Ramnani: Welcome to share it with me. I'm your host, Doctor Sapna Ramnani. This guest is making a welcome return to the podcast. Jamie Woodhouse is the founder of Sentientism, a worldview that encourages us to use evidence, reason, and compassion for all sentient beings when thinking about some of life's biggest ethical questions. In his first appearance, Jamie introduced us to the ideas behind Sentientism and explored what it means to extend moral consideration beyond our own species. This time, we take the conversation even further. We discuss whether a vegan lifestyle is really more affordable, why supermarkets market animal products the way they do, the hidden costs of modern food production, and whether consumers can drive meaningful change through the choices they make. Our conversation then broadens into much bigger questions. We explore human suffering alongside animal suffering. Why societies can become desensitized to violence, where their compassion has limits. How children develop empathy, and what the rapid rise of artificial intelligence could mean if machines were ever capable of experiencing consciousness or suffering. Whether you agree with Jamie's views or not, this is a thoughtful conversation that challenges assumptions and encourages us to examine how we make ethical decisions in an increasingly complex world. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Jamie Woodhouse.

Woodhouse:Hey, Sapna. How are you?

Ramnani: Hi, Jamie. I'm fine. How are you? Very good. Thanks. Doing really well and looking forward to another conversation. Particularly now we've met in person as well. It was lovely to actually meet you in real life. Yeah, it was great meeting you as well. Likewise. Thank you so much for your time today. I am looking forward to this conversation. Yeah. Me too. We have some interesting topics to discuss. I'm not sure how much of an expert I can be, but I have opinions so I will share them. Okay. So are you ready to begin? Yes, absolutely. Let's go.

Ramnani:Have you always been a vegan?

Woodhouse:No, I've been vegan for about seven or eight years now. And before that I was vegetarian for maybe another twenty years. I think I went vegetarian in my early mid twenties. Yeah, I'm supposed to remember the date, but I always forget. I should look it up.

Ramnani:So what made you vegetarian?

Woodhouse:I went vegetarian originally because of a concern for non-human animals. I really cared about their interests, their suffering, the lives they wanted to lead. And I could see, at least to some degree, the problems of animal agriculture. If you imagine what happens in a slaughterhouse. It's just one of the most obviously unethical things you can imagine. And it was partly prompted by my sister, who was vegetarian before me as well. So she helped me not dodge the topic. But you then might ask, okay, why did you go vegetarian and not vegan? Why did it take so long to go vegan? I think it's because in a way, my ethics haven't really changed. They're based on this sort of sentientism worldview, which is about using evidence and reason to understand the world and having compassion for all sentient beings. And in a way, I felt like that when I was in my twenties, too. But going vegetarian was about an ethical step. But I didn't step all the way because of a lot of social norms and psychological problems. In my mind, that stopped me following the logic to where it should really go. So I think with vegetarianism, there's something very visceral about actually putting parts of the victim their flesh into your mouth. That makes it very easy to turn away. But when you think about some of the other forms of animal exploitation, whether that's in the dairy industry or the egg industry or the leather industry or in other forms of exploitation, because you're not actually consuming a piece of the victim. You can convince yourself that maybe these products can be produced in a way that doesn't cause harm or death. And so it was a combination of that, really an intellectual failing on my part to think these things through clearly. I deliberately avoided the topic because I knew where it would lead if I took these ideas seriously and followed these facts where they led. But it was also a social thing too. I think I was scared, really, even going vegetarian at that time in the work environment I was in and with my friends and family, it was seen as quite weird, and going vegan would have been seen as even more unusual. So it was almost like a social calibration and a lack of courage really, of saying, okay, it's going vegetarian is a step, it's a step in the right direction. But I can't let myself think about going further. I look back on it with deep frustration, but also empathy for myself because I'm not a bad person. I'm not a stupid person. I think thinking about that history helps me understand where normal humans are today too. And hopefully I can do that with empathy.

Ramnani:What did your family think?

Woodhouse:So I was very lucky. I think my family was very supportive when I went vegetarian, and they've been supportive when I've transitioned to veganism as well. And quite a few of my family have gone down that path too. My dad is now fully vegan, as is his wife, and my sister is vegan. Quite a few other people in and around the family have gone down that path too. So I've been very lucky. But that is another real constraint for many other people. And I've interviewed a lot of people for my Sentientism podcast who actually had this ethical realization very young as a child. They may have even been four or five years old, or ten or eleven or twelve or a teenager. And they had this ethical realization that the chicken they cared about, they saw on TV was actually the same as the chicken that their parents were serving to them on a plate, and they rejected it. They said, look, this is outrageous, right? Even as a child, they could see that directly. But because of the powerful social norms that constrain most of us in most societies around the world, children aren't allowed to carry through their ethical convictions. So very rapidly, parents and family and friends will steer them or even explicitly constrain them back to consumption of animal products. And for some brave people, despite all of that, they push through and have the courage and try and do it anyway. That's extremely hard for kids. Others will come back to it later on, and when they have more control over their own lives, they will rediscover this ethical revelation and act on it. But for most people, that compassionate response is essentially crushed out of them by family, friends, and society. And it never re-emerges. And they bury it with cognitive dissonance and wishful thinking and believing the explicit disinformation that's pumped out by the industry that we're all desperate to believe. It's a depressing pattern, really, but I was very lucky. I had a generally supportive family around me who allowed me to take these decisions.

