The Simple Heart w/ Wayne Hsiung

What happens when the full power of the state comes after you, for exposing nightmarish abuse at factory farms?  If you’re Kecia Doolittle or Matt Johnson, you fight back – and you win.  Kecia is a founder of Project Counterglow, a grassroots initiative to create a nationwide map of factory farms. Matt Johnson is a core organizer for the animal rights network Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), and le...

In August 2017, I received a phone call that changed my life. “Wayne, there are FBI agents here,” the voice said. “They’re searching for Lily.”  For years, DxE had been openly rescuing animals and daring the industry or government to prosecute us for rescuing dying animals from factory farms. We knew repression was going to come. What we didn’t know is that it would start with a multi-state hunt f...

In just 9 days, one of the most important trials in animal rights history will begin. My friend Matt Johnson faces a felony charge for saving the life of a sick baby pig, and exposing one of the most disturbing episodes of animal torture in recent memory: ventilation shutdown (VSD) at Iowa Select Farms, or ISF. The practice of VSD, which involves shutting down the vents in a building and pumping i...

Around the year 2004, I decided I was going to devote myself to an immense project: veganizing the University of Chicago. I had seen one too many slaughterhouse videos and was suffering from night terrors with images of animals being torn to pieces alive. And the U of C (which is what Chicago grads call the school) was a quirky place where people believed and did weird things. I was further convin...

I went into trial in North Carolina with big ambitions: arguing in court, for the first time in my life, that animals are not property, but living creatures with rights. But that came crashing to a halt in the first few minutes of my opening statement. The judge cut me off, ordered the jurors out of the courtroom, and threatened to remove me from representing myself (and possibly send me to jail)...

My best friend was born to kill. It was not her choice, and perhaps not her fault. But she has a history of violence that would make a serial killer squirm. There was the time she ripped open someone’s head and left their ear hanging from a string of skin. Or the time that she grabbed her victim’s throat so tightly that the screams went silent. It was like someone hit the mute button on a horror m...

Duncan Watts, the Stevens University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is a living legend. HIs paper, Collective Dynamics of Small-World Networks, is one of the most cited papers in the history of sociology. (There are Nobel Prize winners who have fewer citations in their career than that single paper by Duncan.) And while his name is not well known outside of academia, he has transform...

Today I’m in preliminary hearings in Sonoma County, California, relating to the mass open rescue of dozens of dying animals from some of the largest factory farms in the nation. In less than two weeks, I’ll face my first felony trial in Transylvania County, North Carolina, where I’m being prosecuted for seeking to protect a baby goat named Rain, who was sick and destined to be killed.  It can ofte...

Leighton Woodhouse is a journalist, video producer, and dear friend – and one of the sharpest people I know. Shant Mesrobian is a former Obama staffer who, along with Leighton, has become a key voice in what I call the “post-left” critique of the modern Democratic Party. You see, both Leighton and Shant come from classic leftist backgrounds: labor organizing, progressive journalism, etc. But they...

“It seems odd that we would just let the world burn.” That was the title for a piece Ezra Klein wrote for the New York Times a few months ago. And it captures a truth about our civilization’s trajectory. If we don’t act — and act urgently — all life on earth is at risk.  Yet, even with Democrats in power, action on climate change has been nonexistent. We are watching as the world burns.  But not a...

Soon the state will be presenting evidence against Priya Sawhney regarding an alleged “conspiracy” to burglarize and steal animals from some of the largest factory farms in the U.S., including Petaluma Poultry – the largest organic poultry producer in the nation.  All of the animals from Petaluma Poultry were unable to stand. Some had rotting, gaping wounds, including some so deep and necrotic tha...

Justin Marceau is an anomaly. He grew up in rural Montana, in a family that raised animals on their own property. Yet he is now a leading advocate for animal rights. He went to the Air Force Academy to become a pilot. Yet he went to Harvard Law School to study ways to challenge our government and now defends people who take direct action – breaking laws where necessary. But perhaps most curiously,...

It’s a strange time to be talking positively about sacrifice. Over the past year, so many people have lost their businesses, their communities, even their lives. And it seems absurd, perhaps even offensive, to draw something good from that sacrifice. But that’s exactly what we need to do, on both a personal and collective level, to make progress. And Matt Johnson is one of the best people I can th...

Almira Tanner is the Lead Organizer of Direct Action Everywhere (DxE). At first glance, she might not be who you picture when you hear “leader of radical animal liberation network.” Growing up in verdant Vancouver, Canada, she went straight from kindergarten through grad school, finished as valedictorian of her undergraduate class, never stepped out of line, and—God forbid—never had any run-ins wi...

Hadar Aviram—legal scholar, author, and human and animal rights activist—is the Thomas Miller Professor at UC Hastings College of the Law. She holds law and criminology degrees from Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a Ph. D. in Jurisprudence and Social Policy from UC Berkeley, where she studied as a Fulbright Fellow and a Regents Intern. Hadar specializes in criminal justice and civil rights from...

Randy Shaw is the co-founder of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic, author of five books, and has been one of the Bay Area's leading community organizers on tenants’ rights, housing, and homelessness for the past 40 years. Randy, in short, is a fountain of knowledge and knows what works when it comes to solving one the nation's most pressing problems. In this episode, Wayne and Randy explore the roots...

Moby transcends simple classification: a punk who became a breakthrough 90s electronica DJ and producer; a mainstream and highly successful Grammy Awards-nominated musician who prefers to be alone and out of the limelight; an introspective and spiritually-connected philosopher who is...an evidence-driven data wonk. Moby and Wayne Hsiung unpack these contradictions, exploring Moby's tumultuous and...

Glenn Greenwald is the now-legendary journalist and Pulitzer Prize recipient who broke the Edward Snowden story, documented in the Academy Award-winning film Citizenfour, showing how the U.S. and British governments were spying on ordinary citizens. Glenn is also the co-founder of online media publication The Intercept and, in 2019, published leaked messages that broke a watershed corruption scand...

Who says you can't change the world? Meet the people who are. Wayne Hsiung, law professor-turned-grassroots animal rights activist and multi-state felony defendant, uncovers the people behind the political, the unexplored personal stories of social change. Intimate interviews with world-renowned journalists, musicians, filmmakers, community leaders, and all stripes of the politically active. Chang...