Ex-Vegan (2+ Years): Ten Years of Starvation - How Not to Help Animals

Watch on YouTube · 2019-02-06 · 17 min

0:00 You can introduce yourself if you like to and start at the beginning, what year it was when you got into veganism and how you got into it and then how it unfolded.

[video] 0:10 My name is Ian. I was a vegetarian, somewhat vegan throughout periods of time for about 10 years starting in 2007 and that just ended.

[video] 0:23 You know, I feel a lot like most vegetarians and vegans at heart. I really hate the idea of taking animals that we spent a lot of time co-evolving with and putting them into what really amounts to, you know, satanic ritual torture. And then expecting goodness to come out of that for us and our children to eat. And so, you know, I started wanting to grow vegetables and get into gardening and veganism. And after a long time spending that and going to school for sustainable agriculture and stuff, it's like... It's very important, but it's also filled with propaganda with the whole environmentalism stuff and eating meat is evil. It's like, no. What really did it for me is a guy named Sepp Holzer really makes the point that if you take the animals off the land, everything collapses. It's, you know, the wolves of Yellowstone. And so doing it myself, I moved onto a farm.

[video] 1:23 You know, they were already raising pigs and ducks and chickens. I wasn't enthused about the inevitable conclusion of that, but, uh, as I lived there, I realized that me protecting all of them and trying to keep, keep anybody from dying or, you know, younger animals from getting killed. It's the inevitable conclusion of like socialism. Everybody's alive, but there's not enough food for that. And there's not enough caretaking and infrastructure. And even now I'm still kind of chopping at the list as slow as I can go, but, uh, You gotta have room for failure and culling. That's how genetics improve. That's how the land works. You take animals off the land, the environment collapses and desertifies. The animals are miserable and unhealthy and that's exactly where we are right now. It's an oncoming desert and everybody's fat and stupid.

[video] 2:16 What about the health problems? It's the pretty usual fare. retarded speech. I have a reputation for, what was I talking about? I smoked a lot of weed in the past, so I figured that's why. Not the diet, I just gotta be vegan harder. And brain fog, just kind of not knowing which way is up. Some days, even though I feel like I'm drinking juice and I'm getting up early and doing exercise. Like shit. And it's kind of funny because I've been such a specifically powerful liberal vegan that like, Hey, what are you eating? You know, that's poison. That's bad. Animals die. And while I still feel that way, it's because people aren't eating grass fed, nice animals.

[video] 3:07 And I still struggle to imagine that I'm actually here selling raw meat, but I would really argue that the grass fed thing is the key because When they're grass fed and really grass fed pasture raised, there's a lot of code words that like pasture raised might mean they're thrown food on a dead empty pasture all day and grass fed might mean they're in a cage eating bales of hay all day. So you got to kind of know what you're doing if you really want to cross the bridge. And that was another thing for me is going to the local cattle producer. If you're serious about animal welfare, which for me, health has kind of fallen Second priority, I can't eat something that I don't feel good about or at least not terrible about.

[video] 3:55 you know, supporting the operations that are doing it as good as possible. Because in California, there's no mobile butchers. It's not allowed. If I, like we butcher our own animals on the farm and not cows, we can't really manage that. But I can butcher a pig. I can't sell it to a restaurant because that's very illegal for food security reasons. But even though, you know, we all eat our meat that's home prepared and nobody's ever gotten sick. And, um, You know, I use that to trade for big portions of beef and just being able to see there are the cows, even if I'm not raising them, you know, here's the pigs that never go to a slaughterhouse. In California, it's really the best you can do. And I think that's kind of the case for a lot of people. It's like, you know, around in this specific city, it's really hard to get nice grass fed liver. Whereas when I, where I come from, it's, it's a lot easier just because the farms within 20 miles.

[video] 4:50 And I don't think, uh, cracking the whip helps most people, you know, like, uh, my roommate and I both tried a lot of different crazy diets and it's like, uh, $400 a month. Can't keep this up. And because it's not realistic, I got to buy fancy imported crap. And so I think, Everybody should kind of do what they can, moving towards a better goal. And that took me a long time to get through my head. It's like, I don't need to adapt to your specific diet because Augeanus is very expensive to just jump onto, especially if you don't have local stuff. But do what you can.

5:28 You're a vegetarian and also a vegan. That's what you said.

[video] 5:32 I tried veganism. a couple of times throughout it for probably six months to a year. And, you know, got some new information that, oh, I need this vitamin or, oh, I'm not juicing. And obviously that just got a lot worse. And so I started eating eggs and that's about it.

