Dr. Natalie Khazaal joins me on episode 248 of the Sentientism YouTube and Sentientism Podcast.

Dr. Natalie Khazaal is Associate Professor in the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Tech, where she directs the Arabic and Middle East & North Africa programs. Her work spans the Arabic language, exploring the lives of atheists and apostates in Arab and Muslim communities, nonhuman animal ethics, and the media’s role in normalizing speciesism and racism. Natalie is the co-creator of the MARS test (Media Analysis of Racism and Speciesism), an evaluative framework—similar to the Bechdel and DuVernay tests—that measures racism and speciesism in media.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and “how can we make a better future?”

Sentientism answers those questions with “evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” In addition to the YouTube and Spotify above the audio is on our Podcast here on Apple & here on all the other platforms.

00:00 Clips:

“When you discover what is real, it is often not what we want, it is often something that is not optimal.”

“The state of Lebanese television during the civil war, television was kind of a pretty liar. It put these pretty women who were telling the news and there was nothing on the news about the reality of war.”

“I believe that my subjective experience of bliss does not change the objective oppression that everybody else has been experiencing during my time out.”

“Some stories that are beneficial, some stories are pretty lies. When those stories, when those pretty lies are challenged with a better intersubjective reality, that will be the way forward.”

01:00 Welcome:

JW: “You’re one of those guests who tick so many different boxes for this YouTube and podcast. You have a really rich academic interest in religion and atheism and worldviews. You have a deep vein of work around non-human animal ethics and how that intersects with various forms of intra-human ethics… your work on the media and journalism and different forms of cultural artifacts… how they can warp our thinking whether it’s about facts and values.”

03:03 Natalie’s Introduction

“I am an associate professor at Georgia Tech in the school of modern languages and I am the director of the Arabic program there.”

“I’m also a fellow of the ACLS which is the American Council of Learned Societies. It’s like a nonprofit scholarly organization or a group of organizations that focuses on humanities, social sciences and it’s over 100 years old.”

“I’m also the co-creator of the MARS test. I have interests in the intersections or nexus of media, language, disenfranchisement, dehumanization…”

“I have worked on Lebanese media, specifically television during the civil war. I’ve worked on atheism in Arab communities. I’ve worked on speciesism. And my latest work is related to speciesism and racism… in such prestigious venues like the Oscars awards.”

“I also practice Vipasana meditation… I love swimming, gardening, woodworking and I also try to take two months a year… where I don’t consume any media, close my computer, put my cell phone away and just accept phone calls like in the 90s or 80s and just try to calm and focus on real projects that get neglected or reading books that get neglected when we are really engaged in so much media consumption.”

Introducing Natalie’s nonhuman companions for the episode.

06:08 What’s True?

“I was born and raised on the Black Sea coast in a tourist area. My city is called Burgas. I believe it’s 8,000 years old. It’s one of the oldest cities in the world. And there are so many mixtures of different human groups that were there, Greeks, Thracians, Slavs, Bulgarians who came from Mongolia… the Crusaders… the Ottoman Empire, it’s a big mixture.”

“It’s a fascinating city. On three sides it’s surrounded by water and it’s the second largest bird migration site in Europe. But the most important thing is that it was a non-religious society.”

“Bulgaria was in the former socialist block and religion was not really part of our everyday lives.”

 “I actually truly understood the impact of religion when I moved to the US.”

“I lived in Lebanon for a while and a lot of my friends were complaining how much religion has hurt their relationships with their family… with their friends…”

“When they moved away from religion and their interests started to differ from those of their family, how that really damaged these relationships and they lost so much.”

“They found themselves sometimes in a desert and I just truly understood at that time how lucky I was that was not really part of my life.”

“Science was very interesting and very important to me. I really excelled in sciences. I loved biology.”

“I remember, how we were drawing these microorganisms with all the different parts and everything was so fascinating.”

“I also loved physics and all the laws of physics and math. I competed in different competitions, math, linguistics, physics… except for organic chemistry which I didn’t like because I didn’t see any logic there. It was just so random… hard sciences, I absolutely loved.”

“Both my parents were electrical engineers… being raised in that kind of culture has given me a lot of trust in things that are real, things that are scientifically proven, things that can be seen through evidence.”

“That has really helped me to find my way into not just my research but in my personal own kind of like path to discover what is real.”

“I remember a particular memory that really is foundational for me… really for my own development… my own ways of understanding what’s real and what isn’t…”

“I was maybe four years old and I remember my grandmother had made or bought cookies… it was before lunch and I wanted a cookie and I told her ‘Grandma, I saw the cookies over there, can you give me a cookie?’ and she turned to me and she said ‘Oh no there are no cookies… nothing is there.’”

