This episode, I spoke with Seth Ariel Green, a research scientist at the Humane and Sustainable Food Lab at Stanford university. He recently published a meta-analysis called “Meaningfully reducing consumption of meat and animal products is an unsolved problem” (EA Forum summary here) where he reviewed over 30 papers and hundreds of interventions on the topic. Seth also writes about the science of meat reduction on his Substack, called Regression to the Meat, which I highly recommend checking out for some accessible and fun to read writing about meat reduction.

We talk about why Seth is more sceptical than most about plant-based defaults, what actually works when it comes to changing people’s food choices, why some research in this space is misleading and new interventions to shape diets and food choices that he is excited about. 

Chapters:

(00:00:00) Cold intro

(00:00:53) Introduction to Seth and his work

(00:05:38) What are defaults and why is Seth sceptical

(00:19:55) The best paper on defaults - what does it mean for advocates?

(00:28:50) What does the research on meat reduction say?

(00:34:25) Is 5 percentage points a small or big change in meat consumption?

(00:43:20) What actually works in reducing meat consumption?

(00:50:18) Potential interventions that Seth is excited about

Resources:

• Seth's blog 
• Wayne Hsiung’s New Yorker interview
• Ginn, J., & Sparkman, G. (2024). Can you default to vegan? Plant-based defaults to change dining practices on college campuses.
• Finkelstein et al (2012). The Oregon health insurance experiment: evidence from the first year. 
• Jalil, A. J., Tasoff, J., & Bustamante, A. V. (2023). Low-cost climate-change informational intervention reduces meat consumption among students for 3 years
• Hope, J. E., Green, S. A., Peacock, J. R., & Mathur, M. (2025). Taking a bite out of meat, or just giving fresh veggies the boot? Plant-based meats did not reduce meat purchasing in a randomized controlled menu intervention
• Edwards, D. M., Ondish, P., & Neff, R. (2025). Increasing meatless options to decrease meat consumption
• Kramer, L. A., & Landry, P. (2025). How the Sausage Is Made: Testing the Effectiveness of an Informative Video in Promoting Sustainable Food Consumption. 
• Kenny Torella’s Is it even possible to convince people to stop eating meat?
• Warren belasco: food, the key concepts 
• Join our lab’s seminar email list! 

With thanks to Tom Felbar (Ambedo Media) for amazing video and audio editing!

If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - it means a lot to us!

Today, we’re bringing you a special highlights episode! It’s a roundup of some of the most interesting conversations we had in 2025. They include:

• Vicky Bond (Madre Brava) on what it's really like to lead in animal advocacy 
• Lewis Bollard (Coefficient Giving) on the strategies that win and traps to avoid 
• Dawn Neo (Global Food Partners) on the 4+ billion hens in cages in Asia and how we can help them
• David Cole (author of Engines of Liberty) on what we can learn from the marriage equality and gun rights movements 
• Carley Betts (Open Wing Alliance), 50th episode special: 5 leaders on key challenges and opportunities
• David Coman-Hidy (The Navigation Fund), 50th episode special: 5 leaders on key challenges and opportunities
• Karolina Sarek (EA Animal Welfare Fund), 50th episode special: 5 leaders on key challenges and opportunities
• Haven King-Nobles (Fish Welfare Initiative) on why high agency is critical for entrepreneurship 
• Penny Tehlilah (Animal Activism Collective) on uniting "welfarists" and "abolitionists" through pressure campaigns
• David Kay (now at Kraft Heinz) on the emerging cultivated meat industry 

Chapters:

• (00:00:00) Cold Open
• (00:01:55) Lewis Bollard on what advocates commonly get wrong.
• (00:05:34) Vicky Bond on overcoming self-limiting beliefs and imposter syndrome 
• (00:09:07) Haven King Nobles on how to help new projects succeed and supporting new founders
• (00:15:48) Penimah Tehilah on how pressure campaigns can unite the movement. 
• (00:29:37) David Kay on the importance of centering animals in our advocacy. 
• (00:33:34) Dawn Neo on changing informal markets and production in low income countries
• (00:36:00) David Cole on the importance of incrementalism in past social movements
• (00:52:25) Carley Betts on moving past good cop and bad cop binaries in campaigning 
• (00:57:17) David Coman-Hidy on the importance of political advocacy
• (01:01:19) Karolina Sarek on progress for shrimps 

For those who miss Amy as a co-host, you’ll be very happy to know that a bunch of these snippets include her too.

