2_6 Adam Aronovich: Hope in a Complex World / Psychedelics, Ideology, and the Power of Satire

Today my guest Adam Aronovic who is a fiend or Minority Trip Report and a second time guest on the show. Adam is a PhD Candidate in Medical Anthropology and the creator and curator of Healing from Healing, a social channel which casts a critical, skeptical and humorous gaze at Healing and Transformation Culture.

Episode Description:
Today's episode delves into the intersections of ideology, psychedelics, humor, and hope. Adam Aronovich, a medical anthropologist and critical thinker, brings us insightful perspectives on how our attachment to individual narratives and belief systems impacts our approach to psychedelics and healing. He highlights the need to shift from exclusive self-analysis to recognizing the broader impact of our actions on relationships, communities, and the environment. Aronovic discusses the dangers of magical thinking and the importance of epistemic humility, emphasizing how humor and satire can challenge rigid belief systems and open the door to critical reflection. In a world facing unprecedented challenges, he shares his journey towards embracing hope as a moral imperative, and how his role as a father drives his commitment to shaping a brighter future.

Show Notes:

• The shift from individualizing narratives to treating relationships in the context of psychedelics.
• The counterproductive obsession with peeling layers of the onion of personal traumas without considering broader contexts.
• The allure of intuition as a primary arbiter of truth and its ties to distrust in expertise.
• The role of humor and satire as vehicles for critical discourse, disarming resistance, and fostering introspection.
• The distinction between optimism and hope: finding hope despite a lack of optimism.
• The imperative of preparing the next generation to navigate the complexities of the world.
• The challenge of raising children amidst existential risks and planetary grief.
• Embracing a sense of purpose by contributing positively to the next generation's emotional resilience.

You can find Adam's work and Healing from Healing here:
https://www.instagram.com/healingfromhealing

Transcript

[00:00:00] Raad Seraj: Welcome to Minority Trip Report. MTR is a podcast spotlighting stories of personal transformation and underrepresented leaders in mental health, psychedelics, and consciousness. I'm your host, Raad Seraj. If you're learning from or enjoying Minority Trip Report, please subscribe to MTR on YouTube at Minority Trip Report, and follow us on Instagram at Minority Trip.

[00:00:18] Raad Seraj: Thank you and enjoy the episode.

[00:00:20] Raad Seraj: Today my guest is Adam Aronovic, who is a friend of Minority Trip Report and a second time guest on the show. Adam is a PhD candidate in medical anthropology and the creator and curator of Healing from Healing, a social channel which casts a critical, skeptical, and humorous gaze at the healing and transformation culture.

[00:00:37] Raad Seraj: Adam, thanks so much for being here.

[00:00:39] Adam Aronovich: Thank you for having me again. 

[00:00:41] Raad Seraj: It's so good to see you. And I really appreciate you making time for this podcast despite having a bad back, which is the worst kind of pain one can imagine. So thank you. I yeah, I really appreciate it. I want to start at the very obvious place, which is, we were both in Denver and unfortunately didn't get to meet in person, but it was a fantastic conference.

[00:00:58] Raad Seraj: A lot happened. It was almost overwhelmingly big, perhaps, particularly after, being isolated for two years and during the pandemic. So we're out of the bat. Let's talk about Denver. What was your experience and psychedelic science? 

[00:01:13] Adam Aronovich: Yeah, man, there's so much, so many different contradictory sentiments, I think, first of all, I had a lot of fun, like I, I've been in psychedelic conference, both as a participant and also as an attendee giving talks for maybe almost a decade pretty consistently and, even in, in, in 10 years, like the scene has shifted pretty dramatically at the very least in the sense of, The scope and the size of it, right?

[00:01:43] Adam Aronovich: I can remember the first conference. Even psychedelic conference previous to that was like a fourth or a 50 people that attended this one. So that's already gives you an indication of the magnitude of how the interest in psychedelics and its validation through the epistemics of science and acceptance in mainstream society and the medical establishment have advanced in, pretty much a few years.

[00:02:07] Adam Aronovich: For me, this was a pretty special experience also because the first time that I came to a conference with my family, my wife, a little daughter, a very different experience. I wasn't as dialed in the different parties. I, I really wanted to go to your party. But yeah, from the get go, I like already made up my mind and accepted my faith like I don't want to have a FOMO of missing out on different parties and events and conversations like I'm there with my family to enjoy time with my daughter and my wife and just different stages of life, and this particular experience was very different in that sense. But I had a really fun time. 

[00:02:46] Raad Seraj: The last time we spoke, this was almost, it's funny, you were my first ever guest on the podcast. I was still living in Calgary. I had just moved there. Perhaps it was six months after, after I went there. We were still in the very peak of the pandemic.

[00:03:01] Raad Seraj: And so a lot of the conversation we had two years ago was at a very different time, a pandemic, that pseudo documentary had just come out. You had just as an experiment started healing from healing. And here we are, years after, in a very different world. We're again, going into conferences that have 11, 000 people.

[00:03:20] Raad Seraj: It also feels like you are now coming in, people know you as the guy who has done healing from healing. I don't know if talk about it that way or not, but what was it like? And not just being there as a researcher, person who has been a psychonaut, as a father, but also, the guy who started this healing from healing thing.

[00:03:35] Adam Aronovich: Yeah, I, I, it did happen a few times that just random people came to me and Hey I appreciate your work and your platform and things like the kind of the first time in my life where there's a degree of notoriety that I wasn't like really either seeking or counting on.

[00:03:54] Adam Aronovich: But then Yeah, it just happens. Yeah yeah, like people did. Of course it feels good to some extent when a person comes and introduces themselves and Hey, I've been following your work and I really appreciate what you do. Healing from healing is by design, divisive platform, right? The I'm not casting a very wide net to appeal to a wide sense of aesthetic senses and philosophical approaches and politics and perspectives like there's people that love it. And there's people that hate it. So I'm trying, I know that it's a bias, right?

[00:04:27] Adam Aronovich: That it's much more likely for somebody that actually loves what you do and recognizes for the good work to come and approach you rather than some random people going, Hey, I hate what you're doing. And it also I do. I am deeply aware that there's very Different sentiments and they all have their place in it and not getting carried away with, the positive feedback because definitely there's also a negative one.

[00:04:50] Adam Aronovich: And that's, perfectly fine and understandable. But yeah, it's it's a different experience when, being aware that people are aware, more or less people having these conversations that people know the platform. And that it's something that is talked about. I think, that's always been the primary purpose to expose or, put out there some topics, some ideas, have people having conversations and those conversations are happening.

[00:05:10] Adam Aronovich: So that's, a win. I guess 

[00:05:13] Raad Seraj: I'm surprised you say that you're not casting a wide net by the very virtue of casting this humorous skeptical gaze. It feels like you're actually widening the conversation. Why do you feel like you're not casting a wide enough net? Is it because You I mean, yeah, I'm curious about where that comment is coming from.