“I was four years old and I immediately understood that that was a lie. Why? Because I had seen the cookies… I mean, who can blame a grandmother when she doesn’t want to give a cookie before lunch? Nobody can blame her.”

“But my brain just absolutely understood at that moment the difference between truth and lie.”

JW: “The fact that someone could tell a lie. A new idea.”

“It wasn’t just like ‘oh okay’ it was… I did not love my grandmother for a while after that. I got over it. I love her dearly. She was wonderful. Who wouldn’t understand her in that situation…”

“That was a foundational experience for me to understand how much I did not like the lie, how much it damaged something. It damaged something in this relationship.”

“That is a way for me to understand why am I on this journey of finding out the truth and rather knowing the truth than believing in comfortable lies and delusions.”

“I take this view that there is an objective reality.”

“There is also subjective reality, a way in which we subjectively experience bits and pieces of reality as we need to experience them as is beneficial for us to experience them and not experience others.”

“And also what has been called an intersubjective reality… what humans have agreed to call real and true even though it does not have a real existence beyond the human agreement.”

“Different ideas, of democracy, for example, oftentimes some of these intersubjective truths, realities, they’re beneficial for many, but they are oftentimes delusions or as I call them pretty lies.”

“This general direction of my research and private interest is to uncover these pretty lies to see what is real behind the pretty lies, behind the curtain.”

“Also, when you discover what is real it is often not what we want. It is often something that is it’s not optimal.”

“Oftentimes these days I come back to this word ‘optimal’ and I… step just a little bit off… and then I feel a little ache or something… and then immediately my brain says well this is not an optimal reality.”

“Optimal would have been to not have stepped in that particular way because you wasted energy to correct your gait and why did you waste this energy?”

“Our struggle against reality, against what I consider optimal, is what is interesting to me. To discover what we can do with that.”

“How can we can be equanimous with that reality that is not optimal? In other words, how we can accept the disappointment or sometimes the pain of that reality or the loss that is involved in that reality rather than really craving to have a different one all the time.”

“Even my first book I called Pretty Liar. It was a book about the state of Lebanese television during the civil war which started in 1975 and lasted until 1990-1991.”

“Television was kind of a pretty liar. It put these pretty women who were telling the news and there was nothing on the news or very little on the news about the reality of war. And then they were showing these pretty comedy shows… and nothing was ever said about the war even though people really needed that information. They really needed to see their own daily lives reflected on the national media.”

“I continued with that kind of focus and I was looking at how media uses language.”

“That’s a lot of my work… how it uses language to sell pretty lies to consumers… and not just consumers.”

“I co-authored an article called “An Angry Cow is Not a Good Eating Experience” with this scholar from Spain, Núria Almiron,… that article is a comparison between US and Spanish newspapers like the New York Times and El Pais… and how they talk about nonhumans animals that are used for food.”

“The title of the article, Angry Cow, comes from a quote from one of these [newspaper] articles that was published. And the whole quote was, ‘An angry cow is not a good eating experience.’”

“It’s about a farmer who has a bunch of cows. And then he is interviewed because he’s some kind of a model for treating the cows really wonderfully… when they ask him about the rationale… he says ‘well I want my cows to be happy because an angry cow is not a good eating experience.’”

“Meaning if you kill the cow, get the meat and the cow has been angry, then there is some kind of weird chemistry of the anger that is being kept in the meat and so when you eat it somehow it affects you… terrible toxic chemistry affects you and that’s not any good eating experience. You want to enjoy the meat. You want to enjoy the killed cow.”

“That is another example of this pretty lie that has been told over and over again that is crystallized in that particular ideology of speciesism or not recognizing the rights of other species, but solely thinking about the human species and the human perspective. It’s a bias and unequal treatment because of somebody’s species.”

JW: “It’s only by critically analysing the lie that you get to see that his implied compassion or care for the cow isn’t compassion or care at all. It’s purely about maintaining the quality of his product and his ability to make a profit.”

JW: “I love the way you put that description… there is an objective reality. Maybe we can only see it through our subjective perspectives, but then there’s this third intersubjective, constructed reality, that may or may not reflect the objective reality…”

JW: “I like that balanced way of putting it because some people will focus so hard on the subjective that they almost deny an objective reality and that can lead you to relativism or even arbitrary beliefs.”

JW: “Some people will go the other way where they’re so focused on the purely objective they want to deny the subjective or imply there’s not something real about the subjective.”

