So this talk is indeed called how to create a vegan world and that's the title of my book

"How to create a vegan world"

and It's been called a book that everyone should avoid

by the vegan police and this is an actual quote

I didn't invent this.

This is actually somebody calling himself the vegan police.

But what I want to show with this is that, I'm sometimes

a bit of a devil's advocate within the movement

and some people would just simply say I'm the devil.

But so before I give some of my

perceptions about the vegan movement and what we can do better,

let me just say

very simply that I think that vegans of course are awesome. I was ...

Yeah

Yeah, and in United States where I just was at the conference, we would say like give yourself a big round of applause

We're not gonna do that here

So umm... vegans are awesome

Why? because you have to deal with a lot of shit, you are

swimming against the stream, you're doing a thing that's really awesome

That's really great that has so many benefits for so many things and you're doing it in spite of the fact that

97% of the people or something is against you and is criticizing you and ridiculing you so that's why it's really

recommendable to be vegan of course.

So that being said, let me explain some things about what we could do better. In my book,

I used a metaphor I use a metaphor of the track to vegan ville

A hike to vegan ville, vegan ville is the village where we want everybody to live, we want

everybody to live in that village to be vegan, a vegan world right

and

I have

Subdivided the book in different part different chapters. It's about the first one is about getting your bearings

Where are we... the second one is about the call to action? What are we ideally going to ask people to do?

Third one is about motivations. What are the arguments we're going to use?

Then the environment is about like how do we create an environment? That's facilitating people's ...

evolution

Then I have a big chapter on communication

How do we communicate best with people like in an engaging way...

That like really motivates and stimulates them, and then finally there's a chapter on sustainability about how to keep on doing what we're doing

Both as vegans and as activists,

but today

I'm going to talk about another metaphor, and I'm going to use the metaphor of ingredients, and I'm going to talk about

four ingredients that we need

for a vegan world, four things that we need more of in our movement

And you can think more than four, of more than four things, but I'm going to just discuss these ones

open-mindedness

empathy

rationality

and positivity

Those are the four ingredients that I see that we can use some more of.

So let's start with open-mindedness

if you like me you were

for a certain part of your life you were in a certain box

We could call it the box of "Carnism"

It's an ideological box, and it made you think that like Melanie joy says meat-eating is normal, natural, necessary,

you were just inside your safe box, and you were okay there

But then all of a sudden,

you get a bit... (you see the box move) get a bit restless inside the box

and then the light goes on the box opens and you jump out

as a vegan.

Right? and you start talking about all these things, and you start realizing all these things, these..

What.. what.. meat eating or animal products consumption is connected to..

environment, health, and so on.

and then what happened to me, is that I found that I was

all of a sudden

finding myself

To a certain extent, in another box.

In the box of veganism

and I was

Noticing with myself that I wasn't listening very much

anymore to others to non vegans and I was thinking I had found the truth.

and I was just repeating the same things all the time.

So I was saying things like veganism is this! And you're not vegan if you do that! and

vegans are that!.. like all kinds of things that were given to me that were like..

that I wasn't questioning anymore. So for instance this cartoon illustrates very well like if there's so I'm mostly vegan

But and the other person here says there's no you're not vegan if there's a bot

Right so there was no questioning anymore, and I I agreed with this and I don't think today

That's a good thing and I was always also going back like I see many people do going back to the definition of veganism

This guy Donald Watson invented veganism so many years ago

And we go back to his definition and his and that's that's a bit like a religion like going back to the original

scripture and and

I found myself doing that again and again, and here is a good test like to see to check your open-mindedness

This is an article actually. I thought it was a pretty good article. Why vegetarians or vegans should be prepared to bend their own rules

How do you feel about reading this title

are you motivated to read this article or are you saying like?

I'm gonna not gonna read that shit

You know, that's how you can test your own

open-mindedness. Or can you imagine that maybe it's a little bit more complicated than this maybe this serves for purposes of external communication

but when we think about it it may be a little bit more complicated so what I want to say is um..

You can be liberated from the carnist box

But you can end up in another box and just let me be clear if you're in a box

It's much better to be in this box than this box

Okay, but still it's better to be not inside any box at all and the way I put it sometimes is being vegan

means giving up animal products, it doesn't mean giving up thinking

So beware of dogma what's wrong.. Dogma is like not questioning things anymore

Taking things for granted and what's the problem with Dogma is that Dogma doesn't allow ourselves to improve.

Okay, and we have to constantly improve because there's so much work to do and we have to get ever better at it, okay, so

Open-mindedness these things can help you like think about questions like have I thought about this thoroughly?

Have I really thought about this or am I just?