Hope you enjoy the episode! 

With thanks to Tom Felbar (Ambedo Media) for amazing video and audio editing!

If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - it means a lot to us!

Dawn was one of the first people in Asia working on cage-free reforms  – she started working on Asian farm animal welfare 10 years ago, often as one of the few individuals talking to major food companies about improving the welfare of animals in their supply chain.

Dawn Neo is the director of corporate engagement at Global Food Partners. She works with food and hospitality businesses as well as various stakeholders in the industry to improve farm animal welfare. Prior to joining Global Food Partners, she was the lead for Humane Society International’s farm animal welfare program in Asia. 

Today, we cover lots of important things: Major trends in Asian farming, the 2025 cage-free deadline, how to deal with countries with large informal markets, cultural differences in campaigning and negotiation and much more. 

Chapters:

(00:00:00) - Cold Intro 

(00:00:50) - James' intro and Dawn's background

(00:08:12) - Why Asia is critical for farm animals

(00:12:15) - How countries differ in production systems and why this matters 

(00:17:55) - Who is on track for their 2025 cage-free commitments?

(00:23:17) - What if companies can't meet their commitments? & how do cage-free credits work?

(00:31:13) - Which Asian countries are doing well?

(00:36:48) - Rising egg consumption in Asia 

(00:41:09) - How to tackle informal markets? Should we get new commitments or hold companies accountable?

(00:43:30) - Cultural differences in campaigning

(00:57:09) - The need for patience & self-care in advocacy 

Resources: 

• Global Food Partners LinkedIn
• Global Food Partners podcast
• Global Food Partners contact page
• Jason Hickel – Less is more 

For sending recommendations of future guests: 

• [email protected] 
• James’ LinkedIn: James Özden

With thanks to Tom Felbar (Ambedo Media) for amazing video and audio editing!

If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - it means a lot to us!

Vicky Bond has done lots of impressive stuff in her career – she started working as a vet and later ended up running a 100+ person organisation, The Humane League (THL), which many of you might be familiar with as one of the key organisations campaigning to get chickens out of cages. She is now the CEO of Madre Brava, an international climate campaigning group focused on food. 

Given Vicky’s extensive leadership and management experience, managing teams ranging from 5 to over 110, I wanted to pick her brains about leadership and management in the animal advocacy movement. I would highly recommend it for people who are leading teams of any size or want to learn more about how to do it well!

Podcast news:

• We now have a Substack where we’ll soon be sharing summaries and key takeaways from all episodes! We’ll also be doing polls where you can vote on the next guests. Sign up here.
• After our last episode with Sjir from Giving What We Can, we’ve had some people take a pledge to donate between 5-10% of their income to effective charities – this is incredible! But I said I would give up to £1000, and most of this is still up for grabs. So if you’re considering pledging, now is a great time as I’ll be donating £50 to Giving What We Can’s effective animal advocacy fund for each person who takes the trial pledge of 1% or full 10% pledge, up to a total of £1000. So, if you sign up via the links below, there is a special tracker that will let me know how many people take it, and I’ll donate accordingly. 
  • The 🔹Trial Pledge
  • The 🔸10% Pledge

Chapters:
00:00:00 - Cold Intro
00:09:38 - Challenges and lessons in being a first-time CEO 
00:20:40 - Vicky's experience running 100+ person THL
00:26:45 - Challenges in running large organisations 
00:39:02 - Misconceptions around running large teams 
00:42:55 - Advice for running 20+ person orgs 
00:46:41 - The downsides of scale 
00:56:04 - What makes a good leader 
01:02:05 - Overcoming self-limiting beliefs and imposter syndrome
01:05:55 - Madre Brava's strategy on protein split ratios

Resources:

• Entangled life: How fungi make our world 
• Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown podcast
• Rich Roll podcast
• Madrebrava.org and LinkedIn
• The secret thoughts of successful women 

With thanks to Tom Felbar (Ambedo Media) for amazing video and audio editing!

If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - it means a lot to us!

Today we're talking about a topic that's really important to me personally: donating and effective giving. Specifically, why donating 10% of your income to the most effective animal charities might be one of the most important things you can do to improve the world.

To dive deep into this topic, I’m so excited to have Sjir Hoeijmakers on the show today. Sjir is the CEO of Giving What We Can (GWWC), the global organisation promoting effective giving and the 10% pledge. Even more impressive than this, he donates around 50% of his income to effective charities, so he really puts his money where his mouth is! 

