle of compassion. Milo's love for the world and ALL who inhabit it radiates through his entire being, so much so that it's contagious.

Beings who've succeeded on earth for millions of years, don't seek, and should not require, our approval. They belong as well as we do. We do ourselves no favors by asking whether their existence is worth our while. We are hardly in a position to judge, hurdling and lurching along as we are with no goal, no plan except: bigger, faster, more. If we had the courage to be honest about it, we would have to admit that whales and birds and apes and all the rest live fully up to everything of which they are capable. And we, regrettably, fall short of doing that. For them, to be is enough. For us in the isolating alienation of our title retreat from Life, nothing is enough. It is strange how dissatisfied we insist on being, when there is so much of the world to know and love. Carl Safina, Becoming Wild Carl Safina grew up raising pigeons on a rooftop in Brooklyn and hasn't stopped interacting with the wild since. He is an ecologist and author who writes extensively about our human relationship with the natural world and what we can do to make it better. First step: we need to care. Carl's books make us care. He advocates for every living creature out there, and is always graciously pointing out why animals matter, not only why they matter to us, but why they matter to themselves - something I'm pretty certain that most humans don't think about often enough. In his most recent book Becoming Wild, How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty and Achieve Peace, Carl travels around the planet, exploring the cultures of chimpanzees in Uganda, sperm whales in the Caribbean, and Scarlet macaws in Peru. He shows us how other species teach and learn, and what life looks like in their animal societies, which is often as astonishing as it is spectacularly beautiful. His writing has won several awards, including a MacArthur Genius Prize, Pew and Guggenheim fellowships, and the John Burrows, James Beard, and George Rabb metals. He is the first Endowed Professor for Nature and Humanity at Stony Brook University and the founding president of the not for profit, Safina Center. He also hosted the PBS series, Saving the Ocean.

The COVID-19 pandemic's ripple effects are broad; leaving virtually no industry, economy, or continent immune. As travel and tourism has been brought to a standstill, many wilderness areas are left vacant and workers left with the uncertainty of personal income. This "perfect storm" of conditions is leaving many endangered animals highly vulnerable to wildlife crime. – Beverly and Derek Joubert, Project Ranger In the last 50 years, Africa has lost 90 to 95 percent of its large predators. We could very well witness the end of many iconic species in the next decade or two. It's that urgent and we are in that much trouble. If we want to live in a world with lions and leopards and elephants and rhinos, then we've got to get behind those who are out there on the front lines. Beverly and Derek Joubert have spent their lives on the front lines. They are award-winning filmmakers, National Geographic Explorers-in-Residence, and wildlife conservationists who have made over 30 films while researching, exploring, and doing vital conservation work throughout Africa for nearly four decades. They've been on Species Unite before, and if you haven't heard their episode, go back and listen. Their lives sound like something from an epic film - romance, wild adventures, extreme danger, all fueled by a deep love for the wilderness and one another, and the stories that they tell are absolutely astonishing. But, today's episode is different. There is an urgent situation happening across Africa. Since the pandemic started and tourism shut down, there's been a funding crisis for wildlife rangers across the continent, and without the rangers, there will be no one there to protect the wilderness and the animals who live there. It's already bad and on the verge of getting much, much worse. To prevent a full on poaching pandemic, Beverly and Derek have started an emergency intervention called, Project Ranger, an emergency fund supporting those on the front lines of conservation. The situation is dire and it's something that we all can behind in one way or another, before it's too late. So, please listen and share this episode, share the powerful PSAs that the Jouberts have created, and if you are able, donate to Project Ranger.