5:49 How long were you vegan approximately altogether then with those months calculated? Altogether probably about two years. Okay. How do you see the future of veganism in this whole thing? What is the movement, the trend of

[video] 6:03 I think it's a lot like a lot of the cultural clouds floating around now is like all of us got sucked into it when we tried it out and realized something's wrong. And, you know, a lot of people are going carnivore and finding, oh, that doesn't work for some people, a full hundred percent carnivore. And, you know, I think it's, it's betting on its downfall would be betting that people are going to get smarter in large numbers. So I think it'll stick around, keep eating up teenagers and spitting them out when they're 25 and sick. And that's where these interviews come in. It's the epitome of veganism. That was a nice kick in the pants that I really enjoy showing to my vegan friends.

6:49 Do you still have vegan, vegetarian friends? What do they think about you quitting?

[video] 6:54 Not so much. I think about half of them grew out of it. And I think I outgrew about half of them. Same with all my, you know, heavily left-leaning friends. Just found their way out after a while. Did you also take B12 and some other supplements? Yeah, a lot of B12 and multivitamins and just whatever. The GNC salesman convinced me I need.

7:20 Do you regret this whole thing now that you went vegetarian vegan? Or what do you think about it?

[video] 7:26 I don't know. I gotta... Pretty nice school debt from a relatively not valuable degree. So at the same time, I would never would have gone on the farm route and you know, the health route I'm on and stuff without all that nonsense that I had to work through. So it's kind of hard to look back and feel bad about it, even though it ultimately was a waste of time and you know, not good for my health. It got me here and something to say for that.

7:56 What do you think about parents that put their kids or even babies on a vegan diet?

[video] 8:00 I think the line between evil and stupid is pretty blurry sometimes. So it's hard to look at them as pure evil, which is what they're doing is, you know, it's objectively evil. But, you know, they don't intend it as evil. They think they're helping and doing the right thing for the world or their children or something and

8:26 unfortunately you know can't curse that too hard even though it absolutely needs to change yeah is there anything special you learned from this whole time of being a vegetarian being that you would like to share or something you'd like to say to vegans who are watching who maybe don't understand what it actually is about some experience yeah i um on the route to the farm i uh studied permaculture pretty heavily

[video] 8:56 which you should look into. However, that's, you know, a lot of farmers and tractor stuff and solar and vegetarians and health stuff and herbalism. It's a big umbrella, but it basically amounts to sustainable human settlements and agriculture. And as I said, I moved to the farm to grow vegetables because I didn't want to eat, you know, society vegetables grown with sewage and shit. And then... studying how to grow organic vegetables on nothing but compost with no additives and just big shit and whatever, I started learning about anti-nutrients by people who are telling me to eat these plants, but don't eat too much of them because they'll fuck you up. And then when my buddy introduced me to you, it was like, that guy's funny and weird. And wait, anti-nutrients, that's correct. And everything else is weird. I don't want to eat raw meat, gross. So I started watching your videos and Here I am.

9:58 Plants do protect themselves. They don't want to be eaten. Do you see it that way? Did you see it differently back then that they want to be consumed?

[video] 10:06 No, the plant-based diet line, we hear everywhere on every box of food now. That really, in my head, deeply was what we should be doing. The world should be vegan. And just like saying everybody should eat a pound of raw liver every day, there's not enough liver for that. But there's also not enough salad You know, it's, it's what kind of whatever everybody's going to eat, you know, what they're going to eat.

10:32 Did you believe that we are herbivores or something like that, that we should naturally eat plants?

[video] 10:39 I figured with our teeth, it's kind of, we should eat what's available. You know, like if you're in the north, obviously you're eating seals and nothing but, and then if you're in the jungle, you're probably eating 50% mangoes and chickens and whatever.

10:54 Is that what you believed throughout the whole time when you were a vegan?

[video] 10:58 Yeah, and I kind of believe that now. It's like a lot of, you know, races and cultures have been shaped by what they've eaten. And I hate to say it, I can say a lot more for most of the meat-eating cultures, especially the ones that revere their animals instead of just, you know, I think health might be contrary to the Chinese folklore of an animal that dies in pain is better tasting or whatever. But I think knowing about boar taint and how many different types of that there are, and how if an animal dies stressed, there's a good chance that the adrenaline in the meat is gonna make it weird and not good. And I've had dogs not eat portions of pork because they had what I'm told is taint. And it just made, I'm not eating that. And then the dogs wouldn't eat it. So it's like, okay, there's something wrong with this. And we had a deer get stuck on a fence once, well, not me, but my landlord.

