"I think that's often the solution when feeling sort of bogged down in the issues of our day is when you zoom out and you look at sort of the whole arc of change, you can sort of get inspired that, yeah, we've come a long way." - Monica Murphy

Bill Wasik is the editorial director of The New York Times Magazine and Monica Murphy is a veterinarian and writer. Their latest book, Our Kindred Creatures: How Americans Came to Feel the Way They Do About Animals, comes out today, April 23rd.

It's a book about moral change and a moral revolution, one that took place from the 1860s to the 1890s in the United States. Over those three decades, the way we treated animals completely changed. It was the time of the birth of the ASPCA, of many SPCAs, of the anti-vivisection movement, and of the first animal shelters.

It was a time of massive change.

Even though I think most people who listen to this podcast know that we need a much larger moral revolution in terms of how we treat animals, this book gave me so much hope that it can actually be done.

Please listen, share and read Our Kindred Creatures. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/634494/our-kindred-creatures-by-bill-wasik-and-monica-murphy/

“Wouldn't it be amazing if you went into Nike Town and the same pair of shoes or the same style [but]each pair was different because it had been grown and was not the result of a plastic, you know, a plastic polymer or an animal that had been so heavily finished that they all look the same. That, or me, would be mind blowing, where you and I could have the same handbag, but they're from the same brand, in the same shape, it's the exact same model, but the material is slightly different on every single one, like the leaves on a tree.” – Suzanne Lee

Suzanne Lee is the Founder & CEO of BIOFABRICATE, a global network that serves the needs of bio innovators, which are material makers, consumer brands and investors. BIOFABRICATE is where design meets biology.

Suzanne is a pioneer in this space. She started growing materials from microbes for the fashion industry in 2022, coining the term 'Biocouture™'.

She is also the author of Fashioning the Future: Tomorrow’s Wardrobe. She is a special advisor to Parley For The Oceans, The Mills Fabrica and Fashion for Good on biomaterials, a TED Senior Fellow, and a Launch Material Innovator - an initiative of NASA, Nike, USAID and the US State Department. Formerly Suzanne was the Chief Creative Officer of Modern Meadow, a biomaterials start-up in New York (2014-2019).

“He called me into his office and he said, ‘you see that picture above my desk?’ I said, ‘yes.’ It kind of looked like an animal that reminded me of a squirrel. He said, ‘that is a lemur that we think is extinct in the wild. If you can, please go to Madagascar and find out if it's extinct or not.’” – Patricia Wright

Dr. Patricia Wright is an anthropologist, a conservationist, and a professor at Stony Brook University in New York, and she's probably the world's leading expert on lemurs.

There are over 100 species of lemurs, which are prosimians - a type of primate and they only exist on the island of Madagascar.

Patricia spends half her time, six months a year in Madagascar studying lemurs, and has done so since the 80s, when she discovered a new species of lemur, the Golden Bamboo Lemur, and she also established Ranomafana National Park. It is almost an understatement to say that Patricia is a trailblazer— she has done the impossible again and again.

Her story is will astound you.