2_4 Simran Sethi: Reviving Tradition, Reclaiming Culture, and Diversifying Psychedelics

[00:00:20] Raad Seraj: Today my guest is Simran Sethi, who is a multimedia journalist, academic and consultant, endlessly curious about the people and places that nourish and heal us. Her current research as a visiting academic at PUFIN Center at the Open University in Milton Keynes, UK is focused on exploring ways to dismantle systems of repression in support of the Biocultural diversity of sacred plant medicines.

[00:00:41] Raad Seraj: Simran is the founder of Asian Psychedelic Collective, an evolving space of belonging and support for Asians working with and in psychedelics. She's also the fellow at Culture Hack Labs and a member of the first Fireside Project equity cohort ensuring culturally responsive peer support for psychedelic experiences. 

[00:00:57] Raad Seraj: Named one of the 50 most influential global Indians by Vogue, India and the Environmental Messenger by Vanity Fair, Simran has written for outlets, including The New York Times, the Washington Post, National Geographic, Smithsonian, Guernica and The Guardian. Simran is the author of Bread, wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love. 

[00:01:16] Raad Seraj: Simran, thank you so much for being here.

[00:01:18] Simran Sethi: I'm so happy to finally at long last we get to chat. 

[00:01:21] Raad Seraj: Yeah. And you just finished a shift at at Fireside as well, so I really appreciate you taking the time. Being at service to the community as well as the podcast as well.

[00:01:29] Raad Seraj: Thank you so much. As I mentioned, so we're gonna go through quite a bit of your journey but as always, I always start from like the. Let's just say ground zero, right? Or Yeah, not day one necessarily as you were escaping the womb.

[00:01:43] Raad Seraj: But I'm always curious about the set and setting, the formative years of somebody's life. your relationship to your parents, how your parents came to the US and so on, how you relate to your culture, things like that. So why don't we start there in terms of who was Simran and who was Simran's parents. Let's start there. 

[00:02:04] Simran Sethi: Who is Simran now. Okay, we're traversing a lot in that question. So I'll start. I'm all about loaded questions beginning. Yeah, exactly. I'll begin the beginning, which is I was born in Germany to parents of Indian descent. I prefer to use the term South Asian because, we were all split apart because of colonization.

[00:02:22] Simran Sethi: My dad was born in, what's now Pakistan? Walked to India during partition. My mom was born in Uganda. She was sent away to India to study when she was just a small child, age seven, while her family was still in Uganda. And then eventually when I, the Amin came in, every, all Indians had to leave.

[00:02:40] Simran Sethi: So just some displacement. Running through my veins. My dad won scholarships to both east and West Germany. They, my family on the paternal side lost everything during partition. My grandfather my paternal grandfather was a pharmacist, so that shop didn't travel with them and they ended up, in really impoverished circumstances and And so education was the ticket for him, to really get out of those circumstances.

[00:03:09] Simran Sethi: And, when he won that scholarship, it was for a master's degree and he ended up staying, completing a PhD, continuing in, in in my dadi's legacy of my dad that she was a pharmacist. My dad became a clinical pharmaco pharmacologist. My mom meanwhile was studying Know in, in India she went on to get her master's, which wasn't something that a lot of women did.

[00:03:32] Simran Sethi: Back in the day gosh, I don't know what decade that was. I wanna say maybe the sixties. But she had an arranged marriage. They had an arranged marriage. My, my mother's the oldest of seven siblings and so there was a lot of pressure for her, on her to get married.

[00:03:46] Simran Sethi: And, what she would say is my dad wasn't, The most attractive or the wealthiest by far. I know, but it's true. But whatever. And but he was the one who could show her the world. Like he was the most interesting and A wise choice always. Exactly. And and she, they got married, she finished her.

[00:04:04] Simran Sethi: Her master's and then moved to Munich, which is where I was born. And then the National Institutes of Health here in the United States sponsored my father to come to the United States, to this area, Washington, dc which is actually, I've returned to this area now. It's a bit of a sort of a homecoming.

[00:04:21] Simran Sethi: And Yeah, and this is where he continued his cancer research. He also worked with Bob Gallo, who is co-edited with discovering H I V, so he did some really important work and then eventually was recruited to by Wake Forest University's School of Medicine to go down south.

[00:04:37] Simran Sethi: So we moved to North Carolina when I was five years old, and I was raised there in the south until going to university in Massachusetts. And then from there, I. All over the world. I've lived, I've oh gosh, I've lived now on 1, 2, 3, 4 continents. Lived and worked on four and then traveled and researched on six.

[00:04:58] Raad Seraj: When did you learn about, I don't know if your parents told you the stories of partition and migration and immigration and all these other movements, when did you become aware of these things, particularly your South Asian heritage and what happened during the partition?

[00:05:14] Simran Sethi: Yeah, so I'll split those questions. Being aware of South Asian heritage always, because I was always different. My most notable kind of like an immediate kind of othering that I remember is moving first day of I think it was kindergarten or first grade in North Carolina. Blonde kid with a very thick southern accent said, is Christ your savior?

