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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The Power of Being There

00:05

We walked for days crossing the desert to Jordan. The week we left, my kite got stuck in a tree in our yard. I wonder if it is still there. I want it back.

00:25

That’s Sidra, a 12 year old girl, who lives in the Zaatari refugee camp, home to over 80,000 Syrian refugees. For the next eight and a half minutes, Sidra takes me on a tour of her day. We go from her family's tent, to her classroom, the bakery and beyond. I'm left feeling pretty emotionally charged. But sadness isn't really the right word for it. I feel connected to her somehow, like I can understand her. And that's really odd because our realities couldn't be further from each other. We live a world apart, and yet, for a few minutes, I felt like I embodied her dreams, her fears and her insecurities.

01:15

And that's because Clouds Over Sidra is not an ordinary film. It's a 360 degree Virtual Reality documentary, a first of its kind, created in 2015 by Chris Milk and Gabo Arora, and produced and directed by both Gobo and today's guest, Barry Pousman. Barry is an award winning creative producer who works at the intersection of media, art, education, and social change. He's currently the COO and lead producer at Lighshed.io, an immersive production company. And he's also a research fellow at Johns Hopkins University's Immersive Storytelling and Emerging Technologies lab. He was formerly a Chief Digital Strategist for the United Nations, and his work has created real world impact, screening at venues such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, the White House and the Sundance Film Festival.

02:30

I'm Pavani. And I'm Joel. And this is Outside In. Each episode, we'll take a look at design in unexpected places. Now, these creators may not call themselves Experience Designers. They actually go by many different labels. But they all have one thing in common. Whether by instinct, or intention, they create moments that have the power to change us. We start this episode with Barry recalling his first foray into VR filmmaking. Enjoy!

03:02

I was on a small team within the UN system called the SDG Action Campaign. Through that team, I had an opportunity to explore a new format of storytelling. One of our colleagues had met with a famous film director, music video director and producer, creator of all types of media, Chris Milk, and through meeting him, we were able to have access to a 360 camera. And that 360 camera was in a lot of ways a first of its kind, there was just the first days of Samsung Gear VR coming out. And what that was, was the headset for the Samsung phone. They thought it was going to be a gaming kind of like how to turn your phone into more of a gaming experience. And it turned out that Chris Milk and his team had created this camera that allowed people to make movies that would go inside that same gaming headset. They partnered with the SDG action campaign, with Gabo and myself, to create a first of its kind movie in 360. Live action movie with, you know, people and in a way that hadn't really been done. We decided to cover the Syrian civil war, the Syrian refugee crisis, and Zaatari refugee camp is pretty famous at this point. It's home to over 80,000 Syrian refugees. So we get there, you know, we go in through this UN on the ground sort of team, and they helped us identify who would be the right real person to help shine light on this refugee issue that the world was facing. We were sort of introduced to a few different families, few different kids and we discovered this young girl named Sidra. And we can just tell there's magic, you know, there's charisma. And so we were able to set up this 360 camera to think about, you know, how is the user going to feel when they go through this experience, you know, kind of trying to reverse engineer for something that barely anybody has ever done. Luckily, when we first made this partnership, I had the opportunity to go and get a little bit of training on how to run the camera. And also, I got my first ever experience putting on a headset and seeing what 360 video was. And through that experience, I realized that this camera could be a people transportation device, you know, we can transport people's minds to other places. And so, it felt very fragile to keeping that trick alive. When we were out. In Zaatari, in the camp, people would say, oh, let's you know, put it on top of a water tower. Let's get this vantage point to show how big, show those 80,000 you know, people I mean, that is a real thing, that is a real problem. It's a really big thing. We want to talk about, I want to you know, visualize it. I can understand the appetite. But I had to come in and say, you know, I think that we want to hold on to this idea that we're actually transporting people that we're allowing people to feel like they really went there in real life and not saw a movie about something. And so, tried to shut down as many of those sort of ideas to retain that human perspective. And we really shot it at the height of this young 11 year old girl named Sidra. We wanted people to feel like they were a kid in a refugee camp and how did that feel? 

