Somehow the automated Zoom screen grab says it all. I’ve never met with Adam in person, but years ago, we met via LinkedIn after he shared his work facilitating virtual tea conversations.
Since that time, we’ve shared the highs and lows of parenting and navigating an increasingly tech-centric world while persevering to remain human-centered in our work, parenting styles, and leadership.
We reference a few books and other resources, so check them out below!
Yuval Noah Harari & his book Sapiens
Douglas Rushkoff & his book Team Human
De Kai & his book Raising AI (and substack community!)
Old Man and the Lost Horse (sharing the wikipedia source that has the original Chinese text and other references).
Connect with Adam
The Transcription (copied from Otter.ai)
All right, hello, Adam, welcome to my experiment called Brian's newsletter.
So yeah, I'm glad so for those of you tuning in, this is an ongoing series of conversations I'm having with men and people in general that are in this kind of parenting, fatherhood movement, whatever you want to call it, to really look at behind the scenes, if you will, and what it takes to do this work, because for me, and I know this is shared with some folks. The there are
people that are in the trenches that are doing the men's work directly with folks to help them heal, to discover their their true selves, their true passions, and then there's others that do a lot of great research around this, or are great spokespeople, but don't necessarily do the deeper work. And that's okay too, because we need all of us in this fight, right?
And I've tried being a spokesperson when I ran fathering together, but at my heart, I'm I'm in the trenches. I love doing the work and getting to know people on the ground, doing the work with me. So Adam, you are somebody who is in the trenches facilitating amazing things. But I will let you speak for yourself, and
kind of kick off this conversation with kind of the an answer to, what is your role within this larger men's work, interpersonal work that you do so well out there in LA,
all right. Well, right into the sandbox. I like this experiment because me, like I myself, consider myself, consider myself, at least these days, given the weight of the world, everything feels kind of tenuous and experimental and open minded all in the same
so to try and keep it brief. My background is in visual art, music and UX design.
I got into, I kind of stumbled into UX. What is UX design? Just to be really brief about we may have heard it, and at some point in the past, UX is an acronym for user experience. User Experience Design speaks to the look and feel of a digital product, namely an app or website. And so what the UX designer does within the machine of tech ideally is, is that the UX designer advocates both for the end user and for the business goals, and how to build a bridge between business or brand goals and the desires of the end user,
definitely an altruistic, sometimes very existentialist role, having said that I became a UX designer, again as the sort of gold rush of UX began in late 2014 early 2015 simultaneous with Becoming a first time dad, yeah. So I made a really precarious choice in those early days. And sort of my daughter was born in July of 2013, she's running double digits in the coming week or weeks here. And I made a decision right when I got my, you know, UX certificate out of the General Assembly, larger global community, to not to take a full time role, but to freelance, I wanted to be close to home. And why did I choose that? Well, I chose that because I
because of my own parenting imprint of like neglect and abandonment. And you know, I'll bookmark that for probably a later conversation. And so based on that, yeah, based on that imprint of how I was parented, namely, how I was fathered.
I really wanted to stay close by and so fast forward into five years, into freelancing as a UX designer here in LA then the pandemic begins. Then any local competition turned into overnight, turned into global competition, and it became an employer's marketplace. And so people were under bidding each other for the smaller and smaller carrot, if you will. And so 2020, was obviously a year for everyone, every single human being on the planet, and so for me personally, it it's sort of quickly fermented into like a personal bankruptcy, followed by immediately hiring, starting to work with a therapist for the first time in a while, so committing to A therapy process, but also scrounging some some money and applying for scholarships for new certifications in emotional well being coaching and digital well being education. So that's how I'm sitting here with you today here, yeah, in the newsletter, just to try and keep it somewhat succinct, it's a great, great recap. I mean, like that was a good, good overview. And I want to go back you first started talking about UX design, and as you were describing it, I couldn't help but make the leap to you know, as parents, we are the employer, and our children are end users. And I'm sure you think about this, or maybe you don't, I'll let you answer this, but for me, like I just kept conjuring up, what is the interface that I have with my children? Right? Like, what is the screen sometimes right that that helps us connect, like I just came back from a weekend away with my wife, and this is the first time we've been away that both of our daughters have smart devices, and we would get pinged every so often with a little note saying, I love you, I miss you, or I finished this book because my kids and I have a summer reading challenge together, and it was a different form of communication that I knew was on the way.
