A Vanishing Point

Joshua Rubin  0:08  

I remember Abraham took me and put me in a car and put a blindfold on me. And then drove me for hours. And I had this moment of realizing it was the first time since I was a child that I'd ever been asleep in a car not knowing where I was going. And letting go. And surrendering to the not knowing was really profound.

Joel Krieger  0:39  

What would it feel like to wake up immersed in a performance that was created just for you. One in which every single moment you encounter is crafted with an intimate understanding of who you are, and who you hope to become.

Pavani Yalla  0:57  

Odyssey Works creates performances for an audience of one. Each experience is custom-tailored to its participant and occurs not on a stage, but woven into the fabric of their daily life. The experience can last anywhere from a few days, to even a few months. And the results are transformative. Many of these people report to have changed jobs, relationships, or moved across the country. It's amazing how a single performance can alter the course of someone's entire life.

Suldano Abdiruhman  1:32  

I'm starting to see shifts in my work that I feel like directly are connected to it. One of them was quitting a job I had during the pandemic. And then I was thinking about what having a small business would look like, which turned into a real thing that I started with a close friend of mine, I think I felt this renewed sense of self. It was really like... it felt like a new beginning.

Joshua Rubin  2:04  

They had given me an ability to see the world in a new way. Anytime you can have these moments of brief awakenings, to the magic and synchronicity of the world, you're lucky. As a theatrical experience, it's hard to imagine anything like this comparable. Something that is being done and created for you. With you. It is bizarre and unique, and special.

Joel Krieger  2:56  

Welcome to Outside In. I'm Joel...

Pavani Yalla  2:59  

And I'm Pavani. Each episode we'll discover design in unexpected places.

Joel Krieger  3:04  

So these creators may not always call themselves designers, they actually go by many different labels. But they all have one thing in common. They create moments that have the power to change us.

Pavani Yalla  3:25  

In a world full of mass-produced objects and experiences that are designed for anyone, and everyone, Abe Burickson designs for someone. This episode explores a bespoke, more intimate flavor of experience design, where you throw out the need for something to scale to a mass audience, and instead, intentionally design for an audience of one, two, or even just a few.

Joel Krieger  3:53  

Abe and his partner Aiden have experimented with all these formats, from the one-person Odysseys that you just heard about at the very beginning of this episode, to a two-person online experience, called the Book of Separation. And finally to Abe's unique approach to designing custom homes, called the Long Architecture Project.

Pavani Yalla  4:15  

Joel and I recently experienced the Book of Separation. Although it's an online performance experienced while apart, we somehow were able to have a sensory, embodied experience that made us feel more connected than at any other moment during the pandemic.

Joel Krieger  4:31  

We start our conversation here with Abe describing the Book of Separation. And then we take a brief tour of some of his other work—exploring the transformative power of truly bespoke and participatory experience design. Enjoy!

Abraham Burickson  4:57  

The Book of Separation is a digital online experience for two people to have an experience of togetherness, while being incredibly, or not so incredibly, far apart. Obviously, it emerged from our separation during the pandemic, which is something that so many artists are thinking about. The Book of Separation was an experiment in trying to create a different kind of intimacy, a different kind of togetherness, utilizing our online systems that we're so dependent upon. Now, the essential way it works is you get a phone call, each of you, ideally, for people who haven't seen each other in person in a while, say you did Joel, and you Pavani, and you're interviewed about each other, you're asked, you know, kind of general speculative questions, and some more intimate questions. And this custom-built system called one thing takes all that information and custom designs, the other person's experience for them, that is a kind of collage of animations, audio tracks, and videos that take you on a journey, kind of around this fairy tale, fictional world, together. You bump into each other. From time to time you send each other postcards, you even talk to each other on the phone, the phone rings, and you talk to each other, all to create a kind of new way of going on a journey together. I was inspired by, I mean, it's just a small thing, but you know, I was inspired by this thing my wife did for me a long time ago, on my birthday, I think when we were first dating, and she just sent me... she just sent me a poem. Like it's just an email, it was some poem that somebody had written, I don't even remember what it was. She didn't write it. But she linked every word to a different online material. Maybe it was a YouTube video, or a song or a text or something like that. I mean, we've all done things like this, right. But there's something very unique about internet connectivity between people that happens with that. It's interesting, there's no other place where that really happens, sending somebody links. And I think when the internet first happened, people were super excited to kind of be doing that. Just like, you know, when I got my first cell phone, I was like, Oh My God, I can go to the most beautiful hilltop in San Francisco and have a conversation with somebody in a beautiful place? Right. And so we forget that, but I was thinking back on that and how that every mode of interaction and communication has its own quality of connectedness. Even think about letters, think about how intimate a letter is, even though it's really distant even though you don't have like, you don't have a face, you don't have a body. You have a different kind of intimacy than, say, an email or even like a voicemail, like there's something about it. And so the the medium of connection, the medium of relationality, changes what's possible, and we're in the middle of pandemic, and we're in the middle of everybody diving headfirst into zoom, and performances happening on Zoom, and all these things getting poured into what was essentially meant to be, you know, business conference room software, and trying to make it work, which is kind of awesome. Like, I love, I just love the way creative people break things and make them do new things. But zoom has this sort of limited potential. It's super torso focused, right? And it, it causes this very strange relationship to people via screen, and to looking and to a certain kind of self consciousness. And I had felt that we were trying to pour live performance into zoom into Internet connectivity. But maybe there was some emergent form of connection on the internet that we could find if we really got experimental. And so that was the experiment. And it took a year and a half.

Pavani Yalla  9:27  

Yeah, it was amazing. I mean, you mentioned the word medium. You are using paper and pen. You're using, like you said, the internet. You're using your phone. You're in your own home in your own room. Then you're directing us to do things physically with our body, to look in a certain direction, I mean, all of those things together, created the experience and I think that as a designer, I know that there is power in that but to actually experience it come together like that I think was very, very powerful.

Abraham Burickson  10:02  

Yeah. And you know, Pavani, there were so many iterations.

Pavani Yalla  10:08  

I'm sure. 

Abraham Burickson  10:09  

You know, in some of them, we had people like spinning around in the room. And, like one of the, one of the great challenges, I think, for digital experience is embodiment. And so we were thinking like about how, how the fact that people were alone in their rooms, and had some kind of power over that agency, could allow them to maybe be more embodied to engage their place more, you know, just the activity. You know, there's not much of a spoiler at the front. But you know, the activity of going and finding a book that reminds you of your friend, brings the materiality of your home, you're really interested in the weight of the book, there's something about holding the thing in your hand, and associating that with the other person both brings in this embodiment of like holding the book, but also makes this piece emergent from your home, and from whatever history you have with those books. And so I know a lot of times with digital experience, it's all here in the screen. And we're thinking, Well, why does it have to be, you know, certainly, it doesn't have to be like, there's the rest of your life. And there's all that randomness. And sometimes togetherness is the material culture of the space in which you live. So, yeah, it was an experiment. And in that as well,

Pavani Yalla  11:34  

I also appreciated how easy it was to follow the instructions. So for me, personally, and I was like, I told Joel, actually, I had called him on my drive home to get home in time to be able to do this experience in time. And he was like, gosh, I hope you get there in time. And I did, but all of that baggage of, I'm running late, and all the things that happened in the day I was bringing into the experience, but there was something about how it started and the instructions we received that totally helped me feel settled and feel excited, and feel, you know, embraced honestly, in that time. So you have to design for all the various contexts that people are bringing into the experience.

Abraham Burickson  12:20  

Yeah, there's a certain level of relaxation that you want a person to be able to have. And, and trust that that, like you said, is, is an embracing and I think it's taken me a long time to really learn that, you know, because I think a lot of people don't want to muddle muddy the waters with lots of instructions and reminders and things like that. But I found over time that it's okay. It's okay. It's worth being reminded. So you don't feel lost. You feel like you're in good hands. The other thing that you mentioned is so key and was one of the things that was sort of essential to this effort, which is the the way you had to drive home fast to meet Joel at the appointed hour. And digital experiences rarely are just more and more geared towards on-demand when you want it, which, which is great and convenient, and a lot of ways, but we have a different psychological approach to them like and when I say approach, I mean, the way we approach them is is different, it loses a certain kind of specialness, because it's not an event, right? Like I recall going to shows before pandemic a long time ago. And I would have great experiences at shows that weren't that good because I was sort of awoken and made attentive by getting there by showing up on time by knowing everybody else was getting there. At the same time that they were with me. There was an eventness to it. There was a bracket around that time that was powerful for my own attentiveness. And we wanted that here. And so you're excited. You made it like you made it home on time. Yeah, for the show. But you wouldn't have to do that for, you know, Stranger Things or something.

Pavani Yalla  14:22  

Right. I'm curious about the emotional arc of the experience and how intentional or designed that was.

Abraham Burickson  14:32  

Yes, I started less with an emotional arc than what might be called an experiential arc. It started with a bunch of diagrams like the conversations were all in diagrams at first. If this were an actual video conversation, I can show you the final diagram of the piece. What I was looking for was to be moving through the emotional and physical and narrative experiences of togetherness and aloneness. And the different emotional valences of those. And I won't give a spoiler, but like there are times in it, when you're sort of reminded of the great things about being alone and times when you're reminded of how annoying everybody is, and it's so great they're not with you and there are other times, you know, largely the sort of baseline idea is, you know, you're looking for togetherness, you're looking for each other. And so there was an arc to that. In the diagram, that began the whole thing, it was this sort of these kind of increasing loops of togetherness and separation, we sort of envisioned it like to, you might say, shoe laces that are sort of connected at the beginning and they get pulled apart, and then they get sort of wound together one point get pulled even further apart and break at one point and then come back together and get tied in a knot. And so the emotional arc of it could be sort of visualized that way. And then once I had done the, once I've done the diagram worked with my designer to make it look clear for everybody, we were able to use that arc, as kind of the guiding principle more so than the script itself. I use the arc to to do the script for the designer to design the images, the the composer, all those things, that's kind of the baseline.

Pavani Yalla  16:28  

So I'm smiling, because that totally worked. After Joel and I did the experience, we connected briefly. And I told him, there were two very, I'm just gonna try not to spoil it for others as well. But two very powerful moments in the whole experience for me. And one of them was very much where you feel the loss of separation and specifically with your friend, right? And then the other was, oh, it was surprising to me, like, oh, yeah, I kind of want to be alone. This isn't so bad. And I know you know exactly what I'm talking about. But those were the two most powerful moments and why I actually remember exactly what I was seeing on the screen when I experienced those feelings. So it totally worked on me and was probably what was most memorable about the whole experience is flip flopping between feeling alone in a good way and feeling alone  in a bad way.

Abraham Burickson  17:21  

I'm really glad to hear that, you know, one of the great challenges of the piece, and one of the things that we were trying to do, was to create enough of a story, a specific enough story that you felt like you were entering into the world, but a generic enough story that you felt you could overlay your own meanings onto it. And that was also iterative and a really interesting challenge, right? Because the idea was not that you come totally into my story, but that you and Joel together, create a new story with this framework.

Pavani Yalla  18:00  

Yeah, for sure. So I want to kind of switch gears a little bit. But it's, I think, all very related. You are most known for your Odysseys, right? The experiences that you've created for a single person or an audience of one. If you could briefly describe those experiences and how you know, what is the common thread between all of your work essentially and then how has it culminated in your most recent work?