"…I checked into rehab and within 72 hours I was diagnosed with type two diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, erectile dysfunction, bipolar disorder, suicidal depression, anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive personality disorders, sleep disorder and ADHD." – Adam Sud There was a point when Adam Sud's life was completely out of control with food and drug addiction; so much so that he found himself cycling between amphetamine benders and fast food binges until things got so bad that he attempted suicide by drug overdose. Fortunately, he failed and immediately reached out for help. He got sober and transformed everything single thing about his life. He credits a huge amount of his recovery to a plant based diet and the connection he feels with all living things through veganism. Since then, Adam has dedicated his life to helping others transform their lives. He is a diabetes and food addiction coach for Mastering Diabetes, a program that focuses on reversing insulin resistance to master diabetes using low fat, whole food, plant-based nutrition. He is also an international speaker for the plant-based movement and addiction recovery movement. He has worked in recovery centers using plant-based nutrition as a tool for strengthening recovery and relapse prevention. And, he is also the founder of the non-profit, Plant-Based for Positive Change, a program that is dedicated to advancing the research of diet and mental health and addiction and is running the very first research study to investigate the effects of a plant based diet intervention on early addiction recovery outcomes. Adam firmly believes that the simplest change on your fork make the most profound change of your life and that self-love is the root of all recovery. His story is as extraordinary as it is inspiring. I hope that you learn as much as I did. Links – Plant Based for Positive Change https://www.plantbasedforpositivechange.org/ The Infinite Study https://www.plantbasedforpositivechange.org/programs-1 Adam's Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/plantbasedaddict/?hl=en Adam's Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/plantbasedaddict/ Plant strong - https://plantstrong.com/adam-sud

"What's sad about it is… a lot of people think it's the norm… that's what I thought. Diabetes was something my grandmother had and my mom was pre-diabetic so I thought, oh diabetes and clogged arteries and high cholesterol, they're just my destiny - that's a normal part of life because that's what I saw happening to everyone around me." -Jasmine Leyva Heart disease, diabetes, and obesity have been rising at alarming rates all across the country, but the numbers are disproportionately higher in African American communities. There are many reasons that factor into why that is, but the fact that we have an unjust food system is a big one. Food desserts, regions in urban areas where it is difficult to obtain affordable and fresh foods, make it impossible for the people living in those areas to eat healthy and prevent diseases like those mentioned above. Jasmine Leyva is an actress, a filmmaker, and the creator and director of The Invisible Vegan, a full-length independent documentary that delves into the complex issues surrounding the unhealthy dietary patterns in the African American community. The film shows how increased dependence on meat and fast food is rooted in the history of slavery, 20th century socioeconomic inequalities, and the rise of big food. And it explores on the health and wellness possibilities that can be achieved through a plant based diet. The film is packed with information, history, stories of transformation, and interviews with African American vegans ranging from NBA legend, John Salley to Cedric the Entertainer to Stic of Dead Prez. If you haven't already seen it, watch it. Jasmine is a force of a human being – she's inspiring, wise, and incredibly thoughtful. I learned a ton from her film and from our conversation. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Jasmine's website https://jasmineleyva.com/ Jasmine's instagram https://www.instagram.com/jasmine_c_leyva/?hl=es Jasmine's Twitter https://twitter.com/jasmine_c_leyva The Invisible Vegan https://www.theinvisiblevegan.com/ The Invisible Vegan on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Vegan-Cedric-Entertainer/dp/B07WF9L1JM

When the pandemic first hit and tourism all over the world shut down, thousands of captive elephants across Asia went from being very much in demand to being out of work, meaning they are struggling and many of them are in dire situations. Whether these elephants are from places where their lives are really good, like certain sanctuaries, or from places where their lives are incredibly difficult, where they are forced to give rides, perform tricks and spend they rest of the day on horribly small chains, they have all been affected by the pandemic. Jemma Bullock runs a project called ELIE at Elephant Valley Project (EVP) in Eastern Cambodia. EVP is one of the very good places to be an elephant. These elephants live in the forest, eat whatever they want, aren't ridden or bathed or used as selfie props, they don't have to do anything except be elephants. In normal times, tourist visit EVP but they don't interfere with the lives of the residents. They go out into the forest and hike with the elephants and watch them in their natural habitat. It's a pretty incredible place. But, like everyone else, EVP shut down to visitors in March and until then, ecotourism was 90 percent of their income. To survive the crisis, they had to shut down their second sanctuary in Thailand, and have been relying on grants and donations. The fact that they can receive grants and donations makes them much more fortunate than most. I spoke with Jemma about life at EVP and what it's been like since the pandemic started. So far, 2020 at EVP has been a lot like many people's year– unpredictable, difficult, and absolutely insane. Not only have they been navigating the loss of income, tourism, and an entire sanctuary, but they've also had some days (and weeks) that they barely survived – including a three-week stint with a wild elephant on the loose, stealing one of their females and sending the humans up into the trees.