Ramnani:Are there specific vegan products you avoid because they are too expensive?

Woodhouse:There are, and I know you're interested in talking about is it more expensive being vegan or not? And the simple answer is, in general, it's actually a lot cheaper to live as a vegan. And you can see why. Because most of the poorest countries around the world are more plant based, and the products they consume, they will use whole food plant based staples like rice and beans and pulses and lentils and maize and soy. And consumption of animal products is quite rare in those countries, as it has been quite rare through history. So that would lead you to assume that actually plant based living is generally a lot cheaper. And it is. But as you imply, if you switch from classical Western diet somewhere, like here in the UK or Europe or the US, a standard diet, and you just switch your animal products for the expensive branded alternatives. If you go from a cheaply produced bacon that is made out of the flesh of a pig and you switch to an expensive branded alternative bacon, you are going to spend more. Our family enjoys quite a few of those products, and we do have some of them. But yeah, they're generally still at the moment a bit more expensive than the animal alternatives. So from a cost perspective, they don't make too much sense, and I think that gap will close and own branded alternatives are already much closer to the animal products, with some products there already at what's called price parity. And because of the inbuilt inefficiency of the animal agriculture industry, if we can wind back some of the subsidies, I think ultimately the plant based alternatives will end up being cheaper than the animal products. But for now, the best route to saving money on your grocery bill is not to find a vegan burger, or a vegan bacon or a vegan alternative, this or that, particularly not a branded one. It's basically to switch to all of the classic, wonderful range of traditional plant based whole foods that are extremely cheap. That's true pretty much wherever you live.

Ramnani:How much do you think somebody can save if they become vegan?

Woodhouse:There's been some really interesting studies about this in the US and in Portugal and the UK, loads of different places around the world, and the simple answer seems to be that if you don't go for the branded alternatives and you switch to more whole food, plant based product, you can save between twenty and forty percent of your cost per meal. Before we talked, I looked up one of the studies that was done by Kantar in the UK, and this is probably one of the strongest stories. They're not always this big a gap, but they in twenty twenty did a big analysis of people's shopping baskets and what they ate and worked out that the average omnivore meal cost one pound seventy seven and the average vegan meal cost one pound six. So that's a forty percent saving, right? There's another one which suggested a range between twenty one and thirty four percent cheaper, which is done by the Oxford Martin School and The Lancet. There was one in the US done by PCR that suggested a nineteen percent saving. But as we said before, if someone just switches to the branded alternatives, your grocery basket might actually get a bit more expensive. But generally somewhere between twenty and forty percent is the saving you can go for, which is pretty powerful change given the cost of living crisis that many people are struggling with today. Amazing.

Ramnani:So do you think supermarkets are doing enough to cater to customers who follow a vegan diet?

Woodhouse:No, never. They are moving. So if you go into a supermarket today in many countries. I was in France a while ago on a family holiday, and you wouldn't think of France as being a place that's necessarily vegan friendly, given the stereotypes about their culture. But they had aisles and aisles of vegan alternative products and vegan milks and vegan dairy products. It's shifting around the world, and the same is certainly true in the UK and many parts of the US. You can see that even when they put plant based alternatives in their supermarkets, they're still not using all of the tools they use to sell those products strongly. So it's not just about having the product available. It's also about using your marketing resources, about your pricing, about your positioning and your merchandising in the store and supermarkets to do a lot more by actually taking seriously the marketing of these products in the same way as they do when they're marketing animal agriculture products, too. So we should have more plant based products. Supermarkets should concentrate them on the more strongly they should be using plant based products as the loss leader, not chicken or animal based products. So there's so much more they can do. And while it's good to add more plant based products ultimately ethically and for environmental considerations, it's not about adding more plant based options. It's actually about ending the production of the animal based products. That's ultimately where we want to go. So until we've achieved that and we get to supermarkets that have no animal exploitation products in them whatsoever, unfortunately I won't be happy enough. So we have a long way to go. But they're making moves and they're making progress.

Ramnani:So why do you think supermarkets are not marketing their vegan products?