JW: “But I think all three of those types of reality are real in different ways and they are all part of one ultimate reality… even my subjective reality, the firing of my brain and the processing of the information… whatever it is that is my sentience, that’s part of objective reality too even though I have a specific lens through which I look.”

JW: “You grew up without a religious context and then it sounds like your initial exposure to it was quite negatively toned because you were meeting people who were talking about their struggles. But what did you think of the actual belief structures of religion themselves? Did you engage curiously with them? Were you drawn to some of the ideas about teleology or godly authority or a foundation for morality or the existence of heaven and hell?”

“Let’s take… the conversation about veganism in the Bible… you can find there all sorts of ideas that are mutually exclusive and at the same time can be used to justify just about any take on being vegan or not being vegan, eating animals or not eating animals.”

“Something similar… with the question of atheism or apostasy, moving away from religion in in the Quran and in Islam. People can basically justify it any way.”

“But what is in the scripture, in the text, is mutually contradictory, because on one hand the text claims that there is no compulsion to believe or not believe any religion. And at the same time, there’s so many passages where apostates and atheists are maligned and even people are called to… chop off their heads.”

“Basically anybody can focus on the pretty parts and then disregard the stinky parts and create any sort of ideology and sell it as the truth about that scripture, the truth about this issue, the truth about this problem.”

“But ultimately, when you look at it, it is disappointing because it is not the system that is based on… looking into evidence… something that could be verified, something that could not just be taken by a human brain and interpreted in a way that this particular brain at that particular moment in these particular circumstances finds relevant and beneficial to interpret.”

“And so that engagement with religion leaves one dissatisfied in a way… disappointed.”

“I can’t believe this.”

“I have a friend. One time I was on a meditation retreat and she was there… we became friends from that retreat… she said, ‘Oh you know, in one of the sessions I felt during meditation that my hair was wet and I heard the sound of rain’ and then she said to me ‘This is probably from a past life.’”

“I’m thinking ‘hold on, wait a minute. Your hair has never been wet in this life? You have never heard the sound of rain in this life? Why jump into these miraculous explanations… that miracle reality, magic… and not look into what is most reasonable, most likely?’”

“Who knows what happens during meditation… during that session the parts of the brain that were firing may have been next to a part that have experienced earlier and… kept the memory for your hair being wet and maybe it brushed and kind of got them agitated a little bit and that kind of image came to your brain and now you’re claiming this is coming from a past life.”

“What brain cells are going to survive from one life to another to carry a memory of wet hair? What is it beneficial for? What is it? Nothing really.”

“This kind of unrestrained… hope, unrestrained trust in miracle reality, in magic…”

JW: “I was going to ask you, is your interest in meditation the very secular variety or is that a path for glimpsing other worlds or touching the transcendent… but I think you’ve probably already answered it.”

“Let me answer it though because this is an interesting question. I don’t believe in the supernatural forces or entities or gods or deities or reincarnation or karma and punishing somebody for bad deeds with death or being crippled in some way in this life or rewarding them with being a billionaire in this life or being pretty or something like that.”

“My search for what is real intersects with an understanding of how happiness and truth are interconnected.”

“Different theories of happiness… could push us towards understanding what is real, what is even moral.”

“One of the theories is the moods of happiness theory. When living organisms, animals, including humans, are working towards or making progress towards an evolutionary goal.”

“An evolutionary goal is to find food or to reproduce or to have safety… the result of that may give us a jolt of these chemicals of bliss and happiness, even working towards them creates moods of expecting that jolt of bliss… these chemicals running through the body and that creates the mood of happiness.”

“So that’s a very evolutionary kind of understanding.”

“There’s another theory… it’s not so much the goals, because people are so bad at predicting what makes them happy… our mind can simulate a future, but we come from a biased interpretation of now which is incomplete. We don’t have all the information. It is shaped by our current biological state and that’s why we misjudge what our future happiness could be and we make choices that don’t actually satisfy that.”

“So, instead, to be happy means to be deeply engaged in something that is meaningful and your attention is fully focused. People call that being in the zone. You forget about yourself temporarily. It kind of disappears.”

“The third theory is happiness in terms of looking at humans specifically… this equanimity to physical sensations… For that theory I go to two different sources.”

“One is a contemporary science that strives to be objective particularly looking at the research that is incorporated and done also by Lisa Barrett Cohen [Natalie misspoke here, she meant to say Lisa Feldman Barrett] when she wrote her book “How Emotions Are Made” and also maybe the first theorist of human psychology or specifically happiness Gautama Buddha.”