Abraham Burickson  18:28  

So, Odysseys (which we started making 20 years ago, which is mind blowing) are day long, originally than weekend long and week long and month long performances for one person audiences. And they emerged from a kind of question about the ideal audience that my friend Matthew and I had been discussing for a long time. We're out in San Francisco, we're and we've gone down to Big Sur, we're going for a long walk on the beach, and we're talking about this problem. The ideal audience is just that one person who happens to get it. You write a poem, I was a poet and an architect, and he was a theater guy and a painter, you know, you do create your work, and you send it out into the world. And hopefully, there's that person who understands this, and it's perfect for them. And maybe you designed a building that was brilliant, but a lot of people thought it looked like a sewing machine, but you knew that embodied the truth of the world. And so you end up designing for that person, which is, you know, will hopefully show up we said why don't we just design for that person? What would happen? What would be the follow on effects? And so we did, we tried it, so Okay, let's just create the experience for one person and, and I will honestly say at the beginning, we had a kind of a notion that maybe sort of like that Michael Douglas movie, the game? Yeah, we thought, Oh, well, you can like perfectly craft, what they're gonna go through and you can understand you can totally understand them. And you can create this thing that is just like clockwork. And, you know, they have decision moments, but you can be like a Greek god and just kind of set send it down from on high. But I think what we discovered was that A) you can't 100% understand another person, and B) maybe it's more interesting to create something that is a dynamic relational thing about you, and that other person. Suddenly, we as artists weren't these kind of, I don't know, wizards behind the curtain, which is sort of how artists in the professional world tend to be treated, right? Maybe they're geniuses, but they're not in relationship with their audience in this kind of, you know, professionalized world like maybe they'll come out and take a bow after the show, or, you know, give a talk after the installation. But generally, if they're not in relationship, and it's kind of a funny thing, why not, you know, you sit around playing music with friends, you're in relationship, you paint a picture of someone you care about, that's in relationship, it's the way you see them. There's something about intimate, small and community based art making, that is inherently relational, that sort of emerges from relationality. And we found that when we got into doing things this way, the relationality was inevitable. And getting rid of the, the need for a mass audience, getting rid of the need for some kind of advertising that would appeal to everybody. So you get enough butts and seats or books sold or whatever, having 100% sold out shows because you only have one audience member. And always a satisfied audience in that sense, you put aside a lot of those kind of ways of being and you can really enter into relationship. And then what we found was, oh, well, then if this is relational, let's just expand the relationality of it. And we would bring on the person's friends and family and our own friends and family or the communities in a particular place or communities with a particular interest. And what we found was, instead of having hundreds of people coming to see a show, we would have hundreds of people connected to developing, creating, making the world of this piece at various different levels of commitment. And so we would make these experiences which were narrative, and aesthetic experiences that would enter into the life of our audience member, sometimes for months, maybe, you know, maybe it would start say with a children's book that our participant, that's what we call them, our participant's priest gave him a children's book for their four-year-old kid. And it was kind of a weird children's book, maybe it was about a secret room that the little girl in the children's book drew into her imagination by drawing on the sidewalk and opening the door and stepping in. It was a room where she could do any all these fun things that she wanted to do in private. And then maybe after this book had gone into bedtime circulation for a while the participant then got an invitation to his own secret room, you know, but of course, it wasn't a chalk-drawn door on the sidewalk. It was a 20,000 square foot shut down hardware store, downtown Brooklyn. And it goes in there. And there, of course, are all those things that he likes to play with, something to write on something to music to play books to read all the things that were in the children's book that have been planted months before that he'd been engaging with with his kid. Now he's engaging with it himself. His secret room and then maybe in the secret room, he reads a another story. There's a notebook. Somebody else has been living here. Every time he goes. He goes week after week after week. And every time he goes that notebook is there's a little bit more written in that notebook. And it's a story. It's a story of the person who's been there when he wasn't trying to hear the music of this incredible cellist again, and searching high and low and then maybe one day after he leaves his secret room. He sees me who he knows I'm the guy from Odyssey Works because he signed up with us. He knows who I am. But I'm that character, that character's really me but I'm also that character. And we go for a walk and we talk about music and he loves music. He's a musician. He's also a writer, but he's a musician. And we talk about having traveled to have powerful experiences of music and I tell him about how I was In, I was studying the architecture of this indigenous group in the Amazon and, and I went deep into the forests met this community. And they played this music on these stringed Western instruments. But the strings were out of tune, they were walking back and forth, and back and forth. And, and it obviously wasn't about the tuning of the music, it was about this experience, this drone, this being and if it's dark, there's like some candlelight or something I can't quite recall. But it was the eeriest experience of my life, it seemed to go on for months, or more, but it was probably only about half an hour. But it was an experience of having gone somewhere, and been totally about a musical moment. And then while we're having this conversation, we're in the car. And then we're at the airport. And then I open up the back of the car, and I have his suitcase and give him his suitcase. And I pull out of the top of his suitcase, his itinerary, his passport, and he looks at it and he sees he's on his way to Regina, Saskatchewan, and he goes on the plane. And on the plane, he's given by the flight attendant, something flight attendant thought he dropped, which is this weird score, which he can't make heads or tails of... some kind of postmodern musical score. And he's studying it as he's traveling. It's a long trip, it's like eight plus hours, something like that, to get even more probably to get to Saskatchewan, and then he gets there. And he doesn't know why he's there. And so border security is a little bit suspicious of him. And he gets into this whole long debate with them about whether it's okay for him not to know why he's there. And he says, I'm a writer, and they say, Sure, everybody's writer, he says, look it up on the internet, they say the internet is easily faked. Which is true. He says we could go down to a bookstore just got a book out. Finally they let him through. Did Odyssey Works plant that border agent? Do we have that kind of power? Did we make him define who he was in terms of his character in the world? Or was it just luck, and then he ends up at this hotel and he puts his stuff away and he comes outside and there's somebody waiting for him with a truck and he says let's go and they go and they go out of Regina, Saskatchewan, which is this kind of Emerald City sort of city, not that it's green and beautiful like that. But it has the there's like prairie on the outside and city on the inside. And they're right next to each other, which is not like the cities I know in America. And they go until the city fades into the distance. And when they when the city is gone, they stop at the edge of the field and they go for a walk through the field and he starts to see this weird structure, like a single room. It's a single room in a field. That's all it is. It's got a window on each wall. And he realizes he recognizes that window because there was a photo of that window in his secret room in Brooklyn. And he realizes Oh, the photo of that window. The picture on the wall was also an illustration in the children's book that months before he had been read and started reading to his daughter and gets closer and closer and hears the music. He hears the cello music which he realizes was on the CD player in his secret room already, and gets closer. And this is of course the cellist who's written about in the children's book. And then he goes inside and he sits there. And he sits there for two hours listening and watching her play this piece of music, which was composed for this moment. And this was two hours, this was two hours he spent there. But it was of course a month long experience to get to this particular moment, this particular relationship to this piece of music to this event, to go back to what we were talking about before to this event that was so built up to that he when he got there was so present later he said, he said I'll always have Canada, meaning he'll always have this moment. And this was a whole weekend just for this two hour experience. And they turned around, went back to the hotel, spent the night and flew home the next day, whole weekend just for that. That's the kind of thing that Odyssey Works does.

Pavani Yalla  29:24  

Beautiful. Thank you for that.

Joel Krieger  29:26  

Such a surreal gift. It's almost like you get to know these people so well. That the experience you craft for them has this innate transformational quality. I mean, people...how are people different on the other side of this experience?

Abraham Burickson  29:43  

Yeah, it's so interesting. You know, we have a kind of a point of faith. It's sort of simple maybe it's like an artist kind of creed and that's that powerful, artistic narrative. aesthetic experiences are transformative, that seems to hold true. People change their lives, almost universally, they move, they leave a relationship or start a relationship or fully commit to a relationship within the next within the following like three months quit a job. These major life changes tend to happen. I'll say that when an Odyssey was done for me, there were all these grandiose moments, you know, they were like I was conducting an orchestra of voices while blindfolded. And I had been listening to my favorite piece of music at the time was Gretzky's Third Symphony. And so I was just so in it, you know, I just been not, I just been you to just like non stop taking that piece of music in. And so then they knew that. And so all the musicians, everybody in the room sort of knew the piece of music and knew how to go to it. And they knew that I would, so I conducted them to play this piece of music live, they loved, I am not a conductor, I'm not even a musician. So that was it was kind of an amazing experience. But, the most powerful experience of that Odyssey, amongst other more spectacular things was when I was walking down Market Street in San Francisco. Alone, I had to go from point A to point B, simple transportation thing, go for a walk. And then out of one of these, you know, junky camera stores, came a friend of mine. What a surprise? And he just walked with me and didn't say anything. And then a few blocks later came another friend who walked with me and didn't say anything. And we kept going like that, till I got to point B. And it was all I really wanted, was to literally, and metaphorically walk with a friend, I didn't really realize that. I thought maybe I wanted to conduct a great orchestra of voices perform my favorite piece of music. But actually, what I wanted was that.

Pavani Yalla  32:13  

I'm imagining that there is a lot of research on the individual that goes into creating an odyssey in order for someone to know that that's what you needed, you didn't even know that you needed it, right? In order for them to make that happen. They need to really understand you. Can you talk about that process, that upfront research process just a bit? How do you get to know someone, so well?

Abraham Burickson  32:38  

It varies depending on honestly our budget and time. But at a minimum, it involves them filling out a questionnaire, that's about 15 pages long, it takes at a bare minimum, two and a half hours to fill it out. On average, somewhere in the six to seven hours range and not infrequently around 10 hours. So it's a huge commitment, then we do interviews with them, and as many of their friends and family as we can. And then we do things with them, maybe go to the sauna with them and have a conversation, spend time going for a walk in the woods together, finding out what it is to be together with them. And then we take the things that they've told us about themselves. Like, what music they listen to, and what's their favorite place, and what ideas are they interested in? We look at these things and then we try them out ourselves. We see how could we fall in love with this kind of music? What would it take? How might we learn to hate the subway in New York because it's so crowded and garbagey as she said she said it was garbagey... How can we hate the garbagey nature of the subway and love the symmetry of St. Patrick's Cathedral? And how much do we have to listen to this music until it's like familiar to us... second nature? What books do we have to read? We'd split up their reading lists so that everybody would read it. And if they're really into some particular idea like say sushi making, you know, we would go watch Jiro Dreams of Sushi and then kind of have long conversations getting into the idea of craft around sushi. The point being in a way to fall in love with the person and you know how when you fall in love with a person you start to see through their eyes? In part, you're motivated because you want to bring them something that like, right, you want to bring them happiness and joy. And in part because they've infected you, and they're opening their new world for you. And so that's what we try to do in order to enter into a kind of new subjectivity around them. And we have this marker, it's probably silly, but it's, it's also sort of, quite effective of when we're ready, which is, when one member of our team has dreamed about our participant, then we're ready, then they've entered them where at least then at least somebody has crossed the line into internalizing the other person.

Pavani Yalla  35:48  

Empathy is like the one word that comes to mind as you're talking, practicing empathy or to get to know this person and step inside their shoes. And I'm thinking about our day job, Joel, as designers in the corporate world, and how very little time we actually spend doing that. First off, because we're usually designing for mass audiences. And it's impossible to do it, we create these personas that are supposed to mean something. And it feels so freeing to be able to actually truly design for a single person.

Abraham Burickson  36:25  

Absolutely. Right. I mean, of course, we're an ideal case, right? I mean, it's somewhere, we're somewhere, what we're doing is somewhere down the line of kind of an imaginary thought experiment. And, and when, when I think about, I also am a designer. I'm an architectural designer. And I do think about the function of such a thing in the world. And I often come back to this book about sustainable design called Cradle to Cradle, maybe you know it, when I first read that, just piss me off. I don't remember all the details in the book. But I remember it was like, largely impossible, I was never going to enact any of these things, right. One of the things in the book was, you know, this book, you can put it in a hot bath, and wash all the letters off and then print a new book on it. I'm like, That's ridiculous. This is not something that will happen. Right? That is just some way down the line, idealistic thing. But that was many years ago. And I've come back to that book a lot. And the ideas of sustainability in that book quite a bit. I'm not enacting any of them. But it represents a kind of a vanishing points of an idea of a way of thinking, and this work with Odyssey works. Even for myself, you know, these performances, these one person performances, my hope, is that it will serve as a kind of a vanishing point for empathetic, experiential design. And that when you're at your day job saying, well, that's just impossible. Like, I'm just designing for a mass audience, that can be somewhere in your consciousness, and have some have a little bit of a gravitational pull. I've been thinking about this a lot over the years. Because I, for a long time, had a fairly standard architectural design practice. And it felt like I was going in two directions, you know, I was doing residential design and, you know, making things that were looked good and I thought functional, the way I'd been taught, but I also had this other practice, which suggested that we can think of any particular thing, not as the thing, but as a kind of nucleus for experience. And that that experience can be understood, you know, perhaps in the UX way of thinking about experience or like, Oh, you do something, it's you have certain feelings, your body moves in certain ways. You are likely to like it or not, and do things, right. There's that kind of various sort of small concentric circle, small circle around that experience of the moment of engagement with it. But there's also the kind of follow on effects of that object. What, what are the follow on effects of putting a tray for your shoes by the front door? Right? Not only are you going to put your shoes in it, maybe, but maybe you'll have a different attitude towards the home. Maybe you'll start to have a different relationship between inside and outside. Maybe your understanding of warmth will change, maybe your understanding of clothing will change. How will that affect the way you're thinking about other things in your life? Right? These follow on effects are fascinating. And when you design a home, which is what I usually do, when I'm doing architectural design, you're creating all these things that have so many follow on effects, we know that we're always going back to home as the seed of ways of being. But when you do a standard architectural design practice, you sort of like, okay, well, you know, there's a work triangle in the kitchen and things need to be near each other, you have these six rooms, and there's a living room, which has to look nice, you know, all these kind of standard things. But we're not thinking about these follow on effects. And so started thinking about how to look at this other work and Odyssey works as an influence on this. And this idea of of home, which I was creating homes,

and to say what would it be to stop making things when I'm doing architecture, and to start considering the not just the big picture of a person's life, but the effect of a community, like a family as a community, but also the community in which the building exists? The effect that this intervention in their life will have, and suddenly it dawned on me, oh, my God, we we have this enormous opportunity to make the building of a home or even the renovating of a home into the most intentional moment in a person's life. Right, if I wish to be a an environmentalist, that sort of low hanging fruit, right, I can, you know, design a truly green house. But okay, am I going to do that like a LEED way? Am I going to do you know, all these checklist things? And I've done it? Or can I think about how the house will encourage me to live in a different way? Not just how's it gonna have a smaller footprint? But how will the house for instance, how do I think about sizing closets? So I don't buy as much disposable stuff? How do I think about the the way the garden works? And then what, what do I need as a person? Or what does my client need to remember their connection to nature? Because that seems to be in our conversations that has seemed to be what drove them to want to be an environmentalist, this emotional feeling this, this sense, this this aesthetic connection to the qualities of nature? What would it be to bring that in? Do we have to for instance, instead of running the rain outside of the house and away from the house, maybe we want to run the rain into the house and have it so that there's a fountain in the middle of the house? That trickles whenever it's raining? So you're not? So yes, you're protected from getting wet? But you're not isolated from the sounds that made you love environmentalism in the first place? Or maybe it's something else, maybe you're somebody who wants to develop a different a new kind of community, how does that? How does that live in the house? And so I'm sort of trying to build these in and I realized what we needed to do was have a phase architectures like very structured into these phases, right? design phases, and what if we had a phase before that, where the architect and the client together slowly and intimately explored questions of their, of the clients future of the clients impact of their aims and life in the world and community and family and esthetics and use that as the kickoff moment. And once I started doing that, with with my clients, it started to seem absurd to me the way I used to work, which is, you know, you show up somebody's like, oh, I want to, you know, house with like, good views and the kitchen. I'm like, Okay, here's some options. You good. We'll do that. Right. And then let's get into the nitty gritty of like, picking tiles and stuff. Right and totally disconnected from who they want to be, who they want to be what impact they want to have. And you know, it it's so rare that we have an opportunity to do anything that is related to that tends to be this, this abstract thing, but you know, the building of a house, or even the renovating of a house is an unbelievably an unbelievable outlay of resources, both Financial material, and timewise that it seems such a shame that we miss that opportunity to do it together.

Pavani Yalla  45:13  

Absolutely. I'm living this right now. So we just recently moved into a home a couple months ago, it was a new build, we didn't really get to, it wasn't like a custom home or anything. But there are so many details that I would have done differently had, we gone through that type of a process, which is so rare, as you mentioned. But now, you know, accepting the architecture for what it is even like, where we place furniture, what we hang on our walls, you know, all of that I'm obsessing over it now because I know the impact that it can have on our lives. As I was researching a bit for this conversation, I was looking at your website, and I discovered the long architecture project, which is I think what you're starting to talk about now, I had a moment where it's like, oh, my gosh, this rings, so true. We have a spot in our new home. Now, upstairs, it's kind of a common area between all the bedrooms, it's kind of like a landing, all the bedrooms open up into that common area, we never had that sort of a space in our previous home. And just having that space has now created a ritual of us being together before bedtime with the kids, you know, reading to them playing with them. And then we we go to bed, this space, something about it has changed how we interact with each other in just the last couple of months. And I'm seeing the effects of it. So it totally hits home for me right now. And I wish we could have gone through that type of a process.

