Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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My guests this week are Katie Bogen & Hani Chaabo.
Katherine Wela Bogen is a clinical psychology PhD student and reconstructionist Jewish woman dedicated to empowering sexual abuse survivors. Her research on interpersonal violence and human sexuality has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals.
Beyond academia, she organizes international feminist psychology conferences, speaks at national political campaigns, and shares her stories and social commentary with millions on Instagram and TikTok. Raised in an American Jewish family by the son of a Holocaust survivor, Katie interrogated her inherited understanding of Zionism at a college level, and fostered relationships with anti-carceral human rights activists globally.
With degrees in Political Science and Clinical Psychology, her diverse experiences inform her commitment to direct action for social change. Integrating anti-carceral, anti-racist, and anti-colonial feminist principles into her work, Katie passionately advocates for the full political enfranchisement of both Palestinians and Jews.
Dr. Hani Chaabo is board-certified in Family, Integrative & Addiction Medicine. He completed training in Family Medicine at West Virginia University, a fellowship in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, and the Primary Care Psychiatry, Addiction Medicine, and Child & Adolescent Psychiatry fellowship certification programs at the University of California in Irvine.
He has worked with middle eastern refugees, marginalized LGBTQ communities, and steered national scale public health projects.
He is currently Chief Clinical & Wellness Officer at El-Dorado Community Health Center in California. During his time as medical director of Well-being at Ridgecrest Regional Hospital, he was awarded by the American Medical Association’s Joy in Medicine Healthcare System recognition program. He established Ridgecrest’s first Addiction Medicine and Integrative Medicine programs.
Together, these two host the superb Superhumanizer podcast, in which they seek to “journey into the heart of humanity’s most polarizing challenges, guided by the belief that empathy and understanding can bridge the widest divides.” They have hosted some of the most thoughtful, informative conversations for my own deepening understanding of the genocide in Gaza and in the legacy of Zionism, all with a remarkable tenderness and care. What I so appreciate about their work is that they take topics that are often abstracted and “thinky” and bring them down to Earth, to something felt. These conversations foreground empathy and reaching across divides, as opposed to the simplistic binaries that we so often encounter online, which are designed to provoke and enrage.
Unsurprisingly, they are both heart-led public intellectuals in their own right, contributing much needed reminders that, even in the face of all the righteous anger we may feel, the real work is to advocate for empathy and understanding as ancient tools for building bridges across divides—especially the ones that at first seem impossible. I’m so excited for you to spend some time with this necessary conversation with Katie Bogen and Hani Chaabo.
Another episode you might like:
David Guignion: The History of Conspiracy Theories, Making Philosophy Accessible to the Public, Activism, & More | #43
Welcome to the Urgent Futures podcast, the show that finds {signals} in the noise. Each week, I sit down with leading thinkers whose research, concepts, and questions clarify the chaos, from culture to the cosmos.
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CREDITS: This podcast is edited and produced by Adam Labrie and me, Jesse Damiani. Adam Labrie also directed, shot, and edited the video version of the podcast, which is available on YouTube. The podcast is presented by Reality Studies. If you appreciate the work I’m doing, please subscribe and share it with someone you think would enjoy it.
Find more episodes of Urgent Futures at: youtube.com/@UrgentFutures. Past conversations include Taylor Lorenz, Lisa Messeri, Legacy Russell, William E. Rees, Renée DiResta, and more. Here is another recent episode with Indy Johar about reimagining democracy and human intelligence in the age of AI:
