How Big Agriculture Is Draining California’s Water | Kameron Waters DSH #1124

Summary

Digital Social Hour - Episode Summary: "How Big Agriculture Is Draining California’s Water" | Featuring Cameron Waters

Episode Information

• Podcast Title: Digital Social Hour
• Host: Sean Kelly
• Episode Title: How Big Agriculture Is Draining California’s Water | Kameron Waters DSH #1124
• Release Date: January 19, 2025

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Introduction to Cameron Waters and His Documentary

In this compelling episode, host Sean Kelly welcomes Cameron Waters, the creator of the thought-provoking documentary "Christspiracy." Cameron delves into the alarming impact of big agriculture on California's water resources, providing a deep dive into environmental and ethical issues surrounding animal agriculture.

The Critical Role of Animal Agriculture in Water Depletion

Cameron begins by highlighting the staggering statistics of water usage in California, emphasizing that 50% of all usable water is diverted to animal agriculture. He explains, “80% of all agricultural water, period, is growing alfalfa in California, which is the food for animal agriculture” (04:22). This massive allocation leaves insufficient water for other critical needs, contributing to severe droughts and environmental degradation.

Environmental Ironies and Misconceptions

Cameron addresses common narratives, such as those presented by figures like Grant Cardone, who blame environmentalists for water shortages due to the protection of species like the smelt fish. However, Cameron reveals a deeper irony: it is the commercial fishing industry that diverts 40% of the water to protect smelt fish, which are essential as food for salmon and steelhead trout (02:38). This diversion exacerbates water scarcity issues, contradicting the simplistic blame on environmental protection.

Ethical Concerns in Animal Agriculture

Transitioning from environmental issues, Cameron shares his personal journey towards understanding the ethical implications of animal agriculture. Raised as a Christian and initially a hunter and fisherman, Cameron underwent a profound transformation influenced by his faith and ethical considerations. He states, “The central theme of Christspiracy was I asked the question, and along with my co-director, Kip Anderson, is there a right way to kill an animal, a spiritual way to kill an animal” (20:57). This introspection led him to a 15-year commitment to completely abstaining from animal products.

Unveiling the Dark Realities of Factory Farming

Cameron exposes the harsh realities of factory farming, detailing his experiences visiting slaughterhouses and kosher farms. He reveals that even farms labeled as "humanely raised" often employ inhumane practices. For instance, in kosher farms, animals are slaughtered while still alive, causing immense suffering (12:47). He remarks, “Grass fed, humanely raised—what’s another one? These are all like feel-good terms. I feel they're marketing” (14:09). The deceptive labeling masks the brutal truth behind mass animal slaughter.

Historical Context: Religious Practices and Modern Agriculture

A significant portion of the discussion delves into the historical intertwining of religious practices and animal agriculture. Cameron explores how the first slaughterhouse systems were established through temple animal sacrifices, a practice condemned by ancient prophets like Jeremiah and Isaiah. He narrates, “Jesus was the only historical figure ever to go into a temple animal sacrificial ritual and completely shut the whole thing down” (28:50). This act not only defied the established norms but also set a precedent against the unethical treatment of animals.

Connecting Ancient Practices to Modern Issues

Cameron draws parallels between ancient animal sacrifice systems and today's unsustainable animal agriculture. He argues that the subjugation of animals is at the root of many contemporary problems, from environmental degradation to human oppression. “Animal agriculture is the elephant in the room” (46:36), he states, linking water scarcity, deforestation, and even disease proliferation to the demands of large-scale animal farming.

Economic Implications and Sustainability Challenges

The episode also touches on the economic aspects of animal agriculture, highlighting the disproportionate subsidies destined for this industry. Cameron points out, “I believe it's somewhere around 62% or 67% of all public funding goes to support animal agriculture” (39:08). This excessive financial support fosters an unsustainable system, making it difficult to innovate and redirect resources towards more sustainable agricultural practices.

Advocating for Change and Future Directions

In concluding the discussion, Cameron emphasizes the necessity of re-evaluating our agricultural practices to ensure sustainability and ethical treatment of animals. He advocates for redirecting subsidies from animal agriculture to plant-based farming, asserting that “We could solve world hunger tomorrow with animal agriculture subsidies” (45:26). Additionally, Cameron announces upcoming debates and further content to continue this crucial conversation, aiming to inspire listeners to rethink their relationship with animal agriculture and its profound impact on our environment and society.

Notable Quotes

• Cameron Waters (04:22):

  "80% of all agricultural water, period, is growing alfalfa in California, which is the food for animal agriculture."

• Cameron Waters (14:09):

  "Grass fed, humanely raised—what’s another one? These are all like feel-good terms. I feel they're marketing."

• Cameron Waters (20:57):

  "The central theme of Christspiracy was I asked the question, and along with my co-director, Kip Anderson, is there a right way to kill an animal, a spiritual way to kill an animal."

• Cameron Waters (28:50):

  "Jesus was the only historical figure ever to go into a temple animal sacrificial ritual and completely shut the whole thing down."

• Cameron Waters (39:08):

  "I believe it's somewhere around 62% or 67% of all public funding goes to support animal agriculture."

• Cameron Waters (45:26):

  "We could solve world hunger tomorrow with animal agriculture subsidies."

Conclusion

This episode of Digital Social Hour provides a comprehensive and eye-opening examination of how big agriculture, particularly animal farming, is profoundly impacting California's water resources. Through Cameron Waters' in-depth insights and historical contextualization, listeners gain a nuanced understanding of the environmental and ethical challenges posed by current agricultural practices. The discussion not only highlights the urgent need for sustainable reforms but also invites listeners to contemplate their role in fostering a more equitable and environmentally conscious world.

For those interested in further exploring these topics, Cameron Waters encourages watching his documentary "Christspiracy" available at Christspiracy.com, promising an uncensored and in-depth perspective on these pressing issues.

Transcript

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[Cameron Waters]

The chicken as a species is like one of the most dominant species on planet Earth because of the chicken industry. Like pound for pound biologic, there's more chickens and more chicken as like a, as a being on the planet than any other animal species because we breed them into existence constantly. Dang.

[Lucy]

All right, guys, we got Cameron Waters here today and just released a big documentary. Right?

[Cameron Waters]

It's out. It's finally out. We went to theaters and now we're digital on our website.

[Lucy]

Yeah, and you exposed a lot there. You got a lot of threats which we'll dive into first. I want to start off with the fires though, because you have some information pertaining to the California fires, right?

[Cameron Waters]

Right. Yes. So I actually was evacuated from the fires and still am. I'm down in San Diego, drove there to come visit you today. And what I've noticed is that the conversation around the fires, there's so many things that people are talking about and you know, obviously there's the big question marks that go down the rabbit holes of directed energy weapons, smart meters, you know, insurance lapsing with the fire protection, et cetera, the fire hydrants not having water. Right. But the one thing that I hear a lot, which people keep quoting is Trump talking about the fish, the smelt fish in Southern California not having water because of protecting this little smelt fish.

[Lucy]

Yeah, I saw that.

[Cameron Waters]

Right. People like Grant Cardone, others saying, like, oh, the environmentalists, they're ruining California because they're trying to protect this little fish. Right. Well, the irony is that if you look into the environmental organizations that are protecting the smelt fish, it's heavily documented that the commercial fishing industry is trying to protect the smelt fish because it's food for the salmon and this, the steelhead trout that they're catching that are going out to the markets that everybody around our country is eating. So I believe it's 40% of water is diverted because of the smelt fish to protect the smelt fish that could be making its way down to Southern California, but it's not, again, because the commercial fishing industry is putting the protection. So you've got that. Then on top of that, 50% of all water that could be utilized for Southern California is actually going to animal agriculture. And 80% of all agricultural water, period, is growing alfalfa in California, which is the food for animal agriculture. So we're talking about large amounts of water. So what I was thinking is, like, it's just kind of ironic with everybody. I see what's happening, you know, and by the way, I consider, you know, I'm a Christ follower. I also consider myself more on the conservative spectrum in terms of my values. But I'm looking at some of my heroes saying, like, oh, the environmentalists, it's the animal lovers, it's the vegans, they all want to protect the stupid fish. When the irony is it's the fishing industry that's causing the fish protection and it's the animal agriculture industry that's literally taking 50% or more of the water.

[Lucy]

Wow.

[Cameron Waters]

And that leads me to wonder, like, is that why we don't have water in the fire hydrants? And if you look into the public water data, you see that this has major impact. These, the water is all coming from the same place. So that is crazy.

[Lucy]

You've connected some dots I haven't heard yet on social media.

[Cameron Waters]

Yeah. So, you know, obviously there's all the question marks around the things that everyone else is talking about, but around this water piece, why wasn't there water in the fire hydrants? Again, I just, I don't want the rhetoric to get out there that it's just environmentalists and people trying to protect the environment and not caring about humans. It's actually the exact opposite. It's people who Want to keep the meat in fishing industry alive. And the dairy industry, the dairy consumes all that alfalfa, 80% of all agricultural water to grow alfalfa to feed dairy cows.

[Lucy]

Holy crap. And that kind of ties into the documentary, right? Because you went to some of these dairy farms and you witnessed a lot of interesting things. Exactly what were some concerning things you were witnessing at these farms?

[Cameron Waters]

Well, first of all, I mean, my backstory is that just I, you know, I'm the least and last person to ever really go on this journey. I was raised, you know, Christian and still am a Christ follower, but I was also a hunter, a fisherman, and I worked a barbecue restaurant in my teen years. And I kind of woke up to this right as I was going into college and I was taking my faith more seriously and starting a career as a gospel musician. And that was when I did the Daniel Fast, which is this biblical or scriptural kind of fast where you eat only vegetables that a lot of Protestants do. And it's popularized by Rick Warren, the purpose Driven life guy that wrote that book and everything.

[Lucy]

How long are you supposed to eat vegetables for?

[Cameron Waters]

It's either 10 or 21 days. Because in the scripture it's literally about.

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[Cameron Waters]

Daniel and how when he's enslaved in Babylon when, when the Hebrews are taken over, he refuses to eat the meat that the kingdom of Babylon trying to feed him and says, just give me vegetables instead. But everyone's like, oh, you're gonna, you know, basically I'm paraphrasing, but they're like, you know, you can't do that because they're probably worried he's gonna die or they've, they've never seen anyone do that before. And he essentially, he essentially says, test me for 10 days and see how I go up against the rest of the people in your kingdom. And after 10 days, he tests wiser, stronger and healthier than everyone else in the kingdom. And there's another 21 day test as well. Now the funny thing is, is a lot of people will say, oh, it's just a fast. For a period of time, Daniel was probably gorging on the meat, you know, and other things. Outside of that fast, it was just a religious kind of like period. But when you look into Josephus, the ancient Jewish historian, he gives a clearer picture that Daniel actually abhorred the eating of living creatures full stop, and that that was just his lifestyle along with his brothers. So when I was, you know, growing up, I learned Bible stories from popular shows, really like VeggieTales is one of them. You know that show, did you see it? I remember it. So I learned the story of Daniel via VeggieTales primarily. That's how I remember it was the first VHS tape I ever got as a kid was VeggieTales with the Daniel story. And the irony is, is they tell the story about Daniel surviving the lion's den and not getting burned in the fiery furnace and all these things that made Daniel a superhero. For me. He was like my Marvel comic hero growing up because, you know, my mom and my parents were trying to get me into Bible stories. But the irony is the vegetables of Veggie Tales didn't tell the part of the story that he only ate vegetables and which is kind of funny. So even reflecting, you know, since making this film, what we go into is a lot of COVID ups around how there is this thread in the scripture of what, you know, the Christlike way or how this Nazarene movement viewed ethics towards animals and just in general the kind of Edenic plant based diet in the scripture and how it threads through the, through the Bible as well. And there's this essentially kind of COVID up. And I witnessed it as a kid because I never knew this aspect of the story until I was old enough to read the Bible for myself. And when I did, I was like, oh yeah, this, he clearly eats only vegetables. Oh look, historians say he actually this was his full lifestyle. So that sent me down a rabbit hole to really questioning. But I will say I was hoping it was going to be a 10 day test or a 21 day test. I was thinking, oh, I'll go back to eating meat. But I just want to do it the right way because around the same time is when my mom actually, she's an insurance sales lady and she came home after auditing a chicken farm and told me about the battery cages that the chickens are in. And I had an ethical conflict because, you know, as a Christian I always wanted to help the poor and needy and people that were in, you know, tough situations. And when I heard about the tough situations that these chickens were in, I was like, okay, well that doesn't seem like, you know, most people disagree with factory farming. So I was like, okay, I feel like what would Jesus do? You know, I wear the bracelet still to this day.

[Lucy]

I love it.

[Cameron Waters]

WWJD bracelets. What would Jesus do? That was my question as a kid. I used to wear the bracelet as a kid and I, I thought he wouldn't do the battery cages, so what would he do? And so I, it sent me on this journey like I want to figure it out. And that's kind of where crispiracy was born and genuinely was trying to find a right way to actually keep consuming Animals.

[Lucy]

Yeah, yeah. And it was a seven year journey.

[Cameron Waters]

Yeah.

[Lucy]

So you weren't eating animals that whole seven years?

[Cameron Waters]

Well, so the beginning of the story of my full backstory is a little bit compressed because it's a 90 minute film. So it's compressed in like a minute or two. But really it's been a 15 year, probably 15, 16 year journey for me of, of completely being off of animal products, full stop altogether. And then before that, because this goes all the way back to. Right. You know, like I said, right when I was left the house and was becoming a gospel musician, I started to ask these questions and doing Daniel Fast. But again, I was trying. I was oscillating in and out and trying to find the right way to eat an animal. But then. Or kill an animal. But then over time, I started reading my Bible more, doing more and more research to really understand what the truth was. And that led me to the point of meeting Kip, the co director of these previous films, raising some hard questions to him and him saying, hey dude, let's make a film about this.

[Lucy]

Crazy. The one that stood out to me from the film was when you went to the kosher farm. Because I always assumed that was just way higher quality meat.

[Cameron Waters]

Right.

[Lucy]

And apparently it wasn't the one you went to.

[Cameron Waters]

Yeah, I mean, in some ways kosher and halal can actually be worse because the. Well, first of all, the slaughter methods, you know, they're meant to be more humane, but actually they slice the animal's neck and they bleed out while they're like alive. And the level of suffering and. Yeah, and the kosher farms themselves, like you saw in the film. And anyone who watches Christpiracy will see we went to one of the best kosher farms in Israel and the conditions are horrible, but you know, they'll get certified as kosher. And there's things going on there that someone who really is trying to follow kosher would just gasp at because it's not actually kosher. You know, many people say that kosher just doesn't even really exist. The actual standard that is believe to be followed isn't being followed in general. So there's funny enough, a large movement of 70 or more rabbis who have come together and basically said plant based is the new kosher. Because there's just no way around with serving the amount of meat in. Growing the number of animals in that type of way just isn't even possible.

[Lucy]

So it's a shame because you hear all these healthy terms like grass fed, like pasture raised, and then you actually have someone go there and it's not much better. And you're paying a premium.

[Cameron Waters]

Right.

[Lucy]

These animals are being treated pretty horribly, right?

[Cameron Waters]

Yeah. And grass fed, humanely raised. What's another one? These are all like feel good terms. I feel they're marketing. No antibiotics, no antibiotics, gm, non gmo, free range. I just feel they're, they're marketing terms, you know, they're feel good labels that make people feel better about what they're getting. But the reality is, is even if there's subtle differences, what I learned again, coming from someone who loved barbecue and hunting and doing the whole thing, when I actually saw the slaughterhouses, it doesn't matter if it's a free range, grass fed, non gmo, wild caught, whatever, it all ends up in the same slaughterhouse. So they all meet their same end with, you know, death and a lot of times suffering involved with that death. But even still, like grass fed, you know, you can get a grass fed label and I'm sure you've seen the viral clip of a bunch of cows just getting, getting, you know, grass poured in at the last second. So they eat a bunch of grass. Most grass fed is actually grain fed as well too. They have to fatten them up to a certain point, so they'll be like grass fed for a good portion of their life and then they'll actually feed them a bunch of grain at the end to fatten them up.

[Lucy]

I can see that.

[Cameron Waters]

So grass finish is technically the term when they eat only grass their entire life, but still that, you know, there's a whole sustainability issue with how much land it takes to feed a cow grass its whole life. You know, we're talking acres and acres of land, you know, per cow.

[Lucy]

So, yeah, the land and the water, they're watering it with tap water, which has a lot of issues these days.

[Cameron Waters]

Right.

[Lucy]

So, yeah, it's scary times. I mean, the Costco chickens, they don't look like chickens anymore.

[Cameron Waters]

Right?

[Lucy]

You see how plump they are?

[Cameron Waters]

Yeah. They can't.

[Lucy]

Crazy.

[Cameron Waters]

It's insane. They can't stand up. They grow super fast. And even with the egg in the egg industry, they're bred to produce way more eggs than they naturally would, which is really hard on their system. And so they're just in all of this suffering. I mean, the chicken industry is scary, man. And honestly, people don't realize. But there's like, I think there's a stat I'll have to. You have to fact check it, but I'm pretty sure that there's a stat that the chicken as a species is like one of the most dominant species on planet Earth because of the chicken industry, like pound for pound biology. There's more chickens and more chicken as, like a, as a being on the planet than any other animal species because we breed them into existence constantly. And you know, if you. I just sometimes imagine like a, another being coming to Earth or something not from here. And like, if they were doing a book report on planet Earth or something, they would like call it Planet Death. With, with all that's going on.

[Lucy]

That one slaughterhouse you visited with the former prison inmates.

[Cameron Waters]

Right.

[Lucy]

That was horrific.

[Cameron Waters]

Yeah. That was shocking to see. That was actually down the street from my, from my home. Wow. From where I grew up. Yeah. So right around the corner from my, my mom's house. And I had no idea when I went on this journey that this was actually in my backyard. And lo and behold, yeah, it turns out that the slaughterhouse right around the street from my mom has inmates that are slaughtering the animals all day. Majority of them inmates, some of them illegal immigrants. And so they kind of have this almost blackmail over them to work and do that. Because if you're, if you're a prisoner, you have to, or you go back to prison, it's like a reform program, like halfway house type setup. And if you're an illegal immigrant and you know, it's either that or go back to your country. And so they're able to get them to work in those conditions for like as little as, I think, $0.97 per day per day. And so they're getting scraps for pay. That industry has statistically higher rates of suicide, domestic abuse, drug abuse, depression.

[Lucy]

Think about the trauma. You're killing living beings.

[Cameron Waters]

I mean, killing living beings all day. And I just think what I didn't realize was working in the barbecue restaurant and, you know, consuming animals at the level that I did my whole life, I was essentially paying for someone else to do that for me.

[Lucy]

Right.

[Cameron Waters]

And you know, that's. You may not care about animals in their situation for whatever reason, but, you know, most people care about other humans. Like, it's worth considering the kind of conditions we're forcing other humans into by making these, you know, choices.

[Lucy]

Yeah. So what's your conclusion on all this? There's no really humane way to do this at mass scale, consume animals.

[Cameron Waters]

Well, at mass scale, yes. Well, first of all, 99% of all animals consumed, every animal product on planet Earth consumed, 99% comes from factory farms.

[Lucy]

Wow.

[Cameron Waters]

So that's the other thing about grass fed Free range, all of these labels is we're Talking about the 1% of what we're actually consuming. I don't think people really realize. They assume in their head I'm getting the good, healthy kind that's been happy because it's at Whole Foods. Well, that's, you know, factory farming. 99. So, yeah, there's definitely, in some ways the irony is that factory farming is probably somehow a more ethical way to raise and kill animals at the scale that we have. Because really they're just suffering like it's, it's full on prison and suffering for them. And when their life is over, they're ready for it to be over, because what is their life? It's just in a cage, confined with all of this, you know, hearing their friends get, you know, sent off to slaughter every day. Whereas, like, free range, you know, they live a really happy, beautiful life. But then at the end, they get betrayed by the very one who raised them, the farmer. It's kind of like a Hansel and Gretel kind of story is what I realize. You know, fatten them up and be really nice to them. At the end, you pop them in the oven. So I think in some ways, ethically speaking, yeah, we can't really do this at a mass scale for sure. It's just we're. We're hitting our limits on every front. And I'm not even, I'm not even talking environmental. I'm talking water use. I'm talking the way that that slaughterhouse where in my hometown there's prisoners working, it's also destroying the river and the water quality around my hometown. There's a whole racket with, you know, a woman who's doing some science on the water quality there. And it's just horrible what's going on. So these things are stressing our communities. They're bringing, you know, through the slaughtered, depression, suicide, all of these things. So that's definitely not sustainable. But if we even, you know, the smaller free range farms, it's like there's only so much you could do to support that. There's only so many people that could actually afford that if we went to that system. Because it's really, really expensive.

[Lucy]

It is, yeah.

[Cameron Waters]

And then bottom line, for me, that's why the central theme of Christpiracy was I asked the question, and along with my co director, Kip Anderson, is there a right way to kill an animal, a spiritual way to kill an animal, or more specifically, given my personal background and, you know, concerns with my faith, how would Jesus kill an animal. Yeah, you know, I'm wearing this shirt right now. I don't know if you can even see it, but.

[Lucy]

Is that a llama?

[Cameron Waters]

It's a lamb.

[Lucy]

Oh, a lamb.

[Cameron Waters]

But with the little, the tag, the tag on his ear. Because we're all used to seeing Jesus the good shepherd holding the lamb. Right? But imagine him holding a lamb that's meant for slaughter. I mean, they slaughter tons of lamb. You know, Colorado actually close by, they just, on the last election they had a, they were voting to actually eliminate slaughter in Colorado. Really? In Denver. I'm sorry, in Denver.

[Lucy]

That's a big state for slaughter.