“Both of them kind of agree… that there is a universal condition of all animals and these are states of the experiencing sensations, in particular unpleasant sensations, pleasant sensations and neutral sensations. Being aroused or being calm… that is a universal condition for all animals.”

“Descartes was wrong when he was thinking that animals have no sensations… they don’t feel any pain.”

“That kind of universal condition is what we can look at in terms of what can constitute happiness.”

“If we look at the human brain locked in this black box, not knowing exactly what’s out there and just trying to decipher the electrical input from the different senses, from the eyes, from the touch, from the hearing… that it comes in electrical signals, and then trying to imagine what is out there in creative ways and what it could mean both for the environment and also for the internal states of the organism.”

“Imagine that, for the purpose of supporting the equilibrium of the organism, of surviving, of thriving.”

“That imagining, with a goal of an action to support the thriving of the organism, is creating this subjective experience, this subjective reality, this consciousness.”

“That consciousness is involved in registering what of the input signals are going to cause pleasant or unpleasant sensations. If they’re pleasant, the organism needs to go towards it, it needs more of it. If they’re unpleasant you need to run away. You need to protect yourself. Maybe you die because of that.”

“That consciousness, that subjective experience, it registers these states and it is universal for all animals.”

“It is also involved in striving towards one state or away from the other.”

“So here, if we train the human brain… to be equanimous to these sensations, in other words not to want to react to pleasant or unpleasant sensations, to accept them all objectively, without judgment.”

“What that means is, you are going to disrupt a very deeply ingrained biological mechanism that is created to protect the body, to basically help the body to survive and thrive, because the mechanism of surviving and thriving is based on the shifting states of happiness and unhappiness, pleasure and pain, unpleasant and pleasant sensations.”

“And we don’t want the unpleasant sensations. This is natural. If we wanted them, you know, and we didn’t protect our body, we might be dead.”

“So here, the theory of happiness… is to hack that process.”

“The previous theory that I mentioned is summarized by Daniel Gilbert in his book which he called Stumbling on Happiness.”

“This would be not stumbling on happiness, but hacking into happiness like hacking our way into human biology.”

“So we could be happy, and that does not mean that we stop feeling pain or pleasure… It’s just we are equanimous to them. We accept them as what is. We accept what is. We accept the reality of the pleasant and the pleasant sensations as they are, as they come as they shift as they constantly change from one to another.”

JW: “In that context you would still be feeling the pain but because you’re hacking your system you’re not experiencing that as suffering?… And meditation can be a tool that could help you to do that… to disconnect from the initial stimulus, the initial experience, but not experience it in a negative way.”

“Not to judge what that is, not to label what that is, and from that judgment to have the additional suffering, the psychological suffering rather than the biological pain.”

“The biological pain, the biological unpleasant sensation, still continues… this is hard to become widespread, like everybody could do it, but at some level that also misses the point of addressing systemic oppression.”

“While it is a good theory for personal satisfaction it cannot be the only theory of happiness… if we really want to address systemic injustice and systemic oppression.”

“One time… I woke up and I was in this state of absolute bliss. I remember walking on the street and seeing cars, the traffic lights, people crossing, I was crossing and I loved absolutely everybody and everything was just perfect. It was perfection. Everything was happiness and bliss and it lasted for a half a day or maybe even longer and then it was gone.”

“But then think about it, during that state of my subjective experience of bliss and how everything is absolutely perfect, [that] nothing should be changed… How many humans were killed? How many humans were raped? How many non-human animals were tortured and murdered to be eaten or exploited or raped by artificial insemination… and yet I felt a state of bliss.”

“I could say, and many people have said, that because of that experience I knew the real reality… and therefore the reality of suffering is not really real because now I know what the real reality is. I don’t believe in that.

“I believe that my subjective experience of bliss does not change the objective oppression that everybody else has been experiencing during my time out.”

JW: “My understanding is that there’s at least two different paths within Buddhism. One is the Boddhisatva approach of delaying your own nirvana to help others through compassion and wisdom.”

JW: “But the other, which you were hinting at there, is a more ascetic, withdrawn version, where you step back from not only your own suffering but the suffering of everybody else… As if nothing matters at all. And enlightenment comes from accepting everything as it is and denying all desire, even the desire to help others.”

JW: “That’s almost the purest amoral stance you could ever achieve. I don’t matter. Nobody else matters. Nothing matters. And through that, you’ve achieved some form of enlightenment? It doesn’t feel great to me.”

“Yeah. Just because you feel that and you think that ‘that is now the real reality’… but it’s your subjective experience and nothing else.”

38:18 What Matters?

