VEGCAST 122 - SOUNDS OF SUMMERFEST 2015

It's here! It's complete! It's all-new!

That's right, folks, it's VegCast 122!

VegCast! A full menu from first to last! VegCast!

It's July of 2015, and you may ask yourself, why are we just hearing this now instead of back in July or even August or September, etc.?

And frankly, the fact that it's coming out at all, within the bounds of 2015, is a holiday miracle.

However, I had to go ahead without just a couple of clips that I was looking for that were recorded on a separate device,

which I was not able...

to retrieve, but this is still going to be a full menu VegCast.

We're going to hear from the Vegetarian Hall of Fame winner Hans Diehl.

We're going to hear from Gary Francione, who made a splashy return to Summerfest.

We'll be hearing snippets from various people, including Allison Rivers-Samson and Rebecca Gilbert.

So please sit back, relax, and crank up your MP3.

As we deliver to you, this 122nd edition of VegCast!

VegCast!

Ah, yes, the dulcet sounds of birdsong from a previous Summerfest, because we did not record any birdsong.

VegCast!

This time, because once again I did have a little incident with the MP3 recorder, which I will explain later,

but right now we're going to jump right into the sounds of Summerfest with a very quick, brief, mini interview

with Rebecca Gilbert, the author of It's Easy to Start Eating Vegan.

We're here with Rebecca Gilbert right in front of the Student Union building here at Vegetarian Summerfest.

Rebecca, thanks.

Thank you so much for agreeing to do a short clip just for the sounds of Summerfest, because you are one of the people here,

and I wanted to thank you because you just gave me a shirt.

Yay!

Well, I loved being here at Vegetarian Summerfest.

There are so many incredible speakers, so much to learn from a health perspective, from an environmental perspective,

of course for the animals, and I just gifted you with 100% cotton Yummy Plants Love Life Vegan T-shirt.

That's right.

And Yummy Plants is your blog, and you also have a book entitled...

It's Easy to Start Eating Vegan, which is a book for newbies.

Yeah, and it's, I mean, people can find that on my V for Vegan blog,

but I think you're doing great work, and I look to see what you come up with next.

That sounds great. Thank you so much, Vance. Take good care.

Okay. Thank you. All right. Thanks.

Yes, that was Rebecca Gilbert.

Now, check out that V for Vegan blog post about It's Easy to Start Eating Vegan,

but I wanted to point out Rebecca is probably one of the few people with the shortest,

commute to Summerfest, as she is based in Pittsburgh,

but now we're going to turn our attention to someone with a longer commute, if you will,

a world traveler, internationally known, and this year's inductee into the Vegetarian Hall of Fame,

and as you know, it sounds of Summerfest tradition to get the first interview with the Hall of Fame inductee,

and just barely managed to do that.

By a couple minutes this time, but now we will turn our attention to our feature interview with Dr. Hans Diehl.

All right. We are right here in Blackington Hall on the University of Pittsburgh Johnstown campus,

talking with Dr. Hans Diehl, the 2015 Vegetarian Hall of Fame inductee,

and Dr. Diehl, first I want to say thanks for joining me on VegCast.

My pleasure.

Thank you.

And congratulations, of course, on your induction.

I had, as I said last night, there was a bio that you had provided for the program that I read out as the emcee,

and that, in retrospect, just seemed very almost self-effacing, just very basic,

and we found out about, even those of us who knew you had done a lot of stuff with CHIP and with the Pritikin program,

we didn't know, like, half of what you've accomplished.

So you've accomplished a great deal, and how have you managed to fit all of that in?

Well, actually, I'm surprised myself that I have been blessed in reaching out to people everywhere.

The breakthrough for me came once we began to understand that we could place these educational contents on a first-class,

high-brow,

video DVD sets,

and through this means, the word has now spread,

and the program is simultaneously being conducted in 10, 20, 30, 40 different cities around the world.

That's great.

So we're very, very grateful, and so I cannot really take all that much credit for all of this.

It says that we have a wonderful team.

We have people that recognize that this is joy-generating.

We can give.

We can give people that are in a situation of living lives of quiet despair,

we can give them hope and health and healing by helping them to understand

that the body is beginning to heal itself if given a chance with the proper input,

whether it's some proper exercise or perhaps some of the simple foods that come to us,

such as fruits and vegetables and whole grains and some legumes,

and maybe a few seeds and nuts.