Abraham Burickson  46:43  

Right? Yes, I wish everybody could write like I would, I would love it. If this were if phase zero was just inherent in every design process, it wouldn't be that hard to have a process at the beginning that says, Okay, let's think about how this relates to your aims in life. And so much of that has is this kind of hangover from modernism, somebody some brilliant person, having those answers for you that you even see it in sustainability, which is also again, the low hanging fruit about trying to live a purposeful life, most architectural design, that tends towards sustainability tends towards a kind of checklist approach. That is somebody came up with best practices, and you buy them or you don't, right, it sort of comes on down, right? It's it's a passive approach. And so much of design sort of encourages our audience to be passive. But what if it didn't do that? What if the design process was something that encouraged them not only to be active, but the idea that the design could activate the the audience, the user in such a way that they move into a way of, of embodying or projecting into the world, their best values, I think, becomes a kind of a utopian thing, all the so many of the utopias of the 20th and 19th century, in an America that I know of, were based on somebody had an idea that other people kind of bought into. But I feel like there's a there's a, there's a an alternative utopia, which is one that empowers people, to, to go to the place of their most ethical urge, and become that and be empowered to do that. Just imagine it, just imagine if every design thing that you were engaging with, from, from graphics to house to car to, to, to human resources, which is a design, which is right, was done in some way in relationship to your best ethical aims. How would the world be different? Sounds like chaos? I know. But maybe it's a good chaos.

Joel Krieger  49:21  

Yeah, it's a it's interesting, because I think right now a lot of people put a lot of effort into the aesthetic choices that they make when they're, say decorating the house. And so that scene from if you remember the movie, Fight Club, wherever Norton is like, the catalog and everything I've chosen, that that represents me and who I am. So it's like this, this pivot from these these choices as being a static thing that somehow represents some aspect of your identity. And these more kinetic choices that propel you to be more of what you say you are or what you say you want to be. That's fascinating.

Abraham Burickson  49:54  

Yeah, I think, you know if we can start to build processes into design that begin from this kind of idea of experience. And allow people to feel empowered, will move in that direction naturally. I think the tools are there. I think the ideas are here. And growing. When I first did my first Odyssey nobody spoke about experience design. But now, the word immersive is everywhere. Yeah. And the idea of experience. How, however it's being interpreted, is all over I teach at Mica. And we've started these immersive experience classes there mica in the art school in Baltimore. And somebody in the administration was like, can we get this word immersive, just into the name of the department?

Joel Krieger  50:59  

Got to ride the hype curve. Right.

Abraham Burickson  51:00  

Right. And, you know, you see it but you know, on the one hand, things get thinned out in terms become, sort of, they lose their force. On the other hand, it still represents an interest, especially now, God, what a moment we've been through, or still going through, where we've been separated from each other where we're, we're hungering for experiences, or hungering for embodiment or hungering to re approach the normal world except we knew there were all these problems. So there's this, there's this inflection point. It's the perfect moment to be having this conversation, I think.

Joel Krieger  51:43  

Yeah, it's interesting, because the, the word immersive. In what I was hearing, you talk about before, you're really interested in the relationships between things. It's almost sounds like a been reading a little bit about systems design. And it's like seeing the relationships between things rather than the things themselves. And to me immersive. It just sounds like it's a very singular, enclosed thing. And what I love about what you're expressing about your work is, it's always in relation to something else. And I mean, I snagged this quote from maybe your website or an article, it's it said, or you said, Does your design make the world more or less fair, encourage greed or generosity, these are questions that tend to fall outside the design process. And so I just love that this idea of, you know, thinking about the experience, but thinking about this dynamic web of connections that unfurls from it. And, and considering that in the process as well, which, which I feel like is quite quite a different than where the whole immersive scene is going.

Abraham Burickson  52:50  

I mean, that's the power of an idea, right? Like just the word experience, when you drop it, when you sprinkle it on top, like a little bit of salt or something, you sprinkle it on top of, of this word immersive, which Yeah, has, you know, it seems to largely mean that you walk into a room and there's Van Gogh to the left of you Van Gogh to the right of you, Van Gogh above you, right, there's Van Gogh everywhere, you're just inside that go. It's aversive. You know, that's, yeah, you're inside a thing. But when you take it, when you take the word experience into the word, immersive, when you take the idea that we've been talking about experience in the moment experience in an ongoing way, you really get into it. You start thinking, okay, there is physical immersion. I'm in this bathtub, I'm literally immersed in water. There is my room, all of these things, but then there's also a kind of psychological immersion, right? Am I You're telling me a story, do I care or not? You know, I walk into, you know, guests are there, walk into the bag that we went there walking, which I've never been to none of them. But I've seen the pictures, I walk into Van Gogh, and, you know, I love Van Gogh's biography, I just read it, I just read Van Gogh's biography, and in fact, I went to Sam Raimi to where he was in the, in the asylum, and I walked around and I imagined what it was like and so I'm immersed psychologically, in this as well as being immersed physically but then there's like this further step right. The experience of immersion Am I ontologically? immersed? Am I spiritually immersed, is this connected to what is meaningful to me when when you go to Mecca and you're a believer, it is all of those things. It is on it is physically immersive, spiritually immersive. narratively, you're in a story, you walk a story. You know, the journey tonight is you're not just going to that Holy haram, the the, the the stone that you circling doing this whole thing, you're reenacting all these narratives from the Quran, when you go to the, to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, put this put your prayers in the cracks. The story is they go up to having the stories, this was the, this is the piece of the of the Holy Temple, the only piece left, right, you're in the story, you're, you're narratively immersed. You're in this old city of Jerusalem with its aesthetics and its tensions and its violence and its, and its history. And so you're physically immersed. But you're also ontologically immersed if you're, if you believe in it, and it's connected to everything you've longed for in your life. And so, you know, yeah. The immersive industry makes some really cool looking things. And that's great. But when we think about it, experientially, we really dig into it, what are the other ways that it can be immersive? And oh, by the way, you know, all of these religious and political practitioners from the millennia have been thinking about this too, for quite a long time and have done amazing things with it. And we should learn from them. This is like a renaissance of those ideas rather than a new idea. Hmm,

Pavani Yalla  56:18  

love it. This is Joel like so in line with what we used to nerd out about.

Joel Krieger  56:23  

Yeah, I never thought about this before when you said the, the political and what was the other one? The religious? Yeah, of course, like, of course, immersed in a story. And what's more immersive than that, when you read when you fully inhabit this worldview, it it changes the color of everything that you see in every experience you have is informed and, and the meaning is made through that. So yeah, I just, that's a great connection there for me, and considered,

Abraham Burickson  56:56  

I decided to become an architect when I was when I when I was in college, and I left college. And I went to study the whirling of the Whirling Dervishes in Turkey. And I went to Turkey, to do so. And I was young and everything was new and different. I've never been traveling alone before, you know, during that night, so I would go to the dervish lodge. And during the days, what was I doing, I was wandering the city like a tourist and I would walk into those mosques, those incredible mosques in Istanbul, they were just they were everywhere, you know, yeah, there's like the Blue Mosque and, and the is Sophia, those are incredible. But, but you, but you just go deep into the city, and you happen upon another incredible mosque, and maybe, you know, there's something a little less, you know, there's not tourists going in there. And I would go in, at that time, I, you know, I was practicing and I would go in and enter into the space and be changed by it. It's such an amazing thing. Believe it or not, there's something that changes you about being in a sacred structure dependent you know, if it's one of these grand structures, but there's this ritual of going in, you know, you have to wash before you go in, you have to take off your shoes, you have to like enter into a posture. You know, like, just like when you go into a Buddhist meditation, you have to bow and, and you have to have a certain kind of quiet and then you go into the mosque, and there's an orientation on Earth, right, it points you it points you towards where the sacred is, it says this way to Mecca, which is to say it this way to God. And so the Earth has a different understanding now and there's this geometry to these buildings, which is very simple but sort of structures and understanding the world of heaven above and you below and you in the world and you in relationship to these axes of the sacred and and I realized I was somebody else I had different potential. I had different thoughts in my mind, I had a different set of tensions and relaxations in my body. This had changed me and I realized after that I wanted to be an architect. But what I really wanted to be was an experienced designer who made architecture.

Pavani Yalla  59:22  

Yeah. That reminds me a lot. So my family's originally from India, and growing up, we would spend summers there. And the temples, the Hindu temples that I grew up visiting, would often have similar effects. Growing up, I would always want to challenge the things that I was told about religion. You know what, what you should believe you should do this because something bad will happen if you don't, right. I think we all grow up with that to some degree, regardless of what the religion is. And so to be told, God is in this temple, we have to go there, just thinking that I want to Go there, if you don't actually then go there something bad might happen, right? Like these were all of the stories that I would be told. But then to go and actually experience something there, despite rebelling internally against the thought of it was very powerful for me. So specifically, there's, there's a temple in Southern India, that is a top seven hills takes about four hours to hike up to get to the temple. And there is, of course, a route that you could take by car, but it's better to hike up because you are going to attain something different. And we would try to hike up every single time. And initially, it would feel like oh, my gosh, I can't believe I have to do this, I have to go up to see God in this temple. But then every time we would do it, I just came to appreciate it differently. And we would do it without the hike, sometimes when we were short on time, and it would totally change your experience of actually being in the temple. And once it was raining the whole way. And we took our art, we had to take our shoes off, because that's the best way to hike up, right. And it was a spiritual experience for me. And, of course, I was older at the time, so is able to appreciate notions of spirituality. But everything you're talking about, takes me back to those moments. And there are many temples that I visited, but the architecture of the temple, but also the rituals and the ceremonies involved in how you approach how you enter what you do thereafter, all of it had the ability to change me or transformed me, even if I wasn't 100% bought into the notion that God is here. Yeah.

Abraham Burickson  1:01:38  

Wow, that's such a, that's such a great story. And it really points to I think one of the one of the things that seems maybe obvious when you spend enough time looking at it, but is is the notion that we need to be prepared for an impression, you know, the difference between driving up, as you said, versus walking up, as he said, versus walking up barefoot is huge. The thing at the end is the same, but you are prepared in a wholly different way. And the effect is enormous. And I think, you know, a cynic might say, Oh, well, that's what made it feel sacred as you went through all this walking, and you got tired and and your feet are hurt. But I think a more generous understanding of that is that we have a lot that's in the way of our fully receiving something that's in front of us. We have habits, we have a sort of timescales of attentiveness, or dis are in attentiveness. We expect for instance, a movie to be, you know, an hour and a half to three hours at most. And after that we enter into a different mode of being because we've left this kind of expectation. We only have, you know, I think the museum people say on average, you look at a painting for like 22 seconds or something like that, you know, we only we only have a certain amount of time we feel comfortable standing in front of an image a painting will listen to a pop song for three minutes, but not for 40 minutes. And and and there's something that when we're in our ordinary habits, we have our ordinary defences up. It's very unlikely that you know, an image of a of a cross or, you know, or starve David or something's gonna throw anybody I know, into a religious reverie. And right just looking at it in passing. But there's something about that walk up the mountain preparing you for that moment, just like we prepared Rick, for months to get to that moment in the cube in Saskatchewan. Would it have been the same if she had been playing on a street corner in New York? That weird piece of music? Probably not? Is that because the music was worse? No, it was because the preparation was worse. And I think, how shall I put it? There's mind blowing aesthetic experiences all around us that we that we are in no condition to see. We walk in a world of extraordinary beauty. And most of the time we're caught in our complaints, our defenses, our tensions, all of these things. And so I think one of the main things that that an experienced designer can do is think not about the thing itself, not about like, oh, you know, the color red, you know, but think about what are the conditions within which this can be really received what you had a spirit To experience up in that temple and there, you know, there, there are plenty of religious people who say, you know, at the end, all the religious, all the religions are kind of the same thing. They're all pointing in the same direction. It's just the road that you walk to get there. This is a refrain I've, I've heard a number of times, and what if that's true and the real, the real structure of various different religious or spiritual practices is the structure of making it possible for us to see what they have to offer? That's the non cynical answer, right? The cynical answers like, oh, you chant a lot, you're gonna get high, and then you'll feel like you're around God, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, learning from that there's so much to offer for, you know, take those, take those learnings and bring them to something that you wouldn't expect, like human resources. What can human resources do to help employees think about whether they're making something meaningful, or help them make something meaningful? Or see the value in the others around them? Can we take this idea, obviously, to architecture, but also to education? And what is the proper tempo of education? Do we want to just throw information at people every week in the same pattern? Or do we want to spend all semester preparing for one idea? What do you take away from college? Do you remember? And what if college was oriented only towards those few takeaways? And we got rid of the extra stuff and really designed an experience of deeply engaging with an idea? Would that be still as valuable?

Joel Krieger  1:06:44  

It's totally different way of thinking about it, that's for sure.

Pavani Yalla  1:06:46  

I was just thinking how many places actually think this way, or how many people think this way, and how awesome if that impact could could reach different fields and have a farther reaching? Transformation?

Abraham Burickson  1:07:01  

You know, we just started a new school. And we're calling it wildly creative title, the experience design certificate program, it's a one year program, we have our first cohort starting in January, we spent quite some time thinking about what it would be to create a school, a program that did the things we're talking about, that brought designers from all over the field artists and designers from wildly different fields together, under the umbrella of this way of thinking, originally, it was going to be an MFA. And then we thought, maybe, maybe we want people to still be able to be in their lives, and making things and that could be actually not like a concession, but a an essential element of the program. And it's really exciting. I just want to tell people this because I think, you know, we have these people coming from lots of different countries, lots of different practices for this experiment. And taking these expertise says, and seeing if we can change the way that these practices happen across these fields on an ongoing basis, our first cohort is 15 people, then we'll do another one in a year. And I want everybody to go and check it out. Because I want all of your brilliant listeners to apply next year, when we have our next call for applications, anybody's inspired by this way of thinking and wants to transform how graphic design works wants to transform how education works, wants to transform how human resources works, how art making how immersive theater works, inside a community that we hope will continue and grow building a kind of an idea base and a knowledge base and a community base for this way of thinking. To, to sort of take over, right to kind of start at least some small utopian practices in places where you wouldn't imagine them possible.

Joel Krieger  1:09:12  

Is it remote, or you said people are coming together is part of this in person.

Abraham Burickson  1:09:16  

It's low residency, so they come together, and then they go apart. And then they come together and they go apart. And this is very intentionally designed. You know, it's sort of like your trip up the mountain poverty. You know, like, there's a lot of walking involved. Like that's not the sacred moment, right. There's a lot of online time involved, which is really intentional, it's building. And then there's these heightened moments, this event newness to it, and so we've designed this program, around some of the same structures of experience that we designed the some of our Odysseys like that trip into into the room in Saskatchewan for for the weekend. And so it's all we're bringing together these ideas of experience design towards the aim of facilitating people in bringing the ideas of experience design into other fields.