[Cameron Waters]

It's a big state. And they have one of the biggest lamb slaughter operations and, and lamb, like where they grow them. I mean it looks like this massive area. It's almost like trippy looking, you know, like the Matrix or something with all these lambs growing. But they were trying to ban it. So I just. Anyhow, the image of the film is like, can you imagine Christ the good shepherd holding a lamb and then killing it? You know, how would Jesus do it? Would he slit its throat? Would he do this? Would he do that? And so, you know, for me it's particularly important to understand from an ethical perspective along with my faith. But I think it's a good archetypical thing for anyone because everybody in some way, even if you're not a person of faith, can kind of imagine Jesus as being like one of the ultimate, compassionate, peaceful human beings. So what would be that method? And I truly thought, you know, going into making the film that we could find that, you know, like going to Joel Salatin, his farm, you know, and he's a Christian and he's trying to do everything he can to raise animals the best way that he knows how and you know, trying to upend the industrial system. But when the rubber meets the road and it's time to actually kill the animal, I just can't see any way that there's any kind of compassion or peaceful way to it. It's. It's in especially if you know that it's not necessary. It's flips the whole script. And then we get into the coverups that the deeper I went into scripture and the deeper this rabbit hole went, it turns out that there's an actual long standing cover up about the original Nazarene movement, what these people were really about, and how this temple animal sacrificial system was essentially the world's first slaughterhouse system. And that Jesus and the disciples were standing up against that.

[Lucy]

Wow. So this goes way back. Yeah, this isn't a modern day issue. So did you find out who exactly was behind the COVID up?

[Cameron Waters]

So that's a big, that's a big conversation when it comes to the Jesus story or the Christ story. You know, we all the way back into the ancient prophets, Jeremiah, Isaiah, many more prophets, they were all speaking out against animal sacrifice. You can find multiple verses where they say animal sacrifices are an abomination. Jeremiah 7, 22, it says God never commanded animal sacrifices when he brought you out of Egypt. So these prophets were calling out and calling against the Hebrews who believed in their one true creator God. But they were building these systems in temples where they were slaughtering all these animals. And it was something they actually learned from BAAL and Moloch worship, which in that day and age, and still to this day is seen as more of a satanic demonic practice. So they're taking this practice of killing and bloodshed and applying it to their own faith. And these prophets like Jeremiah and Isaiah are saying, hey, God never wanted this. He never wanted sacrifice. He just wanted a humble heart and you to love and follow his simple commands like thou shalt not kill.

[Lucy]

Yeah.

[Cameron Waters]

You know, so it goes way back. And there's, you know, again, even just looking at the Bible itself, you can see moments where this truth is being covered up. In Jeremiah 8, verse 8, he says the lying pen of the scribes has falsified the Torah. What's the Torah? It's the first five books of the Bible. We're talking ancient Hebrew scripture. He, one of the major prophets is sharing with us in the Bible that anyone can pick up in their, you know, if they have a Bible or house. Look at Jeremiah 8, verse 8, it says the lying pen of the scribes has falsified the Torah. What were they falsifying it? Well, Jeremiah is the prophet who's condemning animal sacrifice more than anyone. And his Father Hilkiah in 2nd Kings 22 finds an original book of Moses hidden by the Ark of the Covenant. This is all in the Bible. I never was taught this stuff growing up. Yeah, but he finds another book of the law of Moses and when he finds it, King Josiah rips his clothes and all the priests freak out. And then a number of chapters later they end up saying they burned it.

[Lucy]

Whoa.

[Cameron Waters]

So there you, in your own Bible you have evidence of a cover up happening that has this error of like prophets condemning animal sacrifice, saying there's another law of Moses that doesn't potentially include animal sacrifices that the scribes had falsified it. Right. So even before Jesus. But I believe, you know, I found out about all this information just because I started looking into Jesus. Hey, what does Jesus say about animals and how we should treat animals? You know, it can be harder to decipher through because I think, you know, as we know, Jesus mostly spoke about the orphans and the widows and these, you know, even loving prostitutes, loving your enemies, etc. But when you really read between the lines, you see that multiple times he quoted the prophet Isaiah saying, I desire mercy, not sacrifice. Hosea is another one of these prophets condemning animal sacrifice. Well, what does that mean? So at the time of Jesus, the temple of Jerusalem, which is now where the Dome of the Rock stands, which is the most heavily fought over piece of real estate on planet Earth, there at the epicenter of the world, really was a temple at Jesus's time where they killed hundreds of thousands to even, some records say, millions of animals a week for Passover. So we're talking about a large scale slaughterhouse operation. Blood everywhere. There's scriptures, ancient Jewish scriptures, and even historians that say that they would wait, the priests would wade up to their ankles in blood with so much blood.

[Lucy]

Holy crap.

[Cameron Waters]

Exactly. And I didn't believe it at first. I didn't believe it. So I went to Israel and you see it in the film, I said, I gotta go look around and see. You know, when I was growing up, the temple seemed like a church, like where people are praying and lifting their hands and singing and this and that. Wait, it was a slaughterhouse? They were killing that many animals? No way. So we determined that one way to figure it out was like, hey, if there's all that blood, there's got to be some kind of evidence of like a system of how they got it out of there or something. Turns out there's a tunnel that was just excavated. I think it was just back in like 2014-2018, underneath the. The road leading up to the temple, where the ancient term in Hebrew is shishin, these tubes for the blood to flow out of the bottom of the ground would flow into this tunnel and down to the Kidron Brook. And I was expecting it to be some kind of small little drain, if anything. But I was able to walk through the tunnel. It was so big.

[Lucy]

Wow.

[Cameron Waters]

So it was able to move massive amounts of blood. And they found all kinds of bones. You know, archeologists have found all kinds of bones scattered that show animals coming from hundreds of miles away to supply the need. So what you have to understand is palm Sunday, what most Christians celebrate right before Easter, it's this day when Jesus goes into the temple and the famous story is that he flips the tables of the money changers and he condemns everybody for making God's house into a marketplace. Right. He says, my father's house should be a house of prayer, but you've made it a den of thieves. Well, our film goes into the translation of that word, thieves, because that's not actually what he said. If you realize, again, quoting Jeremiah, remember the prophet that I said earlier? He's quoting Jeremiah right there. Right there. And most people get thieves because of translating from the Greek.

[Lucy]

Yeah.

[Cameron Waters]

However, if you go back to Jeremiah and understand what the Hebrew says, it's much more condemning. He is essentially calling the priests of the temple murderers. You've made this a den of murderers. Well, what's being murdered in the temple? There aren't any priests killing people. It's all animals. Thousands and thousands of animals. And then what does he do in our gospels that we have, like, the Gospel of John, he frees the cattle and the sheep, and he breaks the cages of the doves and frees them. And so if he's doing those actions and freeing the animals and saying, my house is meant to be a house of prayer, but you've made it a den of murderers, what is he really talking about there? So that was the light bulb that went off. And really, we cover this in our film, but it's honestly just scratching the surface. We're just opening a conversation because we do go into other religions as well and see what, you know, Hinduism has to say about how we treat animals. And what does Buddhism have to say about it? Because Kip, my co director, he didn't grow up Christian. He's very much like Eastern mysticism or just agnostic in general. So he had those questions, too. So we just took it on and said, what's. What's the truth about the spiritual, ethical, Right way to kill? But through this scratching the surface and opening this, like, conversation, the rabbit hole goes really deep. And you start to understand that there was a Nazarene movement, which was the movement of the first century, even preceding Jesus. Because all over the Bible, again, anyone can go test this. Go open your Bible, especially if you have a King James, and you'll see all over it's Jesus the Nazarene. Jesus the Nazarene. Everybody thinks it's Jesus of Nazareth, but that's actually typically most places in the Bible, that's not even a proper translation. It's actually Jesus The Nazarene. So the Nazarene were a group that were an offshoot of the Hebraic Judaism of the time that were staunchly opposing animal sacrifice. And if we want to I can even read later, I have writings from early church fathers that are talking about this Naz Nazarene group and how against the temple sacrifices they were. And eating flesh.

[Lucy]

Whoa. There were people eating humans back then?