[00:05:30] Adam Aronovich: The main focus is still critical and criticism, inherently entails also antagonism, right? There's a lot of people that don't necessarily take criticism too well or understand why it's important. Or, like one of, one of the, one of the comments that I get very often on my play in my page is people that are just Started following or found the platform recently Oh, I'm so glad that I found your page.

[00:05:52] Adam Aronovich: Big fan. I love what you're doing and my response is pretty much always the same. It's yeah, it's all fun and games until we make fun of something that you personally like or you personally hold sacred, and that's the thing. It until we touch on something that is a secret cow for them.

[00:06:08] Adam Aronovich: It's valid. Obviously, I don't, I'm not sharing it. Absolute truths. I'm sharing a perspective of oftentimes one person on a wide variety of topics that, I may or may not have some expertise in. So I'm always like trying to calibrate my own tone, but also aware that criticism, even if it's humorous, it's never going to land well with absolutely everybody.

[00:06:32] Adam Aronovich: And some people are going to take it very personally because we are criticizing things that can be very personal or that people are very attached to. Today, this morning I posted something. I posted a couple of articles that I really liked on the subject of kind of the commodification of trauma, right?

[00:06:49] Adam Aronovich: And this immediately triggers a lot of people who might be trauma informed coaches or people that have been in the trauma world for a long time or people that are personally identifying as having CPTSD. Or also different traumatic experiences. And even without really reading the articles or addressing the articles, there's already this knee jerk reaction of like this position of the system, which is understandable, right?

[00:07:13] Adam Aronovich: And this is the nature, of criticism. Many times it's like a person is really attached to a particular idea or a particular thing. Then Any criticism of it is gonna bring forth that kind of like oppositional thing, and that's fine. But it's important to read the articles. 

[00:07:28] Raad Seraj: I totally agree.

[00:07:29] Raad Seraj: It's really funny. You remind me of this one time a couple of weeks ago. I posted this just a snarky comment on Facebook saying like people who claim to be spiritual are some of the unfunniest people I've met. And there was immediate backlash. What was really interesting is that some of the aggression, the pseudo aggression that I got furthered my point.

[00:07:49] Raad Seraj: So I'm like, is it ironic that you are like hating on what I just said? It just proves the point. Not only that. I think a lot of people read when I said un funniest to be unfun. To me, funny and fun is very different things, right? Fun is playfulness. Funny is just in it. The kind of humor that I relate to is also very self-aware, kinda like George Carlin, who's self-aware, but also decided not to give a fuck at all.

[00:08:17] Raad Seraj: Yeah. So I find that really interesting. Give me a sense of what are some of the most dramatic things, good and bad you've heard from people as a response to healing from healing? 

[00:08:27] Adam Aronovich: So I think, when I started healing from healing because of the orientation which is like taking a critical and skeptical and humorous, I of just a bio of my page, but, casting like a critical, skeptical and humorous gaze at healing and transformation culture.

[00:08:44] Adam Aronovich: I thought most of the criticism would come from people who are deep into the healing conspiracy rabbit holes. Mhm. Like these subcultures that intersect and interlock pretty much a lot, right? Like the healing, plant medicine, psychedelics, conspiracy culture libertarianism.

[00:09:06] Adam Aronovich: There's all sorts of different kind of things. Mhm. A lot of the mix. And I thought that most of the pushback or the criticism that I would get would be from people that are like really deep in the conspiracy rabbit hole, people that are really deep into, but that hasn't quite been the case. I find that Actually this is an interesting, this is a thing that I need to be threading very carefully, but most of the criticism that I get actually when it's really abrasive and really mean and really abusive, it's not at all from the right wing libertarian, but actually from a very specific slice of like the United States, Left wing identity politics.

[00:09:54] Adam Aronovich: And there is a degree. There's a degree in which that becomes really toxic dealing with, there's really no way of having. This is one of the things that I've learned is that it's very difficult for me to actually have a conversation in good faith. When somebody already comes in with a very specific notion of what is the moral morally right thing to do, right?

[00:10:18] Adam Aronovich: Imposing that ever changing kaleidoscope of morality and micro identities that into, everybody else outside of Canada's subcultures in the United States and Canada. It is. This is very difficult for me to deal with because I identify and have identified for all of my life as, gravitating or holding leftist ideals, leftist politics, ideologies and to some extent and seeing and experiencing the full wrath of this kind of pseudo leftist American, group has been really even holding a lot of compassion and empathy for the plights of oppressed people everywhere in the world.

[00:11:05] Adam Aronovich: And, being social justice oriented and liberation oriented like this has been to some extent very enlightening of the true nature many times of these discourses. 

[00:11:17] Raad Seraj: It's a really interesting perspective. I don't have a platform as big as yours, but in my small way have. And, my question is sometimes while if I'm going to hold space for it, if I'm going to hold my own, I have to hold space for all the different ideas, all the different perspectives, objections at the same time, just because you can say something doesn't make it right.

[00:11:40] Raad Seraj: Doesn't mean that you deserve to be heard either. And I think, I have this. Saying that I believe in a world that no matter your creed, color, religion, orientation, gender, everybody can be a fucking asshole. It's everybody can be. And that, it's like perhaps a snarky way of saying that we all have the capacity to be bad and oppressive.

[00:12:02] Raad Seraj: And for me, colonization and slavery, these things are an ongoing process. Just because the Western Europeans did it doesn't mean it stopped, right? You just have to look away and look at our clothes, look at what we eat, to go like who is being oppressed by our very consumption and very presence on this planet. Tell me a little bit about specifically, so you had fun, yes, but what are the other contradictory feelings that you were talking about that you opened with?

[00:12:27] Adam Aronovich: For the best part of maybe 10 or 15 years, being involved with psychedelic community in different roles in different ways, starting out, when I was much younger in the very beginnings of projects that were geared towards harm reduction and psychedelic support in trans festivals, when that was something extremely new and groundbreaking, and then seeing the scene evolve.

[00:12:49] Adam Aronovich: Over the 10 or 15 years to, a public acceptance that I couldn't really have fathomed back then. Then, of course, that is very encouraging and very validating, right? I guess there's a sense that maybe 15 years ago we were still like a few outsiders who were not only doing drugs would actually trying to work in more established ways to validate that perhaps the established narratives of, the war on drugs and so on and so forth, weren't the best ideas for a functioning society.

[00:13:23] Adam Aronovich: And nowadays it seems like these things that actually... Taking root in a much more widespread way in which kind of that anti drug propaganda is understood as propaganda and not necessarily the default go to understanding of non ordinary states of awareness or substances anymore. There's a sense of accomplishment.

[00:13:43] Adam Aronovich: There's a sense of validation. There's many positives, of course. But at the same time, I guess there's many things also that a little bit discouraging in terms of the commodification of things in I guess there are things that are inevitable in the sense of when you're mainstreaming something, it's inevitable that things are going to be commodified and then co opted for different ways.