Lauren Ornelas is the founder and the executive director of the Food Empowerment Project, a nonprofit food justice organization that spotlights the abuse of animals on farms, unfair working conditions for produce workers, and the unavailability of healthy foods in communities of color and low-income areas. She and I spoke earlier in the pandemic. She had just written an article on Medium called, We Are All Connected. It was written back in April, but it could not be more relevant now, with the demonstrations in our streets calling out systemic racism. "As many of us know, COVID-19 has just proven what we know: that racism and inequalities that exist for Black, Indigenous, and Brown people in this country are a barrier to success and living healthy lives. Our communities have been losing lives due to police violence, lack of health care, lack of healthy food, lack of clean drinking water, environmental racism, lack of living wages, and the list goes on; however, what makes COVID-19 even more dangerous is that these problems still exist and in some ways are exacerbated." – Lauren Ornelas, We Are All Connected Lauren has spent her entire life on the front lines fighting for human and animal rights. She went vegan and became an activist in the 80s, later she founded and ran the animal right's organization, Viva USA, and in 2007, she started The Food Empowerment Project, an organization that operates from the understanding that we are indeed all connected, humans, animals, and the planet and thus, it only makes sense to fight for the whole package. Later, in that same Medium piece, she writes, "…but I am more determined than ever that we must truly fight the systems that have a role in how we got here." And that is exactly what Lauren and the Food Empowerment Project are doing.

"There's no question that Beyond Meat IPO was a watershed event. You cannot overstate enough how big of a deal that was, because before then you had a relatively small group of folks, including myself, leading the parade, cheering as loudly as we could, and largely falling on deaf ears outside of small pockets here and there. When that [IPO] happened, everybody on Wall Street started to take notice, not just because it went public, but it was the most successful IPOs since I think 2001 or something like that. And so, Wall Street, for better or worse, looks for where the money is being made and once they started to really look into the growth percent, the numbers in the plant based meat aisle - the success of the IPO, everybody started looking for the next one." - Michael Pellman Rowland One silver lining that has come from the devastating Coronavirus pandemic has been the rise of the plant based meat industry. Business is booming. Sales of alternatives to animal flesh proteins have soared since the pandemic started and are now outpacing meat sales. This has been in part because of the meat shortage and in part because many more people have now been made aware of just how bad the meat industry is (extremely bad). They are looking for alternatives and, fortunately there are many. So, I asked my friend, Michael Pellman Rowland to explain the latest goings on in the alternative meat space, a space he knows well. He is a financial advisor whose specialty is around sustainability and impact. And, he's been writing about it for years, primarily for Forbes. His articles are about the future of food, sustainable food startups and technologies, and all of the happenings in the plant based food world from Memphis Meats leading the way to being the first cell-based meat company to bring its product to market to Beyond Meat being offered at Starbucks (although sadly, not in the US (yet)). Michael is particularly excited about companies that offer innovative solutions to reduce the impact that agriculture has on human health, climate change, water scarcity, and the welfare of billions of animals, companies like: Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, JUST, Ocean Hugger, Califia Farms, and Good Catch. I learned a lot from Michael about many of these world-changing companies. He's a wealth of knowledge, information, and advice; and, a really good human being.