JW: “Some people insist that it’s very hard to breach that is/ought gap where you can’t get from statements about reality to moral statements… one possible bridge across that chasm… is something about the quality of our subjective states. That’s partly why I focus so much on sentience, because it does seem to me that there is a link between ultimately the goodness and badness of my experience and the goodness and badness of ethics.”

JW: “Can you remember as a child what were your first thoughts about good and bad and right and wrong and what those words even mean?… my guests have talked about so many different ideas: Freedom, justice, compassion, rights, suffering, fairness, virtue, care, relationships…”

“I can talk about that from an experiential point of view… and this still is very true of me to this day… this overwhelming desire and even internal suffering when I see others suffer… that includes physical pain but it also includes their desire for something… and it’s not happening to them and they can’t achieve it. this unfulfilled desire. I’m kind of very sensitive to that.”

“This really is a morality of understanding the pervasiveness of suffering… it’s guaranteed that organisms are going to suffer at some point in their lives and the morality as a kind of a striving not to cause suffering and also to alleviate it in oneself.”

“Training my brain to be equanimous to these pleasant and unpleasant sensations, but also in others.”

“There’s a variety of ways in which we can alleviate it… stopping, exposing, compensating for oppression in multiple ways and also looking at how oppressions are deeply interconnected.”

“This has been sometimes a very painful experience… my dad died more or less two years ago and it is very difficult for me to still engage and find my way through that experience, not just for me but also for him.”

“He was sick for six months and that whole experience was very physically painful to him and yet I could see how much he didn’t want to die.”

“He really, really, really didn’t want to die and this is kind of my point of engaging with the suffering of others, of seeing what they really want. In that particular case, I was completely [helpless]. I mean, who would be capable of saving anybody from dying if they’re so sick that even medicine cannot save them?”

“Thinking about the painful reality of his own life, that was packed with amassing knowledge, experience, expertise, creating a network, a community, friends, family, and then, all of a sudden, all of that completely goes away.”

“This is a really painful experience. Trying to form a connection with this person and in some way alleviate their suffering as much as possible is one way in which I perceive of morality.”

“Morality, maybe as care is falling the closest to other people’s understanding of morality.”

“It is not really based on religious interpretations or any kind of beliefs but on this… empathy is probably a correct word. Empathy for the struggle and suffering and desires and wants of others.”

JW: “It’s a very intuitive, almost childlike, starting point, that is, for me, still the absolute core… this identification with others… it’s always imperfect. We can never [perfectly] understand what it’s like to be someone else. But that identification with their perspective, their subjective perspective, how things are for them, the things they want, and choosing to care about that for me is just an intuitive core of morality that most children share.”

JW: “And that can lead you on to many places… to a deep concern for the suffering or the flourishing, the experiences of others… it can also lead you to a deep concern for their desires and their wants and their need for autonomy and freedom. And it can lead you into obligations of care or relational commitments of all sorts of different types. But the core is the identification with the other.”

45:25 Who Matters?

JW: “Many people would listen to what you’ve just said and say ‘absolutely I feel the same way. This is what my ethics is about.’ But their moral scope might be more restricted. They might only apply it to their family members but not to other humans. They might only apply it to their ingroup humans but not their outgroup humans. They might apply it to only humans but not to nonhumans.”

JW: “How did you start to think about who matters and how has that vision of who gets to be included morally changed over your life?”

“Oppressions are interconnected. One example of that is how racism and speciesism are interconnected and dehumanisation is part of it.”

“I recently have created the MARS test or the Media Analysis of Racism and Speciesism test with a couple of other scholars, Ellen Gorsevski and Tobias Linné.”

“We have applied it to the Oscar awards, to the Academy Awards, specifically looking into animation movies and how they portray racism… and speciesism. The same thing,  but because of somebody’s species.”

“Who matters is not just a question of who your ingroup is, but who matters is who is suffering. Whoever is suffering really matters.”

“The intersections between racism and speciesism are something that I think we are currently on the cusp of making a lot more visible and a lot more accepted by mainstream researchers and maybe even mainstream publics.”

“They do really intersect. For example, when somebody like Trump says that migrants are animals, is that hurtful? Of course, it’s dehumanising for migrants, for immigrants.”

“They are disenfranchised groups. They could be not just immigrants. They could be Muslims, Asians, gays, they’re often dehumanised.”

“They’re denied humanity. And because of that [are denied] equal moral regard and treatment.”

“All of that comes on this Aristotle’s ladder in which white wealthy men come on top and then we have different types of men and then we have different types of women and then we have later different types of animals etc.”

“That kind of ladder is present and incorporated not just in religions but also in many ideologies… it’s still there.”