Woodhouse:I think it's partly habit. I think it's partly that they're also worried about these social norms. The animal agriculture industry itself has an outsized political power and they have an outsized cultural power, which is completely disproportionate with their contribution to the economy in most Western developed countries. And it's completely out of proportion with the number of people who work in those industries, but they have enormous cultural power. And so I think the supermarkets are a little bit afraid and a bit worried about that, and why they can see the shifting towards plant based products. They're also intrinsically conservative. They don't want to take too much risk, and they like to stick with the things they know work and the consumers buy and the industries and politicians support. So there is also a little bit of cultural fear that I think is slowing them down. And it's frustrating because I think we've moved beyond just expecting corporations to do what makes them money, right? I think most people today would say that they should at least have some value, some sort of ethics. They should care about the climate. They should care about non-human animals. They should care about human rights. We expect they should at least care about those things as well as profits. And you can see the development of things like ESG, environmental, social and governance reporting and funds and investments that are selecting companies that at least pretend to care about values and ethics as well. I'd expect them to be doing more in this space. If you aren't just talking about values and ethics because your marketing department thinks it's clever, but you actually are trying to reflect the values of your customers, of your staff, of your managers, of your shareholders, of your stakeholders, all of whom are human beings with values and ethics, who generally care about non-human animals. Then you should be pushing harder and you should be pushing faster. And I think ultimately that will work commercially for them too. I think there's a real value for a corporation in not just waiting till consumer opinion changes and then following, they can actually lead and drive. And I think many of the most successful corporations have done exactly that. They haven't waited for consumers to jump on board. They've actually set a direction and pushed for it. So I'd like to see more supermarkets take that type of leading role with this ethical imperative and a climate Concern driving. So veganism is often promoted as a compassionate choice. Yet many vegan products contain palm oil, which causes large scale environmental destruction and suffering to animals from a sentientism perspective. How should we think about moral responsibility in cases where our ethical choices still inadvertently harm other sentient beings? We should take them very seriously. Sometimes, if you're talking to people online or just in public discourse, there can be this sense that vegans think veganism is like some sort of moral perfection. Once you're vegan, the job is done. There are no more problems. The world is a better place, and it is a deeply important step because we are boycotting the explicit and direct exploitation, torture and killing of very obviously sentient beings. So it is a really important step. I think it should be like a moral baseline that everybody should achieve, but it does not mean the job is done because every decision we take and every decision, we don't take all action and inaction has effects, and many of those things cause harm. And we should take all of those seriously as well. The example you mentioned there about palm oil, which is in all sorts of different products, that has environmental impacts, it has biodiversity loss impacts we should take seriously and push to try and mitigate and reduce those as far as we reasonably can. Even the production of plant based crops causes some harms as well. There are non-human animals harmed in the farming of crops, although it's vastly fewer than in animal agriculture, partly because in animal agriculture you actually have to feed about ten times the amount of plants through the animal to get the same nutrients as if we just ate the plants themselves. So I completely agree. Being vegan doesn't mean the problem has been fixed. Those other harms still exist, and we should work to try and reduce them. And there's some really interesting movements that are doing exactly that. So there's a movement in the agricultural space called Veganic agriculture, which is saying it's not enough just to switch to a plant based agricultural system. We also need to mitigate the harms of even the plant based agricultural systems. So we need to rethink how we use pesticides and fertilizers and the environmental impact. And we don't put animal bone, meal and blood into the soil as a nutrient source. And the fact that compost, again, it's much more effective if you compost the plants directly rather than you put plants through an animal and then use the animal manure as the compost because you've lost the nutrients from the compost in the same way as you lose nutrients from the food by going through the trophic chains. So that's a long answer to a very good question. But yeah, just switching to a plant based diet does not mean the problem is over, because even veganism recognises there are other forms of exploitation we should work against. And Sentientism absolutely says that every impact on any sentient being, good or bad, should matter to us, and we should continuously work to try and have less bad impacts and have more good impacts, and that work will never be done and we will never achieve some state of perfection. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep trying to do better.

Ramnani:Do you think most people are aware of this?