In our conversation, we talk about the impact your donation can have, why it also makes sense for people who work full-time in the movement and why the act of pledging really matters. We also talk about another important part of Giving What We Can’s work: Their evaluation of regrantors and evaluators, including the Effective Altruism Animal Welfare Fund and Animal Charity Evaluators. 

If anything we talk about today sparks your interest, I really encourage you to consider taking the trial pledge, where you can pledge to give just 1% of your income to effective charities. It's a great way to test it out and see if it works for you. Personally, taking the pledge is one of the things I’m proudest of. Because of this, I’ll be donating £50 to Giving What We Can’s effective animal advocacy fund for each person who takes the trial pledge or full 10% pledge, up to a total of £1000. So, if you sign up via the links below, there is a special tracker that will let me know how many people take it, and I’ll donate accordingly. 

• Take the 🔹Trial Pledge 
• Take the 🔸10% Pledge 

Chapters:

• What is the 10% Pledge? (00:08:00)
• Why pledge vs just donate? (00:10:56)
• Should full-time advocates also give? (00:15:15)
• When shouldn't you pledge? & the Trial peldge (00:24:18)
• Should you give to funds or charities directly? (00:30:10)
• Why is GWWC evaluating Animal Charity Evaluators and the EA Animal Welfare Fund? (00:45:04)
• How did ACE change with GWWC's feedback? (00:55:09)
• GWWC moved $6M to animals in 2024! (01:06:30)

Resources: 

• The How Rich Am I? calculator
• GWWC’s charity recommendations
• GWWC’s evaluations of evaluators
• Career opportunities at GWWC

Sjir's Recommendations:

• Moral Ambition - Book by Rutger Bregman 
• Kurzgesagt - Youtube Channel
• One Helpful Idea Newsletter by Spencer Greenberg

With thanks to Tom Felbar (Ambedo Media) for amazing video and audio editing!

If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - it means a lot to us!

David Cole is a professor of constitutional law at Georgetown University, a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books, a former national legal director of the ACLU and author of the popular book on social change in the US, Engines of Liberty. This book, a must-read for anyone interested in social movements, is the focus of our discussion today.

We spoke about the importance of local organising for political momentum, why incremental progress has seemed to work for other issues, the role of in-person community in social movements, and other lessons from the US marriage equality and gun rights movements.

Chapters:

• The book in a nutshell (00:03:45)
• Why incrementalism was crucial for marriage equality (00:09:36)
• What can we learn from the NRA and gun rights? (00:17:19)
• Why socialising & identity formation are key for movements (00:23:32)
• Symbolic vs high-impact campaigns (00:32:11)
• Messaging strategies in the NRA vs marriage equality (00:36:58)
• Dave & James debrief and key takeaways (00:40:30)

Resources: 

• Engines of Liberty – David Cole 
• The Engagement – Sasha Issenberg

With thanks to Tom Felbar (Ambedo Media) for amazing video and audio editing!

If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - it means a lot to us!

Penny, the Executive Director of Animal Activism Collective, has helped bring hundreds of new activists into the grassroots animal movement, as well as supporting dozens of local grassroots groups around the US. Collectively, these groups, and AAC’s network, have been responsible for securing dozens of victories for animals, including getting over 80 companies and restaurants to drop foie gras, fur and much more.

That’s why I was very excited to speak with Penny today about something that feels pretty unique in our movement: A grassroots organisation like Animal Activism Collective working on cage-free campaigns in partnership with less grassroots-y organisations. In addition to this, we spoke about how AAC manages to get dozens of people to travel across the country to join their in-person weeks of action, why Penny thinks movement unity is important, the benefits of getting people in-person and even how Penny started caring about shrimp! 

This is an episode with lots of fun stories and we’re also trying something new by splicing in audio of their protests, so people can get a sense of the energy they bring.