[Cameron Waters]

No, animal flesh. Oh, animal flesh. Oh, they were. They basically Epiphanius, the early church father, who was amongst a number of church fathers that were condemning heresies, meaning they were going around and they were finding which groups of so called Christians or Jewish Christians weren't following the proper orthodoxy of the Roman Catholic tradition that they were building. And they would condemn him as heretics so that no one would follow them or they would get excommunicated or sometimes they would even like, you know, torture them. Like there's all kinds of things that would happen. Right. But Epiphanius records in his Panarion about the Nazarenes and what he says is they were just like the Hebrews in every way. They even existed before Jesus. Yeah, but the one way they were different is they believed that Moses had received a law, but some other. And the difference was there were no. They didn't believe in animal sacrifices. They didn't believe that was instituted by the fathers, nor did they believe in eating animal flesh. They thought all of this was unlawful to do so. But in every other way they were the same. And so they're condemned by Epiphanius, but because of him we have a preservation of an understanding or an outline of who these people were. And that goes to your original question, which is how does this cover up happen? The coverup happens because when the church was being established, you know, 300 years after Jesus's death, by that time there was a lot of time to start to weed out these groups. And we have evidence of ways that that was done. You know, not even just by the church, just by the Roman Empire. The Romans sacrificed, killed and ate tons of animals. Wow. They were all about it. They had all kinds of gods. And I mean, you see that with the Apostle Paul when he's going to all the different cities trying to preach, he's always rubbing up against people eating meat sacrifice to idols and all of these things. And he's kind of telling his, you know, his followers, hey, don't worry about that. You don't have to worry about meat sacrifice to idols because the early Christians were scared. They didn't want to do that because they thought that was an abomination to eat meat, sacrifice to some other God. But he's like, oh, it's all good. So what ends up happening is you've got this one lone apostle, Paul, who says it's good, but he's in contention with the original disciples who actually walk with Jesus and said, no, no, no, we don't actually do that. And the church ended up amplifying Paul's teachings. You know, he's got more words in the New Testament than Jesus does. And over time, they weed out this early first century movement that, like I said, was the Nazarenes. They eventually, they also went by the name the Ebion or the Ebionim or the Ebionites. That word Ebion means the poor. And it was because it was kind of a slanderous name. People used to say, like, oh, those poor people. And Jesus is talking about them in his Sermon on the Mount when he says, blessed are the poor. Paul's told to remember the poor when he's out preaching. Most people think it's just a general term of like, oh, remember the poor people. But that was actually the name of their community, the Ebonim. It's all over the Dead Sea Scrolls. I'm sure you're familiar with the Dead Sea Scrolls.

[Lucy]

I've heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls, yeah.

[Cameron Waters]

Yeah. They were documents found in Israel in 1947, which it really changed the game on a lot of what we're talking about. I mean, most scholars, you know, I can imagine people listening to this podcast, like this random, you know, kid from Georgia telling the story, makes this documentary and he finds all this stuff. It's not just me. We interviewed scholars, completely unbiased scholars, by the way, who don't have a bone to pick, pun intended, in whether or not we should eat animals. They just are looking at the data. And like Robert Eisenman, Professor Robert Eisenman in the film, he's the guy that we interview and he's in his boat. His office is a boat in Laguna. I'm sorry, Long Beach. He's still there, but he's not like vegetarian or vegan or doesn't care anything about any of those ways. But he'll tell you straight up, oh, no. The Nazarenes and James the Just, Jesus's brother, who. Who most people don't realize. Jesus had a brother, James the Just. He was the leader of this movement after Jesus's death. Heavily documented in historical record that James never ate animal flesh.

[Lucy]

Wow.

[Cameron Waters]

So. And he's the leader of this movement. And so you've got people like Professor Robert Eisenman and many others that will attest, hey, this is what the history shows us, is that this movement was against subjugating animals and using them in animal sacrificial temples. But again, to me, that's just the model of the first slaughterhouse. And to many historians, like the way that we kill animals at the scale that we do. That system started with the first temples, and not just Hebrew temples, by the way. Ancient Vedic traditions in India have moments where the Brahmin class began to sacrifice animals. And then you've got certain figures that stand up and stand against it as well. You know, that's how you get Jainism. Buddhism kind of started similarly too. The Buddha is said to have stood up against the animal sacrificial ritual. But what sets Jesus apart over all traditions, what I think really make, you know, there's so many conversations about Jesus, right, for the last 2000 years about what really makes him unique. But I think what makes him the most unique is that he's the only historical figure ever to go into a temple animal sacrificial ritual and completely shut the whole thing down. And you have to understand what the scale of that is. It's unanimous. The consensus of scholarship is that him shutting the temple down and doing his act is what got him crucified. You know, people will say, oh, it's because he was claiming to be the Messiah or this or that. But there were a lot of messiahs, people claiming that. At times it was kind of hard to pin someone for that because people were saying stuff. People were saying they were doing miracles, all these kinds of things. Not saying that Jesus didn't do that. I'm just saying that wasn't a strong enough case to get him arrested and crucified. But when he went and disrupted the temple, now we're talking about disrupting Roman rule, disrupting commerce. They made a lot of money off the temple taxes. We were just in the other room looking at the guy who's doing the ancient coins. He's an ancient coin collector. They had coins that they would have to exchange to buy the animals. And they were getting taxed like crazy to buy these animals. It's similar to what's happening with subsidies. All this stuff is relevant today as it was then, just as relevant, because now today, animal agriculture only exists because of the level of subsidies that are able to support it, because it's a completely unsustainable business. I think it's somewhere around 62% or 67% of all public funding goes to support animal agriculture.

[Lucy]

Wow.

[Cameron Waters]

For food, that's a lot. Yeah, it's a whole lot. And it's, it's to millions of millions to fruit and veg. You know, the, the amount of money that goes to support animal agriculture and the feed to feed it is astronomically more amount of money than what we get to fruit and veg. So there's no ability to innovate with like vegetable growing and this and that. And it's just unsustainable. A Big Mac that costs what, five, six dollars should really cost us like 14, $15, but it's being subsidized. So anyone who's buying a Big Mac for five bucks, we're paying for it.

[Lucy]

I did not know that.

[Cameron Waters]

Yeah.

[Lucy]

And there's these fast food companies that claim they're really Christian. Right? In and out. Chick fil a.

[Cameron Waters]

Exactly.

[Lucy]

But if they really dug into this stuff, they might second second guess it'll.

[Cameron Waters]

Exactly. They have the, the, the verses on their packaging.

[Lucy]

Oh, they do?