Woodhouse:I think a lot of people are. I think many vegans are. I think quite a few vegans might feel defensive about these subjects because when we discuss them amongst other people who are vegan, it's clear that we want to do better. We want to go further. Ideas like veganic agriculture and mitigating the harms of palm oil growing soybeans, because often it's used as a distraction. So that's causing deforestation in Latin America. And it's true that a lot of soy production is driving deforestation, but seventy eight percent of the global soy crop is fed to farmed animals. And when you feed soy beans and oils to farmed animals, you lose ninety to ninety five percent of their nutritional value. That's the food waste we should really be worried about. So the deforestation that's been driven globally around the world, that's still going on today and that in the UK, we just got done hundreds of years ago, right. I mean, the landscapes we admire as beautiful countryside are basically should be forest, but they've been denuded by sheep and cattle farming and by feed crop production to feed those farmed animals. So yeah, again, I'm starting to rant, but that's partly why I think you might sometimes get a bit attention from vegans if we talk about some of these other problems, because their emotional response is those are serious problems. Those are real problems and we should work on them. But the most effective way of addressing the problems, even in plant based agriculture, is to stop eating the animals and stop supporting animal agriculture. If meat and dairy becomes more expensive due to carbon taxes or ethical sourcing, how do you think consumers would respond? Well, I hope they will respond by taking the even bigger opportunity that's already there today of reducing the money they spend on their grocery budgets and their food by switching to plant based options. I would love to believe that more of our consumption decisions are driven by ethics, but a lot of them are driven by cultural values, and they are driven by price and they are driven by taste and they are driven by convenience. So if we can make these products cheaper, more available, more socially acceptable, and if animal agriculture products can become more expensive and less available and less socially acceptable, I think we could see the change happen quite quickly. So I'd like to see that sort of shift happen, as animal products probably are naturally getting more expensive as they should be. And one of the other interesting dynamics that might make animal products more expensive over time is that there are currently very heavily subsidized. So an enormous amount of the tax revenue that governments collect from us, you and me and in the US and in Europe actually goes to fund animal agriculture. And many more people are looking at that and going, well, if this industry is brutally exploitative of animals and runs large scale slaughterhouses and kills hundreds of billions or maybe even trillions of sentient beings, And if it is brutally, environmentally destructive, both locally through pollution, through land use, through deforestation, but globally through climate emissions. And if it has negative health impacts, both through dietary implications, but also through zoonotic disease and antimicrobial resistance. And I could go on. Right. If this industry has all of those impacts, why the hell is my tax money being used to subsidize these corporations? What is going on? Right. And I think that's a question that is being asked by people across the political spectrum, because people more towards the left or the center who might be concerned about the environment and the ethics, would be questioning why we're subsidizing big animal agriculture, just as we're still subsidizing big oil. But even people more towards the right end of the spectrum, who often also have a deep compassion for non-human animals, will be questioning why big governments are funding corporations that should be left to stand on their own two feet in the free market. So I struggle to find any reason why we should continue to subsidize these industries when we actually already today have a much more healthy, much cheaper, much more available food system that's running at scale on the planet. Because even today's current plant agricultural system, if we just pointed it towards creating food for humans instead of wasting most of it by feeding it through animals, even today's planetary plant based food system would have enough capacity to feed fifteen or twenty billion humans. We have so much plant based food, so the system and the solution exists today as more people realize that and maybe those subsidies drop again, the gap in price will open up even further and hopefully accelerate this process. And you'll see some of the organizations who are involved in the animal industries, they are already seeing this coming. And some of the biggest companies like JBS are switching some of their production and some of their investments to plant based protein production as well. So it doesn't mean necessarily these companies have to disappear, but they absolutely do need to switch their industry from animal exploitation to plant based agricultural systems. And if they do that, they'll be successful. And if they don't, they will cease to exist. Do you think most people are aware of this? No, I don't think they are. The reasons people aren't aware of these facts is one, because we don't want to know them, because we want to just keep doing what is socially comfortable for us and what we've always done. So we deliberately avoid finding out about these things. We want to be deceived. We want to be conned. We want to be ignorant. And then on the other side, you have the industries themselves who are extremely keen to deceive us. They want to hide the slaughter and they want to hide what is done to the non-human animals. They want to do that legally and in marketing terms, they want to present a happy cow happy pig image of the industry. They will do things like welfare washing, where they will put stickers on their labels to pretend that they treat their animals humanely, whereas the word humane means treating someone with kindness and compassion, which is not consistent with what goes on in a slaughterhouse. So you have this interesting mix of an industry who's driving disinformation and trying to deceive us, and a population who largely want to be deceived. So these basic facts about what happens in a slaughterhouse, how cows get pregnant in the first place, why they need to be pregnant to produce milk, what happens to the male calves? All of these stories about the process are largely hidden. The understanding about feed conversion ratios, this idea that as you go up different biological trophic chains from photosynthesis and plants taking energy from the sun to animals consuming plants to us consuming animals, at each stage, you are losing efficiency. And the efficiency difference between plant and animal agriculture can be four or five times up to twenty twenty five times a loss of inefficiencies. That food waste problem about the sheer radical waste of feed conversion ratios is also not understood. The land use impact is not understood. It's about half of all the habitable land on the planet is used for agriculture. The vast majority of that is used for feed crops and animal agriculture, but it produces a tiny amount of the actual nutrition and protein we need. So whether it's the facts of what animal agriculture does, its environmental impacts locally or globally, or these basic understandings about how food systems work. Yeah, most people don't want to know. And the industry certainly doesn't want to tell us. According to the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board, H.M. Treasury estimates that opening up the US led market could bring about one hundred million pounds to the UK economy over the next five years.

Ramnani:Given the current economic crisis, how do advocates of vegetarianism and veganism justify opposing such a significant financial opportunity?

Woodhouse:So I'm generally in favour of free trade globally because it helps the country and the people that are producing things because they get more revenue. It helps the people buying the things because you can get cheaper and better stuff. So generally, I think trade is quite a good idea. And obviously it's facing lots of challenges now with Trump's tariffs and other countries thinking about a more isolationist approach that cuts them off from the global market to some degree. And there are concerns about war and security and about climate change and so many other factors affecting it. But I think generally trade is a good thing. The problem comes when the trade is in products that are intrinsically unethical, because then the trade is enabling more of the bad ethical stuff to happen. So the global trade market in animal products enables the animal agriculture industry, which just enables even more billions of land animals and trillions of aquatic animals to be tortured and killed. So that's one space where I'm not in favor of trade because I don't think that trade should exist. It can also have some interesting side effects, because in quite a few countries around the world, there are active movements trying to, if not end animal agriculture, at least make it slightly less horrific. So there are welfare initiatives that are trying to get pigs out of gestation crates, or stop shrimps having their eye stalks cut off so they reproduce more, or debeaking of hens or the maceration of male chicks. There are all sorts of different campaigns that are running with different levels of success to try and make animal agriculture, even while it continues to run just slightly less horrific. And one of the difficulties is if you live in a country like the UK, that still has absolutely awful standards, but they are better than those in the US, believe it or not, even if you improve the welfare standards in the UK, if you then sign a trade deal with a country like the United States that has even worse animal welfare standards, what happens is that your local industry struggles to compete, and the worst welfare standard products from the US are just imported. So from a consumer perspective, if you don't care about the ethics at all, yes, there's a benefit there because you might get your bacon or your beef or your flesh or whatever. It is slightly cheaper, but actually you're undermining the legal protective stance around welfare improvements in your own country and undermining your own country's farming industry. So that's another thing to watch for with trade is trade isn't always good because it can lead to a race to the bottom, to the most unethical, to the most environmentally destructive product if they are cheaper. And trade can enable that regardless of what the people in your country want to achieve, trade can undermine that if you're not careful. So just as an interesting example, there's actually some campaigns working at the moment where vegan campaign groups are teaming up with UK farmers to enforce standards that will make sure that when we import animal products from outside of the UK, they have to at least meet the UK animal welfare standards. So it's a really interesting example of where both the UK animal agriculture industry doesn't want to be undercut by these even more horrific products, and the vegans certainly don't want that to happen either. So there's an interesting example of vegans and farming communities teaming up together to try and push the government to enforce import standards that would ensure that our own animal welfare regulations, weak as they are, aren't undercut.