06:34

Yeah. So for our listeners who haven't actually seen the film, Joel and I both watched it. But for those who haven't, can you describe what happens? They put the headset on, hit play, like, what is it that they're seeing? What are they experiencing? 

06:47

So an audience would be experiencing a day in the life of a young girl named Sidra. She's 11 years old. You go to school with with Sidra. You see the students in her class; you see the teachers; you watch her play soccer on the soccer pitch in this refugee camp; and you really get a sense of what life in this refugee camp is like, especially for children. There's meals with the family, there's, you know, beautiful sunsets and rainbows. I mean, there's moments of beauty tied into all this struggle and strife. And I think, for the audience, we're always trying to find a balance and a way to communicate that although things are sad, you know, there is beauty and there's hope. 

07:32

You know, that was actually the most surprising thing for me. When I watched it, I realized how there was not any violence that you saw, it wasn't gory. Like I knew it was gonna be depicting stories, basically, of war, right? Like, these are folks who've been affected by war. But the whole tone, including the music, even, was uplifting and hopeful. And the scenes were beautiful, like you said.

07:56

Yeah, actually, you called out the music. I think that's one of the reasons the tone feels so optimistic. We really worked to create an original score, that tried to communicate that feeling. And we wanted to make sure it didn't, you know, just end in like sadness and bleakness and hopelessness. That would be worst case scenario that people come away thinking, This problem is unsolvable. And so I think that was definitely part of the design intention, was that this wasn't going to be a story of like, you know, I mean, people do cry. It's not that it's not sad. It's just that it's not stuck in hopelessness. Yeah. It's sort of like trying to find the most visually compelling moments trying to find things that communicate little human moments and the texture of life things. That's not always the plot, but is something we try to always include. 

08:55

Yeah. And even though it's, you know, a world apart for many of us here, there's a lot of familiarity and things that you can relate to, like the families sitting down and having dinner. The children, of course, for those of us who have children. So I think that's what got to me the most is just how relatable the scenes were. 

09:15

Yeah, I think, you know, as many filmmakers have found that there's just some human truths and just similarities across all cultures that we can lean into and find common ground with and, you know, although this is sort of a story about refugees, you can imagine a story about maybe the aggressor, that paints a picture that adds complexity that adds nuance to a conversation that needs to go on and is maybe stuck. 

09:45

Yeah, Barry, I'm curious... this authentic human vantage point that you described, as I think about the different scenes and looking at it with audience eyes or with like an analytical eye, like how they do this... I noticed something about the car scene. There was a camera in the passenger seat. How did you work with the family to make this camera almost like an invisible witness? Because everything felt very natural. Did they forget it was there? Or how... what was that process like?

10:22

Man, that family was just so great to work with. I will say it was a challenge to even get that camera to sit in the front seat. We were in Gaza. That's the Gaza one, right? Yeah, yeah. And that was I mean, just imagine like, there's no B&H, you can't just go to the camera store and like, get it on Amazon. I was like, weirdly, trying to get this thing in the car for half an hour, you know, just the stand and stuff to get the right shot and at the right height. And we had to tie it all down, because of course, the streets are like Swiss cheese... there's holes everywhere... it's driving on dirt roads. And, you know, you have to sharply abruptly turn left and right. And so I think through the effort that we had to put into that, it kind of allowed the father who's driving the car to, let's say, it was a little more demystified. After those minutes, it's kind of like he had been exposed to it for long enough that people usually forget. And that's kind of one of the secrets of VR's power, I think in, at least, in a production sense, is that, unlike a traditional documentary, where the director stands behind the camera, or someone is standing behind the camera, and you know, the subject knows they're being recorded by another human. With 360 documentaries, you tend to set up the scene and kind of set up the context with that person. But then when you set the camera to record, you leave the room, and often will record for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and after 347 minutes, people kind of forget that the camera's on in the room with them, you know, and then they're just talking to themselves or just, you know, making bread or doing whatever they're doing. And they've forgotten that there's like a giant alien globe, blinking red all around them, you know? So it's a weird thing that... people really do, they just kind of become immune to it, or they'd like, you know, get used to it in a way that allows for really something special to arise

