53: "I would consider myself a Sentientist now" - Tennis pro Marcus Daniell - Sentientist Conversation

Marcus (https://twitter.com/MarcusDaniell) is a professional tennis player from New Zealand. He is a philanthropist and an advocate for effective altruism through his work as the founder of High Impact Athletes (https://highimpactathletes.org/) and as a member of Giving What We Can. 

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?” Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.

We discuss:

0:00 Welcome

1:45 Marcus intro - pro tennis and High Impact Athletes charity

3:02 What's real?

- Growing up on a farm in New Zealand

- A "spiritual" father and a "hippie" mother

- Pragmatism, a love for nature and animals, but a comfort with death. Hunting as a child

- Attending Christian schools

- Enjoying Religious Education but never buying in. Being agnostic/atheist from a young age

- Moving alone to Slovakia for tennis

- Discovering "spirituality" and eastern philosophies

- Studying philosophy at university

- Discovering animal ethics but thinking "I'm an athlete, I need meat"

- A turning point when a friend ordered whale in a sushi restaurant in Tokyo

- Going veg*an a week later

- Finding awe and wonder in a naturalistic/scientific worldview

- "Put me next to the ocean or in a forest or a jungle and it's like experiencing magic for me"

- Naturalistic karma? Putting positive energy into the world and getting positive things back

14:06 What matters? Humans and non-humans

- Meeting a vegan tennis pro

- "I now feel like I'm living in my space in the world - in the right way"

- A sense of solidity... "That's really helped me"

- Our lack of understanding of non-human sentients

- Intelligence vs. sentience as a moral qualifier

- "I would consider myself a sentientist now"

- I try to give respect to all sentient beings. If they can suffer, try not to cause them suffering

- Artificial sentients? Does suffering matter regardless of species or substrate?

- Sentience as an evolved class of information processing that could also be programmed in

- Luna the puppy makes an audio appearance

- Existential, catastrophic and suffering risks (S-risks)

- Peter Singer's Animal Liberation. Trying not to cause suffering

- It's so easy not to think. "I wonder how we can create more of these culturally shocking moments to make more people understand"

- The morals were somewhere there, just hidden under layers of culture and tradition

28:05 The Future

- Talking to others about animal products and hearing "We agree on all the reasons but I'm not going to make the change"

- "I would love for the world to be plant-based"

- Is regenerative animal farming an option?

- Can slaughter ever be humane?

- The broad common ground re: rejecting factory farming

- And more... (see YouTube or Sentientism.info).

Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at https://sentientism.info/. Join our "wall" https://sentientism.info/wall/ w/this form: https://sentientism.info/im-a-sentientist.

Marcus is on our "celebs" page: https://sentientism.info/sentientist-pledge/marcus-daniell.

Everyone interested, Sentientist or not, is welcome in our groups. Main one: https://www.facebook.com/groups/sentientism. Thanks Graham for the post-prod https://twitter.com/cgbessellieu.