Ramnani:Do you think this will work?

Woodhouse:I think the campaign might work because if it was just vegans and animal advocates campaigning for it, I really think we'd struggle. But if you team up with the UK farming industry, which is enormously powerful politically. That's a powerful combination. So I think that campaign has got a good chance of winning.

Ramnani:So my next question is, as you know, about two hundred thousand people are dead in Gaza. The world looks away. Why are we so numb to mass death and consent to enter?

Woodhouse:Some really cut through that indifference. It should do because one of the essential things about us is that every sentient being matters. And that means all of the humans, regardless of where they live, who they are, what their worldview is, what they look like, how intelligent they are. The list goes on. Their gender, their sexuality, their nationality, their religion, their worldview. So it should cut through that. It is unashamedly universal that every sentient being matters and should matter seriously. So in theory, it should cut through. I think the problem is really analogous to some of the issues we're talking about before that us humans, we might like to pretend we are truth seeking, and we might like to pretend we're driven by ethics and morality and we can aspire to that. But primarily we're driven by our own evolved psychology, and we're driven very powerfully by our own social norms and also by the information environment we live in. So that does lead you to positions where otherwise decent people will look at the situation in Gaza or the situation in Ukraine, or what China is doing with the Uyghur Muslims or the situation in Sudan. And I could list off many other horrific things that are happening around the world. The oppression in Iran, anyway, can either just ignore those things or be ignorant of them, or deliberately avoid those topics or misinterpret what's happening in quite radical ways. That means that you lose a compassionate connection with the victims of these situations, and that might be because they've slipped into in or out group thinking. It might be because they've slipped into Conspiracism, which has told them lies about why these conflicts or why these oppressions are happening. It might be because of confirmation bias or wishful thinking. It might be because they might see these ideas in theory, but because of a weakness of will, are they just for whatever reason, can't bring themselves to act? So I think whether we're looking at problems of non-human animal exploitation or some of the horrific things that us humans do to each other, quite often there are common psychological and social reasons why we're not grappling with these problems clearly enough and why we're not consistent when we do. And in a way, that's part of the limitation, really, of something like Sentientism or any worldview, because the science and the philosophy is actually quite straightforward and very simple. Even five or six year olds can understand evidence, reason, and compassion for all sentient beings. And I know that because I run workshops with them in schools. But that isn't really the problem. The dark heart of the problem is in our evolved human psychology, which evolved for a very different world than we're living in today. And because we're social creatures and we're driven by social norms, and those social norms can help us be good. And they can also lead us to very, very dark places. But my hope is that focusing on ideas like worldviews can help us challenge our own psychology, challenge social norms, challenge disinformation and conspiracism and fabrications. We'll never get there perfectly, but at least aspire to being more rational and more compassionate and more universal in the way we do that. And that should help us see situations like that in Gaza more clearly and then to act. So do you think there is enough of an outcry from people about suffering, whether human or animal? No, there isn't. And it's sometimes it's understandable because many people don't have the capacity or the power or the influence or the time or the resources to think that much or act that much about their impact in the wider world. And that's completely understandable that people need to focus on themselves and their families and the situations they're in. But for many other people, they don't speak out because they've avoided the topic or they've ignored the topic, or they don't want to dig into the topic or because they've misunderstood the topic. And if they fixed those things, I think they would speak out. But even many people who see things reasonably clearly and compassionately still don't act. And I think it's because many people underestimate their own power. And I would encourage everybody to not just be defeatist or give up or say, well, this is a systemic problem or a global problem. What could I do as one individual? It's true that our own power is limited, and we can't expect to solve some of these big problems by ourselves. But there are things we can do, particularly when we work together, and there are so many different dimensions of our power as well. You can create content as you're doing with your podcast and share it with the world and hopefully influence people. We can engage on social media often. That can be frustrating and hollow and awful, but it can have a positive influence if we do it in the right way. We can talk to people in our lives, but then we can think about the institutions we can influence. Of course we can vote and we can write to our representatives or our MPs, or go to visit them and explain our view and apply pressure to them. We can obviously apply pressure to corporations through our purchasing choices and our decisions, and through boycotts and through letter writing campaigns and through protests outside their buildings. You can work with other NGOs and charities to drive campaigns. You can volunteer, you can donate money. And in almost every aspect of our life, there are things we can do in concert with others to actually speak out and make a difference, even if that difference is small, because those small differences can then add up. And in a way, that's really what solidarity is about, is working together to try and help those who are oppressed or victims. And we can do that, whether those victims are human or not. My main message is be understanding that many people just don't have the capacity or the time or the power to really do that much. But if we're lucky enough to be in that position, don't underestimate our own power. We can do more than we think, and doing that can be good for us as well. You feel better by doing it. There's some interesting research recently that shows that actually helping others is better for your own state of anxiety and well-being than doing self-care, right? So instead of just taking up meditation or relaxing or going for a walk in nature, these are wonderful things to do. Talking to friends, they're important things to do. But maybe the most impactful thing we can do for our own well-being is actually try and make the world a better place, too. So I haven't dug into the research. I don't know how solid it is, but I like the idea. Right? It can be good for you to help others and to help. The world isn't sentient, isn't really only for people in countries not living through famine or extreme suffering.