12:31

Even when there are moments where they do acknowledge the camera... so they were in the... there was like a computer lab in the refugee camp. And she was talking about well, all the boys are in here playing, they won't let the girls play. And these two guys, they turn around. And there's this beautiful moment where they look at the camera. I mean that was one where I was like, man, I really feel there. So it's like this interesting balance of capturing authentic life as it's happening and these moments of acknowledging you, as someone bearing witness to what's unfolding around you. 

13:02

Yeah, yeah, that was actually... it's funny you bring that up. That's probably my favorite moment in the whole movie... is those two boys turning around and looking right at you and just talking to you. And honestly, you could miss it. You could be looking the other way. You could not know that it's happening. But if you don't miss it, it is just a gem. It's one of those things. You know, this was all an experiment. We had no idea... there was no model of what the right VR movie looked like, at the time.

13:29

Shot in 2015, right. 

13:32

I almost want to say shot in 2014. premiered in 2015. Yeah, anyway, somewhere in there. Yeah, I mean, we just didn't know what was going to work, what was going to read well, what was going to be effective. And having... that's exactly one of those scenarios where we just left that camera on long enough. And those kids forgot. And then they remembered, and then they wanted to talk to it. And, you know, it's just, it just snowballs into real personalities, you start to see how real people act over time. 

14:00

Yeah, Joel brought up the exact same thing I was just gonna bring up, which is like, you mentioned people forgetting that it's there. But like, how did you get people to look at the camera because I thought those were the most powerful moments where I felt like they were looking right at me. And for me, that happened in that film. It was in the bakery, the first time that I noticed people looking at me, you know, one guy was looking at me and I turned around, there was a child who also looked at me, and so it felt very much like, okay, I'm being watched, and I'm in this bakery with them. And the only thing that was missing was the smell of the bread, and I totally would have been there. 

14:34

I've heard people tell us that they smell the bread, you know, in their minds. We've tricked people enough. It sort of shows like the levers maybe of how to trick someone's mind, how to convince someone if something is like...Oh, we tell them it smells, you're inside their head. You're standing there, people are looking at you like you are them. You know, all those things combined starts to really that presence, that sense of presence is just overpowering.

15:03

Well, I realized that because I couldn't smell the bread, like it was almost jarring, right? Because my brain expected to smell it. And so it called it out. It was like, hey, you're really not there because you're not smelling it. Otherwise, I totally felt like I was there. I was just curious about what are some of the other things you've learned through that process. So that was your first film, but I'm sure every time you're learning new techniques, and this is kind of this frontier.

15:28

Wow, really, what I'm learning is that, you know, at some point, we have this canvas that we paint on, and then we realize, Oh, we can have this three dimensional volumetric canvas that we make art inside of. And so all of a sudden, it's like this, you know, instead of a flat rectangle, our movie is all around us, instead of just all around us, now it's interactive. The canvas just keeps cubing. You know, it's so much bigger than it was last year. And every year and so that, I think, is just something at the highest level to be thinking like, okay, new rules, we have to come up with new ideas, new ways to communicate, we've learned the lesson of not just recycling TV shows, you know, when TV was recycling radio plays, so we kind of went through that phase for a little bit, a lot of TV companies were and media companies and publishers, were making VR for a little bit 360 videos, tons of YouTube 360. But it feels like they've now taken a step back and are, you know, a lot more sort of like thinking is going into the second thought ideas, third thought ideas like, okay, where do we go from here? That's nice to see. And I think, over time, it's going to continue to just like keep expanding our canvas, our ability to make projects, and their output is going to continue to grow. And then in a lot of ways, you know, we learned this all from advertising, like how do we create behavior change? How do we keep inspiring and enticing new audiences to do things to buy things to change their ideas? So we're just kind of leveraging old science in new ways.