But here's a new design that I have to start thinking about of how often do I respond? Do I respond immediately? Will I enable, empower? You know, like, there's a whole host of new questions arriving for me. So these are, these are excellent questions. I mean, you know, no one can tell you, like, how to parent your child through these multiple interfaces. First and foremost, the second thing is, a relationship cannot be quantified through the number of screens or the real estate of the screen size, or the frequency of messages or calls or FaceTime. All these tools, may
we find the chutzpah courage to remind ourselves to use these devices as the tools that they are right to augment our communication now, we can take a step back through kind of a bird's eye view and look at the fact that our attention spans have shrunk over the past several decades, especially the last 15 years, but most importantly, that urgency to respond, to react, has shortened to instantaneous. If you don't respond to a text or an emoji instantaneously, what comes at you is something like, what's wrong? What did I do? Why didn't you get back to me? So that kind of like,
I guess, what Cal Newport, author of digital minimalism, calls solitude, deprivation, is very real, and there's not enough conversation about, especially within this particular lens of parenting, you know, in a world of screens, you know, I I too. Last week, I decided last minute, in the midst of getting the news on father's day that a dear friend of ours had passed away after a two year battle of pancreatic cancer, within 24 hours, I decided I was going to do something out of the ordinary and drive LA to San Francisco, which is, you know, it's, it's a straight line, but it's kind of a six hour drive, yeah, best. I drove to SF for 48 hours to attend this conference, this summit called human and tech week. And it was essentially a summit to explore how humans can flourish in the age of AI, and so I brought my, really, my main, one of my main offerings now in this sort of post UX livelihood, which is facilitation, facilitate a slow T experience for fellow technologists. My, my quiet a my hidden agenda is to humanize fellow technologists, but to really create just comfortable and safe containers so that people can still be people with each other through interfacing with this, this technology, this vehicle.
As a side note, I'm a student of Chinese tea culture. I've been so for 16 years, and it's really influenced my how I facilitate this experience, and I do it for teams and organizations, etc, etc.
So here I am committing to this crazy, 48 hour turnaround of being at this conference
and and it's again, it's one of the few times so our our daughter has access to this like family. I It's really her iPad. It's like families.
And so that that opportunity becomes an opportunity for us to to send each other funny gifts or messages or videos or something, and obviously FaceTime at night, to go to sleep, that kind of thing, and but to also find the ways to talk about, like, the frequency of how this stuff is going to work, or how it works for us, or just how it works for me. You know, it's
almost like having kind of, like a rudimentary sort of consent kind of conversation based on, like, I'd like to receive this from you, and what would you like to receive from me? Obviously, we're not talking about sensuality, we're talking about communication,
so finding ways, again, filtering all of those sub conversations through like essentially an ongoing, never ending life lesson in media literacy.
It is interesting. Obviously, it's an exciting time, but also a really fun time for lots of parents,
lots of families. We don't have to really get into the nitty gritty of that within this particular conversation, but there's just so much to be tended to, and we can't tend to these things if we are constantly prodded and poked and interrupted to react and respond all the time.
Well, I think that, like as a fellow dad, the thing that
often comes up in the work that I have with other dads is I have to be an expert. I have to know things. I have to test before I can let my kid test. And to some, some extent, that's true, right? Like, life experience accounts for a lot of work in building that bond between you and your child,
but there's a lot of fun in just learning for the first time with that, right? I mean, you know, and safety lessons, right? We're not talking about like, button and jumping for the first time and all that, but I, there's, there's like, there's tension, you know, between my wife and I at times of, like, how, how, like, how far does the leash go for the child, but also for me, or for her, or other people that we let into our family, and I think that's it's, in a way, very liberating for other men, especially men that we work with, to hear like, Hey, it's okay if your child sees you fail. It's okay if your child sees you cry. You are a human being, and if you shut off the human side of you, it can be just as detrimental as only showing like the only the positives or only the successes that you gain from work. Right? Like most of us do not have a ladder of success. Where I start, you know, I started out as an associate and became manager director, right? That is so few and far between.
Most of our lines are squiggly, spaghetti, pasta night dishes. So to allow our children into that, I think, is something that I don't think a lot of us got from our parents, or it was filtered in a very different way that we have the opportunity now, and it's really and I mean, I I
resonate with everything that you're seeing As a fellow dad,
like I said in the beginning, I was parented through neglect and abandonment, like literal neglect and abandonment, but also what I got was very monotone, very one dimensional.
And so it's impossible to even attempt to speak to this experience as a dad right now, as a dad in 2025, whatever, however we want to quantify that
of how we essentially re parent ourselves, because those of us who had that particular kind of, you know, ACE score, if you will.