"…based on my personal experience and having worked with scientists and researchers most of my life, I would say that it's not too late. There are some things that are probably gone. There are places where only pockets of biodiversity may remain in the time ahead, but that doesn't mean we can't still have a healthy future. It may not be what it once was, but it's like the old saying - when's the best day to quit smoking cigarettes? Today - if you don't quit today, when's the next best day? Tomorrow. So, it's not too late. We may have lost 50% of the world's coral reefs, but that means there's 50% left. We may have taken 90% of the big fish in the ocean, but maybe there's 10% left. We don't have to kill 100 million sharks every year. We don't have to rollback legislation that determines how much carbon we pump into the atmosphere. We can speak out against that and tell our elected leaders that we care. The ocean doesn't have to turn acidic because we're dumping so much carbon into it that its chemistry is changing. These are things that we can change and can control. So, I do remain cautiously optimistic. I realize that the battle lines are drawn and we have to fight hard, but I do think that it's worth fighting for. It's not too late. And we can see a reversal in the places that have been protected. You do see that resilience. The ocean does know how to take care of itself. We just need to leave it alone…" -Brian Skerry Brian Skerry is one of the worlds most accomplished underwater and marine wildlife photographers and he is one of the greatest. He's been a contract photographer for National Geographic Magazine since 1998 and his work has been featured in scores of other publications, such as Sports Illustrated, The New York Times, BBC Wildlife, Paris Match, GEO, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Smithsonian, Esquire, Audubon and Men's Journal. He is also the author of 11 books including the acclaimed monographs Ocean Soul and Shark. In his four decades exploring the world's oceans, Brian has experienced things that very few humans will ever get to experience, like diving with a population of southern right whales who had never before encountered human beings dropping down into their underwater universe. Brian dives eight months of the year, often in extreme conditions - beneath Arctic ice or in shark-infested waters. His work brings us the beauty and the majesty of our oceans, but it also shows us the devastation and the destruction that we've caused them. His stories raise awareness, promote conservation, and ultimately create change. Today, June 8th is World Oceans Day, the day to celebrate the world's combined efforts to protect the one ocean that we all share. And that ocean is in bad shape - between dead zones, loss of apex predators, rising sea levels affecting tidal ecosystems, the bleaching of coral reefs, oil spills polluting the waters and decimating habitats, overfishing and hunting of marine species, climate change, rising acidity levels, and plastic, plastic and more plastic the ocean's future seems extremely bleak. But, as I learned from Brian, there's still time. Our ocean is resillient and there is so much left that we can save, but we have to act now. And, I can't imagine a better day to begin than World Oceans Day. So, start by listening to Brian, one of the best tellers of ocean stories out there.

"The time to begin phasing out the intensive confinement systems in which we raise billions of animals is now. We need to accelerate society's direction of reducing demand for meat from animal factory farms and shift instead to more of an emphasis on healthier — and safer — plant-based foods. As our population grows, plant-based foods are also more sustainable and affordable for societies globally. Unless we — especially legislators and the food industry — make changes immediately, the concerning practices in animal agribusiness will remain. Only in transforming our food system can we eliminate the tinderbox ready to explode in our country. We can't afford to wait." Josh Balk and Dr. Shivam Yoshi, Pandemic on Our Plates Social distancing is the key to slowing the spread of COVID-19. We know this. It has worked and is still working. But, we also know that in this absolutely insane time, a time where we are fully aware that staying apart does indeed saves lives, just the opposite is taking place at factory farms and meat processing plants all across America. Slaughterhouses are being forced to stay open and their workers must remain in close proximity to one another to be able to get their jobs done. And, they are getting sick and they are dying. And, on factory farms, billions of animals are "living" in cramped, filthy, overcrowded spaces with almost no room to move their antibiotic-fueled bodies - conditions that are creating a perfect storm for the next zoonotic disease to emerge and spread. This threat is nothing new, diseases have already come from factory farms - we've just gotten lucky in terms of their spread. But the clock is ticking. Josh Balk is has been a global leader in animal protection for the past 20 years. He is the Vice President of Farm Animal Protection for the Humane Society of the United States, and he's the co-founder of plant based, food manufacturing company, JUST, as in JUST Mayo and my favorite invention of the 21st century, JUST Egg. Josh has spent a couple of decades focusing on and fighting against extreme confinement on America's factory farms, meaning practices like cramming many chickens into small battery cages for their entire lives, and keeping mother pigs in gestation crates, which are small metal cages that fit around their bodies like steel coffins, and days old calves in tiny veal crates where they can barely move. These are some of the cruelest practices on the planet and they are the status quo at factory farms in most American states. Josh and his team have scored huge victories on changing animal welfare policies at some of the worlds largest companies and by changing legislation in many states. But there's still a long way and a lot of states to go. And, there are still billions of animals suffering. And, right now, while we are in the midst of a public health crisis that started because of how we treat animals, we need to demand that our food industry change; otherwise we're setting ourselves up for a much larger crisis. Josh is a hero and a world changer and many humans and millions of animals are lucky to have this guy in their corner.

