"The cartoonist makes people see things." Cartoonist, educator, and comics researcher Julian Lawrence has been proving that for decades. We met during a virtual coffee chat, and I knew right away he had to come on the show.

Julian has been vegan since 2000 and is a senior lecturer in comics and graphic novels at Teesside University in the UK. He created the Green Kid educational comic series and Drippy the Newsboy, a teardrop who, in middle age, has swapped reading newspapers for doom-scrolling. We talk about why his students are rejecting AI, and why comics might hold up better than other creative fields. We dig into what to say when a non-vegan asks, "Do you respect my dietary choice?" We also cover his students' graphic-novel reimagining of the Bayeux Tapestry, the French roots of words like "beef" and "mutton," and his Vancouver band July Fourth Toilet, which had more than 50 members and never played the same show twice.

And a first in the history of the show: Julian plays ukulele live in our session. Yes, really.

After 230+ episodes, I have a new winner for the most interesting vegan origin story I've heard on this show. Dominick Thompson grew up on the west side of Chicago. He broke up dog fights as a kid, refused chicken wings at age eight because they looked like "little bitty arms," and then spent years dealing drugs to get his family out of poverty. That lifestyle landed him in federal prison, and in his first week there he got down on his knees, remembered that childhood moment, and gave up meat for good. That was about 25 years ago.

We talk about how a chess game ended in 40 nights in solitary, how Dom placed in the top ten at prison lift-offs while trading his meat for his cellmates' carbs, and how he went from ex-felon to healthcare executive to one of Instagram's earliest high-profile vegan men. We get into what social media has turned into, why being a real human online matters more than ever, and how his book Eat What Elephants Eat got its name.

Plus, Dom's story is now a feature film. Beyond the Walls is slated for release in winter 2027.

Dotsie Bausch went from hospitalization due to an eating disorder to standing on the Olympic podium as a fully vegan athlete. She was the oldest in her discipline to ever take the Olympic podium, and she gained ten pounds of muscle for the switch from road to track cycling (all powered by plants, of course).

We trace that arc, then get into how an anti-dairy ad that the dairy industry got pulled from NBC sparked her nonprofit Switch4Good, and the fight she's leading now to get plant milk into US school lunches (including the wild stat that nearly a third of school milk cartons get thrown out unopened). Switch4Good ran a successful campaign to get Starbucks to drop its plant milk uncharge, and runs many initiatives for kids, college students, athletes, pediatricians, and more.