17:07

Other things I'm learning? I think one other thing that people often forget in VR is (I just say VR with lowercase a V) it would be the idea that the context matters so much. And I think that's often overlooked, I think, you know, people, of course, talk about the visual ideas, how to shoot how to capture spatial audio, a million great technological solutions to that kind of problem. But I think the actual problem of behavior change, the actual problem of human audiences is bigger than just the video file, or the APK. And that's something that I've just seen it work so well, and seeing it also fall apart based on the context through which people get into the headset, out of the headset, or whatever device they're experiencing. 

18:03

Can you unpack that a little bit? 

18:04

Yeah. So for example, like it's been said before, but that headset is very ugly, and dorky, and lame. And there's plenty of memes making people look lame wearing a VR headset, right? But it's not just that you look dorky, or lame, I think what's going on is, it's really a feeling of vulnerability. When you put on that headset, you have a new layer of vulnerability you did not have before. Someone could poke you. Someone could take your picture to make you look dorky. Someone could beat you up, someone could do anything like that. Who knows what could happen? When you put on that headset, you don't just have blinders on, you literally, your mind is somewhere else, and your body is vulnerable. And that mental state is a real hurdle for a lot of people. And whether they know it or not. There's a reason people don't love putting on VR headsets. I think people don't love feeling vulnerable. Through that we can learn, how do we now like overcome this challenge? This is a real challenge. But I think that one way we can do that is through...really projects kind of like your own projects, where we're trying to set the pre-story before the story begins. Trying to set, like you know, a little bit of a breadcrumb trail to get people excited, intrigued, and ready to listen to it. Ready to hear, ready to absorb it and ready to participate. 

19:41

Prime them. 

19:41

Yeah, prime them. Exactly. 

19:43

You know, the vulnerability piece. I never thought of that before. That's really interesting. It's like they're surrendering some part of themselves right to whatever might happen and I'm guessing would create conditions for other emotions like empathy, to occur, right?

20:00

Or puts up a wall or like, you know, doesn't allow empathy to occur because you're too nervous about your own self. 

20:07

Yeah. Speaking of empathy, I know that a lot of folks now call VR an empathy machine. And we've been talking a little bit about this already. But could you unpack that a little bit in terms of like, how VR helps? 

20:22

Great. Yeah. So I went to this lab at Stanford University. It changed how I think about empathy in general, and empathy with VR. And this Stanford lab is called the Virtual Human Interaction Lab.