“Nonhuman animals are on the bottom, which simultaneously justifies the exploitation of the racialised human groups, disenfranchised human groups, but also nonhuman animals.”

“So as long as we have this divide between what is called an animal and what is called a human, we will always be able to bob up and down the human groups to be underneath the divide into the animal kingdom.”

“At some point maybe they go up, but then they’re always at risk. Some group is always at risk of being plunged down under.”

“That is how they are interconnected and we need to really abolish that harder divide [between the human and nonhuman] because it justifies so much.”

JW: “I guess the reason why dehumanisation is so dangerous for humans is because nonhuman animals are brutalised and oppressed and disenfranchised so awfully… That’s why dehumanisation is a problem.”

JW: “So you can resolve the challenges of dehumanisation by resolving the exclusion of nonhuman sentient beings the same way. I’m sure you’re familiar with Aph and Syl Ko’s work… They point out that even the way the term ‘human’ is used excludes most members of homo sapiens in many contexts. Even being a homo sapiens doesn’t count as being ‘human’ because it’s only the canonical, fully privileged human who really counts.”

JW: “And the only path for the homo sapiens that don’t fit that model is to just replicate the behaviour and the culture and the values of the elite and then maybe they’ll be allowed into the club, but otherwise they’re still oppressed and excluded just like the nonhuman animals are.”

“That’s why who matters is… not just certain human groups, not just all human groups, but also other animals also matter…”

“These things are so interconnected… for example, the role of agriculture in racial oppression, of animal agriculture in particular… the slaughterhouses, the meat packing factories. A lot of them… the workers there are migrants and they have absolutely no breaks. They work on the kill floor and oftentimes not just psychological damage of looking at all the dead animals or the animals that are being still, you know, murdered, but injuries to the human workers are also widespread. The hiring of minors is widespread.”

“There is even an NBC documentary movie I think it was called Slaughterhouse Children where they quote how many children are killed, decapitated in these industries…”

“Environmental racism and how the disproportionate burden of a country’s polluted air, polluted water, like the waste products, they all are dumped in areas primarily coming from animal agriculture. Dumped in areas where disenfranchised communities live and don’t have as much bargaining power to divert these bad effects.”

“Amazon forests are being cut down for the meat industry and then the indigenous people are turned into refugees who go to work in the slaughterhouses, and they contribute to this loop and are being harmed themselves.”

“Historically, when pitbulls and other dogs and horses, they were used to track escaped slaves, they were used to attack Black communities. Black men… were called dog biscuits.”

“On one hand the black communities are being harmed tremendously. On the other hand, that also harms the nonhuman dogs because they are victims themselves. They are placed there in the line of fire against their free will, and they are treated as dispensable.”

“So, we have all of these different groups that suffer. All of them matter. And so, who matters is a is a question of who suffers.”

JW: “You can’t understand these systems without seeing how those interconnections and inter relations work.”

“I was not lucky to have dogs when I was growing up or cats. I remember having once or twice hamsters and they died very quickly and the pain that I felt was terrible.”

“I felt the horrible pain inside when that happened. So horrible, that I wanted to disengage from the whole experience. It was extremely painful.”

“Only later did I start having dogs and really forming a personal connection, but that happened after I left my parents’ house and went to live my own life.”

“Before that, I didn’t really have that personal experience. My family was never involved in any kind of animal agriculture or anything like that. What we had was growing vegetables.”

“My grandparents, when they retired, they bought a house… just for the peace and quiet and to grow vegetables and fruits and stuff like that and have us over for the whole summer as children.”

“That was one of the best times that I’ve had as a child, that freedom and to be with my grandparents and with other children there and to eat, you know, the food and the vegetables and everything that is coming from the ground.”

“I’m really connected to that formational, foundational experience, but I did not explicitly hear any conversation or maybe I don’t remember hearing anything that was related to animal rights.”

“At some point, when I was 17, I shifted from eating animals to not eating animals overnight and there was acompletely subconscious decision that my organism just took.”

“I don’t remember any trigger other than now being on my own, not being in my family anymore and making my own decisions.”

“It is a subconscious decision that my organism made. It happened and it was a moral decision. It was a decision based on ethics. It was not health based. And I decided that I could never eat animals again.”

“That is just so painful to even think about it. And I stopped thinking of animals as food.”

“I couldn’t imagine when sometimes somebody would eat an animal. I was shocked how that could be thought of as food.”

JW: “What did it feel like for you psychologically? And what was the response of the people around you in society? Was it a difficult transition or easy?”