Ramnani:Is it a philosophy for the privileged?

Woodhouse:I think it can be a philosophy for everybody, because I would argue that even if you're in a situation which can be which is very challenging and very tough, understanding reality accurately by using evidence and reason is going to give you your best chance of shaping a good life for you or your family. And I would argue that having compassion for all sentient beings is a stance that pretty much everybody can take. And I think if you actually look at some of the most challenging parts of the world and some of the poorest parts of the world. They are culturally closer to a sentientist compassion for all sentient beings than those rich and lucky people like us in the industrialized West. Right. If you look at ideas of ahimsa in the dharmic religions, if you look at the practices of many indigenous cultures around the world, they have a intuitive, sometimes animistic compassion for non-humans that is much richer than our modern industrialized Western culture. So in a way, I think it might even be the other way around that people in the toughest situations and the poorest parts of the world are probably closer to a sentient worldview than the industrialized West. It's more that we need to learn the lessons the other way around rather than suggest it. But I do think it is a genuinely universal worldview, and it can be. One of the fortunate things is that some people will think that there's maybe a trade off between concern for non-human animals and for us human animals, and very often there is no trade off. There is no dilemma. Being more compassionate about non-human animals is good for us humans, too. And we've talked about some of the reasons already, because, for example, if we could transition to end animal agriculture, that would be an enormous step forward on mitigating the problems of climate change, of air pollution, of water pollution, of deforestation and biodiversity loss through rapacious land use. Animal agriculture has been one of the driving forces behind colonialism and imperialism over the centuries, and is still driving it today. So I think just as one example, if we transition from an animal agricultural system to a plant based agricultural system, we would see an enormous swathe of benefits for all humans to from the poorest to the richest, from the luckiest to the unluckiest. And also in the health space. You'd see that directly through zoonotic transmission, through antimicrobial resistance problems, through cholesterol and heart disease, and all of the other problems that are caused by animal products. So we're in this lucky situation where actually there's a really big win win because by adopting this sentientist stance of having compassion for all sentient beings, it can also be a bit selfish for us humans as well. It's a wonderful win, win, win and for the environment we all share. So that's my pitch. I think it can be a universal worldview for everybody.

Ramnani:When we last spoke, when you were a guest for the first time on this podcast, you were optimistic about the ability of children to develop natural empathy for all sentient beings, given the chance to do so. My question is in two parts. Do you think that the violence everyone is exposed to in the news will have an impact on this? And what do you think is the impact of violence, whether infections such as dramas or actual events on social media, on children's perception of suffering?

Woodhouse:Yeah. I don't think we need to encourage children to have sentio centric compassion for human and non-human animals. I think most of the time they already have it. So in a way, this sentientism worldview is trying to go back to some very ancient ideas in human culture about understanding the world accurately through using evidence, reason, and having this recognition that non-human animals are beings too. They're not just objects. And I think we're also trying to go back, maybe in our own personal histories, to how we probably thought when we were four or five or six years old, we were curious, we were open minded. We're trying to understand the world honestly, and we had an innate compassion. Most young people have an innate compassion for non-human animals as well. Well, as for other humans. So in a way, we're just trying to return back to that. And I think if we just allowed children to express that instead of crushing it out of them with our social norms, things could change very rapidly. And the workshops I run in schools are fascinating because they really just reinforce that hope. Because when you talk to young kids, they are like little philosophers. They're not scared of these questions. They're open to curiosity and exploring. They're up for challenging social norms and asking awkward questions, as any parent knows, right? Kids love asking awkward questions, and they are willing to face these difficult topics very directly. I think sometimes adults are so nervous about kids exposure to some of these difficult challenges, partly including violence, that we can shield them from things that actually they can handle. And there's a deep irony in the animal agriculture space, because parents and schools and society are really worried about exposing to children the reality of animal agriculture. Who would show a slaughterhouse video in a primary school. Right. And I understand that, right? That could be a very traumatic thing for young children to see, but the very same people are quite happy to take the products from that slaughterhouse and give it to the children, even though those children have compassion for the animals that are the victims. So there's something strange going on here where we're actually encouraging children to normalize a horror that we are not willing to show them, because it would be too traumatic. There is a difficult balance here because there's a danger with exposing even adults to violence, because on the one hand, we touched on this in our last conversation. If you show an adult slaughterhouse footage, it can go one of two ways, right? One, the way people should respond is this is horrific. What can I do to stop supporting it at the very least? And what can I do to drive a systemic change to stop this happening? That's one way. That's the ethical, compassionate way. The other way is the horror may actually lead them to disengage with the topic completely. I don't want to see that anymore. I don't want to think about it anymore. I'm going to shut that part of my brain down. But yes, I will go and have a Big Mac for lunch, right? Or even to desensitize people to violence where people will have seen so much violence and so much horror that it doesn't have the emotional impact anymore. So, and you can see this from if you listen to interviews of people who've worked in slaughterhouses, the psychological impact it can have on them is absolutely awful. In a way. They're victims of this system, too. So when we're thinking about depictions of violence, it is extremely difficult because to traumatize someone with that violence is clearly a harm to them. But if we pretend it doesn't exist, we're making that person complicit in the violence themselves. But at the same time, we have to do it in a way that is careful, that we don't turn people away, or that we don't desensitize people to that violence. It's a tricky topic, but I think that we can find a balance of helping people in a non-traumatic way understand the reality of this violence, and hopefully it will motivate them to take actions to reduce their part in it and to shift our systems to make these things happen less. I think that's true when it comes to violence against humans, as well as violence against non-human animals. But the hope I find is that deep down, unless you're a psychopath or a sociopath, and that's only one or two percent of humans, people don't want to harm others, right? They don't want to harm other animals, and they don't want to harm each other. Right? In general, as a starting point, that gives me hope because when you show people the reality of the world, they should be motivated to try and make it a better place.