[00:14:05] Adam Aronovich: I think like one of the one of the paradigmatic things. Is that many of us who have had the sort of like epiphanies and all inducing experiences with psychedelics earlier in this process? One of the things that I think also people understood back in the sixties and seventies and so on so forth was that psychedelics have Inherent transformative potential that is not only individual and encapsulated in the individual experience with something that extends outwards into society and culture that really have the potential to transform massively collective ways of thinking and doing a relationship to ourselves and each other, a relationship to the world.

[00:14:51] Adam Aronovich: There's a really subversive revolutionary Potentially in the mere fact of having a experience that can shift our perception of ourselves in the world in such a radical way that we're suddenly able to understand ourselves embedded within different stories and the ones that are consumed through culture, right?

[00:15:09] Adam Aronovich: And education and so on and so forth. And one of the strategies, of the so called psychedelic renaissance, right? That has been the medicalization of psychedelics is a way, In maps, it's an often repeated trope, right? Like the foot in the door policy, like we're gonna medicalize and psychologize these substances as a way to gain validation from the medical establishment and The establishment as a whole.

[00:15:34] Adam Aronovich: But that entails again, like a massive reductionism of what these things are for as understood exclusively through the lens of therapy, of the medicalized perspective of personal trauma of and it's not that these things are not useful, is that there's now a whole generation of people who got introduced to psychedelics in the last few years.

[00:15:58] Adam Aronovich: Thank you very Who almost exclusively understand psychedelics and approach psychedelics through this hypermedicalized, hyperpsychologized, hyperindividualized perspective. And, eventually that's a disservice, to the real potential and the real gift that psychedelics can have for humanity as a whole without getting too messianic.

[00:16:18] Adam Aronovich: Which we're also gonna address the messianic aspect of it. Because when we're approaching psychedelics as exclusively a technology of the self, A hyper individualized, hyper psychologized, hyper therapized way of dealing with my own internal experience. And the only real healing and transformation that can happen in the world is my own personal transformation without any action in the world.

[00:16:40] Adam Aronovich: Then what ends up happening again is that psychedelics become another one, another tool for power, right? Another tool for the establishment. To reproduce and propagate the main ideologies and neoliberal mindset, the hyper individualistic mindset onwards and onwards instead of actually pausing for a moment and saying hey, yes, people are traumatized.

[00:17:00] Adam Aronovich: People are suffering. People have depression, anxiety, alienation, loneliness, right? But maybe the solution is not Having psychedelic therapies dealing with individual people, but actually having psychedelics provide the sorts of insights right that can both address individual suffering, but also maybe get to the root source of many of these experiences of loneliness and alienation, depression and anxiety.

[00:17:21] Adam Aronovich: There are not, faulty chemistry or, whatever else is there in this hyper individualized, hyper therapized worldview, but rather You know, like seeing hey, yeah, we live in a world that is not as ideal for humans to thrive in. There's all sorts of different, really important, structural, violent processes in place.

[00:17:40] Adam Aronovich: And if we really want to address depression and anxiety, it's not about one person or two persons who have access to resources paying somebody to provide MDMA for them. But maybe using the substance in a way that we can actually identify and address the structural issues that are creating so many pervasive, almost universal epidemics of alienation, loneliness and so on and so forth.

[00:18:01] Adam Aronovich: I think, I like to resume that. It's not that one thing is Not necessarily useful, but rather when exclusive, like Abraham Maslow, right? Like the dictum that if the only tool that you have is a hammer, then everything is going to start looking as a nail. But, not everybody is a nail and more useful than smashing down nails.

[00:18:21] Adam Aronovich: Maybe it's understanding why we have so many nails that need to be smashed down. 

[00:18:26] Raad Seraj: This is a very important point. And, I see this with micro dosing to on the other side, the non medical side, right? On one hand, you can say micro dosing is perhaps a lower barrier to entry.

[00:18:37] Raad Seraj: It feels less risky. On the other hand, people being people, very quickly form entire identities based on the fact that you just microdose.

[00:18:46] Raad Seraj: But that's not even the point. Psychedelics is not even the point in my mind. It's not the point. The substance is not the point. The point is, what you were saying. loneliness, isolation, environmental degradation, dissociation from nature, right? Fragmented communities and so forth. Lack of purpose or not feeling purpose in your life.

[00:19:04] Raad Seraj: Psychedelics fits in one way, but the whole point is to allow an opening so you can experience yourself. Like you were saying, as a, as an agent in other stories, as a real person in other stories. So I feel like whether you're on the medical side or the decrim side, there is this parallel sort of contradictory, full of potholes kind of thing going on, right?

[00:19:29] Raad Seraj: Ultimately maybe the issue is that we in the industrial West, there's no sense of pedigree. There's a sense of story, the greater story in which this current story is unfolding, right? A couple of months ago, a good friend of mine, Peter Vitali and then Wendy Tucker from the Shulgin family invited us to the Shulgin farm, and Anne and Sasha Shulgin have now both passed on, and the family is wondering what to do with this property.

[00:19:52] Raad Seraj: Which is an immense amount of history and attached to it. Very revolutionary history in some ways, right? If you look and think of both Anne and Sasha's story, and what they were doing, and I was, thinking the same thing, which is we as a community don't really have a true north in terms of a space, in terms of a place.

[00:20:09] Raad Seraj: We have the stories, and because everybody's coming to this ecosystem now from their own biases, from their own, let's say education and so on, there's no one place that tells you this was, used for 12, 000 years and so on in different cultures, in different ways. And it's not even about the substance.

[00:20:26] Raad Seraj: It's about alter states and finding them in different ways, right? So perhaps there's, that's the sort of the greater gap here. But I really agree with you that this is a very important question to ponder. 

[00:20:36] Adam Aronovich: So how will you succinctly summarize that point? What is it what is the key insight from that experience?

[00:20:41] Raad Seraj: I think it's very important to have a physical place. To anchor ourselves in a continuous stream of knowledge, right? And experience, both bad and good. If everything feels novel, there's no anchoring. This is not a novel thing. Psychedelic Renaissance is not a thing. It's happened before many times.

[00:21:02] Raad Seraj: How do we anchor ourselves? I went to this last closing panel with Leonard Picard, and I don't know if you went to any of his talks, Adam, but for those in the audience who don't know, he was basically part of the, so he was a Harvard professor, but also a part of the Brotherhood of Divine Light.

[00:21:18] Raad Seraj: Whose whole mission was to liberate humanity by basically giving everybody acid there, I think between 1982, 2002, over 20 years, they distributed 2 billion doses of LSD around the world, right from the US to all the way to Thailand.

[00:21:36] Raad Seraj: But then he got imprisoned for 20 years he was in solitary confinement. He's out now on probation, and he was zoomed in to the presentation. And the presenter asked him at the end, he's Look, you have a very eclectic room of people who have been in this space for a long time, people who are new to this space.