[00:05:39] Simran Sethi: And I'm bamboozled by the question, I'm like, no. He's then you're going to hail. So that was the entry, my family is sick and Hindu and And from that point on, it was like always being aware that I was, different. And during like Christmas, new Year time, or I should say Thanksgiving, Christmas time in the us, like November on, everyone would have their Christmas trees.

[00:06:03] Simran Sethi: Everyone would have, of course there was Christians in South Asia, but like we're not them. And so we didn't have these things. My parents were really adamant Against kind of performative stuff and commercialized stuff and and I think anybody who immigrants knows there's this Give and take, right?

[00:06:19] Simran Sethi: So you hold onto some things like, we held onto our faith. Not that we were like practicing much of anything, but we lost our language, right? So Punjabi was my first language, but I speak it like a toddler now. And my comprehension is probably like that of a young child or maybe a, a tween.

[00:06:36] Simran Sethi: So that's, there's a lot of grief in that. But at that point, like I would stop inviting friends over, and I would lie about the Christmas tree and find some random object to say I got for Christmas. That's how deep that sort of sadness was, that I wasn't like everyone else.

[00:06:51] Simran Sethi: And when I got my driver's license, that also became like a really profound awakening, understanding how the world saw me. There was just black, white, other, those were the boxes. There was no Asian, there was no like Pacific Islander or any of these things. And So they would just look at you and decide.

[00:07:07] Simran Sethi: And on the driver's license in the, in North Carolina at that time, they put your race. And so for me, they put w F for white female. And then three years later, when my sister got her driver's license, so I'm born in October, my sister in June, she had a tan. They put BF for black female on hers. And so it was just like I.

[00:07:28] Simran Sethi: Trying to understand like how I was to move through the world, how the world saw me. I knew of India as this beautiful place. My, my maternal, grandparents had a fair amount of wealth. So it was just like going to India and being served cups of chai and going to the rose garden and this like beautiful experience seeing the Thj Mahal, all this stuff.

[00:07:49] Simran Sethi: And then, you'd go back to the US and all you'd see is A poor starving child in a care commercial. Like we had these commercials like help sponsor a child in India, who's starving. And and I didn't know how to express it. I didn't have a way to help people understand, or they'd say, oh, you're Indian.

[00:08:03] Simran Sethi: What tribe are you? It's I'm not Cherokee or Navajo. I'm Indian from India. And it's like they didn't even know where it was. So anyhow, I'll just say there was a lot of sort of confusion, a lot of longing to fit in. And then a real deepening of kind of my sense of myself as an Indian, when I worked at M T V News as the news anchor for MTV Asia, and moved to Singapore and then subsequently to India to set up the MTV India News Department.

[00:08:32] Raad Seraj: What, and there was, what year was this? Because I remember MTV India. Yeah. When I was living in Saudi Arabia. Yeah. And I was a big fan of MTV India at that time. What year was this? Yeah, nineties, late nineties. 

[00:08:44] Simran Sethi: It was late nineties and I was Priti Sethi then Priti Sethi of MTV News. And it was Sharon Gomez and I were the news anchors.

[00:08:51] Simran Sethi: She was part of MTV when it was part of Star. And I was working at MTV in the US at that point and also still in school. So I didn't come until later. Preti or nickname? Prethe is my legal real name. Okay. Pre. But when you become famous, when you're on TV in Asia, And MTV Asia had a footprint into Russia, so we were translated into Russian, Mandarin and then seen like throughout the subcontinent.

[00:09:18] Simran Sethi: It's a lot. And when I. Decided it was time to finish that work and come back to the United States. I didn't wanna be associated with that name, like that identity, I should say. I really wanna reclaim it now. That's what my parents named me. Preti means love. Simran, the name I chose for myself means to be closer to God, so they're both great.

[00:09:39] Simran Sethi: But I'd like to reclaim that. But but that was when I wasn't the minority, that's such a fallacy. And what that does to a psyche to be the minority, I think is a really like a damaging construct, in the sense of like being made small. But there I was, everyone looked like me and it was a different experience when I lived there for years, as opposed to visiting my grandparents and sitting and having chai in someone's house versus Living and working in a place which wasn't even my home place because my family's from Punjab and I lived in Mahara in Mumbai and then traveled all over for M T V.

[00:10:15] Simran Sethi: So yeah. So that was a huge awakening around like who I was as an, as a South Asian woman. And then I called myself an Indian woman. It's really that evolution. You asked about partition. I knew it as a cons, as an abstract. I didn't understand the reality of it until, I think I read a book in my late thirties, and even then I didn't understand my dad was a refugee.

[00:10:37] Simran Sethi: Like I had no comprehension. And now he's passed on. I never got to ask him, he had a tattoo of an om, and this was a way to distinguish between Hindus and Muslims That's a thing. That's a real, and that's not a, I just thought it was cool, but I never, it's such an astonishing thing to me that I never thought to really understand it.

[00:10:56] Simran Sethi: And I think that speaks to a lot of what happens again when you immigrate, is like these things get buried. Like we don't, as in broadly as an Asian culture, talk about trauma. Then on top of that, you're just trying to figure out how the hell to figure out America, do you know what I mean?