These are the simple foods that have the nutritional bonanza that helps the body to begin to regenerate itself.

Great.

Let me ask you about, because you're often having people go on to diets that they're not familiar with,

and that they may be saying, oh, this is so hard to eat this way,

but your program depends on them sticking to it.

And my question is,

since we're at Summerfest where you have nutritional speakers and you have animal rights speakers,

you have kind of a potpourri of different aspects of vegan eating and vegan living,

do you think or do you conjecture about whether there is any more benefit to being able to commit to a diet like that

with a kind of an ideological underpinning?

Or have you noticed?

No.

Correspondence in that, and you just, you say, I'm Dr. Deal, and you've got to listen to me.

And then they say, all right, I'll do whatever you say.

No, I think the most important aspect of behavior change is to reach people where they are.

If they are committed to the Western lifestyle because they have never heard any better way to do it,

well, why don't we just help people to help them to understand that we have to have more fiber in the diet?

And when you have more fiber in the diet, all of a sudden,

you don't have to worry about constipation anymore and many, many other things.

You don't have to worry about, you know, diverticular disease and so on and so forth.

This is just one illustration.

If we have a person that is on a typical Western diet, why don't we help them to understand,

hey, try to make some changes.

Cut back on red meat.

Cut back on the white meat.

Maybe you can also do something about increasing the amount of fruits and vegetables.

Cut back on processed foods.

The whole idea.

What I find a little bit distasteful is the idea sometimes that we segregate and pit against each other

vegetarianism versus omnivorous diets, meat versus plants.

And what I'm suggesting is that we need to give people an opportunity to find their way of doing what they feel is best for them.

So if they are not quite ready to make the jump all the way, they'll come to that.

As they begin to open up.

They'll open themselves up to the huge amount of scientific evidence that is out there that is very clearly telling us

we need to be moving towards a diet that has less processed foods.

I mean, 51% of the calories that we eat today is processed foods.

So you can be a vegetarian and still be a junkie.

That's true.

And so we want to bring people to a balance here in the lifestyle.

And, of course, we're not just talking about diet either.

We would like people to get into an exercise program.

To begin to manage their adequate sleep patterns.

To perhaps become nicer people.

You know, I mean, if you don't find happiness in life and you're just grinding it out,

I'm a vegetarian and I don't eat those M&Ms, what have you really accomplished?

So I think we need to find an inner light that guides us towards a softer way of living.

And in the process, you find the deeper joy.

And you find that your taste buds begin to gradually change.

And, you know, after a while, you don't even miss those Oreos and M&Ms and the sirloin steaks and all these kind of things.

As shocking as it may sound to some people who have never heard this before,

I used to be there years ago, but I wouldn't even imagine that I could eat a corpse.

I mean, for people to eat those cadavers, I mean, it's just unthinkable now.

And yet I was doing it myself.

Well, that's right.

I was there too.

Yeah.

So, you know, it's important that we are tolerant and that we are kind and caring.

And we let people know, hey, there's a better way out there.

Why don't you come and take a look and maybe you can join us.

Right.

Well, that's great.

And you've found so many different ways of, like, getting the message across in different media.

And we only, a lot of us anyway, only found out last night you're a musician, you're a songwriter.

And you've written this love song that is apparently.

I don't know.

It's like this rumored about thing because we're not allowed.

We weren't allowed to hear it.

But other people, you know, had reacted to it.

I wondered if you had any comment on that.

We are here to make life a happier life.

And if, you know, my humble offering there in the music area, which meant a lot to my wife.

I made it for our 40th engagement year.

So if that is going to be a blessing to someone, great.

You know, I happen to be married to a concertizing pianist.

And so music has become sort of an amateurish effort on my part.

Okay.

Amateurish.

Yeah.

We'll let listeners be the judge of that, I guess.

So just to sum it all up, you know, it's a great thing that you have been recognized for all of this work in the Vegetarian Hall of Fame.

And now, I mean.

I know you've received plenty of accolades that this is being piled on top of.

But what's the next step?

Can you go any further beyond that?

Are you still just trying to get as many people as possible to understand what's going on out there?

And that's you just keep on in the same framework as you've been doing?

Well, I want people to know that health comes by choice, not by chance.

Happiness.

Happiness comes by being a giver rather than being a taker.

And I am concerned that the planet is in a mortal state.

And I think unless we make some changes, that planet is groaning under the load that we place on it.