[00:21:51] Raad Seraj: What's your advice for them? And his whole thing was, the other shoe can drop tomorrow. We're not there yet. He has exuberance, he has all the potential, blah, blah, blah. But the other shoe can literally drop tomorrow. So let's not point fingers at each other, let's not criminalize and stigmatize each other further.

[00:22:08] Raad Seraj: We have to stick together. I don't know what that means and how, but it's speaks with our lack of awareness of history.

[00:22:14] Adam Aronovich: Yeah. To that point and following up on the question before, I think one of the main things that I oftentimes try to illuminate through, whether it's the work that I do online or when I work You know, with clients or when I'm teaching classes or anything, really, it's something that is very basic, but oftentimes also very novel for a lot of people because it's not something that people think about all the time, particularly not when we're very attached.

[00:22:39] Adam Aronovich: To the main narratives from, medical mental health establishments that are very individualizing on any affliction. So I think like psychedelics are following through a very established path off treating individuals as opposed to treating relationships.

[00:22:57] Adam Aronovich: Right? And one of the things that I find very frustrating is perhaps is exactly like the furthering of this narrative that When we are using psychedelics as individuals the only thing that really matters is working through our personal traumas and working through peeling the layers of the onion, like finding the root source of why we are the way that we are, oftentimes in an extremely psychoanalytic, personalized, psychologized way, right?

[00:23:28] Adam Aronovich: And this is something. That I've seen multiple times through many years of doing this work, whether it's in, plant medicine retreat centers or working with people in different capacities, like people really do get lost in that search for root causes of peeling layers of the onion endlessly, sometimes for years, sometimes for lifetimes, just peeling the onion, trying to dig in.

[00:23:50] Adam Aronovich: This happened to me when I was three, like a very Matthean approach to every adult dysfunction is a result of something she didn't happen to you when you were a child. And I'm not saying that these things are not true. I'm saying that using that as the exclusive lens for adult dysfunction, the exclusive Path through which we're trying to heal is extremely counterproductive if we are not able to put a stop to it at some point and get out of ourselves and start also seeing relationships, right?

[00:24:23] Adam Aronovich: That's two different frames that I, when I do closing talks to groups or when I'm, you know, working, running class or workshops or even with clients and one of the first things that I, one of the things that I would say it's like, hey don't forget, right? As we're moving into the integration phase, perhaps, right?

[00:24:39] Adam Aronovich: Yeah, it's very important to keep that I in words to be self aware and conscious and examining our behaviors and patterns and mindfulness, all of these things. But perhaps one I in words and one I Outwards. Or maybe, maybe one and a half eyes inwards, our own stuff, our own shit, our own process, blah, blah, blah.

[00:24:57] Adam Aronovich: But also maybe half an eye outwards that we're also aware of how we are in relationship, how we are in community, how we are in society, how we are in relationship to cold, right? And maybe it's not all about building the layers of the onion endlessly, but also at some point, right? Hey I identify that these are the things that are, I'm suffering from sort of things that are affecting me.

[00:25:18] Adam Aronovich: These are the things that I've been dealing with personally, but also I'm able to identify that the root sources of it are not exclusively my mother micromanaging me and so maybe, but also maybe there's some sort of structural. Issues that affect not only everybody and part of that healing is actually being able to identify and address structural issues, right?

[00:25:36] Adam Aronovich: I say hey, how can I make things better? Not only for myself, but for everybody else. Other people don't have to deal with the things that I've dealt with or other things have like a head start in understanding, right? Like part of the alienation, part of the loneliness, part of the discomfort is not only because of their own personal biography and history and circumstances and so on and so forth, but also because there's certain political, social, cultural things that are affecting all of us that need to be addressed.

[00:26:04] Adam Aronovich: As well. As the bottom line of all of these things and I think this is why psychedelics actually have so much potential and are so powerful and why so frustrating when I feel that they aren't really given the right space to the things that they do is because if there's one thing that actually I have identified through research and practices and so forth, that it's like it is going to be extremely good for is precisely for people to be able to identify Bye.

[00:26:31] Adam Aronovich: The intrinsic links between the health of the individual and the health of the community, the health of the individual and the health of the society, the health of the individual and the health of the culture that encompasses the individual, that feeds that individual and the environment that sustains us and so forth.

[00:26:48] Adam Aronovich: There's all sorts of different metrics right now that, of course, people have already started doing a really good job. Singling out like nature connectedness and so forth, the social components of healing some, I think what I would like to see more off, right? What I would like to see more less office.

[00:27:05] Adam Aronovich: First and foremost, people that are exclusively oriented towards the individual, whether it's like, just like this endless peeling of the onion and personal integration things and something personal life coaches. All those things are fine. But also, in addition to that, okay, more people that actually orienting towards the relational, right?

[00:27:22] Adam Aronovich: The social, the community, the environmental, the importance of understanding the individual and our well being and our happiness as intrinsically connected to the happiness and wellness Of everybody else, the people immediately in our surrounding communities, but also extending out of words the health of the culture, right?

[00:27:40] Adam Aronovich: The health of the environment, and it's the things that are perhaps obvious, but in practice, they aren't obvious. People don't actually think about this too much, particularly when they're going through integration processes or in workshops. This is not something that is highlighted as much, right? Hey, yeah, maybe we're all anxious, but not only because Something happened to us when we were children that created an anxiety.

[00:28:01] Adam Aronovich: Maybe we're all anxious because actually Yeah, the world is boiling and we have no fucking idea of what kind of world is gonna be here in 10 15 20 years. I'm anxious for a multiple For multiple reasons. But one of the things that I'm very anxious about is because when I think about my daughter and what kind of, what kind of world is she going to inherit when she grows up?

[00:28:24] Adam Aronovich: What shot does she have at actually growing old inhabiting the whole world, right? These are environmental concerns are not necessarily individualized or collectivized, right? And this is the kind of thing that I think psychedelics, if they have any use. Or if they can have a real revolutionary use, then it's about like being more oriented towards greater stories or at least stories that are not as self absorbed and self contained within the individual person's trauma.

[00:28:55] Raad Seraj: I think it's really very well put. A quick reflection on that. I feel like the people, because you're right, there is a risk of, and I see a lot of this, perhaps even in myself at a certain point, which is the endless wallowing and the digging, the excavating, constantly going back to what is the root? What is the root of this? And that wanting to attribute your current state of mind to something bad that had happened because in a way, I understand it because it's an attempt to gain agency over your life and the trajectory you're on. On the other hand, the endless wallowing is also if you are a victim to that story, it actually gives you, it allows you to abject responsibility, right?

[00:29:33] Raad Seraj: It's almost like I can abandon responsibility for the future because, oh yeah, that person hurt me or that thing hurt me. So it's a very mixed thing. There's, there has to be a pivot from okay, the point is to gain agency. So moving forward, how do I get agency, understanding at the same time that I'm not subject to my own will, but also the people around me and the community that I'm in, right?