[00:11:11] Simran Sethi: That there's so many layers to what it means to get along and fit in and belong, that you, again, what do we let go of? And I think we let go of being able to process some of that, or even share it with future generations. My parents never talked to me about my mom's just now at age 77 really?

[00:11:29] Simran Sethi: Really waxing nostalgic about her time in Uganda and Rwanda. And, I'm learning stuff that I just, you know, for decades I haven't known. 

[00:11:37] Raad Seraj: There's the other level, right? Is how the Indian people actually end up in places like Uganda and Rwanda, which surprises people. As again, you go back even further in history, which is the history of indentured slavery and so on.

[00:11:49] Raad Seraj: Exactly. People moving around throughout time. I really relate to that because, for a place like Bangladesh, Which got independence from what was at that time, west Pakistan in 1971, where my father was a guerrilla fighter in that war. And even in January when I was back home we went through retraced his steps and in the Liberation War Museum, the very sort of battalion that he was part of was actually in the museum.

[00:12:12] Raad Seraj: And he gets super emotional over there. But then if you, a place like Bangladesh, you get defined by the War of Independence from Pakistan, but then the history goes even further back, which during the partition in 47', what happened there, right? Hindus and Muslims got split up, but then you go a little farther back and then, so the region of Bengal being one unified race, right?

[00:12:33] Raad Seraj: Which was like the. Just, let's just say the jewel of the subcontinent in terms of amount of commerce, literature, culture, right? Such immense changed education. Such immense talent. People thought about Bob Dylan getting the Nobel Prize for literature. I'm like, no, that was Roman Gore, the first Bengali to get the Nobel Prize for literature.

[00:12:54] Raad Seraj: It wasn't Bob Dylan, although Bob Dylan's great too. But yeah. And then so of course you add layers of immigration, you get split up from the culture. You don't even ask those questions cuz no proximity. Who's gonna remind you that partition happened? Who's gonna remind you? Then, there's other, that people have been moving around, forcibly have been forced to move for quite some time.

[00:13:14] Raad Seraj: So I really resonated with that. I wanna come back quickly to your comment you just made, which is when you were a host for MTV India. And then you said that is not an identity when you move back to the us it's not something somebody you wanted to be anymore. Why was that exactly? You said that people around you looked like you, but it's not somebody you wanted.

[00:13:31] Simran Sethi: Oh no, sorry. Let me clarify. It was my name. So I was the news anchor, so I would have people walking up to me on the street, Preity of MTV News. I was not able to at certain points be in public because there was so much. Awareness of who I was. It was, obviously before Instagram and all this stuff, thank God, it was like there was a celebrity there and so I wanted to shed that skin.

[00:13:53] Simran Sethi: Like I was very uncomfortable. I never wanted to be on camera. I was a producer for M T V News. I worked in their documentary division and then they asked me to be on air when I moved to Singapore to be to work there, to be actually closer at that point to my boyfriend who worked at MTB Japan. So it just Like that was the part that I didn't know.

[00:14:13] Simran Sethi: I was so proud. I had finally felt a homecoming in my Indian self because I'd been there for long enough that I genuinely, like when you go as someone who lives in the US and you'd put on like silver Cammies or something like just didn't fit quite right. Like it's just like the clothes don't quite hang the same way.

[00:14:30] Simran Sethi: Yeah. And then they did, like the way I fit in, I really fit. Yeah, it was a glorious, really sweet time for me. 

[00:14:39] Raad Seraj: So what happened when it came to the US? Did you feel more comfortable in your skin or was that sort of sense of inner conflict back? 

[00:14:44] Simran Sethi: I felt more comfortable, but interestingly I realized well there was an extraordinary increase in migration of Mexicans at that point to the place where my family was based in North Carolina, and I went into, I'd never seen a Walmart before I went into a Walmart.

[00:15:01] Simran Sethi: And like they came up, like I was, when I was living in Asia and Singapore and in India, and someone said, do you speak English? And again, these things are just like so insane to me, right? It's wait a minute, I grew up here, what are you saying? And then it was like, wow. Like I am not being seen as.

[00:15:18] Simran Sethi: Other, I'm now being seen as a Mexican with some vitriol, not just like a benign Hey, you're Mexican. I was like, I'm not gonna be able to win here. So that was a really interesting thing. And on the initially, I think I was really I really very uncomfortable with it. But since that time, I've grown so grateful for being seen by many people.

[00:15:42] Simran Sethi: And in many places is belonging there. Oh, are you Greek? Are you Italian? Are Indian? Are you Pakistani? Are you Mexican? Are like where? And that to me is a great gift, but at a certain point I really did feel, some pain around it. 

[00:15:55] Raad Seraj: I guess it depends who puts you in the box, right?

[00:15:58] Simran Sethi: And if they're doing it with benevolence. Yeah. Are, someone calling me Mexican here who thinks in the back of their mind that you're an illegal is very different from being in Mexico right where I lived for nearly two years in the early pandemic. And people being confused that I didn't speak Spanish.