“It probably was not difficult… I am biologically lucky that like other members in my family like my brother, my dad, we have maybe a little bit more self-discipline than other people. Just biologically, this is, you know, my genes.”

“And so when this decision was made, I knew that I wasn’t going to go back. So, it was not really difficult.”

“I know that because of that decision, I discovered a new group of people, a new group of friends that I would not have discovered before.”

“One of my classmates, when she heard that I didn’t eat animals, she said, ‘Oh, why don’t you come to this yoga class?’ And I went there and almost everybody there didn’t eat any animals.”

“So, I found this huge group of people because of that connection.”

“And the same thing happened when I became vegan. I became vegan and then didn’t know anybody, but then immediately afterwards I met a bunch of people who were vegan and started forming relationships and friendships with them.”

“I’ve been really lucky to be exposed to these kind of wonderful relationships given the fact that over the course of my life I have moved 18 times from one city to another and I’ve lived in between 20 and 25 different homes.”

“It just so happened that I, for work, for study, for what not, I move and have to form new friends.”

“Having that community of vegans… pretty much you can find vegans everywhere in the world is almost like a guarantee.”

“And you always find among them people that truly you can connect with.”

“In terms of my family, I knew that in the beginning they were going to make fun of me, which they kind of were.”

“They never argued with me. They never tried to force me to eat meat or anything like that. They were just… making fun a little bit here and there.”

“But with the years, as their illnesses, you know, started to, you know, come up, they started coming to me and asking me what to do and how to do it.”

“And my brother, as a result, is eating vegan food, he was really inspired.”

“My aunt also is mostly eating vegan food.”

“Then everybody was telling me ‘Oh, your grandfather was vegetarian.’”

“So you see these different connections in your family that you never knew before your own transformation or change.”

“It was not difficult. I very quickly found a community of people and my food is very simple. I love, because of my upbringing, I love fruits and vegetables. I absolutely love them. So, I’m not one of these people who are struggling to eat healthy.”

“In fact, my eating is very much programmed by the evidence as I find it in books published by Michael Greger… he has a series of books about How Not to Die, How Not to Diet, How Not to Age.”

“As soon as I find something relevant there, I add it to my diet, and I have this outrageous breakfast that is stuffed with about 30 different healthy ingredients and I can’t wait to eat it every day. It is so satisfying. It has so many things that are at the top list of the healthy foods. It’s just really a pleasure. So even my eating habits are based on my disciplined approach to evidence.”

JW: “I have another podcast recommendation for you. It’s called In a Nutshell, it’s run by Clare Day and Daisy Lund, both doctors in the UK, and they’re part of Plant-Based Health Professionals UK, who are campaigning to try and get the UK health system to be more plant-based.”

1:03:12 How to Make a Better World

JW: “We’ve answered how to understand reality, and we I think share this naturalistic science-based approach to understanding reality. We’ve talked about who matters, and I think we agree… If you can suffer, if you’re sentient, you matter. It doesn’t matter who you are. But that leaves us with a big question of, how do we make a better world in that context for all of those sentient beings?”

“Human brains are really not very capable of predicting their own state of happiness in the future. We are also not able to predict the development of these very complicated systems with gazillions of different elements.”

“Even though these systems might be determined… causes determine the consequences. We cannot really predict them unless we run the whole system step by step by step.”

“We as biological organisms live in circumstances that really determine what happens to us and how we’re going to react rather than having a free will of choosing what to do or what not to do.”

“I believe that the environment, the change in environment will really trigger changes in the behaviour of humans.”

“And the environment includes not only the physical environment but also the intersubjective reality that we just spoke about that includes, stories.”

“Some stories that are beneficial, some stories that are pretty lies and very harmful.”

“So, when those stories, when those pretty lies are challenged with a better intersubjective reality that is not harmful…”

“For example, if we make the knowledge, the information about how meat and dairy industry is being so subsidised. And if we manage to make this into a household truth, then the intersubjective reality of supporting meat and dairy industries will change.”

“But that should be coupled with other changes that happen in the environment like the real prices of meat and dairy versus the subsidised prices. These prices will drive different economic behaviour in humans.”

“That will reinforce back the new story of how harmful and damaging these subsidies are.”

“Long story short is striving to change people’s minds. Change that agreed upon intersubjective reality as well as the material conditions under which human organisms function and react is going to be the way forward.”

“It is extremely difficult to predict any kind of complicated system… But anybody who strives in those two bigger lanes, changing material circumstances and changing intersubjective reality, the stories we tell about stuff, about ourselves, about other animals, about how we should be treated, about how everybody should be treated, about what matters and what doesn’t matter. That is the way to go.”