[00:29:54] Raad Seraj: I'm curious, from your perspective as a medical anthropologist, is there something about the domain of the mind, the brain, mental health, that makes it more susceptible to this sort of distortion? Then let's say other medical aspects. So let's say like diabetes, for example, studying the pancreas. 

[00:30:12] Adam Aronovich: What do you mean? Makes what more susceptible? 

[00:30:16] Raad Seraj: To this sort of anybody can claim anything. It has to be held to be equally true. Because it's so subjective. 

[00:30:22] Adam Aronovich: I think there's a historical momentum that we're going through. It's like a cultural shift over some sort of epistemic chaos.

[00:30:30] Adam Aronovich: Bad. It has been one of the one of the main focuses. Also, my page from the beginning. It's this idea that everybody's opinion stands on equal grounds, right? This is something that is very much entrenched. I would say to some extent on kind of the right wing conspiracy spiritual by like completely a complete disregard for expert opinion, a complete disregard for expert consensus.

[00:30:55] Adam Aronovich: One of the things I think that is very prominent, both in the Psychedelic world, but particularly, more widespread in kind of the new age is spiritual milieu is this appeal to intuition as the primary arbiter of truth, right? There's this idea that everything that we need to know already exists within us.

[00:31:15] Adam Aronovich: And that learning anything external or listening to any expert or reading any book is then unless it confirms or bias is completely superfluous. Because if we only develop the capacity to really listen to that inner voice, then that truth is always gonna come up, right? Like the only compass that we need to navigate this world epistemically, morally and so on and so forth.

[00:31:37] Adam Aronovich: He's already within us. So this is like a very grotesque, augmented appeal to inner guidance. There is, rooted in that magical thinking that also is, I don't know what originates what, but also intrinsically tied to that distrust from expertise and distrust from opinions.

[00:31:58] Adam Aronovich: I think with psychedelics is even trickier. Because psychedelics can exacerbate that 1000 fold. In my experience, this is one of the one of the really tricky things to navigate with psychedelics is that when we have an experience with the psychedelics they these experiences oftentimes tend to be very salient, right?

[00:32:15] Adam Aronovich: And very impactful and to feel like very real, like we're tapping into some pocket of truth that is more real than real and absolutely needs to. And, if we don't really have a good person helping us with integration or a good mentor figure guiding this process or helping us guide this process or a lot of experience with kind of like our own Fallibility when it comes to our own mind and our own belief systems is very easy to fully give into the very alluring and very comfortable idea that we have tapped into truth with a capital T and that experience and whatever insights with the right comment, whatever interpretation we made from that experience.

[00:32:59] Adam Aronovich: Overrides anything and everything else, no matter who said it, no matter how much evidence there is about it, no matter how established that idea is right. So a person would be like, Oh I don't care about all this body of research or all this medical consensus or this because my experience is different.

[00:33:15] Adam Aronovich: Fine. You're entitled to your own opinion. You're entitled to your own experience. You're entitled to, whatever it is. But The entitlement to push for that anecdotic personal interpretation of something as standing on equal grounds with knowledge. This is an epistemic problem that is very prominent and very prevalent, I think, across the spectrum.

[00:33:38] Adam Aronovich: I think epistemic humility is important, and epistemic humility is something, particularly with psychonauts, particularly with people that are doing psychedelics, particularly people that are on this path of plant medicines and, uncanny valley of entities, spirits, who is saying what, where is the transmission coming from?

[00:33:58] Raad Seraj: Let me bring it back to your work for a second then. Because I think what you're really talking about is a sense of discernment, right? How do you, first of all, sense that you are, you have opinions that might be contradictory and you have to hold both and then decide? What is the right perspective for this particular time or moment?

[00:34:14] Raad Seraj: Where do you think humor and satire, and particularly coming from the perspective of your work, through Healing from Healing, how does satire fit into all this? 

[00:34:23] Adam Aronovich: I think people are very attached to their ideas, and people are very attached to their belief systems.

[00:34:28] Adam Aronovich: People get latched in into a particular way of understanding themselves and replacing the world and what things are for. And let's say like what psychedelics are good for what kind of worldview is the right worldview? What kind of moral compass is the right moral compass? What kind of ideology?

[00:34:42] Adam Aronovich: It's the correct ideology. People get reattached to all of these things and they become part. This is a whole other topic when it comes to identity, which is something that, we can discuss for days, right? Like this turn towards identitarianism is like the main framework through which we understand ourselves and our place in society and the world and so on and so forth.

[00:34:59] Adam Aronovich: When you're poking holes or criticizing or making fun of something that people are very attached to or people feel very strongly about during again, like we're going back to the beginning of this conversation, you're gonna encounter a lot of antagonism. You're gonna encounter a lot of resistance.

[00:35:15] Adam Aronovich: And humor is a good vehicle to be able to maybe drive a point home in a way that is more subtle that is not perceived to be a personal attack on a person's belief systems or a person's identity or a person's anything, but rather something that, oh, Maybe, first, at least a chuckle, disarm them to some extent, like maybe this is something that I can reflect on how it applies to my personal life, my personal approach to things.

[00:35:43] Adam Aronovich: I think like one of the taglines that I use a lot, right? If you want to tell people. If you want to tell people the truth, you want to make them laugh, otherwise they will kill you. I haven't really been able to find the root source of that quote. I think it's one of those quotes that are just, universally attributed to all sorts of different people.

[00:36:00] Adam Aronovich: But, I found that to be very true, right? If you want to go and tell somebody, hey this is like something that you believe in, it's fucked up. Or but if you come on with a, with a joke that is universal, that is not like personally oriented towards one thing, then it becomes better as a vehicle for criticism, for skepticism, for illuminating things that perhaps the person is not aware of.

[00:36:23] Adam Aronovich: I know for myself. I, like I, I believe in all sorts of fucked up things. I don't, like my ideas, my ideologies, my belief systems and things that I hold sacred. All the everything that I say for everybody else obviously applies to me, too. And I know, right? Like when somebody comes at me like with a very You know, confrontational adversarial energy er, then like I immediately shut down and fuck you.

[00:36:46] Adam Aronovich: I don't want to have this conversation with you, but if someone is hey, like bringing it with a joke or something like, hey maybe this is something that actually I can look into with a, with much less resistance, with much less attachment, with a little bit more of a, humorous perspective on it.

[00:36:58] Adam Aronovich: So I think again, like humor and satire are a vehicle for criticism. It's like a Trojan horse. Like you want to bring in something that you feel is important that you want people to really ponder, to really think, to really the relation to their own lived experience, but also in a way that is not immediately antagonizing.

[00:37:17] Raad Seraj: That's very well said. So I mentioned to you before we started the podcast, I've been very fortunate to have both you and Dennis Walker, who is the host of Micropreneur, who I know you and Dennis. know each other, and you guys are friends, and you shared the stage at Denver. And one of the things that Dennis and I talked about, because he is very similar in the use of satire and humor to make a point, to talk about the moral ambiguity of it all, and to essentially dis, disarm this sort of identity politics.