Right.

Well, that's a sobering thought.

Well, I guess we're going to have to end this interview on a down note then, Dr. Thiel.

But I did want to be, you know.

We're happy for you.

And you're obviously a happy person despite some of the big picture problems that we all face.

So I guess I just want to say thanks for taking the time out from a very busy day and joining me on VegCast.

Thank you so much.

Glad to be here.

Okay, great.

Thank you.

There are millions of memories running through my mind.

Conjuring emotions from another place and time.

There was some I dearly treasure while others fade away.

But my most precious memory is when I first saw your face.

I've been so many places.

I've seen so many sights.

I'm blessed with hope and happiness through countless days and nights.

But this I will remember when the rest of life is through.

The finest thing I've ever done is simply loving you.

Mmm.

To have you and to hold you.

My wildest dream come true.

And even...

Even in the worst of times, your love has brought me through.

It's stronger than an army.

And it's deeper than the sea.

Mere words cannot begin to tell how much you mean to me.

Mmm.

I've been so many places.

I've seen so many sights.

I'm blessed with hope and happiness through countless days and nights.

But this I will remember when the rest of life is through.

The finest thing I've ever done is simply loving you.

I'm blessed with hope and happiness through countless days and nights.

The finest thing I've ever done is simply loving you.

With sound recordings and got all kind of hyped up to make this case on the podcast for this item that the people were requesting.

Let's see first what some of those people have to say and I'll be back to explain.

So now for the most important question.

This is Allison, by the way.

Yes.

Are you doing a draw along this year?

Well, it's funny you should ask that question, Allison, because no.

I'm not okay with it.

I'm not okay with this.

Okay, well, I'm...

I'm writing it on the evaluation form.

Whoa!

Where is the draw along?

Exactly.

All right, and more to the point, this will be part of the Sounds of Summerfest now.

So we're creating a grassroots movement.

Okay.

Everybody's saying, where's the draw along?

Exactly.

Yes, everyone was saying that.

And the draw along, of course, the inimitable...

Well, Ted Barnett did it.

Ted Barnett did it that one time, but it is certainly a one-of-a-kind live improv cartooning extravaganza

that has been at most Summerfests, although I think we did previously skip it one year before.

But we certainly skipped it this year.

There was outrage.

That was Allison.

I did ask people to say their last name after this, but she just used her first

because it's Allison Rivers-Samson who really can just go by the one name.

In the vegan movement, of course, the chocolatier, baker, entrepreneur, all-around vegan dynamo expressing her opinion there.

But she was not alone in asking this question, where's the draw along?

What they were going to miss you not drawing, that's become a stable thing to be doing the drawing.

It's fun.

It's entertaining.

He needs to be doing it.

Okay.

What's your last name?

Peggy Fritz.

Fun as that.

That's Peggy Fritz.

Well, exactly.

Exactly is exactly right.

Because while this was a fun Summerfest in general for me, I just kept being accosted by people wanting to know where's the draw along.

And I would get out my recorder and record them because I was building up this archive.

And so I would like, they would say that and I would say, okay, could you say that again for the court?

Although I don't want to imply that there's any litigation involved here.

But I would pull it out and then record.

I was expecting this so you'd make your drawing.

I was too.

Exactly.

All right.

There, we got, sorry, you're Dean Barnum.

Right.

And Jan.

Sorry, Mark.

And right about there is where my eye river ran out of memory because as it turned out, a bunch of earlier sound files that I thought I had deleted off of it, I had not succeeded in doing so.

And it was still full of audio.

So I ran out of room to record, and then I had a couple of others that I managed to record in a different system, but was unable to get those, to retrieve those.

So I'm going to have to stay with the three clips that we have as the massive archive that I was building.

But to the Summerfest organizers, you know, at least three people now want to see that draw along next year.

So hope we can get that.

Worked out.

I'll have your people call my people.

Okay.

Glad I got that out of my system.

Well, one of the noteworthy aspects of Summerfest 2015 was the return appearance of Gary Francione for the first time in 15 years, giving an address on Friday night, doing classes and everything.

It was great to see that.

A lot of people were fascinated by this person that had been coming.

Summerfest for years and never seen.

And I wanted to get a clip with him there at the University of Pittsburgh Johnstown campus during that weekend, but it did not happen due to scheduling and technical difficulties.

So at a later date, we met up in Bryn Mawr to try to recreate what it would have been like if we had been able to chat for just a couple minutes.