20:39

They are trying to see if, through empathy, if they can create real-world behavior change. And for this experiment, they wanted to find out could they create behavior change around paper. Tell us, let's see if we can stop people from using an average of six to eight paper towels per spill. Right? That was the idea. How can we change that one behavior. Now here was the experiment, they had developed a simulator in VR. In it, you put on the headphones, you put on the headset, and you're embodying an avatar that is holding a chainsaw, and you're chopping down a tree in front of you. And it's a big tree. And it's like, really loud, like chainsaw sounds, like grinding teeth on the wood. And so you're chopping this tree down. And it's, and it's kind of uncomfortable, you don't really want to be doing it, but your avatar is doing it and you can't help yourself. And then eventually, the tree falls when, you know, after three minutes, or however long the tree falls, and you're able to see, it kind of opens up your vision, you can see...wow, there's a lot of trees that you've (presumably you or someone) has now cut down with chainsaws. Some people go through the experiment, and they read an article about deforestation, right. And other people go through the experiment. And they watch a web video, like a standard rectangle video. And they are exposed to like a story about, you know, how trees are part of the world, breathing and all these things. And so this is three different modes to learn, right one being VR, one's an article, written article, and one is a traditional video. And when the person who's going through the experience takes off their headset, or stops reading or stops watching the video, then they go and sit with a facilitator. And the facilitator has a cup of water on the table, there's always like two cups of water and a pitcher, and a roll of paper towels on the table. All of a sudden, every time when the facilitator is asking the questions for the survey, every time they knock over the glass of water on accident. And when they do that, anybody who read the article or watched the traditional video, they pull off, I'm not kidding, six to eight paper towels on average, which means some people are pulling off like 15 paper towels. Okay, so imagine six to eight paper towels is the average for the average traditional media consumption about deforestation. Now, the people that went through the VR simulator, they pull off one to two paper towels to clean up the same spill, the same amount of water. That's like where empathy really moves the needle. It's not a long term study, you know, like, it is true that they just got out of the experience. And now they are being tested kind of. But something about it just says we're on the right track. And they have other experiences, experiments, and similar sort of like interesting ways that they do the practical test of behavior. So I recommend everybody listening, go to the Virtual Human Interaction Lab website. It's chock full of other experiments and findings, and there's lots there. So highly recommended. 

23:47

That's fascinating. You know, you were talking a minute ago about the advertising world and have taken a few pages out of their playbook. But in a way it feels like the general bent or arc of VR is not towards manipulation, it does feel like the big wave that is cresting right now is more about connecting people to each other. What's your survey of the landscape? 

24:11

Yeah, I think those aren't mutually exclusive. I heard someone once talking about kind of like how we make sense of the world. And we make sense of the world through repetition and patterns, we understand that the sun rises every morning, and the sun goes down at night. And it always rises on one side, it goes down on the other side. And in VR, the sun doesn't have to rise. It doesn't have to rise on the right side. And it can rise three times in a day. And all of a sudden, you know, it's like if that's a convincing enough VR experience that could break your sense of reality. There's like opportunities in VR where it can really mess with you, mess with your real world. Because, we depend on those patterns to generate, like a sort of a status to stand on, a floor to stand on, a reality. And the more convincing the VR becomes, the more fragile those patterns may become, as well. So that's kind of like a...where manipulation could happen, I think is like kind of within that sort of subconscious space. Whereas the forefront, the foreground, the talk is about connecting people, but it's kind of like Facebook, you know, it's connecting people, but at the cost of everything else that we know. So like, you know, just like Amazon, the everything store at the cost of what. So it's kind of like, it is going to be the great connector, I do believe that I think that as VR or whatever, we're going to be calling it in the future, you know, like, as it does move that way, and we're all wearing cool glasses, and they look cool, and we're not feeling vulnerable, and we're all talking with each other, virtually, I think we're gonna there's a trade off. Our trade off is we will get manipulated, because it's a manipulatable landscape. It's in a lot of ways, not unsimilar to books, you know, very manipulatable tools, from religious texts to Mein Kampf to any other self help book. I mean, you know, they're always trying to get you to do something. 

26:16

Yeah, yeah. So it's kind of back to that old adage of Tech is neither good nor bad, but can be used for both. 

26:23

Yeah, yeah. That's kind of where I, that's where I sit, and I think is being used for both. 

26:29

I wonder, just kind of going back to the intentions of Clouds Over Sidra specifically, I mean, you guys got funding to film this thing, to achieve an objective, and I'm guessing that there may have been metrics possibly attached to what you're trying to do. I mean, can you talk a bit about the intention, and then the way that it was seen at the end of the day, after everything was done? You know, what was the felt impact of the piece? 