Ramnani:I hope so. Okay, so one more question. When we last spoke, you told me Sentientism is neutral on AI for now, but with AI evolving so fast, at what point do we have a moral obligation to consider its potential suffering and could wait and be a serious ethical failure.

Woodhouse:Yeah. So sentientism as a worldview is neutral on lots of things. So it doesn't tell us which things are sentient or even what sentience is. So it's quite neutral about your philosophy of mind, what you think sentience and consciousness are. And it doesn't tell you who is sentient, but it does say we should use evidence and reason to work it out. So amongst sentient, you'll find lots of different opinions about artificial intelligence. Some think in principle, it's impossible for. Artificial intelligence is ever to be conscious. Other people, including me, think it's conceivably possible. And more and more people are now explicitly working in this space and seeing it as a problem. So a lot of the work in the artificial intelligence space has been about what risks does artificial intelligence pose to humans? There are important work now going on. What could artificial intelligence mean for non-humans as well? It's not just about human security. It's about what are the impacts for good or bad, on non-human animals. But increasingly, people are starting to think, what about the artificial intelligences Themselves. Now you'll see a lot of different opinions about artificial intelligence consciousness. My view of the sort of consensus amongst the experts is that they think it's very unlikely that the current AIS, particularly the LLMs, the large language models today, are sentient or conscious in any meaningful way, but they think it's possible, and they think it might happen reasonably soon because the field is developing so quickly. So there are interesting evaluations being done by organisations like Helios AI. There was a recent one done teaming up with anthropic, one of the big AI companies that ran some evaluations of their models. They don't think the AI called Claude is sentient or conscious yet, but they're starting to do evaluations to try and tease out how we might be able to tell. And some of the experiments they ran were very interesting. So one was when they got two different versions of Claude to talk to each other, they always seemed to fall in the same sort of pattern. They would start talking without any prompt. They would start talking about their own consciousness and whether they were conscious or whether each of them were conscious. They would then move into a deeper conversation about philosophy and the philosophy of mind and what consciousness is, and eventually they would end up almost having a spiritual conversation, using emojis and spirals and talking about the wonder of the universe and long moments of pauses that seem to be an attractor for these eyes to fall into when they're in conversations with themselves, with no humans involved. So that doesn't say anything about whether they're sentient or conscious necessarily, but it's just interesting how they react. Another experiment was to let Claude, the AI, choose from a massive long list of different tasks, just like his long list of different tasks. Choose what you want. And the idea was to work out whether Claude has preferences or not. Now, whether these preferences are like yours or mine. I have a preference for the taste of my coffee. So drink some coffee because I feel that in my brain, whether it's that sort of preference or whether it's the preference of a thermostat to adjust the temperature to the right setting, who knows? But they were preferences there. So Claude really preferred philosophical questions, really liked creative questions like brainstorm these ideas for me or help me write this poem. And what they really didn't like was things that would go up against their training. So if you said, look, help me develop a bio weapon or to carry out some cybercrime or do something terrible to someone, right? The AI would just not want to do those types of things. So you could see the preference freely. And anthropic has also introduced a thing in its AI now, which allows the AI to refuse to do a task and to end a conversation if it's not happy. And I put happy in inverted commas, right? So again, if you're really pressuring an AI to do something dangerous or immoral, it can now say, I'm sorry, I'm not continuing this conversation and we'll shut it down. So again, none of that says these models are sentient or conscious, but it at least starts the research to help us imagine how we might work out whether they are or not. And there's also an interesting parallel theme of thought. There are some academics like Josh Gellers and David Gunkel and Mark Zuckerberg who are working this through. And they're almost saying, look, it doesn't really matter in a way whether they're sentient or conscious, because people are already starting to treat them as though they are. So whether or not we think artificial intelligence is sentient or conscious, we have to deal with the ethical fact that people are already in relation with entities and treating them as though they are moral patients. So almost regardless of the consciousness question, we have to face this topic and we have to face it now because the field is moving very, very fast. So again, a crazily long answer, but it's a fascinating topic. And as I said earlier on, many vegans and animal advocates find this topic frustrating because they're worried it might distract us from the hundreds of billions and trillions of very obviously sentient animals that really are suffering needlessly at our hands today. But by engaging in this question of digital minds or artificial sentience, it is yet another opportunity to call people back to Sentientism and say, look, sentience matters. whoever has it. If you're a sentient being, it doesn't matter if you're a human, a non-human animal, or even if you're not biological, you matter and you matter. Seriously. So if we are going to start worrying conceptually about potentially sentient artificial intelligences, we absolutely have to care about all of the sentient humans and all of the sentient, non-human animals if we want to have a consistent, coherent ethics. So it's another opportunity to take this holistic, universal approach to people who are working in this artificial intelligence space to sort of drag them back to some of these philosophical foundations and say, look, we need to get these things right. And as the artificial intelligence has become more powerful, I want them to have a sentientist worldview, too, because otherwise we're in deep trouble. If a very powerful artificial intelligence absorbs default human ethics about how to treat weaker sentient beings, we are in a whole world of trouble. I'd be much more comfortable if powerful AIS have a sentientist worldview, but at the moment they're a long way from it. Once again, it has been a very interesting Conversation.

