Sentientism "You don't really have to convince people to be compassionate" - Jesse Tandler MD of New Roots Institute - Sentientism 212
Jesse Tandler is Managing Director of New Roots Institute. He oversees programming, people operations, and implementation of New Roots Institute's strategy. Jesse is a writer, academic, and has been an educator for nearly two decades. He earned a B.A. from UC Berkeley in 2002 and an MFA from the New School in 2007. Shortly thereafter, he began teaching high school students about the ethics of our food culture. Later, during his PhD work, Jesse continued to include environmental and animal ethics on the syllabi of his undergraduate classes at the City University of New York, where for five years he taught philosophy, literature, writing, and rhetoric. In 2017, he moved to Los Angeles to apply his years of research and educational experience in the non-profit sphere. Outside of New Roots Institute, you may find him practicing yoga, appreciating beauty in its myriad forms, reading in one of his preferred languages, or teaching food politics at UCLA.
In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the most important questions: “what’s real?”, “who matters?” and "how can we make a better world?"
Sentientism answers those questions with "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The video of our conversation is here on YouTube.
00:00 Clips!
01:09 Welcome
02:55 Jesse's Intro
- Continental philosophy, teaching food politics and running New Roots Institute (was the Factory Farming Awareness Coalition)
03:32 What's Real?
- Jewish pre-school
- "I assumed there was a god because that's what the adults told me"
- At 6-7 yrs old "It seemed slightly improbable to me because there was no other evidence for it"
- At 4-5 yrs "I started getting really concerned about death and what was going to happen when I died... the annihilation of my consciousness"
- "I asked my dad and he said 'of course there's no god'... I felt validated actually"
- Next 15 years "a very atheistic worldview... probably some contempt for religion and people who believed in something that seemed completely impossible to me... I was pretty loud about it..."
- "Very few atheists around me..." A 9th grade debate: "Is there a god... it was pretty much me against the class"
- "It became a point of identity for me... in middle school and high school"
- "Some of my points of identity - like being a meat-eater - had changed drastically"
- College at Berkeley, psychedelics "It opened me up to the possibility that I might just not be seeing everything... my five senses were limited... I had a circumscribed intellect... it was unlikely I had access to whatever the reality out there is."
- "Us looking at the universe is like a dog looking at the TV... the dog has no idea what's going on with the TV... I barely have any idea..."
- 2 layers: phenomenon "what we experience" then "something else going on that we just don't really have access to - maybe some kind of spiritual access.. intuitive access.. but we can't figure out empirically."
20:38 What Matters?
35:38 Who Matters?
46:47 A Better World?
01:19:29 Follow Jesse:
- @jmtandler And more... full show notes at Sentientism.info.
Sentientism is “Evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings.” More at Sentientism.info. Join our "I'm a Sentientist" wall via this simple form.
Everyone, Sentientist or not, is welcome in our groups. The biggest so far is here on FaceBook. Come join us there!