Pavani Yalla  1:10:10  

That's great. We'll have to check back in a year. I'm just so curious. Yeah, well, of course that to come on in, because I'm thinking about like, Are most of us who call ourselves experienced designers like have come through different avenues of formal education. And then most of the skills I think we picked up are not through formal education, it's, you know, on the job or just the life right. But to have a have a program that is very much geared towards something that is, I think, true experience design, not some of the stuff we see out there. It sounds so, so awesome.

Abraham Burickson  1:10:50  

Yeah, poverty. I mean, it's right. Like we are, I don't know about you, but like, I think back on my education, like, oh, but that moment was really experienced design. Oh, there was that thing that there. But really what they're talking about was this. It's such an emergent field that people haven't been talking about it directly. There's not a lot of books out there. I'm working on a new book, but it won't be out for like two years because of publishing takes a long time. But but there's not a lot of people addressing it directly. And you have to kind of like lift up the veil and look at you know, think about the art of gathering by Priya Parker. Oh, we love. Right? That's, I mean, that's an experience design books on a specific topic. But you know, then you can even go further back, you look at Mircea Eliade is the sacred and the profane. And he's talking about the art of experience design through these these notions of inventiveness and ordinariness, like the and how those two work together, sometimes we call it the liminal and every day, and how you can design for instance, you can take these ideas and use them to design say, a certificate program, right? Yeah, an educational program where there's the everyday where you build your use utility usage of the thing and the heightened transformative times where you integrate in a new way, and you change who you are. And the relationship between these you just, there's so many people think about them the idea of performativity and architecture, which has been around for decades, you know, not thinking about the piece of architecture as a thing, but as a facilitator of ways of living. Isn't that experience design? It's been there. So it's, it's not like the idea wasn't around. But so many of us had to say, Wait a second. Isn't this all connected? Yeah. And that's what we're doing in the program. We're saying, yes, it's all connected. If you've been thinking that way, if you're one of our wandering souls has been saying, wait a second. Come join us. That's where we're

Pavani Yalla  1:12:47  

at. Love that. I have one final question that just came up for me. You've talked about design, you also talk about art. And I know people often will juxtapose the two or compare the two, do you have a point of view on those two things?

Abraham Burickson  1:13:05  

I think it's really interesting. And it has been helpful for me to think about these things in terms of experience. The art that I love is art that moves me. I'm, in many ways, moved into a different way of being, it has an effect it like gets inside of me, and changes something. I was just reading. George hoppin, who's my favorite sort of lesser known poet. And I just read this one stanza from one poem. And by the end of that stanza,

I had a different way of seeing the world around me. I was so grateful to that. And then I think about design like architecture. And it, it can do the same thing, except it's a little less personal, perhaps.

It can change me it can change the way I see things, but it tends to interface with the functionality of life. The design practices tend to be more connected to the quotidian, more connected to, you know, where I take a shower and how to figure out how to get to the exit. And you know, how do you put this IKEA bed together? One thing just to zoom back is of course, on the other side of it is how do the people who are making these think about their process? The way we tend to be taught is an artist has some kind of concept or inspiration. designer has a process. And so the way we're taught is quite different. And so On the one hand, I think it's a really important distinction between art and design, in terms of where we're coming from culturally and practice wise, and on the other hand, I think we can start bleeding them together more. What happens if the graphic designer tries to come from a place of inspiration? What happens if the, if the poet tries to think a little bit more about, you know, what is the conditions of listening to this piece of work? Why is nobody coming to these poetry readings? Why is a poem that's hard to understand? So hard to listen to on a first read, but so powerful on the 34th? Read? Why is the number of readings not embedded in the design of the poem? If we can start bringing the ideas and the working methods of of the traditional artists and the traditional designer into the room with each other, then the idea of experience can be the link. And I think it's liberatory. I think the idea of experiences formally and personally and ethically liberatory.

Pavani Yalla  1:16:22  

What's been top of mind for you? Like? What are some of the things that you've gleaned from our conversation?

Joel Krieger  1:16:27  

It's made me think a lot about how we live in a world that is, it's a world full of mass produced objects, and experiences. And I think it's precisely because these things are designed for everyone, that they're actually designed for no one. So the question that's been spinning on my mind is, you know, what happens when we start designing for very specific people, when you're designing for a mass theoretical persona, everything you're doing is abstracted. And when you're designing for one specific person, somehow everything becomes very concrete and real. And you have to move into relationship with that person, the person you're designing for becomes an active agent and a integral part of this design process. Like, for example, their process for doing the Odysseys a aid talks about researching the person, they do things together with them, I thought that was wonderful, you know, it's like, okay, you're actually going to go with a real person, and experience together the things that they love and the things that they hate. And through that, you begin to see the world through their eyes. And I think he said something to the effect of they're, they're basically trying to fall in love with this person. And my favorite part about this whole process was that they actually had a signal for when they knew that they were ready for the performance when the team member dreamed about the participant, and that's when they knew that they were ready. And I just, that just gave me chills. Because it's, it's kind of being in touch with this. With this intuitive side of yourself as a designer, I mean, I, I feel like in the world of deadlines and deliverables, there's this forcing, there's this rush, everything's rushed. And so much about doing a good job has to be getting yourself ready to the point to where you can do a good job. So it's like all that work of priming, and getting ready. And, you know, preparing the ground and your mind making it fertile, so that you can actually see the dots to connect them. That's important work. And yet, maybe you actually can't make a wonderful thing until you do all that work, and being in tune with yourself enough to know when you're ready. I just thought that was a wonderful, a wonderful insight and something that I think everyone can incorporate in some way to their own personal process.

Pavani Yalla  1:19:13  

Yeah. So I think you're talking about priming your own mind through this intense research process, right, which I think is powerful. I think Abe is also in the same interview talking about the importance of priming or preparing your audience for the experience that they're about to have. He says, There are mind blowing experiences all around us that we are in no condition to see. We walk in a world of extraordinary beauty. One of the main things that an experienced designer can do is think not about the thing itself, but think about what are the conditions within which this can be really received. That like for me, I think nailed it in terms of what we should all be doing, everything that leads up to the experience, the context surrounding the experience, so that the person is in the right frame of mind, to have the most, you know, epic version of the thing or the experience. You know, I was a few weeks ago in Mexico, we went on vacation, it was our first time leaving the kids back with with my parents. Every morning, I had set my alarm to wake up in time to see the sunrise over the Gulf of Mexico. You know, at the very beginning of this interview talks about event newness, the state of mind, you're in when you're, you know, anticipating arriving in time for something, I mean, I was totally feeling that. And then, when I did arrive, you know, I was like, the only one on the beach. And it was, it was an epic sunrise, not because of where it was. But because of the conditions within which I was receiving that experience. I just remember thinking like, oh, my gosh, this is a momentous event, look at what's happening, the moment the sun comes up, look at the sky, and it's like, we have sunsets and sunrises every day. There's nothing more routine than that. And yet, we don't, you know, experience that in that way, every single day. And so for me, that's just a simple example of I think, what he's talking about, which is that the stuff exists around us. Experience Design is really I think, even more so about designing those conditions, so that you can

Joel Krieger  1:21:44  

Yeah, I love that bit. You and they've got into at the end about religion, because what you're talking about in that whole segment, just really helped me to see why these structures exist, why ceremonial rituals exist? It's because it's all the things that lead up to the thing. Part of what this has highlighted for me, too, is, you know, I've always had an aversion to this whole desire to scale. You know, that that that was always the question that was asked to me is, you know, like, here's a, here's a cool idea. Yes, but how does it scale? Well, maybe you think shouldn't scale. I mean, that's what's so beautiful about Abe's work is that has nothing to do with scale. There's no way to scale this. There's a way to replicate it in a decentralized way. But scale abstracts everything, and it, it makes it to where, yes, you can affect a greater quantity of people, but in a much less personal and powerful way. And I think that's why so much of our design world feels so dead. There's no soul in it. There's no spirit in any of that stuff that's designed. But when you're designing for one or two or a few people, it's about that, that relationship that you can't have. When you're a designer designing for an abstract theoretical audience, you don't actually have a relationship with them.

Pavani Yalla  1:23:16  

Yeah, you know, you were saying it's hard to scale, a bespoke experience like what they've done with the Odysseys. But if you think about the book of separation, on the spectrum of bespoke to something somewhat mass producing, it kind of like starts to tip in that, hey, this is something you can put out there and a mass audience could experience it still, you know, intimately with just another person. But it's basically a formula or an a set of assets that they put out there. So I think that's smart, where they're using technology to help create still a personalized experience for more mass audience. So there's something there where I think for those of us who are like, how could I possibly applied some of this to what I do, because I have to design for a mass audience. It's like, okay, maybe you can't go off and create one person experiences, but you can apply some of the principles to your process. And he says it in the interview, too. It's not, you know, sometimes it feels like what they do is so far fetched. And so you know, niche, but you can still apply that to other fields and other kind of common practices.

Joel Krieger  1:24:30  

A lot of tech is trying to do this in a scaled way. So you think about Spotify, your personalized playlist or whatever, and I don't know how I feel about all that. Okay, there's an algorithm. It's, it's learning things about what you do and what you like, and trying to make the experience more relevant to you. But it's not doing the same thing. It's not able to really listen through to see something that you don't tell it. And that to me is what so interesting about the Odyssey work stuff is, it was the moment where he was having an odyssey done for him. And he didn't even know that what he wanted was to walk with friends.

Pavani Yalla  1:25:18  

Well, same thing with the book of separation, right? Because you and I both were in it. And your experience was shaped by me. And my experience was shaped by you. It was still much more personal than an algorithm. Yeah,

Joel Krieger  1:25:31  

That's true. Right? Yeah, I think it has a lot to do with because the, the only thing that was exploring was a relationship, again, between two people. So yeah, it's almost like what made it adaptive and responsive and live was the fact that it was two people exploring a relationship that they already had with each other. Also, um, I just thought of ask great questions. And I think that, as a designer, that practice of asking questions, tends to get lost in the shuffle. But really, it's the most important thing you can be doing. Because it's a way to help you really think and see the situation in a way that you you might not otherwise. So questions like, what if we stopped making objects and start making experiences. So let's stop thinking in terms of things, and focus instead on the experience that those things enable. And that's a different way of looking at things. So we're not we're not designing a house, we're actually creating an experience that enables daily rituals that help you achieve the goals in your life, and help you move towards the person that you said you wanted to be. In the interview, I mentioned a quote from Fight Club and actually dug up that quote, just a reference here. So this is a moment when Edward Norton is talking about his Perfectly Decorated apartment. And he says, like everyone else, I have become a slave to the IKEA nesting instinct. If I saw something clever, like the coffee table in the shape of Ian and Yang had to have it, I would flip through catalogs and wonder what kind of dining set defines me as a person. And just think about that for a minute. That is the way that most people go about decorating their house. It's like this esthetic collecting of things where you attach your identity to them. And so I'm just offering this as a counterpoint to what he was talking about choosing to place a thing in your home. Because of the experience, it enables. Like I love the example he mentioned of the shoe tray. It's a seemingly mundane thing that probably an traditional architect wouldn't think about. But it's placed there. And he placed it there, because it helps you remember to take your shoes off when entering, which has following effects, like making the home field more sacred, and clearly defining, outside versus inside and so on. So I just I just wanted to call this out, because I really think this is a new way of looking at things. But you almost have to train your eyes so that everywhere you look, you don't see the thing, you see the experience of the thing. And I feel like that takes that's gonna take some work to begin to see the world in that way. Abe is like our kind of people in that he is a cross pollinator. That's where I relate to him so much as he's all about breaking down these silos. I mean, even the way that he thinks about designing a house, he's totally obliterating these edges, this boundary of what it means and pulling in all these other disciplines and ways of thinking about things.

Pavani Yalla  1:28:57  

That's the end of this episode. But if you're curious to learn more about aid, his collaborators and Odyssey works, go ahead and check out Odyssey works.org. And special thanks to Suldano Abdiruhman and Joshua Rubin for helping us understand what participating in an Odyssey is really like. You can learn more about their experience, and everything else we've mentioned. In the show notes for this episode, just head on over to outside in podcast.org and click on this episode page.

Joel Krieger  1:29:27  

Finally, we offer this podcast free in the spirit of the gift. It takes a lot of effort to produce each episode. So if you find value in them, please take a minute right now. Head over to wherever you listen to your podcast and give us a rating and review. Until next time!

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Outside In is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. If you find it valuable, please consider subscribing, rating or reviewing.

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Through The Red Door

This episode contains strong language and depictions of violence, which may not be suitable for some audiences.

Kevin Jones  00:09

What you were about to hear will not be pleasant for your ears. 

Montage

Another cop puts his gun to the back of my head and says, Yeah, take a breath. One move and I'll blow your fucking head off. Suddenly, I see flashing lights behind the quick shrill of a siren. The officer gets out. If you drop your hands while I remove this gun. I'm gonna shoot you in the face. I’m a social worker, psychologist, paramedic, referee, public relations representative, judge, jury, and sometimes, tragically, executioner. Anytime I see that uniform, I think about all the time those bastards have harassed me ever since I was 14 years old. I don't think I'm stopping him because he's black. But I do think I'm stopping him because he fits the description. I didn't want to shoot this baby. But I know this baby was on his way to kill somebody else's baby. I'm not supposed to get frustrated. I’m not supposed to get angry.

Joel Krieger  01:26

Welcomed outside. I'm Joel,

Pavani Yalla  01:29

and I'm Pavani. Each episode will discover design in unexpected places.

Joel Krieger  01:34

So these creators may not always call themselves designers, they actually go by many different labels. But they all have one thing in common. They create moments that have the power to change us.

Quote Montage  01:47

So evolve, takes the nuance, the conflict between two sides, and puts that on stage.

Oh, I was brought to tears several times. The longer the performance went on, the harder the story's got to take.

All I could think about was I wish I had seen this many years ago,

This kind of theater goes in under the radar. It allows these kinds of feelings to go both ways. And that's what's different. 

Could you solve this by pushing yourself to be a little bit less comfortable?

It changed my way of thinking. And my mind doesn't change that often. 

The hardest part about being a police officer is to have people not see your humanity. I was just to the point where I was done listening. Somehow, this show made it so I'm ready to listen again. 