Repeating something that I've heard all the time

Think about what information you might be missing. Think about what your own biases are when you talk to people etc and

I

See it like this practice slow opinion slow opinion is about being slow in forming an opinion

Not like on Facebook like right away saying like it's like this, and I think like this

I think this or that no just take a break and think

Like maybe I haven't thought this to me by need to think about this a little longer

And you say like for now I have no opinion or this is my preliminary opinion and it may change later

Okay, that's how you I think practice open-mindedness

The second one is empathy and

We are, as vegans, we are typically very good at empathy. This is Anita Krajnc

I never know how to pronounce the name. The woman who started the safe movement in the Toronto

And she's feeding. She's watering a pig here. I think it's a very nice symbol or icon of empathy and

Like I said we um.. opps..

Yeah, we're very good at empathy

especially for these pigs and these cows and these um..

Chickens but

We're not so good as empathy for meat-eaters or

for hunters or

for bull-fighters

you know

so

You could say

Really, do you need, do we really need empathy for these people? No? like seriously?

So I take Gary Yourofsky here as an example of somebody who's like really in your face, and who doesn't really

Take reactions of the people he's talking to that much into account. He just says it like straight like it is and

and um..

There's this. I mean on the opposite side of Gary Yourofsky you have something somebody like Thích Nhất Hạnh

Do you know him? He's like a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, and he's vegan, and he's spreading veganism

He's almost.. he's.. he won't be with us very long. He's he's very sick

He's a wonderful person. He's very compassionate. He's like a monk

He's like very zen, and he won't like scream in your face etc

I'm not saying either one of these approaches is the right approach. I'm saying like for myself

I'd choose usually a more soft a more calmer approach

And I think it is actually applicable and appropriate or useful in almost any situation

and

I can imagine that there's people thinking here like oh, there's definitely some people we don't need empathy for

People who are really really not nice

Can you think of some people like that they were recently in the news?

These people right do we need empathy for them?

Well, I think it might be useful, and I just want to illustrate

With this guy this is Daryl Davis. He's a black guy and

He um.. he grew up outside of America and he came back

To America when he was 10 and he had no experience with racism whatsoever and he was walking into a March

And he was the only black kid and all of a sudden people were throwing things at him. It wasn't a 1960s or 70s

throwing cans and bottles and bricks at him and

He just didn't understand. He said what is this about and?

He found out about racism

and he wondered like how can these people hate me if they don't even know me and

What he did was he went to Ku Klux Klan people and he befriended them

and he spoke to them and he listened to them and

He was open to them and he showed empathy towards them and the result was that he was able to get 200 people

Outside of the Ku Klux Klan he got them to give them their capes their robes to them to him and they left the Klan

So empathy worked for him

He's actually, this is a documentary about him on Netflix if you want to see that

So I think empathy or compassion and listening is never out of place

So it's about having an open mind, listening to people asking questions. It's about building a relationship

I think this is one of the

Most important things we can do if we want to influence other people, is to build a relationship with them

It's not to accuse them not to guilt-trip them not to like show no empathy for them, but build a relationship

Trying to understand them

So to be more, some tips to be more empathetic

You can under, you can try to understand the situation we are in, so some people know this this quote from me

Why do most people eat meat? Most people eat meat because most people eat meat right so this is a situation

We're in a situation where we're doing what everybody else does and it's quite kind of

Understandable that people are doing the wrong thing when so many people are doing the wrong thing so that's that's a situation or a condition

we have to take into account and

You have to realize that to a certain extent you are special

This is the adoption of innovation curve or model and it divides people into

into different sections from innovators to

laggards. So for instance if you had a smartphone

15 years ago already you were an early adopter or an innovator if you still don't have a smartphone. You're like on that end

Okay

And that's the way it is it's going to be with with vegans and with meat-eating with animal products consumption. You are the early

adopters and other people come later into the game and to a certain extent

We can say that you or we are the low-hanging fruit

The low-hanging fruit in the sense that it was easy to reach us

It was easy to reach us with these moral arguments. We heard about animal suffering and more or less rapidly we went vegan

With other people it's not like that. They need more than just moral arguments

So understand that you're not the same as other people

Secondly understand when you are dealing with people that you don't have all the information

I give you a very good trick to be more empathic and to be more calm like suppose

That this happens like somebody crosses you like like this guy on a motorbike like races past you on the highway

160 kilometres an hour when that happens to me I go like ...erghhh

Because they're like very unsafe, and they're like yeah

I get very aggressive about that and the thing that helps me is to think like well

Maybe he's on his way to his mom in the hospital

Who is dying or something like that that like really immediately shifts my my attitude?

I had it on the way coming here actually and I

I have to remind myself of my own strategies, and I did it and it calmed me down of course

It's going to be more difficult when they pass you like this. Okay, so it doesn't always, it doesn't work for everything

and

thirdly remember that empathy works remember that guy Darrell Davis with the Ku Klux Klan if

You find it difficult to have empathy remember that it's also question of effectiveness of creating results for animals

Rationality is the third thing. So rational

There's a lot to be said about it one recent example of where we were not entirely rational or not entirely