[00:16:14] Simran Sethi: Like que like, it's no. So I'm Indian, I'm not right. But I'm delighted that you think I'm one of you, yeah, 

[00:16:21] Raad Seraj: Yeah. Totally. 

[00:16:21] Raad Seraj: So one other thing I want to ask is that you said, yeah, that when they were giving out these identity cards or IDs, you got w. F, which is white female. And your sister got BF black female, right? Why did you get white female? 

[00:16:38] Simran Sethi: The only thing I can think of is I am my birthday, it's for Theri.

[00:16:42] Simran Sethi: It was our driver's license. So the minute I turned, 18, I got it. Or 16 I guess it was. I don't remember when we get our driver's licenses anymore. I think it's 16 driver's license. 18 drink. Yeah. I immediately went to get my driver's license. And so it was October. There was like, the fall.

[00:17:00] Simran Sethi: But when I, my sister went in June to get hers, which is when her birthday is. She had a tan, she'd spent more time in the sun. So I think she just showed up looking a little darker. I really, that was something that couldn't really be known, but it's just to me, speaks to the idea that like, even my own sister and I weren't perceived in the same way by some people. 

[00:17:21] Raad Seraj: It's it reminds me of a story So back in the day I helped put together a backpacking trip at back to Bangladesh. And really the genesis story of that is that in 20 20 13, Bangladesh suffered one of the worst industrial accidents in the textile sector. About the fires.

[00:17:40] Raad Seraj: There were fires. There were, there was a four, there's a building that was four story tall that. Had number of structural issues, but it's also the, one of the subcontractors that companies like Gap and Joe Fresh that get their clothes manufactured there. So despite all the flaws this factory was allowed to operate.

[00:17:59] Raad Seraj: And then it collapsed one day trapping about 1200 people. Majority were young women who were manufacturing clothing for these global brands. Walmart, Joe Fresh and Gap included. It was the, by far, the worst industrial accident in that space. And one of the things I wanted to do right after that, and it's not that I was very conscious, I wasn't a big shopper, but I also didn't care about where my clothes were being made, the stories behind the people making your clothes.

[00:18:26] Raad Seraj: And so I organized a a backpacking trip at that time, I still believe is still the only I immersive backpacking program in the world, which takes fashion designers from around the world to Bangladesh on a two week backpacking trip. It's very rough and tumble, very immersive. But the reason I bring this up is that.

[00:18:43] Raad Seraj: If I go back to Banglesh by myself, Everybody thinks I'm Bangladeshi. And because I was doing the program and it just happens that majority of the people who attend the program, attended the program were all white women from the west. The moment I would hang out with them, nobody would even question that I was Bangladeshi.

[00:19:02] Raad Seraj: It was automatically, everybody spoke to me, was always in English and David didn't assume that I spoke Bangla. So there's stuff says, say stuff around me and David didn't think I would know. So it's just really funny when you talk about how people perceive you, depending on, let's say it set setting, it just reminded me of that story.

[00:19:19] Raad Seraj: It was hilarious. And in those settings, if I actually went back to people who were staring at us and I spoke in Bangla, they were shocked completely. It's like, how does this, yeah. Why is this brown guy hanging out with five white girls? What's happening? 

[00:19:31] Simran Sethi: I know. Seriously. And Oh no, what did we just say about him?

[00:19:34] Simran Sethi: Whoop. Yeah. 

[00:19:36] Raad Seraj: No. So that was really funny. I wanna come to this I wanna move to your, what feels like a lifelong career and, hearing about you and knowing what you're working on, but this also this what feels like a pursuit of truth or unravel, un unearthing truth or bringing light to things that are not talked about often, which all falls under the umbrella.

[00:19:57] Raad Seraj: What I feel like is journalism. And you've been a journalist for a long time. I wanna talk about why journalism and before you talk about your career as journalism. I'm, I have this question to you, which is, what is journalism? And I ask that from the perspective of, to me, I thought journalism or a journalist is somebody who.

[00:20:15] Raad Seraj: Again, unravels the truth or brings light to the truth. But in the state of the world that we have today, the truth is becoming increasingly, in some cases, relative for the lack of a better word, what is a journal? What does a journalist do, and what is journalism? Maybe let's start there. 

[00:20:31] Simran Sethi: Yeah, so it used to be a journalism professor as well, and this is not in a textbook definition, but what's coming to me right now is that someone who is committed to.

[00:20:43] Simran Sethi: Documenting and sharing about the multiple truths that exist in the world today and with an eye to serving the public interest. So considering that definition, I don't think that there are many outlets that consistently do that. And when I say multiple truths, what I'm talking about is maybe multiple perspectives, not to say, and this has been such a dramatic problem and that I faced as an environmental journalist was a false equivalence. So let's say the I P C, right? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, I was an environmental reporter says that scientists say with 99% certainty that climate change is real, right?

[00:21:24] Simran Sethi: But what we would do is, not me per se, but the royal journalist, we would talk to the 1% and talk to the 99%, right? The one skeptic plus the solid science scientific community and give them each equal airtime. And so the public became very confused. And I think that to me is one of the greatest tragedies of what.