Joel Krieger  02:41

So you just heard from several audience members, reflecting on their experience with evolve, which is the subject of our episode today. And that super intense segment at the very beginning was a montage of monologues from the play itself. And we put that together because we wanted to give you a glimpse into what this experience might be like. I almost hesitate to call it a play because it kind of defies being labeled. I mean, Evolve is really more like a process that enables us to meet moments of polarization and conflict in a really brave way. And it helps people reclaim their curiosity about others, and helps them to ask the question; what is it like to be you? So today, we're going to be speaking with a remarkable creator. He's been an actor and a director who's performed on stage for over 40 years now. His name is Kevin Jones. And he's the artistic director, the CEO, the co-founder of the Red Door Project. This group is kind of like a theatre company with a twist. The story we're going to follow is a still unfolding creative evolution. So we'll begin with a play called Hands Up, which is about the black experience of police profiling, then to Cop Out, which examines the same subject from the perspective of police officers. And finally to Evolve, which weaves both these perspectives together. So I would encourage everyone to kind of listen to this story with a bit of a wide angle lens. Because while we do talk a lot about issues of race, it's really about something much deeper as well. So Pavani, I never realized theater could be such a transformative medium. I mean, what they put together here is really something special.

Pavani Yalla  04:38

I think he’s come up with a platform for change. But it's really, it's more than a platform for change. It's a platform for dialogue, for discourse. We, myself included, want to go change the world. And in order to do that we need to work together to do it. Right. But if we can't even talk to each other, how are we going to work together? How are we going to collaborate and, you know, change anything? How are we going to solve some of the biggest issues of our time, if we can’t even have a conversation? And I find myself in that situation a lot. I am, you know, often these days, especially talking to folks who I think maybe have different values or have different beliefs than I do, that I don't agree with. And it's difficult too... I'm a pretty open person, I'm a nice person. And it's difficult to navigate the conversation because I feel like we don't have a pattern or just, you know, a guide for how to go about having these conversations in a productive way in which neither of us is going to shut down. And we come out on the other end actually wanting to work together.

Joel Krieger  05:55

Well said, Alright, let's go and get into it. We'll join our conversation with Kevin telling us what the red door project is really all about.

Kevin Jones  06:06

Let me just try to give this conversation as sort of a heading so that he can make sure that we are, you know, careful about how we frame things. So you know, we're talking about race, we're talking about issues that are very volatile, and people have a lot of feelings about it. So I'm going to say something that I think that for a lot of folks is really incendiary. But I'm gonna say it anyway, you can edit it out. But I don't really feel like race is the problem. I mean, I think racism does exist, you know, we all know that race is, is a social construct as the term. But the reason I want to talk about it now, I should say, is because you know, I'm a black guy, and I'm going to talk about race a lot. And I just wanted to, I think it's just important. So yeah, I don't think race is the problem. I think, you know, the fact that we hurt each other as human beings, is and that we do that, you know, that that is part of being human. And that we have also criticized the nature of hurting each other. You know, we compartmentalize it, well, you hurt me, you’re prejudiced. Now we have words; like microaggressions, and things like that, that actually really hone in on this notion of hurting each other. But we do do that. And race is not the problem. Race just becomes an excuse you know racism or sexism or homophobia, this is me talking... classism, these have become the reasons that we assigned to these become the story. holders of race, I got a story about racism, I got a story about sexism. I got a story about classism, right. But the bottom line, the thing that holds the structure together, I think, is the fact that we as human beings hurt each other. And we haven't quite figured out how to reconcile that. But the problem will never get solved. I don't think unless we recognize that, that's what we're doing is we're hurting each other. And it doesn't really matter. If you know, someone is racist towards me or whatever. What really matters is whether or not they want to hurt me. Right? And how that manifests itself. So I don't know, I just, you know, that's something that I want to talk about a lot. I would actually... and listen a lot. I'd love to hear other people's ideas and reactions to that, because I just said something that I think can be very incendiary. And I'd love to. Maybe you want to tell me how that lands on you right now?

Joel Krieger  08:33

Yeah, well, actually, it lands quite well, to be honest, that's part of what appealed to me about this was that you can very clearly see how what you've created has had a profound impact in this one topic, but that it applies everywhere. And you just look at what's going on right now around the you know, vaccine versus anti Vax. I mean, it's, it's amazing. There seems to be no end of labels we can put on each other, to “other” someone. It's this; “Us versus Them”. And there's something inherent about the human psyche, that unless we can get past it, this is never gonna go away, we can cure the problem of racism, and then it's going to be something else. It's a constant... you know, just line them up, label after label—there seems to always be a way that we can create an “Us” and a “Them”.

Kevin Jones  09:19

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's well said. So I'll leave that there for a moment. And please feel free to keep me on track. So going back to your question around what theater and acting did for me, there are a lot of different ways to enter that because I got into theater at a relatively late period of my life. But I've always liked watching people, whether it is an airport, bus stop on the street or whatever, and all different kinds of people. And I was always fascinated with that. So I think that was kind of my way in but then once I started to take acting, consider acting as a serious advocation. I noticed that I was always being asked to play people that nobody else wanted to play. Let's just put it that way, right. And I remember telling a director once, just years ago, I said, I don't like these people. And he said to me, well, no wonder you're such a bad actor. And I thought, gee, I thought I was a good actor, but okay. He said, Yeah, you can't play anybody, Kevin, unless you actually learn to love them, not just like them, but love them, you know? Because when you love them, then you understand their motivations. You understand the story behind why they do what they do. Not only do you understand, but you're curious, you have to know you're, you're very active, listening in, you're listening. And you're, you're very adamant about getting the answers to your questions about, you know, like, why does he do this? What you know, everything from, you know, when was he raised by his mom or dad, both parents? Were they together, were the parents loving? How much education did the parents have? Were they religious? Were they not religious? You know, it's like, because you recognize that all of these things are the milieu  that make this human being... It's like a systems idea, right? You know, all of your influences, all of the people that have you that have had influence in your life, the ones that you've gotten fights with, you know, what was your dad? You know, what did your dad, what was his vision for you? Right? What was your mom's vision for you? So, that to me was like, once I got that, I was like, Whoa, you know, it really changed the way I thought about race, right? Because, you know, I mean, I remember I was raised in an all black community in New York City, Jamaica, Queens, and the cops were always around. And they're mostly white. And they were, you know, pretty rough. Right? And I remember I tell the story in the TED talk, but I, you know, just being harassed by police officers on my way back from Carnegie Hall, he throws me down on the ground, you know, they all surround me, they look at me, they go, Well, you know, where the fuck are you going so fast, you know, just and, you know, get your black ass on the ground, and yada yada, yada. And it shocked me because these were authority figures. Right, these were the personifications of right and wrong. These are the people that have... that wield all power, you know, I was like 14, 15 years old. And they're talking to me like I was dirt. And I've never been taught to like that before. So it really stayed with me, to the point where I did believe the rhetoric, I did believe the stories about racism, and I did believe that cops hated black people. I've come to learn a different... I have a different story that I tell myself now, a much more nuanced, much more complex story about why cops are hard on black people. But that's where it started. And so when I got introduced to, you know, this idea of really being curious about my characters, it just, not only did it give me a sort of a bridge into someone's perspective, but it also gave me a kind of a welcome sign. And once I was able to do that, then I just noticed that this idea of prejudice and subjugation and oppression and all the language and the stories that we tell about — that they are stories, and you know, and they think stories don't mean what we think they mean. Let's just put it like that. And so the stories I was telling about why police officers were hard on black folks was very different after I played a cop and played a cop who was an alcoholic cop who had been shot too. Especially while doing all of this work as a, with the police officers, that just gave me a certain level of insight into character and understanding how hurt how scared and frustrated how hopeless police officers are. How wounded and some permanently wounded and traumatized police officers are. I think that you know, one of the things about being an artist is maybe you can't know everything that the person was thinking and feeling. But you can get really close. And, and the most important thing is that we can reach a level of empathy and understanding for that individual.

Pavani Yalla  15:13

I'm curious, in the trajectory of becoming an actor and then having this realization that as you get to know the folks that you're acting, you understand them as a whole person. Was there a moment...  is the moment that you played a cop where you understood that this was a very specific thing that you were interested in, in investigating further? Or, you know, at what point did you feel like this? 

Kevin Jones  15:41

Right. Yeah. So I think, so that takes us back. Right. So I think if I understand your question is this. What was the impetus that got me into this and so that started with the program of Hands Up? So this might be a good time to talk about Hands Up?

Pavani Yalla  16:00

Yeah, tell us about Hands Up.

Kevin Jones  16:02

So I'm going to read you a couple just just excerpts from two monologues. One is from Hands up, and then the other one's from cop out. So we did one play was, it was called Hands Up, seven monologues written by seven black playwrights depicting their life experience as it relates to police profiling. And um, I’ll just go into that monologue now: “I think there's a difference between a Caucasian person and a white person, a Caucasian person is one whose skin just happens to be lighter than yours, they're just trying to get along and get through life and get through America just the same as as a black as any black person. And they don't treat you any different than anybody else. But a white person. When a white person walks into the room, you can tell by the way they've looked at you that they know that they're white, and you're black. It's the smugness in their face, when they look at you they come into events in our community. And they act like they should have special treatment, or even some merit badge for coming off their high horses and spending an evening with the help. And when you enter into the majority of white areas, they look at you like you're lost. What you're about to hear will not be pleasant for your ears. You see, when I speak of white America, I do not speak of every white citizen in America, I speak of the majority of Americans who influenced the laws that keep the good old boy network in power, or reap the benefits of it. While giving their silent consent, in order to protect their privilege. It's pretty much the same as I feel about cops. I know they’re not all assholes, and I know some who actually do a lot of good in the black community. If my loved ones or I were in danger, I would surely call them. But as for the majority, I hate cops. I wish I could stand here and tell you something politically correct. I wish I could make my language nice and plentiful for your ears. But I wouldn't be true to myself if I stood here and told you that I trusted any cop that I didn't know personally before he put on that badge.” So that monologue is from Hands Up. It's called “Superiority Fantasy.” It's about a 15 minute monologue. And that is written by a playwright who actually had this, tells the story about police profiling, how he was stopped, and so on and so forth. And we have six more monologues that tell a different perspective. We have one monologue from an African American man who was biracial, and people who looked white. And people thought he was white, and the internal struggle that he has as a black man who wants to be identified as a black man, but also is aware of the privilege he has from having white skin. We have a monologue from a black man who is adopted by two white parents who talks about he's never, you know, never experienced racism or police profiling, except from his parents, and talks about how he was never able to talk to his parents about being black and so he felt dismissed. So they're very complex, very nuanced. And we said we were going to take the show and present it to six different venues around the city of Portland, just six, we'll just give it to the community. And essentially what we wanted for our community to receive from us were two things. For the white community, we wanted to educate them, because we realized that the stories that they have been told about being black are usually taken from TV, the media, the news, radio, the entertainment industry. And they're so they're jaded. They're, they're not, you know, they're not honest and not real. And so we wanted to give them stories that were real, so that they could start to understand what this relationship with who these people are, and the kinds of relationships that are available to them. And then for people of color, we wanted them, we wanted to give them a place to heal. And what do I mean by heal? You know, I probably have been pulled over and stopped and harassed by police officers more than 100 times in my life. I'm 69 years old. And I remember I was with a friend of mine who was white. And we were in a car together and I got pulled over and the cop just talked to me awful. And he just, he was really rude. He was so rude that my white friend was sitting next to me leaned over and said, “Hey, what the fuck is wrong with you? Calm down.” I’ll never forget. And I freaked out. I was like, “Kenny, don't do that. What are you doing? Never talked to a cop like that. What is your What is? Have you lost your mind?” He said, “No, Man, fuck that. He's, he has no business talking to you like that.” And so they had a little exchange. And the thing that was shocking to me was that the cop calmed down. Never apologized. But he calmed down and he went away. And Kenny and I sat on the curb for a good hour. Me telling him of my experience with police officers. I said “Man, that happens to me all the time. All the time.” He said, “Kevin, I did not know.” He broke into tears. We were in our 40s at the time. And he said “I did not know that is not okay.” That is you know, and, and I realized that two things he'd never, he didn't know the story of what black folks go through. And I never was able to be witnessed by a white person before. I'll be honest with you, and you talk to most black people about this. two things. One is when it happens, they don't tell anybody. They don't tell anybody. They don't even tell their best friends, because it's too much shame in it. Cop pull you over, you must have done something wrong. So there's always a doubt. So you don't tell anyone. So here I am. Here is he's witnessing it. I didn't even have to do anything. I didn't tell him the story. He was a part of the story. So that was very, very, very profound. So black people need that opportunity. So when they come to Hands Up, that's the deal for them. They get to come there, they get to see this. And at the end of it, they go, “That shit happens to me all the time.” And they can say it publicly to everyone, to each other. And we've heard so many black people that would say people of color, not just black people, people of color who would say, “Man, I got a lot of shit to work out here. I got issues. I'm wounded internally. I've been wounded by this.” They realize that for the first time, many times, so I thought that was a great thing. So during the time that we were doing the show, and touring it all around. Someone said the police want to see this show. And I said yeah, okay, but when it doesn't, it doesn't bode well for police officers. This is not a show that you want to bring cops to. You know, there’s a lot of “we hate cops” here. Well, you heard it in that monologue. So I was like, yeah, okay, well, fine. But then someone did come to the show, as a cop, and stood up and said that I think that every police officer should see this show. And I freaked out. And he said and he came over to me at the end of the show, and he said “would you mind in me introducing you to our Director of Training?” that was Bob day at the time. So I met Bob and Bob was like, “Hey, you walk in here, you think you’re going to come in here and tell me how racist cops are? You might as well just turn around and walk out right now. It's not going to happen.” And I said to him “No, that's not what I was gonna say. But I'd love to hear more about what you're thinking and feeling there.” And that began a relationship. I told him that I wanted to interview police officers. We hired playwrights from all over the country, most of them black, to identify police officers in their life that they wanted to interview. And if they couldn't find anyone, we would help them find them. And we produced about 25, 30 police monologues from that powerful model. How about if I read you a short one from Cop Out. Is that okay?

Joel Krieger  25:34

Yeah, that'd be great. And this is from the second show?