Resources:

• Sign up - UK Voters for Animal Mass Lobby day
• Confidence Code – Katty Kay, Claire Shipman
• This is an uprising – Englers
• Animal Liberation Hour
• AAC website
• AAC Instagram
• AAC YouTube
• AAC email – [email protected]

Chapters:

• What Penny has changed her mind on (00:03:41)
• The RAGE tour: 30 days straight of protest (00:09:20)
• AAC's collaboration with ICAW and CAFT on cage-free & fur campaigns (00:11:02)
• How did the collaboration between ICAW and AAC on cage-free campaigns start? (00:16:25)
• How did AAC's grassroots base react to welfare-focused campaigns? (00:21:20)
• Why Penny is so excited about pressure campaigns (00:24:20)
• How Penny became convinced that welfare campaigns are important (00:30:40)
• How do we create more similar collaborations in the movement? (00:33:48)
• AAC's mentorship and other programs (00:38:26)
• Why an organised grassroots base is essential to social change (00:46:41)
• Penny's recommendations and a win she's grateful for (00:58:29)

With thanks to Tom Felbar (Ambedo Media) for amazing video and audio editing!

If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - it means a lot to us!

Lewis Bollard should be a familiar name for those trying to improve the lives of farmed animals. For almost 10 years, he’s been running the farm animal welfare program at Open Philanthropy, the largest funder in the fight against factory farming. It's hard to think of someone who's had a large positive influence on the modern farm animal welfare movement. 

In this conversation, we discuss the many different approaches we can take to help animals. We talk about why some strategies are less promising than they initially seem, common misconceptions he sees amongst advocates, why creating good strategy is hard, where the movement is under-investing and what he’s learned from other social movements. 

See the full transcript on our Buzzsprout.

Chapters:

• What Lewis has changed his mind on (00:02:33)
• The challenges of institutional meat reduction (00:06:05) 
• Lewis' pessimism on animal welfare litigation (00:11:58)
• The case for animal welfare technologies (00:14:42)
• Why blocking new farms may not help (or even make things worse) (00:18:24)
• What Lewis thinks advocates commonly get wrong (00:23:11)
• Incrementalism vs moonshots & the speed of social change (00:26:50)
• What is the movement under-investing in? (00:36:44)
• Challenges in scaling large organisations (00:41:46)
• Prop 12 and the future of US legislation (00:45:43)
• How can we improve our political advocacy? (00:50:01)
• What can we do in the Global South? (00:55:32)
• How will transformative AI affect animal advocacy? (01:07:43)
• What is tough about Lewis' role? (01:15:41)

Resources:

• For more about Open Phil as a funder, check out our episode with Amanda Hungerford
• Lewis’ substack 
• Lewis AMA on the EA Forum
• Lewis' Twitter

With thanks to Tom Felbar (Ambedo Media) for amazing video and audio editing!

If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - it means a lot to us!

Cass Sunstein has one of the most impressive track records out there. He’s the author of the social change books Nudge and How Change Happens, a Harvard Law professor and former US government official in the Obama administration. He has been writing about animal rights law since as early as 1999 and has written several seminal papers on the topic. He has a forthcoming book, with the working title Animals Matter, discussing how we can normalise and popularise caring about animals in mainstream society.

In this conversation, we speak about understanding the contradictory views held by the public on animal welfare, how our advocacy can help them overcome these contradicting views, how he was smeared by the media and even called “the most dangerous man in America” for his views on animal rights, and how we can get more people to speak only about pro-animal issues. 

For those interested in hearing more about his previous book, How Change Happens, and his views on social change, you can listen to this great episode of his with 80,000 Hours, which covers that topic in more depth.

Referenced resources:

• Animals Matter – Substack Post by Cass Sunstein
• 80,000 Hours podcast with Cass Sunstein on How Change Happens 
• Justice for animals – Martha nussbaum 
• It’s a cookbook: animal welfare cascades 

With thanks to Tom Felbar (Ambedo Media) for amazing video and audio editing!

If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - it means a lot to us!

There are never-ending conversations in the animal advocacy movement about whether diet change is an effective ask for the public. Today, we speak with Thom from FarmKind on why he thinks asking people to donate, rather than change their diet, can be a much more promising approach.

We speak about why behaviour change is difficult, the many benefits of donating, what other social movements have used as their asks, as well as the different experiments FarmKind has run in their quest to figure out how to best raise funds for animal advocacy. 

Mentioned resources

• FarmKind website 
• Farmkind LinkedIn
• Change Meat Resistance: Systematic Literature Review on Consumer Resistance to the Alternative Protein Transition | Annual Reviews 
• Research by Pax Fauna 
• Moral ambition - Rutger Bregman 
• Frans waal - mama’s last hug

With thanks to Tom Felbar (Ambedo Media) for amazing video and audio editing!

If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating and review us - it means a lot to us!