[00:21:49] Simran Sethi: Journalism has become with the 24 hour news cycle plus like every platform that you can get news on, there's a demand for a lot of filler material. And so I think there's a real distortion. Like I can run a six minute story on Paris Hilton's autobiography. But I'm gonna give, I'm gonna give two minutes to like, what's going on with Norendra Modi, trying to like silence journalists, like to keep it full circle with journalists that like, what's gonna sell, what's gonna get the eyeballs or what's gonna get the ears, or what's gonna get the clicks.

[00:22:23] Simran Sethi: And that is like what we're chasing now, as opposed to What is gonna make democracy around the world stronger? What is gonna build an informed electorate? What is gonna keep people healthy and safe? How can we be critical in our assessment of our political candidates? When now I think there's a lot of kowtowing, genuflecting to candidates.

[00:22:44] Simran Sethi: To the point where it's just we don't wanna lose that side, right? We don't wanna, we need those listeners. Or more importantly, like we need access to that politician. So if we upset them, then their office is just not gonna grant us another interview. And that to me is deeply troubling.

[00:22:58] Simran Sethi: Now, of course there's still extraordinary investigative journalism going on but I think there's just a much greater focus on. Bottom lines as opposed to like the integrity of what, serving the public interest is all about. 

[00:23:14] Raad Seraj: I agree with that definition. Having no background in journalism, I still, I still relate to that idea that having presenting multiple versions of the truth or multiple perspectives of the truth and letting the audience decide it does beg the question though.

[00:23:29] Raad Seraj: How do you build the capacity in your audience to perceive multiple truths or hold space for it? Because yeah, it's, and this perhaps relates to what I believe is the true power of psychedelics, whether it's, holding multiple truths, inner truths, versions of the truth in yourself, or what you perceive from the outside.

[00:23:49] Raad Seraj: How do you build that sort of capacity in, in audience? I think that's really part of the issue. I find there's so much information, 

[00:23:57] Simran Sethi: yeah, I think, we have to build People's ability to think critically and analyze the information that comes in. When I say multiple truths, what I mean is that there's a real temptation, especially in the more polarized outlets, to say, X is good or X is bad, we have three minutes to talk about something.

[00:24:16] Simran Sethi: Or we have 60 seconds to talk about something. And and and go, right? And so we're gonna end up with a story that just says, This is good or this is bad, it's gonna be declarative. And that's what sort of the medium seems to demand is like there's a singular answer. Leaving people with a bunch of questions at the end is not right, acceptable in many places, but it should be because the truth is we, it's not easy to say, I guess I wish I could give like an immediate example, something that's coming to mind.

[00:24:45] Simran Sethi: You can't see this, right? But it's like half full or half empty, this mug, it's it's both. But if I'm only looking at it and telling you it's half full, I'm not explaining like the other half, like something is missing. You know what I mean? And I guess that's, I'll talk about, lemme give a better example here.

[00:25:01] Simran Sethi: When I worked as an environmental reporter, it was in a time when people were really excited about shopping our way to sustainability. And I was very much, I. A part of that conversation. Now, I wanted to explain the electrical grid so we could, so people could understand if you bought an eco efficient light bulb, why that would matter.

[00:25:20] Simran Sethi: But no one allowed me to tell that story because they thought it was boring. Agreed. No one wants to hear about infrastructure. Just tell 'em what to buy. So that to me is a great example. So I was going on show after show for Oprah and the Today Show I worked for NBC and like News, NBC News and all these outlets like, but all they would let me do was speak to the very tip of the iceberg.

[00:25:39] Simran Sethi: They wouldn't let me explain environmental injustice. These things are now cropping up. But when I tried to tell these stories a long time ago, they would much rather talk about eco-friendly fashion. Do you know what I mean, than like the impacts of carbon emissions. There's no way like the.

[00:25:55] Simran Sethi: Industrial disaster in Bangladesh was gonna get more than a couple of days coverage. Because like people don't even know where Bangladesh is in the United States. That's true. So that sort of thing. And they don't care. They'll buy Gap like they'll. If, I don't know, if like Justin Bieber does align the gap, they'll write multiple stories on that, but you're probably gonna get one.

[00:26:13] Simran Sethi: Do you know what I mean? Or two, about a building collapse. And that is where I think we run into a lot of problems. 

[00:26:18] Raad Seraj: Yeah, totally true. Actually, with the Rana Plaza collapse, what was surprising to me, as of course that's what, there's no positive correlation, right? It's always oh, Bangladesh, it's where disaster poverty, corruption, debts.

[00:26:31] Raad Seraj: Yeah. And nothing good comes out of Bangladesh. So from that perspective, the framing wasn't surprising. But what I did see, I remember the coverage lasted for two weeks almost, which was unlike any other thing in Bummish. But I think, then came number of documentaries, just the extent of the disaster and the fact that it was mostly women, young women, working women, who were, not only supporting their families, but they were part of this new narrative in balance, which is like empowered women who were.

[00:26:59] Raad Seraj: Not working at homes, other people's homes anymore, as, endangered slaves to some point, to some degree, but they're really taking their lives into their hands. It was a different, I guess the way the story kind of tailed off was, it felt different at that time. But I wanna come back to this point around, so how do you make stories that are emotionally resonant, not prescriptive, but actually it does allow people to, it.