[00:37:45] Raad Seraj: I think comedians nowadays get into a lot of trouble because they punch down. They dehumanize and belittle people. Whereas comedy and humor is very powerful because the thing that, like the court jester which can poke fun of the king You know in front of the whole court and make the king laugh while also not get executed You know It can be he's basically saying fuck you to the king and the king laughs at him and actually, Rewards him or her so I want to use this point to talk about how do you discern, or how you as a humorist or satirist in this space, who has a big platform, make sure that you're not punching down, you're punching up.

[00:38:25] Raad Seraj: And I want to draw attention particularly to a recent case where, there's this video of this white woman on a plane screaming about, Someone that they're seeing, or it's in the back. It has all the makings of a Karen screaming on a plane.

[00:38:39] Raad Seraj: And you had memes about this person, but you chose to take it down a few days later. I found your rationale for that very interesting. You went through in detail, talking about why you took it down, and what was important for others to know. For example... You haven't heard the entire story of why the woman was experiencing what she was experiencing and why she was acting the way she was.

[00:39:02] Raad Seraj: I found number two really interesting as well, because it said it's fair to prioritize compassion over laughs in certain situations, which is also really good. And then she hasn't consented to being filmed, which is also, I think, a very important consideration. But ultimately, you still held your ground that we shouldn't just default to giving somebody the credit of having a mental health crisis.

[00:39:22] Raad Seraj: Some people are extra, and they do act out . I ask myself, what would have been the experience if it was a person wearing a turban, making the same claims on a plane? What would have happened? They would have been shot, or maybe kicked off the plane immediately.

[00:39:34] Raad Seraj: I think they would have been, yeah wrestled to the ground, kicked, by people in that plane. Frankly speaking. So who do we actually give the benefit of the doubt is a question here. But ultimately I thought your post was really interesting both in the sense that you did take it down.

[00:39:49] Raad Seraj: So you did give consideration. And you did choose to be more compassionate. At the same time, calling out the default assumption here, which is that this person was unwell. I want to ask you here, perhaps as a sort of closing question, which is really important at this particular time, how do you use humor and satire to punch up and not punch down?

[00:40:09] Adam Aronovich: Yeah, I think like first of all, I think a little bit of context from my own personal perspective and healing from healing is a platform that grew very quickly to my understanding of things like I started this platform, perhaps. I don't know, 18 months ago or so there was a big break in between where I abandoned the platform after my daughter was born.

[00:40:30] Adam Aronovich: I didn't really have the energy for it. He has grown like very quickly very steadily in a way that I never I Prepared for in that sense. So I went from being just like a random person posting my thoughts in the Internet to very quickly understanding that there is a degree of responsibility in having a relatively large platform that has, relatively good engagement and that has been, like a process for me that I wasn't really Preparing for consciously.

[00:41:04] Adam Aronovich: So that I think all of that is to say, I fucked up many times in this past 18 months, and I really appreciate people taking the time to help me and coach me and help me understand certain things that perhaps from my perspective, I've been blind to when it comes to Certain things, right? And this case, I think, was a very unique and very illuminating case for me for all the different things that you mentioned, just for, for kind of a little bit of background. So the video that we're talking about is a video of a woman who was in a plane. She's a white woman from the U. S. Was in a plane, and she got up from her seat, went to the front of the plane and started talking about somebody not being real.

[00:41:49] Adam Aronovich: Like this motherfucker is not real became a catchphrase in the internet that started being memed everywhere. This motherfucker is not real. People made songs about it. People made memes about it. People got on the trend of this motherfucker is not real. And... It became an internet sensation, and one of the things that was very peculiar about this particular incident is that oftentimes when shit like this happens people become sleuths very quickly, and they find out who the person is, and in a matter of hours or minutes, they find the Twitter account, they find the employers of the person, like it becomes like a thing that transcends the meme and becomes a thing in the real world, right?

[00:42:30] Adam Aronovich: Like it actually becomes anything in the real world that has It has actual implications and consequences for the people that are involved in that video. And this time it didn't happen, but like people to this day, I think people haven't really been able to identify who this person is. She didn't come forward.

[00:42:46] Adam Aronovich: She, whether she didn't have an online presence or she made sure that whatever, it doesn't matter. But we don't really know who she is, what happened what her story was, what was it that she saw. We do have some info that is very unreliable from people that were on that plane. Like first hand, second hand accounts that say that person was sitting next to somebody who was wearing a hoodie, and she thought that this person was blinking not right, which is a very common trope within certain, conspiracy.

[00:43:18] Adam Aronovich: Right wing circles, right? Like the reptilian trope, the kind of dehumanizing of those people that are perceived to be in control, pulling the strings of everything else. So most of the interpretations that I saw prior to posting that meme were coming from the perspective, right? That motherfucker is not real.

[00:43:36] Adam Aronovich: It was that woman for some reason thought that the person she was sitting next to was not blinking right, that she thought he was less than human, that either was a reptilian or an alien. Or something that is very much rooted into this lore of right wing conspiracy extremism. Yeah, like that is that was my understanding of the thing and I went with it because that's one of the things I tried to bring attention to in my platform, right?

[00:44:05] Adam Aronovich: The dangers of these extreme forms of conspiracy epistemics of conspiracy culture of dehumanizing others. The inherent antisemitism and all of this kind, like reptilian talk in the Rothchild, whatever , kind the plot li Revisited, which is like a very long subject, but we can talk about it perhaps in a different situation of how a lot of modern conspiracy culture still draws back to the protocols of the elders of Zion and the blood by blood level, anti Jewishness, and so on and so forth.

[00:44:34] Adam Aronovich: People remix that video. They made all sorts of memes and reposted them. They were very funny. I thought they were very funny. A lot of people thought they were very funny, but also there was like a, not insignificant pushback from people who were very upset by it. Yeah. People who.

[00:44:50] Adam Aronovich: Not didn't find it funny. People who thought it was very degrading for that person. People who thought that it is very immoral and inappropriate to make fun of somebody that is very clearly having mental health episode, but it's very clearly like people. People were saying Oh she's very clearly psychotic.

[00:45:09] Adam Aronovich: She's going through a psychotic episode. She's going through a health mental health thing. That was the main thing, right? And I thought right. And I tried to have that conversation in the comments with people that were like really angry with the situation. And I'm like, Hey I don't I personally don't think actually that the right approach in situations like this is to immediately assume that person is mentally ill, schizophrenic like, why are you diagnosing that person based on her being extra on a flight when we don't really even know what was the background for that episode?

[00:45:42] Adam Aronovich: Like pushing back on the pushback with what I think is a very legitimate thing, which is actually, like people can be extra people can be totally extra and be outlandish, not necessarily because they we need to pathologize or medicalize or attribute to them some sort of label that is based on like a mental health thing.