And, of course, since it was Gary Francione.

And the chat kind of went on.

But there's a lot of good stuff there.

So we're going to listen to that right now.

Okay.

Here we are right now in beautiful, bucolic Johnstown, looking, you know, around at the grass, the shade, the parking meters, the Bryn Mawr trains.

Oh, wait a minute.

Well, we really plan to be in Johnstown, but right now we're in as bucolic a setting as we can.

This is Gary Francione here.

Gary Francione here, who was at Summerfest, but I did not manage to corral him while he was there.

So I'm talking to him now.

So, Gary, welcome to the Sounds of Summerfest edition of VegCast.

Well, I'm glad to be here, even though we're in Bryn Mawr and not in Johnstown.

Yeah.

We really weren't able to pull that off.

But, you know, maybe we'll put a little bed of birds chirping and stuff under it, and it'll sound just like we were still there.

There are birds chirping.

You just hear it?

Yeah.

Do you hear it?

There's chirping.

It's not exactly.

They're not the same birds as you find up in Johnstown.

So we're, you know, this is a Summerfest thing, and it was a big Summerfest in a way because of the return of Gary Francione.

So let me just first ask you, I think you were last at Summerfest in either 2000 or 2001.

In your hiatus, you know, coming back, is it just like settling back into a warm background?

Or were there jarring things that were different about it?

Or what was your overall impression?

Oh, it was terrific.

I had a really good time.

I enjoyed it.

You know, what was interesting is that, you know, I left, I think, 2000, maybe 1999, but certainly 2000 was the last time I was there.

So it's been 15 years.

You were definitely there in 2000.

Yeah, okay, 2000.

The faces have obviously changed.

I mean, you know, there were some people there that I remember from 15 years ago.

But most of the people are new.

So it was great to meet all these new people.

And it was, you know, Summerfest has always been a nice atmosphere.

It's always been a good atmosphere.

It's always been terrific food.

I mean, the food is the best of any conference ever.

And so, you know, it's terrific in that regard.

But it's always been a pretty casual place.

It's always been a place where, you know, you meet nice people.

And you can, you know, you can.

You can spend time with nice people and have discussions.

And, you know, that's exactly how I found it and how Anna and I found it this year was, you know, when we were driving home.

I said to Anna, well, what's your impression?

She said, it was Summerfest.

So, you know, it was Summerfest.

And it's an event.

And I think it was terrific.

I mean, I enjoyed meeting, you know, I met a lot of really terrific people.

And it was great.

Yeah, you got a great response.

People packing.

And the different venues.

To hear, you know, you know, the main hook for this.

Everybody has to have a book or a thing that they're tied to.

You have this book, Eat Like You Care.

And now a new website, HowDoIGoVegan.com.

And what these two share, I think, and stop me if I'm going too far here,

is that they're taking basically the same message that you've always been.

They're promulgating and kind of repackaging it in a little bit,

I don't necessarily want to say smarter, because how could Gary Francione get any smarter?

But in a more targeted way.

In a more concise, like, direct,

just try to make sure that everybody who comes into contact with it can easily get something from it.

Is that?

It's.

Look, it took me some time to get this stuff worked out, you know?

I mean, you know, I started 30-some-odd years ago being, you know,

a law professor who was doing animal welfare cases

and working with all these animal welfare groups.

And it took me some time to sort of realize I was wasting my time.

And, in fact, I was engaging in counterproductive efforts.

And so it took me some time to work out.

And what the situation was.

I mean, it was, you know, in the early to mid-90s that it, you know,

and I'd been doing this, I'd been involved for like over 10 years.

And it took me really that long to sort of understand that the property status of animals

meant that animal welfare regulation could never work.

And, you know, and it took me time to sort of,

I was working with a lot of these groups that I wrote about in 1996 as new welfarist groups.

I mean, I was working with a lot of these groups that I wrote about in 1996 as new welfarist groups.

And I was working with those people.

Those were people that were my friends that I was working with.

And, you know, so it took me sort of some time to see that the property status of animals was problematic.

It took me time to see that these animal groups, you know,

all of them were basically going in the wrong direction.

All of these large groups were going in the wrong direction.

And, you know, and so it's been a process for me to sort of, you know, get my theory developed.

Now I have it developed.

It's developed fairly well.

I'm familiar with it in the sense that I see it now in a very clear way.