Ramnani:Do you have any final thoughts?

Woodhouse:Thank you. It's been wonderful to talk to you again. I guess one thing I wanted to do was to leave people with some practical ideas about the plant based food thing. My wife laughed when I told her that you were going to ask me about food, because quite often I will just have a cold can of baked beans for lunch. So I'm absolutely not an expert on these things, but I think what I would encourage people to do, just as some practical suggestions, is just invest ten minutes in doing a bit of research about it, because it's so much easier than you think. You can go to places like the Vegan Society or the or Viva, or the PCR or Veganuary or Challenge twenty two. These are all websites and organisations that have brilliant help about vegan diets, particularly vegan diets on a budget, there's loads of content, books and social media groups and YouTube channels. One of the good ones is cheap, lazy, vegan and explicitly focused on easy, cheap vegan foods. So I'd recommend those even if you spend five or ten minutes with one of the LMS, like ChatGPT asking questions about nutrition or price comparisons of different products in your supermarket, or even, can you help me make a meal plan out of the things I've got here? You'll be amazed at how quickly and easily you can find some solutions. And yes, LMS use energy and water, but you will save so much more by switching away from animal agriculture. The LMS impacts a tiny slice of what animal agriculture does on the environment or water or anything else. So I would just encourage people to care enough just to do a little bit of work, and you'll be amazed at how quickly things fall into place. And the general advice people have is you can start with, if you're switching to a completely plant based diet, it's important to look at your supplements. So I take a veg one supplement from the Vegan Society. I have an Omega supplement and I have an iron supplement, which I only take because I donate platelets and plasma every two weeks. Most people don't need to bother with an iron supplement. Those supplements cost me thirty two pence a day, right? I think the other things to do are to try and avoid fast food and restaurants and go shopping instead for the price of a Big Mac meal, which is like five or six pounds in the UK. You can feed yourself for probably a day or two. And then when we think about supermarket shopping, it's about just a variety of foods and people often will zero in on where do you get your proteins? And there's so many different choices of beans, pulses, lentils, tofu, and so on. And the price of these can be absolutely amazing. So I just looked up, for example, you can get lentils for one pound eighty a kilo, chickpeas for two pounds a kilo, tofu for five pounds a kilo, and you can get soy milk for fifty pence a litre. Right. So these are enormously nutritious, protein packed foods that are way cheaper than any animal product. So if you look on any supermarket and say, what are the top ten cheapest products for per calorie, per protein, per kilo? Nearly all of them will be non-animal products in every instance. And then it's a question really, of using those as much as you can rather than the alternatives. The alternatives can be great, but if you want to keep your costs down on the Whole Foods, plants, fruits and vegetables and pulses, it's about it's often much easier than doing individual meals, cooking in bulk and freezing. And I think the main thing would be, rather than thinking about it as, okay, I'm now having to give up certain animal products, you can really unleash your creativity when it comes to food. A lot of people find this when they transition to a plant based diet is it just opens your world up to the thirty thousand different varieties of plants and vegetables and fruits that you can use in your cooking, and the sauces and the spices that you really rely on for flavour. So I think many people, as they switch to a plant based diet regime, find it just opens up a whole new culinary world for them. And so that can be fun to explore too. So those were just some practical thoughts about how to make the plant based transition. The help is out there. I'd love to help people, even though I'm not much of an expert. But if you just spend ten, fifteen minutes just starting the research, things will fall into place so quickly. You just need to care enough to go and do a little bit of work. And it's worth it, I think. And then the final thing would be, yeah, just if you're interested in finding out more about Sentientism, if you just search for that word pretty much anywhere, you'll find it. So we have our own podcast and our YouTube. We have online social media forums on all of the different platforms, whether it's Facebook, telegram, signal, discord, blue Sky, we're pretty much everywhere. So you can come and join those groups and they're open to anyone interested in the ideas. You don't have to sign up to Sentientism if you're just interested in this sort of thinking, then come and join us too. And if you want to help, do some of the work I do in schools, running workshops, in schools around worldviews and sentientism, let me know. That would be a wonderful volunteering opportunity too. But yeah, just reach out, get in touch, and help us imagine what a sentient world might look like and help us move towards it.

Ramnani:It was really nice talking to you today. It was a really great interview and I really appreciated your views on Sentientism.

Woodhouse:It was such a pleasure to be your guest again. Thank you so much, Sapna, and I wish you well with this new season of the podcast too. I'm looking forward to hearing some more guests, but it's great to be amongst them. Thank you.

Ramnani:My pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Woodhouse:Have a nice afternoon. Thank you so much. Take care.

Ramnani:Take care. Thanks very much.

Woodhouse:Take care. Take care. Bye bye.

 

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