[00:27:23] Raad Seraj: It informs people, but also allows people to ask really important questions And I'm asking this particular question from perspective of your book, which is bread, wine, and Chocolate. Now, this book is I haven't read it yet, but it sounds fantastic just from the description and.

[00:27:41] Raad Seraj: I have a particular sort of question around the framing of this book without having read it, just from based on the description. And I'm gonna read the description out for everybody for the audience here. And so one of the descriptions I found on your website was that not the whole description, but a part of it is that.

[00:27:56] Raad Seraj: In the last century, we have lived and eaten through the most dramatic shifts ever experienced in food and agriculture. While most of this is invisible, what we do know is that food is beginning to look and taste the same. Whether you're strolling through a San Francisco farmer's market at a Midwestern potluck or a McDonald's in India, 95% of the world's calories now come from only 30 species.

[00:28:16] Raad Seraj: And a closer look at America's cornucopia of grocery store options reveals that our food is primarily made of only corn. Wheat rice, palm oil, and soybeans, food itself, the most delicious, diverse varieties of food is being lost slowly and irreparably. I wanna ask you, how does food relate to language? Now?

[00:28:40] Raad Seraj: One of my most favorite writers is Wade Davis. Because I find he has this incredible gift of of language or poetry. He's currently a professor at ubc. He wrote multiple books and he spent lots of time in, with indigenous peoples around the world. And he's an Aetna botanist as well.

[00:28:55] Raad Seraj: But one of his, one of the things that he's been talking about for a while is that, Nearly half the indigenous languages in the world, 7,000 documented languages have also disappeared. Is there a correlation or a relationship between Yes. The loss of indigenous foods or diversity of food and language and Yes.

[00:29:13] Raad Seraj: What is that relationship in your mind? 

[00:29:15] Simran Sethi: Yes. Yeah, it's not a relationship in my mind. It's data. It's it's, and I've lectured at UBC about this actually, but the book is about the loss of agricultural biodiversity told through the lens of bread, wine, coffee, chocolate, and beer. So it's looking at soil seed, pollinator, microbe loss and what the implications of that are. I went to the deep origins of our foods. I spent five years on six continents writing this book. Including going to Ethiopia and to India to the Golden Temple tracing like our sacred Kara Prasad, back to the wheat fields of India. But But to speak about that correlation, there's a direct correlation between biodiversity loss and the loss of language.

[00:29:56] Simran Sethi: So if you think about the homogenization of foods, of fields, of clothing, of culture, the demand to eat the same number of foods and the same types of foods, wear the same kinds of clothes, speak the same language results in an erosion of the fabric of our cultures. And I'm noticing the time here and that we have about 15 minutes left.

[00:30:21] Simran Sethi: So I would love to build a bridge here to psychedelics because I think there's a very profound thing that's happening here as well. There is definitely a beauty in honoring and celebrating diverse cultures and being able to work with the healing traditions from those cultures, whether it be the Shipibo people and Ayahuasca or the Bwiti people and Iboga, or the lineage, the sacred mushrooms that have come through Maria Sabina and, the many hands that have stewarded our foods, our medicines, our languages. Like they get taken and they get distorted and they get appropriated and something is lost. When everything becomes simply a commodity. And you know what I have found? I was in addition to being a journalist I would call myself a storyteller as a through line of my life.

[00:31:16] Simran Sethi: People are made of stories and my job was to really uncover them not to tell them for other people, but to create space so these under-reported stories like biodiversity loss and food and agriculture could be told. And I feel like if you think about the narrative even of something like yoga or meditation in the global north, someone who practices yoga is probably a thin white woman.

[00:31:41] Simran Sethi: And this is like from our culture, like this is, these are ancient practices that, I would see my Nani, my grandmother doing a version of Surya Namaskar, like sun salutation, meditation and Pranayama, like this idea of breath work. It's like, where did Stan gruff get this from?

[00:31:59] Simran Sethi: He admits it's inspired by, pranayam, like the awareness of the breath, altered states of consciousness. This is all part of our Asian lineage. And I think when we go into medicine space, and here I'll speak for myself. I don't wanna say we, but maybe like someone. A chant in the background, that's a sacred chant to me, a Sikh mantra, mispronounced by someone, and I'm in this deep medicine experience, and what's coming in is, this is not mine anymore. This has been taken, or that it's taking me, it's, I'm trying to go back to my ancestor and my ancestors are my lineage, but it's been blocked. Or I'm spying like a Ganesh in the corner that's like decoration for somebody. But it's again, that's a sacred god.

[00:32:42] Simran Sethi: That's of, it's, so these things, new age stuff has been conflated with like Asian stuff, whether it's like Buddhism or whatever, and often out of context or without any acknowledgement or appreciation, this came from a place. And I think that's, that can be quite painful, and quite isolating.

