

We're Reaching a Critical Mass - Consumer Behaviour Expert Jack Waverley - Sentientism 235
Jack Waverley is a senior lecturer in marketing at the University of Manchester. He uses marketing and consumer research to protect and promote the interests of all animals, including humans. Jack teaches on a range of BSc and MSc courses in the Fashion, Business, and Technology (FBT) group. He also supervises a number of PhD and dissertation students. He is an academic expert member of the Academy of Marketing and a member of the Vegan Society's Research Advisory Committee.
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
00:52 Welcome
- Jack's talk at VARC 2025
- "The VARC conference is like being in the future...where we want to get to... it really does feel like you've jumped forward 10 years"
02:49 Jack's Intro
- A marketing consumer researcher... focusing both onconsumption of animals and consumption for animals
- "Markets as a system of morals... material objects moving around... infrastructures"
- "How we move from one system to another"
- The AI question "I very much adopt a sentiocentric or Sentientist perspective"
- "The reason I'm concerned about animals is because they are sentient"
- "If AI were to become sentient... then of course they would fall within... my moral circle"
- "Most people think about 'what can AI do for me... for humans?... How does AI affect humanity?'"
- "I'm much more interested in 'what can we do for AI?'... our responsibilities for AI... how can AI help post-humanity, more than humanity, all sentient beings."
- "I've ended up in this... very anthropocentric tradition... marketing and consumer research... but bringing in animals and bringing in AI"
- A new field of #SentientistMarketing ?
05:14 What's Real
- Growing up in "a nominally Christian household... but we never went to church... more agnostic"
- "There was never an explicit framework of... this is why these things are good or bad"
- A liberal, progressive upbringing "live and let live"
- "It wasn't quite a blank slate [re: moral thinking] but it was as close as you probably get"
- "Broadly naturalistic is my baseline... interested in biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics... scientific ways of approaching the world"
- "I didn't really go out looking for any kind of revelation... [or] any strict rules... [or] some sort of authority figure"
- "I didn't mind other people having religion but for me it just didn't make sense... I was naturalistic"
31:44 What and Who Matters?
35:50 A Better World?
01:21:40 Follow Jack:
- Jack at Manchester University
- Jack on LinkedIn (please get in touch)
And more... full show notes at Sentientism.info.
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