[Cameron Waters]

Yeah. Oh, they do. And so I do believe, you know, to some extent, like say a chick fil a or an in n out or even like your local pastor. I don't think they're intentionally in on some conspiracy because it's so far removed. We're talking 2,000 years ago. This stuff went down where there was a schism and a split. In a way of thinking, Jesus went and disrupted the temple and did what he did, but then he was crucified. And then it all becomes about who's got the better story. Right. And over time, I believe that, you know, like I said, Paul and some of the early traditions began to downplay, oh, this whole thing about animals and sacrifice and everything. It's not really that important. That's not an important part of the message. When I think it was a key part of not only Jesus message, the entire Nazarene movement, but all the prophets before him were constantly condemning. And why? Because if you look at the Bible in its full metanarrative, people listening to this who are Christian will think he's just cherry picking scripture and scenarios to support his bias, that he loves animals. But remember, that's not how I started. I started trying to find a way to continue to kill and eat animals. But when you talk about context, the full context of the Bible, you got to start with the beginning and you got to end with the ending. What's the beginning? It's the Garden of Eden. Everybody knows the story of Adam and Eve. In the garden, right? And God prescribes that they only eat fruits and vegetables, basically in the garden of Eden. And then the prophetic kingdom of heaven which Jesus is always praying comes on earth as it is in heaven. He said, it's here now, in our midst. The kingdom of heaven is at hand. The kingdom of heaven is described in Isaiah 11 as no animal slaughter. The wolf will let even. Even animals, not slaughtering other animals. The wolf will lay with the lamb. The lion will eat straw like the ox. And it ends with saying, they will not hurt or destroy on my holy mountain. What's the holy mountain? The temple where Jesus disrupted the animal sacrifices. And that word destroy on my holy mountain is actually a bit of a mistranslation. It's. The Hebrew word is shakath, which the root is shakat, which means to slaughter an animal. The Shoket is the one who slaughters the animal. And the Shakita is the process of slaughtering. So they will not hurt or slaughter animals on my holy mountain. That's the vision of the kingdom of heaven. So when Jesus shows up on the scene and says the kingdom of heaven's here, it makes sense why he throws down on this animal sacrificial system. He's trying to mimic the Edenic ideal. From the beginning. We weren't killing animals. It was peace amongst, you know, man and the creatures of God. Right. So. And ironically, Isaiah 11, I truly believe, is kind of the battle hymn of the republic, if you will, of this Nazarene Ebionite group that Jesus seems to be a part of, along with his brother James, who led the movement after him. Even John the Baptist. In the opening statement of Isaiah 11, it says, a shoot or a branch will come from Jesse, meaning a lineage from this patriarch Jesse. But that word shoot is a netseer Netzer. And that's where the word Nazarene comes from. So that's the opening statement. A Nazarene will come, a branch, a new. Someone's going to take our religion and they're going to fully remove themselves from it and start a new tree and a new belief. A Nazarene. And then if you keep reading down, that verse talks about freeing the oppressed and the captives, and it talks about him judging the righteous as poor. I'm sorry, the poor as righteous. It uses that word, poor there, the Ebion. So I believe the Nazarenes and the Ebionites, these first Christian sects, got their names from this kingdom vision. This. This heavenly vision of peace on earth amongst God's Creatures and trying to restore Eden on earth, basically.

[Lucy]

That is fascinating. So do you believe Jesus was vegetarian his whole life or do you think there was a pivotal moment that kind of switched him over?

[Cameron Waters]

It's a really good question. I mean, it's hard to know. It's 2,000 years ago. And in general too, I would preface that, you know, Vegan is a 20th century term. Vegetarian is, you know, probably a few hundred years before that. So these are like modern terms we're trying to apply on him. I just think fundamentally Jesus was a liberator of the oppressed, all oppressed, and that includes animals. And in fact, as you see or have heard about what we discuss with how prisoners are being used to kill animals, subjugating animals has a direct effect on the oppression of humans. It's at the root. You know, Henry David Thoreau, one of my favorite authors, wrote that there are thousands striking at the branches of evil to everyone who's striking at the root. It's actually the quote at the beginning of our film. But what I realized is as a Christian, I was always trying to think about how do we help the hungry, how do we help the poor, how do we help, you know, child soldiers with Joseph Kony, how do we, how do we make the world a better place and bring that heavenly vision amongst humans? And what I've come to realize is that the way we subjugate animals is at the root of all those problems.

[Lucy]

Wow.

[Cameron Waters]

World hunger could be solved tomorrow with animal agriculture subsidies. The amount of money that we spend, 300 some odd billion a year just here in America, I believe could solve world hunger for an entire year tomorrow if we just redirected that. And the proof is in the pudding and how inefficient animal based calories are. We use 70 to 80% of all agricultural land to make meat for us to eat, but we only get 12% of our calories from it.

[Lucy]

Dang.

[Cameron Waters]

So I mean you're as a crypto dude, you're probably a little bit into some stats.

[Lucy]

Yeah, those numbers are not good.

[Cameron Waters]

Those aren't good stats. Right. It's a big net loss. So we could solve world hunger. Stuff like Joseph Kony. I got into invisible children when I was young people trying to fight all the craziness in Africa where they're drugging these kids and getting them to fight battles amongst tribes. All that tribal warfare, most of it started over cattle land. Wow, right? Water charity water. We're all wanting to build wells and provide water to the needy, you know, and biggest issue of Water on planet Earth. Animal agriculture.

[Lucy]

Really?

[Cameron Waters]

Yeah.

[Lucy]

Because. Yeah. You said earlier it goes to their.

[Cameron Waters]

Just here in California. I'm dealing with it right now. I'm evacuated from my house.

[Lucy]

Right.

[Cameron Waters]

LA's burning because 50 or more percent of our water is going to animal agriculture. 40% is being diverted to save a smelt fish. That's food for the salmon that everyone is eating. That I used to eat.

[Lucy]

Yeah.

[Cameron Waters]

And like I said, 80% of all of our agricultural water is going to grow alfalfa that the dairy cows eat in California.

[Lucy]

Yeah.

[Cameron Waters]

And then go, and then go drive through California and go see Cow Schwitz. I don't know if you've ever, I.

[Lucy]

Haven'T heard of that.

[Cameron Waters]

It's a nickname. If you go like drive between LA and San Francisco on the 5, there's just, just miles and miles of just like cows and cows and cows for. They call it cow Schwitz because it's like concentration camp, slaughterhouse. There's slaughterhouses there. But it's, it's where they're growing a lot of them. And you know, the conditions, some of the conditions are so horrific. They're just all sitting in their own feces and you know, and, and their babies are being ripped from them every day as they are giving birth and constantly being impregnated. So I like to say that in our world right now, I truly believe in humanity and that everybody at some level has a good heart and wants to make the world a better place. We have so many issues right now that we're all thinking about and trying to solve. Covid has brought a lot of that into our minds. It's sent everybody or a lot of people at least on a more open minded path of like the powers that be and what conspiracies or things may be happening, you know, Big pharma, these types of things. But again, animal agriculture is the elephant in the room or the cow in the room, the chicken in the room, you know, because that issue alone right there, vaccines, vaccination, it's on a lot of people's minds since COVID Yep. The term vaccine comes from the Latin vaca, which means cow because the first ever vaccines were created through solving cowpox. They were taking and injecting cowpox into other cows to try to vaccinate the herd, to get quote unquote, herd immunity. Right. But what I feel is these issues that so many people are concerned with, with even mandated vaccine orders, Big pharma, the overreach that it maybe has what everyone needs to Realize is all of that started because we're confining animals in these conditions that are so unnatural that it's breeding disease to where it's creating the possibility that Big Pharma has an opportunity to jump in and create a solution to the problem.

[Lucy]

Wow.

[Cameron Waters]

And they've named it after cows, who we've created as a herd. And what did you hear all throughout Covid, from conspiracy theorists? Like herd mentality. Yeah, right. Herd immunity, it's, it's almost like karmic in a way. I see it. You know, Jesus says the golden rule, do unto others as you have done unto you. Because it's a reflection that what you put out, you get back, ask and you shall receive. Right. Or, and I think about it this way, if we don't want to be vaccinated, chipped, tracked, confined, controlled by our government, we're doing the same thing to the animals. The number one species on. Sorry, let me rephrase this. The overwhelming majority of, of living beings on planet Earth are that they're chipped, they're tracked, their birth is forced and controlled, their death is forced and controlled, they're vaccinated. The list goes on and on. That's animals. In the agriculture industry, the overall majority, I mean, we're talking billions and billions of beings. 90 billion animals are killed every single year.