[00:33:00] Simran Sethi: And what I found, when I started to reach for psychedelics after decades of managing depression, it just became, unmanageable, during especially the pandemic and a lot of isolation and just a lot of stuff going on, and got to a point of like suicidal ideation. Even though I was taking Prozac and Xanax and trying, it was just like, it felt like a thick blanket.

[00:33:23] Simran Sethi: It didn't feel like integrated healing and a friend said, Suggested psychedelics and I started doing all the reading. As a good journalist, I did all the research. I was like, okay, quieting the default mode network. All right? That sounds good. Like I want that, but what I didn't know, cause I'd only ever, I used psychedelics recreationally without any consciousness around these healing qualities, like acid in my teens, ecstasy in my twenties, like weed all throughout, but not with this idea, with this understanding of this. And I was like, what they didn't say was, you will feel a connection to your father, who you haven't felt his presence since he passed away seven years ago. You will receive the forgiveness that you saw from your grandmother.

[00:34:10] Simran Sethi: That the last time I saw her, I felt like I wasn't the way I wanted to be with her. You will like, you will feel your mom's little girl's self getting on that boat from Uganda, and you will understand why she's been so hard on you. Like this is the preciousness of this psychedelics. But in Asian culture, and I know that speaking really broadly, we're not a monolith, but there's a lot we have in common with our East Asian brothers and sisters with West and central Asian family. Like the cultures, the values, the qualities around immigration, the pressure around being the model minority.

[00:34:46] Simran Sethi: All these things like our resonant. And I feel Western culture has tried to say like Asian means East Asian and South Asian, something else. But when we think of South Asian, we don't really think of Bangladesh or Iran. We're really just talking about India and maybe Pakistan, like they've done this thing.

[00:35:01] Simran Sethi: No one even thinks about Kazakhstan, like the fourth largest country in the world is central asia. So reclaiming that, reclaiming our medicines, reclaiming our relationship with Entheogen and, I like to say extraordinary states of consciousness instead of altered. These are our birthright, this healing is our birthright and it's mental health and drug use have been so stigmatized in Asian community.

[00:35:26] Simran Sethi: I just, I, I found an organization that would help us find a place where we could speak about our stuff. And feel safe, and be able to put down our armor and be able to not have to defer to someone else's trauma or, try to make ourselves seem okay, but just to exhale, and be held and know that however you show up.

[00:35:50] Simran Sethi: You are welcome here. 

[00:35:52] Raad Seraj: That's beautiful and yeah, it's such a, such a good segue to talk about Asian psychedelic collective because, you and I connected first when you had the intention. You didn't have a logo at that time, but to see it, to come to fruition is such a beautiful, vibrant community of people.

[00:36:07] Raad Seraj: Is so wonderful. So thank you. Let's talk about the Asian psychedelic Collective. Thank you. Tell me about the Genesis story and What has the response been so far? You mentioned that the Asia is not a monolith, it has many different cultures and many different stories, but there are unifying narratives here.

[00:36:24] Raad Seraj: What are those narratives and how has that been received by the community? Yeah, 

[00:36:29] Raad Seraj: It's interesting, 

[00:36:29] Simran Sethi: so I'll first of all explain how I connected to you. I, again, using all my journalist skills, I like. I had a couple of experiences. I had a medicine experience that was really powerful around my family and my ancestors.

[00:36:43] Simran Sethi: I didn't feel like I could integrate in a with white folks because they didn't understand my experience. So then I sought out, again, around partition and, everything I was describing. So then I sought out Bipo groups. But again, it was like I was the only, I was the only Asian in there.

[00:36:59] Simran Sethi: Like it wasn't quite the right fit, and we need to have space for black trauma and that is not the same. I think this idea of bipo or people of color is just so unfortunate in a way. I want us to be a family together. And I also wanna name that like our traumas aren't right the same. So if you go into a practitioner training and all you're getting is some generic bipo training, that doesn't make you equipped to take care of people in their specificity.

[00:37:27] Simran Sethi: And I can't speak to Canada and I mean there are a lot, hella, lot of a South Asians in Canada. At least that cuz my people are there. I'm sure maybe Big Asian too. It's like in the United States. Asians are the fastest growing ethno racial group in this country. In Oregon, we are the fastest growing ethno racial group in the country.

[00:37:43] Simran Sethi: How are people being trained to serve our community and understand what's coming up for us when we're in liminal space and being able to hold us, being able to support us, being able to integrate with us? I couldn't find that. So I started scrolling through LinkedIn. I did a search on psychedelics and every name that sounded Asian to me, like inclu, including yours, I was like, hi, you might remember this.

[00:38:10] Simran Sethi: It's my name is Simran. I'm part of a small group of people putting together this collective, it was just me at the time. And it was born out of not being able to find like the right fit for integration. Having an experience in a psychedelic justice class where the professor just like, Dismissed East Asians, like y'all haven't had any trouble.

[00:38:29] Simran Sethi: Like So the historical naivete, I wanna say, because if you're educated, again, I'm speaking to the US in this system, you don't learn about anything other than the dominant culture, right? So like internment is like a page in a history book. Forget about knowing about anything that's actually happened in Asia, but we are, Asians are two outta three people on the planet, and we have faced the disproportionate impacts of everything. War, famine, displacement. Internment, enslavement, colonization. I don't wanna say disproportionate impacts of everything. There's been a lot of that, of course, in Africa, but climate crisis all of this, the wars, like we have faced it, but when people see us here, they just think we're okay.