[00:46:00] Adam Aronovich: But just because all the reasons epistemic reasons, there's ideology reasons, like that again, like I thought that was more Based on kind of the conspiracy epistemic thing of that person, like really thinking that she's sitting next to somebody that is not blinking, right? Because that was one of the eyewitnesses purportedly was passing on as opposed to her having a mental breakdown.

[00:46:21] Adam Aronovich: So this is that is to say, right? If I had thought for myself, Oh, like this person is definitely having a psychotic break or this person seems to be having a mental breakdown in public, the last thing that I would do was post that publicly, right? But that wasn't near anywhere what I thought was actually happening.

[00:46:39] Adam Aronovich: So I tried to push back on that idea, right? And as the Internet goes, like Instagram is never really the best place to have an argument with anybody. Really, like the platform just doesn't lend itself for having nuanced conversations about things and so forth. It just became this inflammatory thing where, you know, a lot of people were just really upset because they thought that she is definitely having a mental health crisis.

[00:47:01] Adam Aronovich: She's definitely having a psychotic episode. I thought it's actually a little bit condescending to be honest. I think I still think it's very condescending to assume But a person cannot be extra because she must be mentally ill. I think that's even worse, actually. I still think that. If I was acting publicly, I don't know, maybe I woke up on the wrong side of the foot.

[00:47:23] Adam Aronovich: Maybe I'm frustrated. Maybe I didn't sleep right. Maybe I'm hungry. There's a thousand other reasons that I would prefer people ascribing to my behavior rather than, oh that person must be mentally ill. That person must be going through a psychotic episode. 

[00:47:36] Raad Seraj: Or... Some people are assholes, and that's okay too, 

[00:47:39] Adam Aronovich: Some people are assholes, yes, okay. It didn't take days, it actually took a couple of hours for me to take it down. And... To say that I'm 100% whole with that decision would be a stretch. I think ultimately it was the right choice because one, I really don't have the capacity or the emotional resilience to receive that kind of directed abuse and criticism.

[00:48:07] Adam Aronovich: This is something that, for myself, I know that I You know, I think a lot of people would assume if you have a platform that has engagement and you're posting controversial stuff every once in a while, then you must have a really thick skin and very resilient to criticism. I honestly don't like I do things personally and particularly when they're direct attacks on my sense of morality or, like my judgment and so on and okay first of all, I do want to listen.

[00:48:30] Adam Aronovich: I do want to see, right? What is the point that people are trying to make to grow from it? But also, yeah, I do take it personally. So I took it down even though I wasn't 100% convinced that the arguments were valid. And I still think, some of them are so there aren't as much.

[00:48:46] Adam Aronovich: I took it down because first and foremost, I do think that we need to give people the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes the things that you mentioned are the things that I post that I posted as my reply, right? First and foremost yes. There we haven't heard her story. Nobody has been able to get in touch with her.

[00:49:02] Adam Aronovich: We don't know what happened. Is it relevant? perhaps to the extent that she has an opportunity to Explain and communicate her own experience. Is there a chance that she was really going through a psychotic breakdown and Sure is there that possibility? Sure. Is that enough to prioritize compassion and kindness over laughter and not continue to propagate that?

[00:49:33] Adam Aronovich: Yes. That was the main thing. The second thing which by the way, it is assuming that really was that was happening, which I'm not convinced at all. Yeah, but benefit of the doubt. Maybe people are right. Maybe she was going through, something like really destabilizing that requires, compassion.

[00:49:50] Adam Aronovich: Fine. Thirdly, I You know, I do oftentimes upload things that I find funny, absurd, ridiculous, but almost always, or generally always, these are the things that people choose to upload themselves, right? Like content that people create, things that I find in YouTube, things that I find in TikTok, things that I find in Instagram, things that for some reason somebody thinks oh, I'm gonna create this piece of content and this is something that I want to put out there because this is a message that I want to do.

[00:50:17] Adam Aronovich: Oftentimes it's because they're, selling something or branding themselves in a certain way, like it's always something right that I find interesting, curious, funny, absurd, ridiculous, sincere. There's a multiple variety of reasons why I would choose to post something, but again, like 99.

[00:50:32] Adam Aronovich: 9% of the times there's people, there's things that people themselves chose to post. This one was unique in the sense that people were filming her nonconsensually, I imagine, right? And one of the main points, one of the debates that was happening there is the right to privacy, the right to not have every public blowout documented and then used as content and memed and made fun of and so on and so forth, which is a very tricky thing, right?

[00:51:03] Adam Aronovich: I think there were some good points. There were some points that were less, convincing. But, I can to some extent empathize with that sentiment that perhaps it's okay to limit our sense our range of critique when it comes to people's content when it's actually content that people are choosing to put out as opposed to something that weren't consensually being agrees to be on I one of my earlier interest when it comes to art, if I can call it that is street photography.

[00:51:34] Adam Aronovich: I'm not as Into it at the moment. I think since a I kind of became a thing, it's become very difficult to discern between what is real and what is not in street photography. Like it's one of the main things that has been hit by a I street photography is just a very simple, approach to photography, which is, candy.

[00:51:53] Adam Aronovich: It's urban is trying to capture snippets of humanity in public, right? Like oftentimes it entails taking photographs of people in public 99% of the time. Against their consent without really asking for consent in the street, in public transport, in different situations of life. There's a thriving or has been a thriving field of art, of candid street photography.

[00:52:16] Adam Aronovich: And there are huge discussions about the ethics of taking pictures or filming people in public again, without their consent. There's a place in the world where... Those things aren't really an issue. There's place in the world where you can't do that. Like I have a friend, one of my best friends, the person that actually got me like into street photography back in Israel when we were growing up is one of the most talented artists and one of the most Incredibly like gifted street photographers that I've met and he lives in Germany now and he can't do that shit in Germany it sounds like I'm in Germany I can't go and start taking photographs of people in the streets because I'm you know, like people don't it's just not it's just not gonna happen 

[00:52:56] Raad Seraj: I think for me this was a really interesting case because Ultimately, this is all a dilemma, right?

[00:53:02] Raad Seraj: And you have a series of dilemma in the times we live in. How do you negotiate with the right thing to do is even if reluctantly, the whole negotiation process is what's really interesting. And I ultimately, I think, you have a platform, you could have acted any which way, but you chose to give this person the benefit of the doubt and then you chose to take it down. To bring it all together, my last question to you is, What are your hopes and fears for the space moving forward? Maybe we'll talk again in two years from now. The last time we spoke pandemic had just started. We're the thick of it now. It seems to be a blimp or like some blemish in our collective memory.

[00:53:41] Raad Seraj: What are your hopes and fears for the psychedelic space moving forward?

[00:53:46] Adam Aronovich: I guess you know, the fear is and has been and will be that psychedelics are and will continue to be absorbed by the neoliberal establishment as another way of policing the status quo and maintaining, a certain order, a certain social order, as opposed to really being agents of revolution, change, and so on and so forth, I think, capitalism in general, neoliberalism, late stage consumerism have that incredible power.