[Lucy]

Holy crap.

[Cameron Waters]

90 billion. That's just land animals.

[Lucy]

Not even fish.

[Cameron Waters]

Not even fish if you include fish. We're talking trillions every single year in animal agriculture, in the fishing industry. That's like if we just take the land animals, 90 billion animals killed per year, that's like killing the entire human population 10 times over every single year. So that's the majority of the experience of living beings on Earth. So how do we as humans, the rational ones, the humane beings, how do we expect to ever feel free and to not be tracked and to not be forced to comply into this and to that and all these things. If we're turning around and doing the same thing to lower living beings.

[Lucy]

So ironic.

[Cameron Waters]

I believe in the golden rule in that way. I think Jesus was onto something when he said that, and that it applies not only to how we treat each other, but how we treat animals. Jesus said, however you treat the least of these, you know.

[Lucy]

Yeah.

[Cameron Waters]

The last shall be first, first shall be last. He's the servant leader, the good shepherd.

[Lucy]

You really connected some dots for me, man. I never connected animal ag to big pharma like this before. This is mind blowing for me. I need, I need to look more into animal agriculture Right.

[Cameron Waters]

And that all ties back to that ritual system of the temples. Because I truly, in a way, see the priestly system of animal sacrifices, like the original Big Pharma. And the temple was like the bank of the day. It's where all the money came through. It was the center of the commerce in Jerusalem. It was the way most of the money was made. The military was there, like Jesus going and doing this. It says in Mark that he and his disciples actually scouted it out the night before. So they did recon. This was like a planned event.

[Lucy]

Wow.

[Cameron Waters]

And it says in Mark that they blocked people from bringing any merchandise. It says in the temple, they mean animals. That's the only kind of merchandise that was really being sold. So they blocked people from bringing animals in. Jesus comes in, disrupts the whole place, frees the animals that are in there. We're talking like thousands of people. Chaos. Cows running and sheeps running all around. And he's saying, this was supposed to be a house of prayer, but you've made it a den of murderers. Right. And imagine the equivalent of doing that then is like someone in one fell swoop disrupting the Vatican, the Federal Reserve, the military and Big Pharma, all in one swoop. Because what was that animal sacrificial system? It was what people did when they were sick or when they had ailments, leprosy, this. That they would go to the temple and make a sacrifice because they believe that was their sickness, had something to do with their sin. And so they would go sacrifice the animal to try to cleanse that. And so much of our systems that we are questioning today originate from that system.

[Lucy]

I could see why Netflix censored this. Now you got some powerful enemies. Yeah. You're exposing some major, major players.

[Cameron Waters]

Yeah. So we feel we're protected. But as you said. Yeah, just. This was supposed to be a Netflix original. And it was. One of the hardest decisions that we made was we filmed for about five and a half years, and then we started editing. And then Covid hit actually.

[Lucy]

Yeah.

[Cameron Waters]

And we were locked inside, you know, grinding away. And then we finally produced an edit and turned it over to Netflix. And they were like, we have a few notes. And we went back and forth with them as much as we could, and we ended up splitting amicably. Some of the previous films are still on Netflix, but they've got. I understand they've got probably shareholders and people they have to answer to. And so they wanted to make some edits that we didn't agree with. We didn't Feel it told the full story. We decided to back out and buy our rights back. They were. It was already a Netflix original. It was a straight shot to the platform, like the previous film, Seaspiracy, which talks specifically about overfishing and the fishing industry. But through the help of a lot of our supporters, we did a crowdfund and we bought the rights back from Netflix and went to theaters with it. The theater's actually censored a bit of it. I could see that the piece on the Red Heifer, the theater wouldn't allow us to put the theater releasing company didn't want us to put the Red Heifer information into the film.

[Lucy]

Interesting.

[Cameron Waters]

But now it's live and uncensored on our website, christspiracy.com and we're going to keep it there as long as we can. And we've got some fun things in the future of how we're going to just continue the conversation. It's only just beginning, really, with this film. Because we're not on Netflix, we get to release all of our extended interviews. So similar to, like your podcast conversations here, it's like we have, you know, hundreds of hours of podcasts with these really epic professors and psychologists and, you know, philosophers and everyone that we interviewed for the film. And we get to release all that content over time.

[Lucy]

I love it.

[Cameron Waters]

Doing it all pay it forward method right now just to make it accessible to everyone. So the mission is just to get the message out there and like you said, try to stay safe in the process.

[Lucy]

Yeah. You know, we'll link the documentary below. Guys, check it out. I watched it. It was great. And I like that you could control the speed, too. I'm a 2x type of guy.

[Cameron Waters]

You're a 2x guy?

[Lucy]

Yeah.

[Cameron Waters]

Wow. I can't imagine cry spiracy at 2x is. It already feels so fast.

[Lucy]

It was tough, but I had to watch the full thing to prepare for this, so I made it happen.

[Cameron Waters]

Cool.

[Lucy]

I'm used to it. You got to work your way up. You can't just do 2x overnight.

[Cameron Waters]

Totally.

[Lucy]

You got to do 1, 2 and then 1 5.

[Cameron Waters]

Totally. Do you ever, like, leave it on 2x for something that definitely shouldn't be that fast and it starts playing and like, like music.

[Lucy]

Certain pods. I can't do 2x because the guest is already talking, like, fast. If it's like Gary Vee or someone that talks fast. Yeah, Bench talks pretty fast. But usually I could handle it. Certain audiobooks that are like, high level, I gotta tone it back.

[Cameron Waters]

Wow.

[Lucy]

But I can usually hang at two hours.

[Cameron Waters]

Well, definitely. If you ever get some time, watch it again at regular speed.

[Lucy]

I will.

[Cameron Waters]

Because it's. It's very. If anything, it's an entertaining film. You may not agree with it, whoever is listening, but we've yet to see someone not be entertained by it because it's like getting shot out of a cannon. From the beginning, it just moves super fast. We go all around the world. Like I said, we're in car chases in India being chased down by the cattle mafia.

[Lucy]

Saw that one. You had a drone up there. You caught 70 cows being smuggled.

[Cameron Waters]

Exactly.

[Lucy]

Police didn't do anything.

[Cameron Waters]

We went to the world's largest animal public temple, animal sacrifice in Nepal, which was crazy. The God of my sacrifice, like you said, undercover at kosher farms and humane slaughterhouses to. Yeah. Joel Saladin and all these things. We're all around the world with this film, and there's a lot in there. And so what I've found is that people, when they watch it second, third time, it gets better and better each time because they're able to absorb more of the information. That's cool.

[Lucy]

I'll definitely give it another go. You also got a debate coming up.

[Cameron Waters]

Yeah.

[Lucy]

I don't know if we want to spoil who it's with, but when is that?

[Cameron Waters]

The 20th? In just a few days. Three days.

[Lucy]

Okay. So this will be out after. So I guess you could say who it is.

[Cameron Waters]

Yeah. Yeah. So I'm debating Wes Huff, who was recently on Rogan, recently debated Billy Carson.

[Lucy]

Yep.

[Cameron Waters]

Which, funny enough, like, yeah, I'm Billy Carson. He's a he. Cool dude, I'm sure. Super nice. There's things that I've seen him in the past, over the years that I would question myself, too. In fact, I saw him on your pod.

[Lucy]

He just came back on a few days ago.

[Cameron Waters]

Oh, he did? Yeah. I remember a while back, right. When I started following your content, he said kale almost killed him.

[Lucy]

Yeah, that was a vile one.