Rachel Nuwer has spent a decade writing about, reporting on, investigating, and going undercover in the illegal wildlife trade. She is a freelance journalist whose work often focuses on wildlife trafficking and poaching and appears in publications like the New York Times and National Geographic. She also wrote the book Poached: Inside the Dark World of Wildlife Trafficking. It's a book for anyone who is interested in a planet that still has tigers, elephants, rhinos and thousands of other species living on it a couple generations from now. Rachel takes the reader to trafficking hotspots in twelve countries shares an in person account from the frontlines of the trade. Rachel and I met in Brooklyn in January, pre-pandemic, to talk about her book and her time spent reporting on the wildlife trade. She is a wealth of knowledge with a deep understanding of the incredibly complex world of wildlife trafficking.

We all have a food story; the story that we tell ourselves about what we eat and why we eat it. It's that story that runs the show when it comes to how we shop, cook, and feed our children. It was most often taught to us by our parents and their parents, most who thought they were passing on good values and deep traditions and were only doing what was best for their kids. But our food story is more than that. It was also passed on to our parents and to us from advertisers, marketers and a food industry that uses words like values and traditions to get us to buy into a narrative that has damaged our health, destroyed the planet, and caused endless suffering to billions of animals. But once we come to terms with the fact that it's just a story and not something that we can't change, there's a whole new world waiting. And, like in so many other industries that are inherently broken in America and around the globe, the pandemic has exposed the gaping holes in our food system. But it's also given us the opportunity to take a deeper look into what and how we eat and decide that we can change the story. Aaron Gross is a professor of theology and religious studies at the University of San Diego, and he's the CEO and founder of Farm Forward. Farm forward was founded as the nation's first nonprofit devoted exclusively to ending factory farming. Recently, Aaron and the writer, Jonathan Safran Foer published a piece in the Guardian called, We Have to Wake Up: Factory Farms are Breeding Grounds for Pandemics. There's a paragraph in the article that says, " The link between factory farming and increasing pandemic risk is well established scientifically, but the political will to curtail that risk has, in the past, been absent. Now is the time to build that will. It really does matter if we talk about this, share our concerns with our friends, explain these issues to our children, wonder together about how we should eat differently, call on our political leaders, and support advocacy organizations fighting factory farming. Leaders are listening. Changing the most powerful industrial complex in the world – the factory farm – could not possibly be easy, but in this moment with these stakes it is, maybe for the first time in our lifetimes, possible." Aaron graciously joined me from his quarantine in San Diego to talk about how we change the story around how and what we eat and ultimately, how we change our food system. Aaron is one of the smartest guys out there and it was beyond a privilege to hear his thoughts and ideas on how we forge ahead. This conversation was enlightening, inspiring, and incredibly informative. I hope that you learn as much as I did. We can change our food industry. As bad as most things across the planet are right now, there's real opportunity in front of us. Let's not waste it.