But how we repairing ourselves through parenting our kids and then also being open to them teaching us, yeah, stuff like, like, I think to me, it's like one of the promises of of the internet. I feel like, to me, being of strange, of awkward feeling elder millennial is I wanted to learn and be very honest about, like asking questions and learning on the fly as well. I don't want to pretend like I know anything. And so when me know my this past year, we homeschooled our daughter kind of buying just kind of stumbled into it just due to some health concerns, which was very experimental for us. So trying to spark that ability to Let's Ask questions, but let's do so in the safest way possible, and not just willingly chatgpt our way to anything. Because why? Because these particular tools hallucinate. They don't actually have any embedded knowledge. They really just regurgitate, you know, words, you know, for their plausibility generator. We could talk about that later.
So I still have hope again, like this is the thing of from like, one dad to another, for any parents that are gonna be listening to this.
The thing that's like, not really explicitly spoken about when you become a parent, is like, you sign on to be a professional optimist, and how you choose to be an optimist, whether it's as a realist or as a pessimist or as a cynic, as a cynic or a stoic, or whatever.
You know, optimism is kind of part of the job description in the face of everything that's going on. And so I remain cautiously optimistic that we find the ways to not only use these tools effectively, but literally, before I got on this call, we listened into a podcast called Team human by a really great writer and thinker named Douglas Rushkoff, and he was talking to now I can't remember the author's name. I think his name is dakai. He just published a book called parenting AI. So this theory of AI is here, whether you like it or not. Now, how we relate to this thing.
Sorry, we kind of segue into this, but, I guess.
But how we relate to this technology should be seen as like how it relates to their child. But this technology, in essence, is a child, not that it's conscious, like a child, but that it kind of there's a monkey. See?
Monkey do the thing we keep hitting. Are hitting against the wall, in the eye. And so it's imperative, not just as parents, as human beings, to
do our best with raising this technology, because this is this. You and I, everyone listening to this right now, we are the last generation to parent. Ai. Future generations of AI will be parent. AI will parent itself. This is it. This is this is a one shot at actually instilling or programming in like the best of us. Yeah, no, no pressure, no pressure. Well, and it's, you know, as you were saying that too, I was just thinking, I'm one of the last gen xers, right? I'm actually eating kid. And so I didn't really have my own email until I went to college, and it was, you know, a black screen Dot Matrix style email, pine, for those of you who remember pine, if you're old enough to remember that and so and and, you know, we, we were not in control of the internet. Obviously, like, few years older than you, but like, it was our parents or the people that were learning to code on index cards and punch cards, they were the ones that invented the internet, and now here comes AI being created and generated by people who were raised within this environment of the internet and the.com boom and bust. And it's just such a
it's so fascinating because, you know, like television came radio came, like there were multiple decades between a lot of these technological advances, and now here they are coming rapidly in succession in our lifetimes. So it'll be fascinating to see, as you say, the how AI parents itself, how we remain the overlords and, you know, whatever kind of dark terminology I think about. But I want to, I'll let you say one more thing, but I want to take us in a different direction, to kind of close. Direction, to kind of go, go, go, go, go.
So, like, we've talked about faith very peripherally in our past conversations and our spiritual backgrounds. And anyway, tea, the ceremony of tea, is very spiritual, or can be very spiritual and relational. And I'm just curious, like from a non tech, right? Like being connected means lots of different things, not just plugging into an internet court or whatever Ethernet cord better, but when you think about faith you were raised within, in the spiritual reality around you, how does that help guide, provide framework, if at all. Because when you say, you know, like with the orientation, we have those AI, in my background in ministry, we would often talk about, from an interfaith dialog perspective, what is your orientation to faith or to a higher power? Even if that orientation is I don't orient to it, right? I am an atheist, or I whatever, I turn my back to a higher power, fine, right? Like in an interfaith dialog, that's great. That's fodder for deeper conversation.
With AI, with technology,
there's an interfaith component with with AI, because, to my knowledge, none of the great creators of these traditions, we call Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, etc, had the technology we had, or even science, right? And so I'm just curious, like, how you are inspired? How are you guided by a faith tradition or a spiritual background?
So hard question to answer. I'm gonna be really honest with you. Well,
not, not, yeah, not that we have any answers to any of these questions. I will say that I,
I would, I would probably identify as being culturally Jewish and not religiously Jewish. Also, also due to the fact that I wasn't really raised in the technology. I wasn't really raised in the faith. I'm a third culture kid. I'm Middle Eastern by birth, but I'm a naturalized American, and I've been in the States for as long as I can consciously remember, though Hebrew was my first language and so I wasn't bar mitzvahed as a Jew, which is probably says a lot more about my parents than It says about me. But having said that, I feel like I'm more spiritual than I am religious. I feel like I'm I orient more towards humanism, kindness, curiosity, the first to apologize
when I don't know or when I've made a mistake. Again, that's just to reverse the imprint that I got and my upbringing,
it's a really emotional subject, because as a Jew,
my personally, speaking, my faith has been really shaken in the last 20 months, yeah, and, and, you know, or the earthquakes and the aftershocks continue to rumble and rumble.