Kevin Jones  25:37

Right from the second show, Cop Out: “Are you kidding me? Are you absolutely fucking kidding me? Stopping you because you're black is against the law. Profiling is against the law. You saying I'm breaking the law? That I'm willing to risk my family, my home, everything I stand for just to stop you because you're black? You have any idea how much I don't want to stop you because you're black. First of all, profiling is illegal. And don't tell me I'm getting and don't tell me I'll get away with it in this culture. Please. Shit you can't even even make jokes about it. Yesterday, I stopped the car because of the taillight. So I get to the car and a black guy loses his mind, because it's the 14th time he's been stopped in a white neighborhood in the last three months. He launches into me, you're a fucking racist. You're profiling me. Okay, he's not entirely wrong. Was he stopped all those times because he was black? Probably not. But was he stopped because he fit the description? Possibly. You see, we're trained for possibilities, not probabilities. Here's an example. And this is how it works. A resident calls 911 and reports a robbery. The call taker types in the computer 20, 5’10”, mask, dark skin, maybe, and gives the report to the dispatch. Dispatch gets the report to me, interprets it, and tells me male Black 20s. And I'm on the street at 2am. And I get the report. And I see a black guy, 20 year old male. He's not happy to see me. If we were in a place where there were more black people, New York, Chicago, Oakland, I would have to look more closely. But here, Portland. I don't think I'm stopping him because he's black. But I do think I'm stopping him because he fits the description.” So that's just an excerpt of a monologue called “Full Stop” from the next series of monologues that we produced. And we've created a show called Cop Out. And this was one of the monologues from there. So to go back to your question, how did this happen? It happened through this process. How did how did I why was I interested in playing police officer is because I went through that two, three years of being I'd been heavily entrenched in the world of police officers, interviewing with police officers, spending time having coffee with police officers, being coached by police officers, going on ride alongs with police officers. Hearing, you know, police officers are interesting people, they don't... they don't talk a lot. But then they're incredibly emotional. They're more sensitive than your average bear. And that, you know, so when once they were able to realize that I was trustworthy, that I was on their side, they believed in what we were doing. I just, I had a wealth of material to work with when performing as a police officer.

Pavani Yalla  29:22

So one thing that I didn't realize was that it wasn't necessarily with the intention to have cops come experience it?

Kevin Jones  29:29

Oh, yeah. No.

Pavani Yalla  29:30

So that kind of emerged. And that's when you realize the power of these monologues. I also love the structure or the strategy of leveraging monologues. I guess it's not even a strategy. It's just art. Right? But can you talk a little bit more about that and why you think his monologues were so powerful?

Kevin Jones  29:53

Sure. So the power of story can probably start there. Before we had language, we had stories, right. And then language came as a compliment to stories, but they weren't separate. You know, this is how we learn to do everything that we do. This is how we navigate our conflicts is by watching how other people navigate their conflicts, we learn how to accomplish the certain, all the things that we want to accomplish in our life is by someone first sharing a story about whether it be through a lesson or telling us what happened or, you know, let me tell you something that I want in the future, whatever, it's all wrapped up in story, the learning process is all wrapped up in the story. So realizing that first person, “let me tell you what happened to me” kinds of stories... There's a kind of linkage that happens in the brain. And I'm not a neurologist or cognitive scientist or any of that. And it's kind of amazing that, you know, that thing that happens when someone, “let me tell you what happened to me.” So the monologues are all written in first person. And the design of them is to bring out the humanity in the individual. So how do we do that? Well, first off, we don't assign names to the people, we don't give anyone a lot of background that we let the person come up and talk about. So as you heard from these two monologues, these are just you don't get a lot of context. But because it's in first person, because it's acted well, because it's an emotional arc. It has an impact. So the monologues usually start with Let me tell you a little something about who I am. Let me tell you something about something that happened to me. Let me tell you how I felt about it. Let me tell you about a challenge that occurred because of that, like something that got in my way, or something that I had to overcome in order to accomplish or get to what I wanted. And then let me tell you about the prize or the thing that I received at the end. So monologues tend to have all of those things, because that's what Joseph Campbell discovered is the hero's journey is built into our cognitive map for learning, for mastering, for achieving stuff. It's just, it's just laid in there. That was the amazing discovery that he made, is, you know, they're in the hero's journey as the hero he's in the land of the familiar, he gets a call to the adventure, a call to become something else a call to do something else a call to learn something, to save someone, that takes him out of the world of the familiar, he has to cross a threshold. As he crosses that threshold, he then has to make some, ask himself some questions like, do I really want to do this? Yes, you do. When he does that, he meets his spiritual aide, his mentor, his teacher, his guide, the guide prepares teachers and runs them through some lessons, and then he's tested; did you learn what you needed to learn? Did you accomplish it? And once you do that, then you go and you face into it on your own. And once you face it, you slay the dragon if you will. And you discover in slaying the dragon, that you weren't really afraid of the dragon, or the thing that you thought you were afraid of. It's not out there, it's actually something in yourself. And then you get the prize and you go back to the beginning and share that with your world and with yourself and become a more self actualized human being. And that is just sort of cooked in. It's baked into our storytelling, you know, so we when we told us when we asked our subjects to tell their stories, like we say to the playwright, the writer of the monologue, okay, I'm going back to designing the actual monologues, we would say to the playwright, find a subject and focus on these things. And then they'll allow your creativity to do its thing. Just Just tell whatever story catches you, but remember, just remember that it's got to cover these areas, but the nature of the work and the way in which we approached it, I realize now looking back on it actually allow for us to be able to interview cops and to be able to embrace that process just as much as we did with Hands Up, we had when we were doing Hands Up, which is the show about that was written by black playwrights. There's a lot of anger, there's a lot of fear. There's a lot of histrionics. And we were doing a show for high school kids. And two, black high school kids stood up after the show and said: “I guess this means that I'm going to be dead before I reach... before I become an adult.” We looked at each other at the same time, we thought, Oh, I think it's time to move on from this. I felt almost, I felt guilty. I felt like Oh, geez, you know, if I'm just now seeing this, how long has this been happening? You know, how long have we been propagating this message? And how long have we, you know, benefited from it through our own self, ego, and our own need to be first or whatever. And we had to stop for a minute. And we realize that the only thing we could do at that point was to really, eventually bring both monologues, both sets of monologues together, because we recognize that there were conversations that were starting to emerge from what we had started that weren't based on truth. And we wanted people to become more self aware, and less reactive. I guess, you know, because when we're less reactive where we are, we're just less polarized, and we were realizing that what we were doing was creating a lot of polarization. So I just want to say that was an emergent property of the work that we were doing. 

Pavani Yalla  37:11

The focus first with you on Hands Up, and then Cop Out, they were kind of two very, almost opposite sides of that discussion, and you wanted to bring them together so that you have a more holistic…

Kevin Jones  37:26

Yes, Thank you. I wanted to reflect back to the general audience, our actual state, the kind of conversation that we need to be having. And the state that we're in, we are in conflict. And I wanted us to be able to see ourselves on stage with all of our emotion with all of our vehemence with all of our certainty with all of our hurt and pain on both sides. To see how compelling both sides are. Right? It's like we only see one sided. Absolutely, right. I mean, I can't say that's wrong. But when you see both sides being both logical in their own way, there's a symmetry that forces people to look at themselves. Like, Oh, well, what is the truth? What do I think? What do I really believe? Well, I always thought that the black guy was always right around this, but like, you know, he's, the cop is making sense over here. When he talks about, you know, for example, police profiling, it's against the law. Why would they want to do it, of course, they don't want to do that. So yeah, yeah.

Joel Krieger  38:37

It's a very nuanced thing we're dealing with, it's like, we're so conditioned, to have a side. Why does there always have to be a side? And there's something really powerful about, well, there is no side.

Kevin Jones  38:50

Right? Yeah. And why? And, and, given that there is no side? Why are we, as human beings, so invested in creating those sides? It's like, we know plenty about the problem. What we don't know is about each other. It's really what I'm just trying to say. We just don't know how to be curious about each other. And if we could do that, we wouldn't have to be some fancy schmancy, about all of these theories and ideas about why we're not getting along. That's what I believe. I mean, and that's been my observation, I should say, I just, I don't feel safe in the world. like I used to. I feel like I have to find my tribe and, and stay with them. And you know, because I look out, you know, I look at the faces of people on TV and the news and, and what they're up to, and I think oh my God, people are like, just really, like that whole January 6 thing was. Just what was that? You know? Talk about theater. Yeah. Anyway.

Joel Krieger  40:07

Yeah, it's going off the rails, it's almost like this, I think everyone can feel it. There's this underlying sense of something's not right. Something's deeply not right. 

Kevin Jones  40:17

Something is deeply not right. That is, that is it. Something is, and we all know it. And I have to feel like, you know, like this conversation that we're having and how we're thinking about this, I have to think that there were the majority, I can't you know, it's so there's a very loud minority of people that are making me scared, right? To the point where I don't trust my ability to connect with other human beings, like I used to think we just have to find ways to do it. And that's what evolved is supposed to do for, for the audience is supposed to give people insight into our problems. And what we try to do is we try to portray some of our most gnarly issues, issues of race. Issues of what we're doing monologues now, judges, we're doing monologues of the homeless, we want people who work with youth. We want to talk to social scientists, we want to talk to people in religion, we want as much from the Zeitgeist, the current days, I guys we want, we want as much as we can stand without confusing folks. We don't want to just stay on the race and police issue.

Pavani Yalla  41:42

It strikes me that you are kind of investigating or learning and are on a journey yourself. Right? It seems like you're really trying to understand what's going on and what those narratives are, rather than having kind of a topic like a single topic that you want to go about in like, an angle, if you will. Yeah. So that's, I think, what is also interesting to me, because you are discovering this work, and really trying to inspect it and understand what it what's really going on here.

Kevin Jones  42:16

Yeah, yeah. Sure. Curating. It's like, how do you curate a culture, you know, like, we were, our job is to reflect back to people. Like the homeless problem. As an example, I have a series of monologues from the homeless right now, homeless women, and the stories about how they got there. Break your heart, shocking, scaring the shit out of you just because it can happen to anybody. And it's the reason why we don't want to look at the homeless problem. Because we can see it happening. Like, I don't want to go, I can't look. But the bottom line is, we don't really have an answer to the problem. And it is a byproduct of how we live. And so to look at that, we immediately have to look at how we live. But everybody's telling me, Kevin, we can't do monologues on the homeless. Why? Because nobody would come. I go, you know how many times we've thought that and we were wrong? Why do you think that now? Because now it's really serious, people don't want to hear or deal with the homeless. I think that there's something in us, a survival mechanism, maybe that will not allow us to face into that kind of hopelessness, or death. You know, and because we are there, we can see how complicit we've been in this. So I have these wonderful monologues that I really want to get out there. And they're just, yeah, they're just beautiful, beautiful stories, but they're hard. They're hard. And they can be, these are people who could be living right next door to you, or be at on your job or people who, you know, go to your church, you know, there's so many things to learn in this relationship with with, that we have with with the homeless, there's so many things that we can learn about ourselves and, and each other, we can really find a way to face into this.

Pavani Yalla  44:26

So you mentioned that this was a really hard topic, but all of the topics that you've delved into are really hard. And when you say that they're hard topics, like do people want to come see this? That's what you're thinking? Yeah, you're thinking about the emotions that they're going to feel. And so can you talk a little bit more about what people feel when they come and experience some of these stories? Like what is that emotional journey that your audience is going through?

Kevin Jones  44:54

Yeah, yeah. I think where people come to, you know, come to the theater to be entertained. I think what happens for folks is because it's one person coming on the stage at a time, and there's no background, you know, we just let him walk out onto the stage, there's maybe some transition music from once one monologue to the next. It always gives them the sense of being entertained. And what they go through is a transformation in what they believe. Right? They think that on a fundamental, fundamental level, they come in believing that life is like this. And they come out understanding that it's not, it's actually like this. So when it comes to white folks hearing about how black people experience their reality, it's like, oh, wow, I really just thought black people were just the ones that were were angry, were just, you know how to, had a problem had anger issues, or there was something that was going on in the culture that just made them that way. But now I understand that, yeah, if I was being harassed by the police, as much as these people are, I would think differently. Holy mackerel, I never thought that before. And the same thing is true for black folks who see this and go, you know, what, I kind of did think this was just my problem. I mean, I know what happens, I hear about it. But you know, and she is thinking, and internalizing these incidents in the same way that I internalize them. And that is very uplifting for most people, it's an illuminating experience, I will say that it's an illuminating experience. It becomes a series of epiphanies for people to where they want to talk about it, you know, the talkbacks that we have, what happens is it becomes like church almost, it's like the room becomes the energy shifts, things get really silent. When the show's over, I will say something or Leslie, my partner will say something like, so we don't want to hear what you think we want to hear what you feel, we ask that you maybe check in with your body first. And just speak from that we don't even if the thought even the thing you're going to say doesn't make any sense. We would much rather hear that. We'd much rather feel that as a group. And that always, you know, creates even more silence, because then people will hope because we immediately want to go into what I think right? And like, then they sort of put the brakes on that. And then, you know, ask themselves, what do they feel? And for some, it's much easier than others. And we as facilitators are trying to sort the space for those groups of people who are on the edge of something, you know, how are some people who are just very fluid, you know, they come to these kinds of things, they immediately know what to say, boom, boom, boom. And then there are some people who are very quiet and stoic and have nothing saying there's nothing you can do to make them say something. But then there's a group of people who are just kind of like... yeah… well....

Pavani Yalla  48:40

Yeah, I can relate to that. Same.

Kevin Jones  48:45

So we try to pull those out. But then what happens is, you know, there's this amazing gathering of people like this, this networking process that happens, people share telephone numbers and contact information. They bring others and they make agreements to get together later. 

Pavani Yalla  49:04

Do you feel like then that the monologues themselves? There's a transformation that happens to the point where people are then primed for the talkback. And that the talkback is kind of like a necessary cap to the experience?

Kevin Jones  49:24

Yes, yeah. People would say the show is great. But you come for the talkback, that's what people would say. Because it's the opportunity to hear and share. feelings. You know, we had one audience. It was a black woman. She's sitting in the back of the theater and afterwards she just howled like a wolf. Just howled. An old woman. She was older than me, she was in her seventies. And that's that's it. And an echo that sort of like, bellowed in space. And either I said it or Leslie said it's this is, let's just be with that, please let's not, let's not feel like we have to respond or speak to it or describe it as just let that be. And it was to this day, probably the best talkback we've ever had, where we just were able to go to a deep place as a group, where people were talking about their experiences of being, for example, white and how their parents were, were racist, and how hard it was to, to get over that and how much shame they had in that because of their connections to a racist history or whatever. And hearing, you know, the amount of internalized white oppression that we rarely get a chance to hear publicly. And not in a way of putting them down or shame or feeling any kind of internal shame, but really a way to help them celebrate this, this epiphany that they're having an opportunity to let it out. And watching the marginalized group and black folks and people of color, hold space for them and welcome them and allow that to happen, was really quite powerful. Because, you know, and I think I know, it came from this woman and her howl it was just, I mean, oh, my God, it was gut wrenching. You know? And,

Pavani Yalla  51:41

Yeah, so you created a safe space, basically. And for however many minutes that that lasts, people don't get to experience that really anywhere else. And it's a very unique room at that point.