"…This is not a surprise in many ways and, for decades, not just animal rights activists, but public health experts have been sounding the alarm bells about this kind of risk. And you know, my concern is in many ways people are referring to this as a once in a century event or the black swan or something, but it's like rolling dice and rolling snake eyes once doesn't have any effect on rolling. And in fact, we're rolling the dice even faster now. The main reason is because we are in so much contact with animals through factory farms. So the way to think about pandemics is that we know that emerging zoonotic infections come from places where animals and humans are in close contact. Well, where is that? Live animal markets, we know that. And the other place is industrial animal farms and slaughterhouses. That is the most obvious place for that connection to happen." – Leah Garces The New Coronavirus has done a superb job at exposing the numerous vulnerabilities and holes in many of our systems and industries, but none are as gaping or dangerous as the chasms in our food system. Our food system is in crisis. We are seeing it right now – meat shortages, mass killings of animals because of shut downs and overflow, workers are getting sick and dying. It's a fragile system that needs (and has needed for decades) a complete overhaul. By exposing these vulnerabilities, the pandemic is also giving us an opportunity to demand that the system change and, while we are at it, to think about changing the way that we eat. If we don't, if we ignore the scores of red flags waving from the factory farms and slaughterhouses across the country, then not only will the crisis deepen, but we are also putting the entire globe at risk for another pandemic that could and probably will be much worse than the one we are currently experiencing. Factory farms are breeding grounds for viruses and bacterial resistance. We cram thousands of animals into filthy, confined spaces. Their immune systems are stressed because of their living conditions. This is the perfect environment for viruses to grow and to mutate. And, to transmit to humans – it's happened before and next time, and, yes, it will happen again, and next time could be much worse. Leah Garcés mission is to end factory farming. She is the President of Mercy for Animals and has spent much of her life leading the animal protection movement in exposing the hidden and horrible worlds of factory farming - and, changing them. Her approach has been usual and it's created change in a system that in many ways seemed unchangeable. She has worked with whistleblowing farmers to expose industrial chicken farms and has partnered with some of the world's largest food companies to improve conditions for factory-farmed animals. Leah learned that she could make considerable progress by working with her adversaries in the meat industry instead of battling against them, something I think that all of us can learn from. Her story is one that makes us rethink how we change broken systems and repair destructive industries. She wrote a book about it called, Grilled, Turning Adversaries Into Allies to Change the Chicken Industry. It's an incredible read – not only does it expose the horrors of our food system, it's also a book on how to make change happen, how to fight for justice, and how to remain empathic, optimistic, and hopeful in a fight for a much better world. Leah is a hero to millions of animals, to humans across the planet, and to me. She thinks big, she get's things done, and creates massive impact in the process.

Rich Hardy is a former undercover investigator who spent two decades working in 28 countries, exposing animal cruelty of many of the worlds worst industries – including fur trapping in North America, monkey breeding farms in Asia, and slaughterhouses and factory farms across the globe. His images and videos have been used by more than 20 international animal organizations helping to change minds and laws about how we treat animals. Most of the industries Rich worked in are hidden from the public, extraordinarily secretive, and often have higher security than Area 51; therefore Rich lived an incredibly risky double life for much of those 20 years. He had to take jobs doing the very thing he was there to expose and many of his assignments involved working with and often befriending those causing harm and suffering to the animals he was fighting to protect. One would think that 20 years of witnessing that kind of mass scale abuse would harden the soul and embitter just about anyone, but Rich is one of the kindest, most thoughtful guys out there. His work only broadened his already enormous capacity for compassion - toward animals but also toward some of the very human beings he worked amongst. He wrote a book about it, called, Not As Nature Intended. It's based on his journals from his time undercover and somehow, manages to not only show the darkness and devastation of the worlds he had to become a part of, but there's also light, hope, and enormous heart. It's a testament of what he saw and of what billions of animals have endured and still endure every minute of the day. He and I spoke last week from our respective quarantines, his in the UK and mine in New York. I was especially interested in his time on factory farms, what he witnessed, the sickness and disease that are an inherent part of the industry, and why he is not at all surprised that we are in the midst of a pandemic that was caused by of our relationship to animals. In order to prevent future pandemics, it's not just wild animal markets that need to shut down, it's every industry in which we exploit animals. And factory farming should be right up there on the top of every single human's list.