And one of the advantages of that is I'm able to sort of distill out the ideas that I think are really clear.

And I have, I mean, I think in certain ways, you know, the recent writing has been, I think, more direct, less academic.

Again, I don't apologize for the academic work.

I had to do it.

I had to do that to get to where I am now.

Right.

But I think that, you know, Eat Like You Care, the one that Anna and I are working on now,

which is the abolitionist approach to animal rights, a manifesto, is the same sort of thing.

We're trying to take the abolitionist ideas, which are deeply philosophical on certain levels,

but present them in a way so that, you know, people understand them.

And also, look, I've also been resisting, you know,

I didn't really want to do it.

I didn't really want to capitulate to the fact that I'm living in a world now

that is very different from the world of 30 years ago.

People don't read anything that they regard as remotely complex, or most people don't.

And, you know, we live in a world where if it's anything longer than a tweet,

you lose people's attention.

So, and I, you know, I resisted that for a long time.

I mean, it was 2005 that we started the abolitionist approach website.

And I did that kicking and screaming.

I didn't want to do it.

I mean, I did it because I was persuaded to do it by somebody who was savvy about computers.

And I didn't want to get involved with it.

And I didn't want, you know, and I didn't want to open a Facebook account.

And I didn't want to, now I've got like almost 70,000 people on that page.

And we have really fascinating discussions.

And I think it's a great platform for educating people.

But, you know, look, I mean, I came out of university in the 1970s, you know,

and I was, I was, you know, when I became a professor, it was, you know, I was a sort of a,

a conventional person in that regard that I wrote the sorts of things that professors write.

But, you know, that work has to in many ways be translated so that it can have,

it can be distributed more widely in a political sense.

Okay.

Well, let's just get, I mean, we don't have a lot of time here,

but I want to be sure that we do talk about the content, not just the style.

And a large part of the content, you know,

people come to the kind of abolitionist approach and want to treat it in the way they're used to,

which is like, well, now where do I, you know, sign up for my membership in this?

How do I, you know, tell people about this leader that we have?

And you're always like, I don't want to be your leader.

You've got to go out and be the leader.

I don't want to be anybody's leader.

And you actually, I was at a session where you were, you know,

kind of going through five steps for everybody.

Going out and being kind of 24-7 advocates for the vegan ideology,

no matter, you know, how you encounter somebody.

Can you give us any sense of that?

Because that's been a, as you know, I've brought this up,

you're recommending a kind of activity that comes easily and naturally to lawyers,

which you are, and you're an excellent debater,

and you have a way of listening to people,

to find out what they're doing,

and you're an excellent debater, and you have a way of listening to people,

to find a way that you can respond and be persuasive,

whereas most people don't have those skills,

but you say, you don't need to have those,

you just got to get out there and start talking.

Well, that's not quite right.

I say you've got to educate yourself before you can educate other people.

I think that's key.

But look, let's talk about substance briefly.

In many ways, you know, years ago, in 1999,

you wrote a review of my book, Introduction to Animal Rights.

No, that was in 2000.

2000, okay, 2000.

Okay, and that was 2000.

And you wrote a review for the City Paper.

And what you basically said was that I was arguing

that most of us already believed what we needed to believe

to come to the conclusion that animals had rights

and we ought not to be exploiting them.

In many ways, I have been developing and refining that theme

for the past 15 years.

As far as I'm concerned, our conventional wisdom about animals,

that it's wrong to inflict unnecessary suffering on them,

which everybody accepts,

leads, you know, leads inexorably to the conclusion

that we've got to be exploiting them.

We've got to be vegan.

And it's a simple idea.

You don't need a dense theory of animal rights.

You don't need, you know, all you need to understand

is the conventional wisdom.

And the conventional wisdom gets us to veganism.

And I think that was the point of writing Eat Like You Care

with Anna Charlton in 2013,

was sort of make that point in a really straight, simple way,

that our conventional wisdom that we think it's wrong

to inflict unnecessary suffering on animals,

even if we believe that animals don't matter as much morally as humans,

which I reject,

but even if one believes that,

one still gets to veganism.

And that's what we wrote that book for,

to figure, to get people to see

where what they already believed led them.

When I was talking at Summerfest about how to talk to people,

look, I understand that people are shy.

I understand that people are not used.

But what I'm suggesting is each of us has a social network.