So,
something that you said about about faith and about, you know, this emerging technology.
I just recently heard Eva Harari speak, who's a historian. He wrote Sapiens, among other books. He's a historian and a sort of a public intellectual philosopher, and he's kind of a barometer for me right now, personally, just being really personal about that. And so I read a lot of nonfiction.
I more and more towards nonfiction, because I grew up in a lot of fiction, and not the kind of fiction that I'm like, like, really, you wouldn't recommend reading it. I wouldn't recommend, I wouldn't recommend experiencing so something that he said that's really echoing in my head right now in this particular part of the conversation, this is the first so if humans, if religion was has, up until now, for 1000s of years, been oriented around text, if faith and stories and culture has been oriented around text and humanity and sharing of texts and stories, this is now the first time in our human history where the text will talk back to you,
where, as he recently put it in a podcast, you can no rabbi can know all the texts, right? They always continue to study. However, there's now a technology this, AI, this particular chatbot that can absorb all of the texts and spit them back at you. What does that do for religion, for faith, moving forward? I have no idea, but I don't want you know enough dystopian sci fi to to give us a product roadmap. Let's not make dystopia you know product roadmap.
So
that's a great pause point, and I don't know if I can,
I'm in a lot of stories as well, because you're right, like
I was thinking about just the, you know, there's a couple of influencers and theologians that I follow religiously, and some of the very much, you know, interpret things the way I do. But they know Hebrew, they know Greek. I don't know those right? Like, I know some Latin because I study French and I can speak some Spanish and Italian, right? Like and, and even even Latin text, right? Because Jesus, if Jesus existed and lives in the way that the Bible talks about, he would have spoken Aramaic and not looked anything like me, or you, maybe a little bit more like you, you know, given your release or whatever, but, but I think like to have,
I'll just say, instead of rambling more, I'll just say I read foundation again for the first time in probably 20 years. Isaac Asimov's like, you know, huge, one of the foundations of sci fi. You know, literature. Have you seen the series, too? No, I watched a couple. I just haven't had a chance to really get into it. There's no time. Yeah, no time.
But rereading the first book and some of the second and some other short stories and stuff, it's just, it's fascinating to me. And for those that haven't watched it, you should totally watch it. It's read it, watch it, whatever. But it's this idea that, you know, eventually we will have enough data that we will forget the data, right? Like the Bible in foundation is so old people don't remember the Bible anymore. They have other texts. And the main guy is like, well, I can use statistics to know that humanity is going to collapse any day now, if we haven't already gotten there, right? And dystopia, utopia, it doesn't matter. It's just the study of science and algorithms that Asimov was writing about 6070, years ago is just you've got me thinking about that more and more as I think about chatgpt and other AI systems, where you ask it a question, and if you ask it the right way, you get everything interpreted through lenses that you don't even know where that is, unless you ask for the citation, right? I think it's like, when I was going to grad school, Wikipedia was brand new, and it was like, you can't cite Wikipedia. I was like, No, but I'll go to Wikipedia and look at the reference section, you know, if I'm in a hurry. And now it's same with chat, GPT, or whatever system you want to use. You're like, Hey, here's my question answer for me. And cite your sources. And if you go to those sources and can't find what they're talking about, that's a problem, you know? So, yeah, we're very so many challenging moments and so many opportunities all wrapped into one, and we don't know which one it is, right? It's like the multiverse Dallas folk tale about the, you know, the guy who has a son, but his son is injured, so farmer and the horse, right, right? Like the farm on the horse. We'll see, you know, like every moment, we'll just have to see if it's a blessing or a curse.
Yeah, it's a fascinating time, and we will definitely have to continue this conversation between the two of us. Maybe we'll bring in a third guest or fourth, yeah, just to really ratchet up, bring maybe a Hindu or some other state traditions to really mess with our minds but let's pause here.
They didn't even get to some of the questions I thought we would get to and that's totally funny, but folks this is going to be what these Friday, things are about. So, I hope you enjoy Adam and I as brief recorded conversation.
brief recorded conversation. we'll probably keep talking after i hit stop. stay tuned for more of these on fridays. stay tuned for reflections, both from adam and myself midweek, as we kind of step away from this conversation and reflect on it in our own way. but until next time, thank you for being here and thank you, adam for trying this experiment with me. it's been a pleasure. Awesome. Peace, everybody.
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