“And so, your podcast with these questions that you’re asking is doing exactly that. You are contributing to changing that intersubjective reality into the direction that I hope we all go.”

JW: “How optimistic do you feel about our chances? Because on the one hand, there are very powerful entrenched interests who want to keep telling us the pretty lies and to keep the story constructed the way it is. And many humans actually want to be conned by the pretty lies. Many humans are desperate to believe the lies they’re told because often they are reassuring and they tell you don’t have to change and they tell you everything’s fine. So that can make the problem feel very difficult.”

JW: “But on the flip side, it does feel as you’ve been saying that there are some obvious areas where the win are so comprehensive where everybody could benefit at once that we should be able to switch the narratives and switch these intersubjective constructions into something that is radically better for humans, for nonhumans, you know, even for the planet we all share.”

“The only thing I can do is hope that there is a chance. Hope that this will happen at some point. Sometimes history can be very quick and changes, vast changes can come very quickly and can just destroy an old way of being and introduce a new way of acting. So, I only hope that this will happen.”

“On the other hand, sensations that come with the pretty lies, they have to be able to take the disappointment and pain and suboptimal condition of what is true. And I know that this is really difficult for a lot of people. That’s why not a lot of people are trying to understand themselves and understand better reality.”

“I have a friend, she told me one time, and I remember this very clearly because it is so suggestive of how so many people are acting. She said, ‘oh please don’t tell me anything about how animals are treated because I won’t be able to eat my burger.’”

“And so, there is this both connection and disconnection at the same time.”

“At some point she knows… she’s predicting that it will involve diminishing her pleasure… specifically the pleasure of her food or who knows what else. Maybe relationships with other people. But this is really difficult.”

“This is one of several different ways to go. But I hope there are more people who really want to understand their own subjective experience better, their own conscious experience better because that will really help question the intersubjective pretty lies and help change material conditions and behaviour in humans.”

“Many people can start from many different points and move into the same direction and these things can basically reinforce each other.”

JW: “Even the story with your friend, on the one hand it’s deeply frustrating, but there is hope there too. Because she is telling you that she does actually care. If she didn’t care at all she wouldn’t mind you telling her the truth. But she knows she cares and that’s why she’s trying to avoid it and that’s partly where I get my hope from.”

JW: “Most people around the world believe things that are completely unfounded and most people around the world act in ways that are brutally exclusionary and oppressive to other humans and to non-human animals as well.”

JW: “But at the same time, most people around the world, (we can maybe put the clinical psychopaths to one side for a moment,) most people around the world do actually want to understand reality well if they can. And most of them do have an intuitive felt compassion that’s similar to yours or mine, not just for other humans, but for nonhuman animals as well.”

JW: “So it does feel like there’s this latent good quality epistemology and ethics lurking in most human minds… that we could free and tap into and maybe things could change very quickly. So here’s hoping.”

JW: “It’s been such a pleasure talking to you… your wide ranging work is pulling on so many of those levers… blurring the human / nonhuman boundary, challenging all different forms of oppression as they work across different intersections, considering nonhuman animals as another type of migrant, which is another fascinating aspect of your work. And then taking that deeply critical approach to looking at media and animated films and journalism and challenging where we see these problems being manifested in popular culture and academia as well.”

01:14:06 Follow Natalie and Her Work

– https://modlangs.gatech.edu/people/person/natalie-khazaal

– https://modlangs.gatech.edu/featured-people/natalie-khazaal

– “Pretty Liar: Television, Language and Gender in Wartime Lebanon”

– “Like an Animal’: Critical Animal Studies Perspectives on Borders, Displacement, and Othering” (ed with Nuria Almiron) About Human and nonhuman immigration and refugees and how we carve boundaries.

– “Nonbelievers, Apostates and Atheists in the Muslim World” (ed with Jack David Eller)

JW: “I’m particularly interested in the non-believers in the Muslim world as well because I think people have such a simplistic view of Muslim oriented countries. They just assume there are no non-believers there at all. And it’s just not the case. There are large percentages of non-believers of various different types in every religious community around the world, Muslim communities included. So to, you know, shine a light on them, help people realize they’re there and help people realize that they can be targets of oppression and violence too is deeply important.”

Thanks to the growing number of people helping to fund us via our Sentientism Patreon, our Ko-Fi page and via YouTube memberships. You can do the same or help by picking out some Sentientism merch on Redbubble or buying our guests’ books at the Sentientism Bookshop. Thanks also to Graham for the post-production. Sentientism is proud to now be part of the iRoar podcast network – go check out some of the other wonderful podcasts there.