[00:54:16] Adam Aronovich: Thank you. Capacity to take anything potentially subversive and repackage it and commodify it and selling it back to us as another D tooth, D cloth, sanitized, hygienic commodity product devoid of all of those things that would make it unsavory for Thank you. Power or for the status quo. And that's what's happening with psychedelics, with plant medicines, like the narratives, the stories that we're telling about them, the ways that are being used, the ways that are being marketed, the way that the market is structured around these things in a hyper therapized, hyper psychologized, medicalized way is really create like that's the process that is happening.

[00:55:00] Adam Aronovich: Of turning all of this Things that have been demonized and, to some extent other from the proper arsenal of tools that people can have to experience their own lives and grow and so on and so forth. Again, like just sanitizing them from all of that real subversive revolutionary potential for real change is what we need in this moment in time and reselling them to us as this commodities that don't really have that except for their utility as band aids to Palliate the horrors and terrors of late stage capitalism, colonialism, imperialism.

[00:55:38] Raad Seraj: What, what gives you hope though? This part is very much obvious from your work.

[00:55:43] Raad Seraj: What gives you hope? 

[00:55:45] Adam Aronovich: I think the best thing that I heard is from Daniel Schmachtenberger when he was in a conversation that he was having in one of the podcasts I was listening and he makes a distinction between optimism and hope. And he says, if we look objectively at things, there isn't really much room for optimism.

[00:56:00] Adam Aronovich: And that's fine, because optimism is a function of how we interpret reality and what kind of assessment of the future we can make in terms of prediction of how things are going to unfold. And I'm not an optimist in that sense because I think it would be very naive to be an optimist. The things that are going to get better, given the circumstances in socio political, economical, environmental predicaments that we're in.

[00:56:25] Adam Aronovich: But it says, even if Do that process of prediction of understanding reality and predicting how things are going to unfold. We can't really be optimistic. That doesn't necessarily mean that we can be hopeful and hopeful. Hope actually right is not based on rational prediction of anything. Hope is a moral imperative.

[00:56:47] Adam Aronovich: Hope is something that we have to hold as a moral imperative because hope is the only thing that would be able to change anything. We can't allow ourselves to become hopeless. We can't allow ourselves to be hope, to lose hope. We can't allow ourselves to really give up that sense of you know what things are fucked up and they don't seem to really be getting better, but they can be better, I think, to wrap up this part, I think for a very long time.

[00:57:16] Adam Aronovich: For most of my life, I didn't really want to have kids. And one of the main reasons I didn't really want to have kids was that I didn't really know what kind of world I was gonna bring kids into. And it seems to me, it seemed to me pretty responsible and pretty egoistic to bring a child to a world that is going to shit, right?

[00:57:35] Adam Aronovich: What am I bringing a person to the world to suffer through climate war? To suffer through, mass migrations, to suffer through resource depletion and the violence that inevitably is going to entail and so on and so forth. And that way of perceiving things came from hopelessness, from a very deep sense that not only I didn't have much optimism that things can be better, but also that I didn't really have hope that things can be better.

[00:58:02] Adam Aronovich: And there's a very big difference between those two things. And that's what I started understanding as time went by. So like the fact that I don't see or can't imagine viable solutions to the magnitude of the predicaments that we're facing. Doesn't mean that those solutions don't exist.

[00:58:19] Adam Aronovich: Doesn't mean somebody else might not be able to actually figure things out that somebody else is gonna have the clarity of mind and the charisma and the leadership to guide throws of people into a brave new world with whether it's I'm not a very Utopian person when it comes to technology. I think it's a little bit absurd to think that technologies are going to save us.

[00:58:43] Adam Aronovich: But to some extent, giving the benefit of the doubt, maybe somebody is going to come with a way to, I don't know, shoot something into the atmosphere and create. So when my, when I met my wife, that was one of the things that was, like, really, preoccupied with, right? I actually do feel like I want to experience fatherhood, that I want to care for offspring, that I want to, be a father, right?

[00:59:08] Adam Aronovich: That I want to guide a new soul growing up in this world. And... The idea that again, like going back to that idea that not because I can't imagine or I can see where I can't fathom a solution to the global predicament that we're in, that doesn't mean that they don't exist. And I think, Generation Z gets a lot of shit for multiple reasons.

[00:59:34] Adam Aronovich: I think most of that is very unfair. I think, these are people that are growing up in late stage capitalism that from day one have to deal with. The knowledge that the generations before them are going to leave them a planet that is pretty much on any on inhabitable that not only that, but the people don't really give a fuck about their future.

[00:59:55] Adam Aronovich: And I think there's a lot of people that are going, that are growing up now, and they're going to have to be growing up in the next few years that are not really gonna have a choice other than from very different day one, tackle. The existential risk, the meta crisis, the interlocking crisis that are now existential risks to humanity.

[01:00:15] Adam Aronovich: When my daughter was born, one of the things that I acquired Other than a child was a massive sense of dread something that I didn't really expect. Nobody told me that fatherhood comes with fear and anxiety. But it's not only fear of anxiety of the regular fear, anxiety of I have now a person in the world that I care for more than my life itself is something were to happen to them.

[01:00:37] Adam Aronovich: I don't know how I could continue being alive. All those things are true, but also there's a sense of dread that transcends just my personal Fear about, something like really existential when it comes to the metacrisis, when it comes to her future, when it comes to those things. From my perspective, I know that the only thing that I can do for her and the only thing that I can do for humanity when it comes to that is to be the best father that I can for her to help her be emotionally literate and emotionally capable enough to be able to deal, in in the best way possible with all the beauty of the world, but also with all the grief which is going to have to go through the planetary grief, the personal grief, the fear and the anxiety the terror and the horror of the Anthropocene. Couple with, the inherent beauty of life on this planet. All of those things are going to coexist within her as she grows up. I imagine in a way that is very different that it has been for me. Being able to prepare her emotionally values wise, human wise, to deal with her future, with what is waiting for her has become for me like a sense, like a cliché.

[01:01:51] Adam Aronovich: But something that does give me a sense of purpose and meaning. Yeah, like maybe I'm not going to figure out the cure for cancer, the cure for, any of this. I like to talk shit about things, but, my own limitations I'm very aware of. But, if I can contribute something to the next generation of people that are not really going to have the same privileges of not dealing with these things urgently in the same way that I have, then, that's enough purpose for me. 

[01:02:13] Raad Seraj: Very importantly said, I think the older I get, I realize all cliches are true and they have been always true. So Adam, this is a very strong close and I really appreciate the distinction between optimism and hope. A phenomenal conversation, as always very different from our last and a very different time from the last time.

[01:02:30] Raad Seraj: Thank you for all the work you do and your perspectives. I am looking forward to seeing how healing from healing evolves and grows. Thank you for your time and for hanging out on the podcast. 

[01:02:42] Adam Aronovich: Yeah, thank you for having me. It's been my pleasure. 

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