Justin Goodman is the Vice President of Advocacy and Public Policy at White Coat Waste Project, a two and a half million member, taxpayer watchdog group that is working to end twenty billion dollars in taxpayer funded animal experiments. Justin and I met in D C in February, pre-social distancing. And, it just so happened that on the very morning that we met, White Coat had released footage of National Institute of Health experiments that had been going on for decades. It was a gift for me to be with Justin before and after this interview, and to watch his phone blow up from half of Capitol Hill in reaction to the horrifying footage. I felt like I had front row seats to seeing how effective and powerful White Coat Waste Project is. And since we met, they've had another huge victory: A couple of weeks ago, White Coat exposed how the National Institutes for Health has spent millions of tax dollars funding dangerous coronavirus animal tests at the controversial Wuhan Institute of Virology and just one week after they released their international exposé–Trump promised he'd end the government's funding of dangerous, cruel and wasteful animal experiments at the Wuhan Institute of Virology! And, today is World Day for Laboratory Animals – so, please think about them during this (relatively) short stint in quarantine. They are in it for life, in tiny cages, being tested on and tortured, and almost all of them will never know the sun, the wind, the grass, what it feels like to run, explore, adventure, and discover; nor will they experience life with other animals, to be a part of a herd, a troop, a flock, or a family. Count your blessings and please, stop paying for their abuse.

There's not much that we can be certain about in such uncertain times but there are a few things. One is that unless we change the way that that we treat animals, the next pandemic is most definitely coming. Only next time, it could be much worse, much more infectious and even more fatal than the current crisis we're now facing. COVID-19 most likely started at a wild animal market in Wuhan, China and was transmitted to a human from an animal, probably a pangolin. Wild animal markets are breeding grounds for diseases - and in order to stop the transmission of the diseases to humans, we need to shut down the markets, end the global wildlife trade, and change the way that we treat animals across the board. If there's one upside coming from this pandemic (I certainly hope there's more than one), it's that wild animal markets have shut down in China (at least they are closed right now) and hopefully, many other countries will soon follow suit. There's still much confusion surrounding the wild animal markets in China and elsewhere in terms of what's shut down and what hasn't. So, I asked Peter Knights the Executive Director of WildAid to explain. Peter has been investigating and working to end illegal wildlife trafficking for the past thirty years. WildAid is different from other conservation organizations, because instead of focusing on fighting the supply side of the illegal wildlife trade, they work to reduce demand and to increase local support for conservation efforts. They've been a massive force in the reduction of the demand for ivory, rhino horn, shark fins, and much other illegal wildlife for decades. Their campaigns have changed the world. If you haven't seen them (although, you probably have and just didn't know it) take a look at their website. There are two incredible campaigns for pangolins on there, one with Jay Chou and the other with Jackie Chan. Peter and I spoke on Friday from our respective quarantines. He graciously explained the current situation with what's happening with wild animal markets across the planet. And, he shared what the future looks like if we don't put an end to these markets and the wild life trade. I hope you learn as much as I did.

Today's episode was recorded on Wednesday April 15th as a live webinar conversation between Pei Su, the Executive Director and Co-founder of ACTAsia and myself. It's unedited and somewhat messy sound-wise but we wanted to get it out as soon as possible. There are a lot of rumors and misinformation getting passed around the globe in terms of China's wildlife trade and markets: what has been banned, what hasn't, and what all of it means. In today's conversation, Pei Su answers many of my questions about what's happening on the ground in China, what the bans actually mean, and where the many loopholes lie. Pei Su has been on the front lines to create a better world for animals for three decades. She is a wealth of knowledge, a force and an inspiration. In 2011, she co-founded ACTAsia – an organization that's dedicated to creating change in China through humane education. What that means is that they go into schools and train the teachers to teach a 6-year program called Caring for Life Education. The kids are in the program from ages 6 -12 and they learn animal welfare, empathy toward animals, environmental issues, social welfare, and citizenship. To date, 80,000 kids have gone through Caring For Life and 2,000 teachers have been trained. Pei believes that things won't really change for animals in China until people start to view them differently – and, the best people for that job are the children – as they will create change for generations to come. There is also a ton of good information on what's happening in China on ACTAsia's website.