Kevin Jones  51:57

It's so true. We just don't get to experience that anymore.

Pavani Yalla  52:01

And we should be, to your point earlier around community, you know, how we communicate and dialogue? And

Kevin Jones  52:07

yeah, yeah.

Joel Krieger  52:10

It's almost like, so few of us have ever I mean, I just feel like as a, as a culture, the art of listening, is this forgotten practice? And what you're describing is, I imagine this unfolding. It's almost like the play broke down whatever barriers we have to actually hearing another human being. And then there's this time where you're listening at a level that you may not have ever listened before.

Kevin Jones  52:40

Exactly. That's exactly right. I think, you know, listening is not easy. There's a lot of different kinds of listening and the kind of listening that happens when first person storytelling happens, is the person who's listening. There's a transformation that can happen doesn't always but when it does, it's it's really amazing, is that you become dropped into this container that removes all judgment, it becomes an agnostic listener, you become just, I don't care what the story is, I don't care what this person did. I just want to hear this one, I want to learn. I'm fascinated. I don't even know why I'm fascinated. But I'm just, I just want to hear the end of the story. I want to hear  everything. I'm rooting for them. Like a child, you know, I have a grandson, who's six years old. And it's so amazing. When he's you talking to him, it gets up on your lap, he's this close to you. And he's like, listen to you like this. That's where we all came from, is, you know, that kind of listening that kind and so... when we listen, we change, we do change.

Joel Krieger  53:57

Well, what I've noticed about listening to you talk is that your process seems to have this very emergent quality of paying attention and reacting in real time and designing in real time. But at a certain point, you've kind of noticed these patterns, and put it into a kind of a theory of change that I think you call the protect, expand and evolve cycle. I'd love to hear you unpack that process for us.

Kevin Jones  54:21

One of the things that we've learned in the work that we do is that there is truly a cycle that occurs for people when we are changing, when we change our minds, when we learn something new, when we get into a conflict as systems. We do three things, human beings are systems, we protect, we expand and we evolve. Now when people hear that they think linearly they think well, this first this happens, and then this happens. And then this happens. And it's, I think of it more as a quantum thing, it's always happening. But to think about it for the brain to be able to sort of lay it out and understand that it's probably best to lay it out linearly. But just know that in hearing it that way, it's not necessarily how it plays out. All systems on this planet, for example, have a boundary, we have a boundary, we have skin, we have immune systems, and it's there to protect us, it's there to keep us whole. Now, if I need to, if I go outside, and it's really cold outside, then my protective mechanism, which is also protecting my temperature, is going to have to make some adjustments. And now as a human being, what do I mean by that? What is protected look like in the human being, it means I hold on to my values, my beliefs are dear to me. I hold on to my identity, I must be seen as this kind of person, you must see me as a X person, not a THIS person. So those are all of the kinds of mechanisms that keep us in protect. If you make a suggestion that I eat a certain food that I don't believe in or don't like, or it reminds me of something, I'm going to bristle. I don't want that food. Why not? Why don't you try it? You never had it before? Well, it looks bad. What do you mean, it looks bad? How can you tell it's bad, just by the way it looks? Look, if you keep at me like this, I'm gonna hit you in the face, right? All of this is protect. So and so what happens, expand is like, well, you know what, maybe I should give it a try, you know, it looks kind of good. Well, it smells good. Or, you know, I should be more open to things. I'm going to start to try to be more open to things that I, you know, I'm usually closed down to. So I'll give it a try. Let's expand. Now, two things can happen when you expand, you could say, shit, I knew this was bad. And you can go back to protect, because you didn't like what happened. Or you can allow yourself to stay open and curious to the experience. And that's what we try to get people to do, we try to get people to let go of the protective boundary, let go of the protective barrier, and open up and be available to something new. And then in our case, you'll hear something different that you don't like you'll hear if you're a police officer, you're going to hear stuff you don't like if you're someone from community of color, or whatever you're going to hear stuff you don't like, what we are asking you to do is to not shut down know that this is part of the process, what you're feeling angry, protective, judgmental, is all part of the change process, don't give it meaning that it doesn't really have. It's a mechanism. So we can try to get people trained to that, to accept that. So that they can understand it gives them permission, sort of a way to change, we find that when people can embrace that, that gives them sort of a platform to move into expand, and considering new thoughts and ideas. This notion of evolve, you know, think about a caterpillar turning into a butterfly, No, there's nothing about a caterpillar that you can recognize in a butterfly, the whole system is different. And we don't realize it, but we as human beings have that ability as well to, right. I mean, we can't change our physical makeup in that same way. But we can in other ways, but we can change our beliefs completely. We can change our values completely. We can change our attitudes, we can change our ideals, you know what is most important, we can literally change those things. And there is a process for doing it. And art is one of the ways and one of the mechanisms that is used to help us get into that process. So the butterfly so the notion of changing and changing completely i think is just understated. Like, we live in a culture where we get the message that it's important to become a fixed person, you know, we establish a fixed sense of self, right? That's what we all are supposed to become something. What are you going to be when you grow up? Who are you going to be, you know, and so, you know, you get your job, you get your degree, and then you're good, you're good to go. So, is that a bad thing? I don't know, I know that there are consequences to that though. Because when you become so fixated on an idea of who you are, then it makes it very, very difficult to evolve. Because evolving means you'd have to find a way to let go of those things. Right. So that's the, and letting go of those things, does require a leap of faith, does require that we are willing to step into the danger. And that's where the hero's journey can help us. Because understanding that through the hero's journey, there's your gateway, there's your template, there's your guide, for going through to that world that's different, that's new for you, you don't have to be afraid that's actually a good thing. And we're aren't does that where art comes in is art helps us through storytelling, through metaphor, through mythology, through mysticism, it provides us with the the messaging, the imaging, the symbols, the sense sensations that we need, in order to be able to determine if this is a safe place, if this is if this transformation is safe for us, we need to hear stories, the mystical thing about hearing a story is that it's not my story, I'm hearing your story. But somehow my brain thinks it's my story. And what I hear you solve the problem, I'm actually solving it for myself. That's kind of mystical. And so that helps us in the process. How do you get there without art and music and celebration? And, and ritual? And sensation? How do you get to that place of transformation without those things, it is not a brain thing. Let's remember that every civilization that has come before us in this world is gone. Right? There's not. And what makes us so special, that we think we're going to be able to figure it out and know that this is this is my PSA here, if we don't figure out how to make that transformation, if we don't figure out how to use the, the human mechanism of art, to the make these transitions that we are attempting to make in our in our world, that we won't have anything left to do, but to do things like figure out how to get to Mars and, you know, keep expanding out, taking, you know, I mean, that's all that's it. That's why I think, yeah, so protect, expand, evolve, is simplistic. But when you really, you know, if you meditate on it, for example, just this notion that you're always in that fluid motion of protect, expand, evolve. And when you can embrace it and understand it and really believe in it. Then it can in fact, transform you in the moment it transforms your way, your orientation in your relationships with people. Because you don't think just because Oh God, I got a funny feeling in my stomach, or, like, the way she looks at me is just really pissing me off. We don't have to, like react. So you know, as if it means so much. It's just the cycle of you protecting, expanding and evolving.

Joel Krieger  1:03:51

So we really wanted to talk to somebody who had experienced a change from attending Evolve. Kevin recommended we speak with Bob Day. Now Bob is a 30 year veteran of the police force. He actually retired in 2019, as deputy chief of police. Bob has a really remarkable journey that goes from being an audience member of hands up to collaborator of cop out, and eventually to serving as a core member of The Red Door project staff. So at the time of Hands Up, Bob was the captain of the training division for the Police Bureau, one of his colleagues saw Hands Up and decided that this is something that Bob should have on his radar. So we set up a meeting between Bob, Kevin and Leslie. So here's Bob telling us about that initial encounter with Kevin.

Bob Day  1:04:41

And I told Kevin that if he was coming here to tell me that cops are racist, he could leave. And Kevin's response was, well, tell me more about that. Which was remarkable, that I never had that response before. And I'm not proud of my delivery, but that's kind of where I was in 2016. You remember, we're coming have, you know, a lot of events, including Michael Brown, Ferguson, Obama had really been on the police, there's just a lot of energy around this conversation that I wasn't prepared or skilled or knowledgeable about how to navigate, as I think is still the case today with a lot of cops. And so when Kevin said, Tell me more about that, that really opened up a door, a conversation that I'd never had before. And so that's what launched us on this, on this journey, was really his willingness to, to be the first one to say, you know to be curious.

Joel Krieger  1:05:37

What were you expecting him to say? When you told him that?

Bob Day  1:05:41

I figured he'd leave. I mean, I was pretty clear in my remarks. And I just, you know, I kind of figured it was an easy way to end an uncomfortable meeting. And then, in that meeting, you know, they really encouraged me to go to Hands Up, they told me about Hands Up what it was, and knowing how I'm seeing that, I've had, you know, 25 years of people telling me, I'm a racist, and I'm a bad person, and cops are bad, and this and that. So I went home, and I told my wife what a crazy invitation I received that day. And she looked at me and said, I think that might be a good opportunity for us, which I tell people now as marriage lingo for: get your coat, we're going to the play. And so we went, and it was exactly what I expected. It was, you know, seven monologues of black people saying all these things about the police that were, you know, largely, you know, hard to hear. And, you know, some of it because it's for the stage is embellished, inflammatory, you know, hyperbolic whatever, but it's a show, but the core essence of it is true. And I knew it was true and accurate. And it's their experience. And at the end of the show, they do a talkback, where the audience can, you know, 250 people in the room, the audience can sort of say what they want. And I was not in uniform, I didn't tell anybody I was a police officer, I just was sitting there with my wife. And towards the end, this black man, he was sitting about, I don't know, six or seven chairs over from me, just an average looking dude, just like me. He wasn't angry, wasn't, you know, intense, he just was talking about how tired he was of the treatment of people of color and city of Portland by the police and this and that. And towards the end, he essentially said, you know, if that doesn't change, I'm, we're going to take matters into our own hands. And I'm like, Huh, that's a fairly significant statement to make. And, you know, this guy is a community member, a person who lives in the city, he seems pretty normal. It's like, it was just like, caught me so flat footed. And I remember thinking, now, I should probably know more about that. And, you know, I did not connect with him. But, you know, going to Kevin afterwards and saying, okay, clearly you're, you're reaching somebody here that I'm not. And my initial, you know, reach out was along the lines of my role as a captain of the Police Bureau responsible for leadership responsible for the men and women doing the work of police in the city of Portland. And then over time, I had no idea how it would, you know, impact me and change my life personally, that that was kind of the beginning of the journey.

Joel Krieger  1:08:34

Yeah. And when you think back to the way you felt, during the show, and after the show, can you describe some of the emotions that you went through?

Bob Day  1:08:46

You know, there was anger, there was frustration, and probably the biggest thing for me was, you know, I wanted to just shout out, you know, that's not true. That's not accurate, you know, policing. So we pride ourselves on, you know, the facts, we just want the facts, what are the facts? Well, I've learned, you know, the facts don't always tell the truth, right. They're not always all of the truth. But we, we try, we strive for accuracy. So it was odd for me to be in this performance, and see it, you know, as a theatrical production. I want to go up there and correct everything. What Kevin's helped me to understand, you know, is the power of art and the power of story. And it is a production. It's not a, you know, documentary. Yeah, you know, what I mean? It's, you know, once I was able to wrap my head around that, then I was able to listen differently and listen to it as a story. And, and what I've learned from that is, it's easy when things are uncomfortable to want to dismiss versus lean in. So what I was essentially doing was, you know, looking for an out like, well, that, you know, that story can't be real because look what they said about Michael Brown, right? So that person's experience can't be real, because they're not even saying the truth about that. So it's you know, you find that you're looking that you're into that uncomfortability level, you're into that dissonance, you know, where something's rubbing up against something that you believe, and it's not the same thing that you believe. So it's like, you know, fingernails coming down a chalkboard, you're trying to get rid of that dissonance, that noise, and the best, easiest way to do that is just dismiss it like now, you know, that's just not right, that's not accurate. So I can move on. And what I've learned is that's, you know, that's, that's the last place I want to be, actually want to, I want to be more curious, I want to sit with that uncomfortability, because that's where the growth and the change and the excitement and the richness really lives in my opinion. After that one, I said to Kevin, you know, I need to know more about this. So I started going to more Hands Up shows. So this is in, like August of ‘16. And just, I mean, I don't want to say this lightly, so please bear with me. Two weeks after we saw that show, we lost our son to cancer, our son was 15 years old, he was diagnosed at age nine, and he fought for six years against Ewing sarcoma. You know, it was really, I mean, in lack of a better word intense, doesn't even partially describe. In fact, it'll be five years this month on August 27, that we lost him. So that's an important, excuse me, that's important note towards sorry, what's going on in my life, right, you know, this, impacted by this, you know, monumental loss that you know, even to this day is still is still painful. So, from you know, I saw the show, had conversations with Kevin, Sam died, then I kind of just, you know, checked out for 30, 60 days, didn't work, you know, just healing, family trauma, all that. But, you know, life does go on. So I got back into conversation, I got back into work, and so forth. And I started attending these Hands Up shows, just because I wanted to hear these stories. And I wanted to hear, you know, what the audiences are saying. And I was sitting there after one of the shows, and this black man stood up as a father. And he started to talk about how he was afraid that his son was going to die at the hands of the police. And I went right back to my dismissive nature. But the likelihood of a black man being killed by the police in this country is actually really low, the argument would be that it is high. But if you look at the numbers, the police kill about 1000 people a year. So 50 to 60 million people a year contacted 10 million people arrested, 1000 of them killed, about 225 of them black. And now that 225, probably, on average, and don’t quote me on this, but the numbers are around 20 a year that are quote, unarmed. So I'm running through all these numbers in my head, like, anyway, as he's talking, his son sitting next to him, he's like, 14, 15 year old kid, he's just embarrassed as hell trying to blend into the theater seat next to his dad. This dad starts to cry, he starts to weep in front of this audience of like, 250 people, and he just starts weeping. And he says, I just don't want to lose my son. Well, I've lost Sam, like, six or seven months earlier. And I'm like, I mean, that just hit me. Because I knew that fear, right? I knew that that sound in his voice, I knew that emotion. And suddenly, you know, I didn't see him as a black guy, me as the police. I just saw us as a couple of dads. You know, we're just a couple of dads who are, just love our kids. It occurred to me in that moment, like, my desire to be right, to be justified, my numbers are accurate. I mean, really, that the likelihood of his son dying at the hands of police are really low from just a pure statistical everyday standpoint, that's irrelevant in this conversation, the tendency for I think all of us, but certainly for me, you know, you want to be right, you want to be justified. You want to be on you know, your side and say, Hey, we're on the side of truth. We're on the side, you know. And in that moment, I realized, you know, what, that's not what's important here, right now, what's important is to hear the fear in that man's voice. And to realize that, you know, rightly or wrongly, that message is being communicated to his son. I mean, it's been communicated very publicly in that room. But we know that, you know, at tables across America, every day, black families are having a totally different conversation about the police than white families are. And so whether I agree with that or not, I needed to understand that's happening. And then I need to understand so what's my role, particularly as a police leader? What's my responsibility in this and that goes back to the curiosity piece. I went back and I sat down with my officers, and I'm like, here's the story. And of course, they're all the same place, you know, and I'm like, no, that doesn't matter. If this 16, 17 year old kid has been told this messaging and believes that, and then we contact him on a traffic stop that we think is just super benign and super, you know, I ran a red light at one o'clock in the morning, we're just going to go up and tell him to knock it off. And as we're walking up on the car, he thinks he's gonna die. You know, and we teach our officers to look for furtive movement, nervousness, sweaty brow, lack of cooperation, you know, reaching around the car, you know, all the things that if you thought this was your moment, you'd probably be experiencing and doing, you can see how these events continue to escalate into these tragic outcomes oftentimes. And so really, that was the transformative moment for me was when I was able to see, you know, it was less about who's right, who's wrong here? And who's on what side and see, actually, what's my role in helping here? What's my role in being a part of the solution? How do you hold competing views? I have strong personal beliefs. Don't get me wrong, I don't. But how do you hold those beliefs in the face of you know, those other competing views, and not just completely shut down, lose your mind, walk away or resort to violence. And that's a muscle that we just don't work very often in this country, particularly in the last couple of years. You're either with me or against me, you're either on my side, or you're not.