[00:39:13] Simran Sethi: Oh, the doctors and the this, the engineers and the, what have you. The largest income disparity is within the Asian community in the United States. We are not one thing. But we are seen as being this kind of super smart breed of folks, and that's really damaging for a couple of reasons. But first, Because it erases our humanity, because then we can't speak to our vulnerabilities.

[00:39:35] Simran Sethi: And then that's exacerbated by the fact that like our culture doesn't talk about this stuff. And then it creates a hierarchy where if I'm the model minority, what's that other person? It's separating us from our other communities of color, which. I'm really, really pained by. So I think it looks on its face like a great thing.

[00:39:53] Simran Sethi: Like we're the model minority, but then you just dig a little bit deeper and you're like, that's not really serving us. So yeah. I lost my train of thought there, but I wanna also add that, we're underrepresented in clinical trials. We are underrepresented in practitioner trainings.

[00:40:09] Simran Sethi: We are underrepresented across the board and also when we are there, we're not seen. So you have a book like How to Change Your Mind, that gives you like a paragraph in the beginning about Maria Sabina, and then three at the end, but it's Gordon Wason gets more pages. Everything else is white men and white lab coats.

[00:40:26] Simran Sethi: I know the Netflix special was better, but let's stay with the book for a minute because Pollen is so influential. Like just even there, the erasure. And then I see and my dad was a scientist, so I'm particularly attuned to that. It's he was erased, his labor was erased, and we're not, again, a culture that like waves the pompoms for ourselves.

[00:40:45] Simran Sethi: So APC is here to advocate, right? We're here built on three pillars of building community. We have integration circles and wellness circles, our integration circles to honor our intersections. So we're not just one thing. We're not just one kind of Asian, and we're also not just one kind of person.

[00:41:01] Simran Sethi: So we have a LGBTQ2+ circle, an immigrant first generation circle. We're rolling out our women femme circle, our men's circle. We have a general circle as well. We have sound healing. We have Yoga, we're suing to have meditation and this is all by Asian for Asian to have these safe spaces for ourselves.

[00:41:21] Simran Sethi: We have education as our second pillar, and that's really about, and this was all informed by like conversation with you plus like a hundred plus other people. Like I, I spoke to people and found, asked them, what would you want in an organization to feel a sense of belonging, right? So a p c, the Asian Psychedelic Collective is a place of belonging in emergence, space of belonging for Asians, working in and with psychedelics.

[00:41:44] Simran Sethi: And it's built on these pillars of community. Like I just mentioned, education, which is really about, also talking about like, How to talk to your Asian family about psychedelics, right? We're gonna be rolling out that resource and other resources that we've curated and a drug war healing circle, an Asian drug war healing circle, brought to us by the Center for Political Education, like they're, they are two Asian women who are now like carrying this into a p c, but to explain the war on drugs and how that's been damaging to us here.

[00:42:15] Simran Sethi: The global north as well as in Asia, you know how that's impacted policy and culture, our culture around drugs. And then, really hoping to create educational modules. So there will be that sensitivity in psychedelic practitioner trainings. And then the third pillar is advocacy. And it's not advocacy for psychedelics.

[00:42:33] Simran Sethi: This is for some people, but like you said at the top, it's not for everyone. We're not here to just Just universally say, this is what everyone should do. But to advocate for our place here, if we are going to have this, it needs to be accessible. It needs to be culturally accessible and financially accessible.

[00:42:50] Simran Sethi: We need to, again, have culturally responsive and attuned care and advocate again for us to be there in all those places. In the trials, in the research in the leadership, physicians in spaces, in investment like you like, you matter. And when someone sees like, rod's there, that means that like maybe they have a belief that they could be there too, and I mean I sat very recently with my 77 year old mom and that liberation that she has felt like I want that. I want that for our people more than anything. I want that for our people. 

[00:43:25] Simran Sethi: So powerful and so beautifully said. Simran, thank you so much. I know we are almost outta time. I just wanna acknowledge that. Thank you. The work that you're putting in, the work that you're doing to bring us all together has been incredibly powerful. And just the timing couldn't be better. 

[00:43:40] Simran Sethi: So maybe tell us how to find APC.

[00:43:42] Simran Sethi: Yeah, asian psychedelic collective.org sign up for our mailing list.

[00:43:46] Simran Sethi: And then in, in addition to that, Instagram at Asian psychedelic Collective, those are the best places. We're also on LinkedIn, but that's we're very small organization, all volunteer led, so we want people to please show up.

[00:43:58] Simran Sethi: All of our events are donation based, so no one's turned away. And we're really like, Hopeful to build this community and even have folks come on board and volunteer with us. That'd be great. 

[00:44:07] Simran Sethi: Amazing Simran. Thanks so much. Good luck on with APC and everything else. Yeah. I look forward to, again, remaining friends and spending more time together. Thanks so much for, again, for spending time here. 

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