[Cameron Waters]

I went off in the comments a little bit because I'm like, come on, bro. Like, killer kale, seriously. But. But yeah. So Wes has had this kind of explosion of. Of interest and popularity because of that debate that he did with Billy and crazy synchronistic story of how, you know, I went on this podcast with this guy Aaron. Abke.

[Lucy]

I know Aaron. Yeah. You know, he's been on the show.

[Cameron Waters]

He's been on the show. So Aaron had me on a podcast that he's yet to release. Yet. He's. He's launching A new one called the Jesus Way.

[Lucy]

Nice.

[Cameron Waters]

Which is covering a lot of this material that we're talking about about this first century movement, the opposition to animal sacrifices and everything. But I went on with Aaron and then a few days later, Aaron's like, through a few different friends in conversation, he's like, hey, have you seen this Wesley guy? This is before the Billy debate.

[Lucy]

Oh, really?

[Cameron Waters]

And I'm like, oh, yeah, I have seen him. Oh, he's kind of debunking Aaron in this one video. And then Aaron's like, oh, yeah, he's actually wants to debate and he wants me to have someone join me because he's bringing a person. He's like, so will you come join me? So, yeah, I'm joining him for the debate. To debate this particular topic. I think Wes wants to debate some other things.

[Lucy]

Yeah. I wonder what his take on of this is.

[Cameron Waters]

I don't know that he's ever really. I've never heard talk about it unless in preparation for this debate. He's probably watched Christpiracy, maybe watched some of the content that maybe Aaron shared a little bit here and there about this, but Aaron's only just started scratching the surface on this. He spent, you know, a long time with his previous content talking about a variety of different things, but he started to hone in on this more. And like I said, he's about to launch this Jesus Way podcast. And I. I'm on like the first or second episode talking about conspiracy and all of that. But. But yeah, the timing is. Couldn't be more insane because we agreed to do it right before the Billy debate. We didn't know it was going to be so such a big deal.

[Lucy]

It's going to get a lot of views now.

[Cameron Waters]

So then the Billy debate exploded and obviously that went crazy. And then he did Joe Rogan and then pbd. Is he coming here? Are you going to try to get him?

[Lucy]

I think I hit him up. I don't think he responded. He's probably getting hit up.

[Cameron Waters]

I feel for him. I feel for him. It's got to be so, yeah. Stressful. He wasn't. You know, it seems to me that I can relate because I know what it's like to just be so you're like, I'm just obsessed with this topic. I just want to learn everything about it. And you start to put it out online because you're like, oh, this is cool. You know, like, I want other people to know. And if it catches fire, it's like, well, I really just wanted to spend time in the subject. And now I'm being asked to debate everyone. Everyone's condemning things that I'm doing or praising it to a level that it's like, hard to keep up with. So I'm sure he's going through a lot.

[Lucy]

Yeah, I hear Huberman talk about that a lot because there's a lot of people that are on social media all the time, but if you're an expert, you should focus the majority of your time studying and researching and then post as needed.

[Cameron Waters]

Yeah.

[Lucy]

But some people get caught up with the. The views and whatever, you know.

[Cameron Waters]

Yeah. And that's where I'm at. I mean, because of these fires with la, it actually like our account on Christpiracy, if. If I'm not making content, along with my partner who's working with me, no contents going out. And the fires just blew everything up for us. So we've actually been like silent for a minute. But that's why I wanted to share this bit of the fires today.

[Lucy]

I haven't heard that angle about it.

[Cameron Waters]

Yeah. So I don't know if you're able to push that out because that's.

[Lucy]

I. I literally haven't seen that angle at all.

[Cameron Waters]

Yeah. And I have some footage too, by the way. We'll throw a B roll.

[Lucy]

Yeah.

[Cameron Waters]

And I have this, this clip from the. In our D.C. of California, which is an environmental group with commercial fishermen talking about how we need to protect the smell. So maybe jump. The positioning that with Trump on Rogan saying, you know, the stupid fish or whatever he said. Yeah. Which again too. That's the irony. My. A big mission, besides just communicating this truth about Christianity, is also communicating the reality of animal agriculture to conservatives because it's been a diametrically opposed kind of position. Like most people who are conservative typically are like super anti vegan or think it's an agenda.

[Lucy]

A lot of hunters and. Yeah, a lot of people that eat meat, for sure. And a lot of Christians eat meat.

[Cameron Waters]

Yeah, exactly. But my position is, I think it's fundamentally aligned. Even more so in a lot of ways than say like a left position or an atheist position.

[Lucy]

Absolutely.

[Cameron Waters]

I think believing in some kind of creator disrespecting creatures would be disrespecting the creator. And as a conservative, like, take the animal ethics out of it. If you believe, you know, that the government should have the least amount of overreach as possible, then any conservative needs to look at subsidies for animal agriculture. It's unbelievable the amount of money that we're wasting and spending and you know, they believe in strong family units. All these animal families are being ripped apart. The babies are pro life. Is it just for humans or is it also for animals? And animals, Many animals present sentience at the level of say like a three to five year old.

[Lucy]

So I have heard that with chickens just now and cows even.

[Cameron Waters]

Right, right. I mean, pigs are super smart. Pigs are smarter than dogs.

[Lucy]

Wow.

[Cameron Waters]

So then it becomes an ethical argument of like, well, if they can, if, if they have that level of sentience and a really more so capacity to suffer, then is it right. Could a pro life type argument then extend to an animal where, you know, would we be okay with killing a baby? Because it's only got a certain level of Cynthia at this point?

[Lucy]

You know, it's an interesting conversation because certain countries, you know, they eat dogs and cats and like, over here we see that it's bad, but we, we think eating pigs and cows is fine.

[Cameron Waters]

Right? Yeah, it's all cultural. It's all cultural programming. We actually interviewed Mark Ching, who rescued dogs from over in, in China with the dog meat trade and everything, and he makes that connection in the film. It's one of the most powerful parts of the film, honestly, because I think everybody can relate to their dog or their cat or whatever at home. And that fundamental disconnect of the dog on my couch is to be loved and the pig on my plate is to be eaten is like, what is the real difference? You know, biologically speaking, there isn't one. And so the fact that we make that distinguishment is in its own way at the root of a really strong cognitive dissonance we have in our head. And it's again, if you don't care about animals and ethics and you just care about humans, maybe you're a biohacker and you want optimum brain performance. Brains and holistic thinking. Right. Left. Brain communication. All these things are conversations that people are having. Some of the greatest thinkers in history ultimately were vegetarian. Yeah. If you look up the who's who, whether they started that way or whether they ended up that way because they were thinking deeply. Tesla, you know, Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, all of these people, they see that fundamental connection between all sentient beings. And I think that there is something in the, in the brain, which science does show, that comes online from being able to make that connection because you're not compartmentalizing your brain.

[Lucy]

Right.

[Cameron Waters]

To with this kind of contradiction.

[Lucy]

Makes sense. Cameron, this has been real fun. I can't wait to film with you again one day. Any closing messages or where could people find you?

[Cameron Waters]

Yeah, definitely. Check out Christspiracy across all platforms. I'm at Cameron Waters with a K and Definitely go to ChristsPiracy.com to watch the film ASAP if you haven't. We all, we don't know how long it's going to be there. You never know these days with a film like this what could happen. So get there and watch that. It's totally free to watch with the opportunity to pay it forward. And yeah, we are only just beginning. There's other things in the works so stay tuned even beyond this film. Love it.

[Lucy]

And stay tuned for the debate. I can't wait to watch that man. We'll link everything below. Thanks for coming on.

[Cameron Waters]

Thanks bro.

[Lucy]

Yeah, thanks for watching guys. See you next time.

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