Joel Krieger  1:16:31

Most often when we're having a discussion, or a debate, the goal is to win, the goal is to be right, and to convince the other person, but how often do we enter into a conversation? Not trying to be right, but trying to understand why the other person believes what they believe. You use the word curious, that's really what it's about, isn't it? It's just getting people curious to know, why do you believe that? Why do you feel that way? I want to understand.

Bob Day  1:17:01

Well, and the thing about it is, see what curiosity does, Joel, is it, it starts to allow you to move past all those, you know, presuppositions or stereotypes. And then all of a sudden, you start to see that humanity. You know, like, I saw that dad, in a more dramatic way. I am so grateful. My life is richer, I mean, not only just conversations like this, which I love, but I mean, I have sat in the room with some people who have been really, really mad at the police for a long time. And I sit in the room with some really strong white male straight conservatives. I mean, I've had incredible opportunities on both sides of, of this divide. That's just been rich, and that I've learned from, and I think if people would be more open to that, then I mean, I said, I can only speak for myself, but my life is forever changed the relationships, the conversations, the experiences, the places,

Joel Krieger  1:18:00

What is it about Evolve that makes it so powerful? I mean, what is it about this medium?

Bob Day  1:18:05

The crude way that I say that this evolved experience works is we sort of put everybody shit out on the street. Like, we don't hold back the monologues, both by the cops and by the African American participants are pretty raw, pretty in your face, and pretty one sided intentionally so. So I like to say these are the conversations cops are having at Starbucks or in the locker room with each other. These are conversations black people are having in their homes or on the street corner, but they're not conversations people are having together. Well, you can put it on stage. And when it's over, it's kind of like, Huh, well, it's all out there. I guess we need to talk about it. It's a lot to take in. I mean, it's you see it, and you're like, wow, okay, I didn't know anybody actually said that stuff publicly. These emotions are coming to the surface. And now we're actually going to address those, through facilitated conversation through reflection through questions. I mean, it's incredible. I've never seen anything like it. It's using the media and of art, to evoke a response to bring those emotions and ideas to the surface. And then creating space for those to be able to be to be able to be talked about, your voice will be heard, no matter where you're at, on the spectrum, if you go to this thing, your voice is going to be heard, you're going to hear yourself and see yourself in some part of some story somewhere. And that's, you know, that's a good thing. I mean, you want people to connect at some point. Yeah, I can see, you know, I can see that I can understand that. And then you're also going to hear a lot of stuff you don't like, and you don't agree with and that's why we're here. We're here to both affirm and challenge and give you practice and sitting in that space. And, you know, I don't think you can do that in just an everyday conversation because people get too caught up in the moment and the emotion but if they sit through a few monologues, they have time to kind of absorb and process it.

Joel Krieger  1:19:59

Yeah, well, for somebody who's very change adverse, you seem to have embraced change in this part of your life and just, you know, gone all in. I mean, I love it. You're telling me you weren't like that before?

Bob Day  1:20:14

No. Like I said, I just cannot emphasize enough how exciting it has been to have this awakening. I mean, I am your quintessential 100%, conservative, straight fundamental guy. I mean, I'm, you know in my core like, I don't like change, I like things the way they are at Starbucks, I get the same drink. I've gotten the same drink for probably 15 years. We just moved into this house this week, my wife started telling me we were going to move two years ago, because she knew it would take that long to give it up, you know, I mean, I am the model of consistency. And so this is a huge shift for me.

Pavani Yalla  1:21:07

So I didn't get to meet Bob. But you had, it sounds like a great conversation with him.

Joel Krieger  1:21:12

Yeah, it was such a remarkable story. I really enjoyed my time with him, we talked for like two hours, it really left an impression on me, I mean, that you can't really understate the amount of change that he went through. And, to me, that just speaks to the power of this platform that Kevin and his team have developed. But he just kept talking about this richness, this world that has opened up for him. And how grateful he was for this change. It's almost like it has enriched his life. And he knows it. And he lives it every day. It's amazing. But he's kind of made it a practice to be curious about other people. And he had all these stories about being in the middle of these super intense situations, just taking it all in and listening. And it's almost like, I don't know, he's developed these muscles, to be able to sit down and listen to someone who not only do you not disagree with but they kind of hate you without getting triggered. I mean, he's, he's figured out how to maneuver around this reactionary reflex that we all have when we brush up against dissonance. And he just channels it into curiosity. It's amazing.

Pavani Yalla  1:22:26

It's like he recognizes it, names it, and it's like, oh, yeah, it's that thing again, and then just like dismisses it. And then forces the other way of being right. Which is like living into curiosity. And

Joel Krieger  1:22:40

Yeah, Kevin uses this phrase, “embrace dissonance”. Dissonance is something that's unpleasant, we shy away from it, you almost you just don't want to go there. But that's almost what this requires of us, is to, is to lean into it. And that's what I think is so powerful about this project is it gives us a way forward, it gives us a model, to, to wade into those waters of dissonance and to navigate through them.

Pavani Yalla  1:23:10

You know, Kevin, definitely gives credit to storytelling in our conversation. And you'll hear him say several times, like, I'm not a neuroscientist, but it's everything that he's talking about, though, is backed by the science. And we know now through several research studies, that your brain when it's listening to a story, there's a lot that goes on, like a lot of fascinating stuff that goes on both neurologically and chemically. And when someone when you look at the brain of someone who's listening to a story versus when they're just being told facts, their brain will not just the language processing parts of their brain light up, but all the parts of their brain that they would normally be using, if they were experiencing the story themselves also light up. So it's as if your brain thinks you're experiencing the story. It thinks you're there. And that's why we feel transported often when we're listening to a good story, right? And what's also really fascinating is that, so Kevin, you heard him say, Oh, you know, when someone says, Let me tell you about something that happened to me. There's a linkage that happens in your brain. And he's absolutely right. I went back and I looked into this because I was curious about it. When someone is being told a story, their brain mirrors and synchronizes with the brain of the person who's telling them the story, and that's called neural coupling. Which means that you're connecting with this person, neurologically. Which is so interesting because it means storytelling has the power to connect you physically, literally connect you to another person, step inside their shoes, understand their reality and all the things that we talked about when we talk about empathy. I mean, he just there was so much that he talks about and then again, the science really backs it up like he was saying, people listen, when you tell a story. And like, chemically, what's happening is your brain starts to release cortisol, which is kind of like the stress hormone because your brain is trying to figure out what's going to happen in the story. It's trying to figure out how things are going to resolve and that's the attention grabber and the attention capture gets you to listen. Oxytocin is released when you're listening to a story. And that's what gets you to care about the character and gets you to empathize. This is art. But at the same time, there's a lot of science going on, as well.

Joel Krieger  1:25:53

It's almost like it's deceptively simple, because, you know, there's really two parts to this design. There's the two major parts, there's the story. And then there's the dialogue, the talkbacks. These are things that I guess, are taken for granted, in a lot of the design world, it's like, you know, there's this desire to want to use technology are these sophisticated things. And it's almost like this is really all the technology you need to break through this polarization trap. It's like stories and dialogue.

Pavani Yalla  1:26:24

Yeah. So both of those right, story and dialogue, are ways of communicating. And they're just very different. The whole time he was talking about what happens in these talk backs, I couldn't help but wonder and wish that the environment, the ethos, the energy of that room, like how awesome would it be, if that could be replicated? Everywhere that we find ourselves in discourse with folks who might have diametrically opposing views? Too often, we're not in that type of a room when we're talking about these things, right? We're either in an echo chamber, or we're engaging through social media, we're consuming the news. And like, those are the stories we're getting. We're having dinner conversations that are very ineffective. And yeah, it just made me wonder, how awesome would it be if we could just replicate those conditions? Every time we were having important conversations about things like this?

Joel Krieger  1:27:27

Yeah. I mean, speaks to the power of ceremony and ritual. I mean, these are hard conversations, and you cannot just jump right into them. Our default mode of existing and maneuvering through this world does not allow for that type of listening, and dialogue. It just doesn't. I mean, dialogue is a lost art. We talked about this a little bit, how we're kind of losing the we're losing our ability to listen to each other to be curious about each other. We're losing the ability to have real conversations. It's very easy for us to mistake our beliefs for us, you know, it's like you, you are not actually your beliefs. One fun little, I don't know what you call it, if it's like a metaphor, like a little experiment or way of looking at it that I've found helpful. Because I've actually been told that I changed my mind all the time. Yes. So I'm going to take that not as a sign of wishy washy this but as a sign of open mindedness. Sure. So yes, so, but I like to think of it as trying on clothes. So if you think of ideas as clothes, and it's like, oh, here's a shirt, or here's some pants, it's like, oh, that's like, not something I would usually wear. But like, let me put it on for a little bit. I'm gonna walk around in these pants for a day. And it's really kind of fun. Because you, you're not attached to it. It's just a pair of pants. If I don't like it, I'll take it back to the store. But it allows you to inhabit those ideas in a non committal way. It's not threatening to your sense of who you are. It's just, Hmm, what would it be like to believe this, and it's really easy to do. And it's kind of fun. And you just, you know, like any other pair of clothes, when you outgrow them, you discard them, and you get a new pair that fits you. So, you know, I feel like there's lots of techniques like that, we could be playing with to develop our muscle memory for this. It's like, it's like, we almost have to get better at leaning into the dissonance and just being with it. And I think a lot of that has to do with not attaching your identity to these ideas. Because when you aren't so attached, you don't feel threatened. And that's that protect thing that Kevin was talking about. It's like, you don't feel the need to protect to be defensive, if you don't feel like you're being attacked. So if you're able to separate your sense of I from this idea, then I feel like it's easier to steer through that channel, you know?

Pavani Yalla  1:29:53

Yeah, I think these are muscles we all need more and more. Now. I think I know I find myself struggling to have conversations more now than I ever did.

Joel Krieger  1:30:06

Kevin had this great phrase, we're in a state of conflict, we are trapped in opposition. It's, it's the perfect way to capture this moment in time, this structure, this platform they've developed, really should be looked at as a tool that can be built upon that can be used in different ways to tackle really tough subjects to move us past this very binary polarized state that we're in. 

Joel Krieger

Alright, that's it for today. Thank you for listening. So it's important to point out that evolve is not only a live event, it's also offered online as well. Now, this version has already been presented to community leaders, law enforcement, judges, and the criminal justice community, as well as corporate clients interested in augmenting their DEI programs, or implicit bias training. You can learn more about this by visiting their website at reddoorproject.org. This podcast is offered for free in the spirit of the gift. It takes an enormous amount of time and energy to put each episode together. So if you find value in these stories, and we really hope that you do, please let us know. You can actually do this right now. It's really easy. Just take a moment, go to our show page on Apple podcast, Spotify, or wherever you're listening, and leave us a rating and review. It will only take a minute of your time and it will really help us out.

Pavani Yalla  1:31:47

To get key insights from this episode, visit our show notes at outsideinpodcast.org. You can get links to everything we discussed and can learn all about Kevin, his collaborators Evolve and the Red Door Project. If you want to stay in the loop for when new episodes are released, you can follow us on Twitter, Instagram, our handle is @outsideinxd or sign up to our mailing list, subscribe on the contact page of our website.

Joel Krieger  1:32:14

Let's go ahead and close with a bit of gratitude. Thank you to Kevin Jones, who gave so freely of his time to dig into his work and his process. It was truly inspiring for us on so many levels. And thank you to Bob Day, who shared so openly about his own personal transformation. Special thanks to our dear friend David Waingarten, who put Kevin's work on our radar and connected us. And thank you to our friends at Blue Chalk Media, who supplied us with the field audio and audience interviews from the Evolve play that we remixed into that mosaic that you heard at the beginning of the show. We’d like to acknowledge the monologues that Kevin read during his interview were excerpts from “Superiority Fantasy” (written by Nathan James) and “Full Stop” (written by Bonnie Ratner).

Alright, that's it for the story. We hope you join us next time.

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