[video] 11:53 He said he tried to butcher it, and since it spent two hours there dying and bleeding to death, that its muscles were like hard and just not right. It was gross.

12:05 Could you in short describe the meals you had as a vegan in a day?

[video] 12:10 think breaditarian is a good description a lot of pasta a lot of sandwiches and veggie burgers yeah you know rice and soy and a lot of soy on you know almond milk soy milk fake milks and yeah not good vegetables fruit Yeah, obviously, as most vegans, that wasn't the majority of what I was eating.

12:37 You believe that most vegans don't eat? Mostly a whole foods, plant-based diet?

[video] 12:42 Well, if they go raw, yeah. But I've met a lot of vegetarians that don't actually eat a lot of vegetables. They just don't eat meat.

12:51 What do you think that is that they just don't like? Brain fog.

[video] 12:56 Yeah, I mean, I didn't quit eating meat because I didn't like meat. But as soon as I stopped, I didn't want it. It wasn't like, oh, I just want a cheeseburger. It really was hard to eat meat to begin with and then eat raw meat. But as you mentioned before, it was pretty quick, like three bites into trying a little slice of raw steak. It's just chewing easy. It tastes good with no sauce on it. And my body really wants this.

13:27 If a vegan would tell you that you did it wrong because you didn't eat mostly vegetables and fruit or whatever, would you say that they are right? Because you ate mostly grains.

[video] 13:40 I mean, I think it boils down to what works for everybody specifically, but I would argue that the vegan periods were decently vegetable and nutrient dense, whereas the more lazy vegetarian period was just don't eat meat. So, I mean, between veganism and communism, nobody's doing it right. That makes everybody not wrong. Not much of an argument there.

14:04 How do you see the whole slaughtering of animals now? You said that it was essentially wrong to do it, and now...

[video] 14:12 I mean, I think... a lot of people just have it in their brains that don't want to engage in violence. Like when I see a creature, I don't even a creature that I'm going to eat. I don't get to, I can't skip the step of death to go pork. Whereas as soon as the animal is, is cut and bled and dressed for hanging, then I can see it more as food and it's still, you know, gruesome. But I think culturally a lot of us have fallen for the trap of, you know, engage in that natural will to be nice and good to creatures other than us. But it's kind of being used against us. And again, I think really as a person who wants to do what they can for animals, the best thing you can do is give money to, for both yourself and the animals, is give money to the good operations producing animals. Because withdrawing from it just allows all the bullshit to keep going in the exact same trends

[video] 15:12 Whereas now I still, you know, I take a second and apologize and thank the meat every time I buy and eat meat because I know that that animal had a good life, but it ended, you know, with a five-hour car ride on a truck on a freeway. And then at, you know, 3 a.m. they pull up and get lined up and popped. And usually it's by, you know, people who slaughter animals all day, every day, and I can't imagine it's done with. too much concern, not that I'm saying they're unprofessional necessarily, just like I enjoy the opportunity to look at the animal we're about to butcher and know that I've spoiled them for the last few weeks, both to give them more nutrients to pass up, but also to make them you know, comfortable. And then it's a quick moment. We all get to say goodbye.

[video] 16:03 And, you know, there's no mysteries in the process, which is a huge part of whether it's meat or vegetables for me is if, if you don't, if you can't go and look at every stage of the process, someone's going to lie to you and feed you shit absolutely everywhere. And, uh, that took me a while to realize that applies absolutely everywhere.

16:22 Hmm. Where do you believe these so-called morals come from, that we should be good to everybody? This is essentially why people get pulled into veganism, because they see how animals are killed and it's something that we are not confronted with in everyday life, in nature we would be. Would you say that this is somewhat religious, that veganism is maybe in some way religious, these morals, or how do you see it?

[video] 16:48 I think, as you described it earlier, it's a bit of a cult. I think there's definitely a religious connotation to it. Like, you know, most vegans will solidify their veganism if you give them evidence they don't like. And that's a very, you know, zealous, fanatical mindset of like, no, I just have to ignore that and focus on whatever God happens to be. But...

[video] 17:15 Yeah, I don't know. Lost my train of thought. It's a vegan brain.

17:19 That's funny. I guess we can end it. Thank you, man. Cool. Thanks, man.