Whether or not you're, you know,

if you're not comfortable speaking in front of a group of 100 or 500 or,

you know, whatever, you don't do it.

But, you know, each of us,

whether we have access to or inclination to talk in that sort of form,

each of us has a social network of friends and family

that we're constantly communicating with.

And if we educate those people,

even if only one or two of the people in our network go vegan,

then they do one or two of the people.

We're talking about exponential development.

We're talking about a paradigm shift.

And what I said at that workshop was when we talk to people,

we have to assume they're not going vegan.

They're not stupid, that they're people of goodwill.

We shouldn't get frustrated.

We shouldn't get angry.

But we need to educate ourselves.

And see, this is what I see is a real problem with a lot of animal advocates

is they think that this is easy

and that all they need to do is go out and say,

be compassionate or, you know, animals have, whatever.

You need to be able to address the questions that people give you,

the people that, you know, the sorts of,

and you need to also recognize that people are going to say a lot of things

that you regard as dumb and perhaps even as offensive.

You know, you're going to hear, you know,

about plants, but here it wasn't Hitler or vegetarian.

You're going to hear all that stuff.

And instead of getting angry with people,

you need to sort of learn how to respond to that stuff in a creative way.

But I really want to make it clear that I don't want to be anybody's,

I'm a professor at Rutgers.

I generate ideas and stuff.

And, you know, I don't want to be anybody's leader.

And as far as I'm concerned, you go to abolitionistapproach.com

or you go to my Facebook site or to the, you know, to the new site,

howdoigovegan.com.

You will never find a donate button because,

I will not allow it.

I don't want your money.

I will not accept money.

What I want is for you to go vegan,

and I want you to spend some time educating yourself

so you can educate other people about going vegan.

Okay.

Just before we go, I want to make sure that we do talk about

how do I go vegan because I was impressed when I heard about this.

And you're a tough, you're a tough critic.

So when you said you, when you, when you said.

Well, just when I heard about it, I was like, oh, duh,

that's such a great idea because if somebody is interested in that,

they're going to go and type that phrase into Google.

How do I go vegan?

And Google gives the highest rank to something that has the search phrase

in its domain name.

Right.

So would you care to give us just any briefing on how this is, you know,

like your care is almost, I think you said in the session that I was at,

it's not, it's not even so much for non-vegans as it is something that

vegans can purchase as a kind of a guide to how to have these discussions.

But how do I go vegan is more forward or more front-facing to the public.

Right.

So what, you know, that just came out of nowhere for a lot of us,

but not for you or obviously you, what was the process there?

The impetus for the URL?

The URL and the whole, yeah.

Well, I wanted to do, I wanted to do a site that was abolitionist vegan because,

you know, there's veganism and there's abolitionist veganism.

So, you know, and, and we probably don't have time to get into that,

but, but there's, you know, abolitionists and I wanted to do a site.

And what we did, we, we, we got one of the two people who had done a very popular,

uh, vegan starter guide, uh, Sandra Cummings,

who was one of the two people who had done an earlier vegan starter guide.

We got her to come on board and, you know, cause she wanted to do an abolitionist.

She wanted to do one that she wanted to do, um, you know,

vegan kit is a good reference tool, but, uh,

she wanted to do something that was more abolitionist.

So we got together and we formed a little team and we, we did that.

Now I wanted to call the URL, uh, abolitionist vegan,

or, or the world is vegan if you want it.com.

I got out.

I voted by the group, um, Vincent Kahane, um, and Anna Charlton and Mariana Gonzalez.

They all said, no, let's go with, how do I go vegan?

Because that's what people will type in the search engine.

And I said, no, no.

I said, that sounds so horrible.

And I went along with them because I believe in democracy sort of, um, and, you know,

sometimes I believe in democracy.

And so I said, okay, fine, let's call it.

How do I go vegan?

And it's been getting zillions of hits.

So they were right.

I was wrong.

And you've got that on, on tape.

I was wrong.

Great.

I'm going to use, I'm going to take.

That clip and use it for any other thing that I need when I have a great, but it's

been, it's been, it's a terrific site and, and I encourage people to go there.

And our regular site is abolitionist approach.com.

And you can read hundreds of essays on animal rights, abolitionist, veganism, the problems

between, you know, the problems with animal welfare regulation, all that sort of stuff.

And then you can come over to the Facebook site, uh, Gary L. Franci on the abolitionist

approach to animal rights, uh, on Facebook where, you know, we have discussions about

this stuff all the time.

You can ask questions, you can interact with people who really have been thinking about

this stuff for a long time.

But again, the most important thing, it, you know, the problem with, with animal ethics

and the problem with the, with the way we treat animals, it's not a problem of money.

It's not, you're not going to solve the problem.

You're not going to change the paradigm by giving money to one of these large organizations.

If anything, you're going to, you're going to retard progress because I think these large

organizations, um, have become basically promoters of happy exploitation and they're not, not

only not useful, they're counterproductive.

The way this is going to change is not by you giving money.

You're not giving money to anybody, but by you becoming vegan and educating other people

to be vegan.

So if you're, if you're, you know, some people were coming up to me in Summerfest and saying,

I could never speak in front of a large group like you're speaking for.

I said, fine.

I said, you know, I said, first of all, it's a lot easier than you think it is.

I said, but if it, if it makes you anxious, don't do it.

But do you have friends?

Yeah.

Do you have dinner parties with your friends?

You have parties.

Yeah.

Well, talk to your friends, you know, I mean, just talk to your friends, talk to your family,

you know, talk, talk to, talk to parents of kids that, you know, that you, you know, that

you meet, you know, for, for, you know, PTA events or something like that.

But, you know, if each of us, if each of us in the next year turn two people on to veganism,

and I mean real veganism, not this flexible veganism or, you know, what I'm talking about,

real veganism.

Right.

If we, if each of us turned two people on, we would have a vegan world in like 10 years,

12 years.

Right.

Well, then let's get going.

That's right.

The time's a wasting, man.

The time's a wasting.

Okay.

Well, Gary, thank you for, it was great.

To see you back at Summerfest.

Hope that'll be part of a, of a trend there.

And thank you for joining me for this Sounds of Summerfest.

And thank you for having me, man.

Thank you for being on Vegacast.

All right.

Science Fact.

Our Science Fact for VegCast 122 is actually more of a collection of science facts.

Science facts that have been collected into books.

Book form.

Now, obviously my 121 podcasts worth of commentary on different studies as they appear in the

media comprise, no, they compose a kind of collection of science facts that I've sometimes

referred people to.

But now we have a much better resource and that is a site called nutritionfacts.org,

which as you know, Dr.

Michael Greger, a frequent guest on the Sounds of Summerfest podcast, but not this year.

So we're getting him in this way.

He does this site nutritionfacts.org, which is an exhaustive and comprehensive collection

of scientific data with some explication and commentary by Dr.

Greger.

And now kind of the companion volume to that is a book entitled How Not to Die from Flatiron

Books.

And I bring this up not just because it's been a while since my last VegCast and there's

so many different studies and facts to choose from that this is a much better option.

But I also want you to run out and buy this book because I'm the illustrator of it.

I did one credited illustration for it that is on page 120.

So check that.

But go get the book.

I don't actually get a kickback from the sales, but just it's a great book.

It's got all kinds of stuff where he's explaining the different ways that you can die.

Now, the book is not called How to Not Die.

You're going to die, but there's different ways that you might die that would be better

avoided.

And he's showing you how to avoid those with various lifestyle changes, mostly in

your diet, obviously.

And it's exhaustive.

It's more than 400 pages of book and more than 130 pages of notes with references and

index and everything.

So please go and get that.

Read that.

And then when you are done with that and fully understand all of the ramifications of that,

why, you come back to me and I swear I will have yet another science fact.

New York Times.

Bestseller.

How Not to Die.

Now, this particular Sounds of Summerfest podcast is getting out so late that I've actually

heard from NAVS.

They've invited me back next year, so I will be back there.

See you there.

Hope to be doing the draw along.

We didn't they didn't say anything about that, but then they hadn't heard this podcast yet.

But of course, that was for me one of the key sounds of Summerfest.

And having now passed that and these other sounds along to you, I am out of here.

Yes, that is VegCast 122.

Thanks to Dr. Hans Diehl for talking with me and thanks to him and Woody Wright for

permission to play Simply Loving You on VegCast.

Thanks to Rebecca Gilbert for talking with us.

Thanks to Gary Franzen.

And Sione for meeting me in Bryn Mawr for that interview.

And thanks to Dr. Michael Greger for asking me to do the illustration for How Not to Die.

Thanks to all my Summerfest fans, whether you were heard on here or not.

See you next time.

And until then, please get out there and live like you mean it.