27:01

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's astonishing, when you add it all up together. We went into it really believing it was going to be an experiment, and that if we failed, it was okay, that we knew that this was new. And we wanted to work with Chris Milk and his team, we wanted to explore new ways of storytelling, you know, we were excited about the opportunity. But at the same time, I think there was a real acknowledgement that this could fall apart. And, you know, we may have done something and it didn't work. And you know, we learn and now we're going to do something different next time. So with that in mind, I would say it far exceeded expectations. As soon as it was done, it actually premiered at the World Economic Forum in Davos. And it went from there, to this event that the Secretary General of the UN puts on every year, currently, it's a donors conference, private donors that are going to donate to the Syrian refugee crisis, because just government funding, even governments around the world, it's just not enough funding to manage how many refugees that are coming out of Syria. And so through this donor event, we were able to show the Secretary General's office the experience, Clouds Over Sidra, and, you know, literally their first time, of course, seeing the headset as well. And they were really blown away by the film. Ban Ki-moon made, everybody watch the film at this donor conference. And of course, at these conferences, they kind of know how much to expect to raise. And this is the third year of the conference, they were expecting, I think $2.3 billion to be raised. And instead of $2.3 billion, you know, they added this film, and Ban Ki-moon changed his whole speech to be about Sidra. And girls like Sidra, kids like Sidra. Instead of 2.3 billion, they raised $3.8 billion within 24 hours. You know, I don't know if it could take credit for that. But just really, I think it's important to be part of that conversation where that much help, that much support is moving into the hands of people that need it. And of course, it's also, you know, just by nature of it being the first, and the power of that film, I think it became a film that really spurred a movement. When, as I was mentioning Samsung, when they first came out with this headset and the whole VR idea, like everyone kind of thought it was just a gaming thing. And no one really realized it could be a place for stories that matter. So I think that's kind of something that that film unlocked. And that spurred the movement of VR for good, VR for impact at HTC Vive, pretty much everyone wanted to get into how do we tell stories that matter? Because they matter. And we're here with this new storytelling platform. And we should be part of that. 

30:04

How much of this success would you say, had to do with this kind of ethos of "It's okay, it's an experiment, there's, there's not really any expectations, let's just try something and see what happens."

30:18

I think that that sort of prompt or motivation, it doesn't, it's not foolproof, and it requires a certain type of team or personality to absorb that kind of prompt and then do their best work, you know, so it's kind of like a more hands-off approach to managing, right? It's like, go and run with this idea. Let's see how far you get. Let's see, if you make greatness, you know, and then it's up to that contributor, then it's up to me and the other director, and, you know, it's like, can we make great things with this autonomy that we now have? And really, it's like, what else is life for? I mean, we're only on the planet for 100 years, tops. So, you know, if every year I got to make something awesome, you know, and I'm already like, way behind cuz I didn't start till I was 23. So, you know, my last 23 are gonna be like, on a beach in Hawaii, probably somewhere. So we gotta like, I got to compress 100 different great things into only 50 years. Well, I got to get started. And if you got autonomy, then why not? Why not make something great. Luckily, we met the challenge and made something really beautiful. I think. 

31:25

I agree. I think you're off to a good start, by the way. 

31:28

Thanks. 

31:28

Oh, with your deadline. Yeah, yeah, of how many awesome things you have to make before....

31:36

So we talked a lot about Clouds Over Sidra, and wanted to talk a little bit more about My Mother's Wing. Now that this is not your first film anymore, right? in VR? How did you approach it differently? Or, you know, what was different about this set and setting? 

31:54

Yeah, so I think just the idea of tackling a documentary about the lives of people in Gaza, and just the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in general, it's kind of a tough project. It's a project that's in a lot of ways, let's say, hard to win...win over audiences, you know? It's a subject that a lot of audiences sort of have their camp, you know, they've already picked a side, and no article or movie they watch is going to change their mind kind of thing, you know. And in spite of that, I think the film is able to find a voice that doesn't feel biased, that doesn't feel sensational, that doesn't have a bad guy. Honestly, there's no antagonist in this film. So that at the highest level, that's kind of unique about it. And that's a real challenge. And, the challenge that people don't have, that already have a side that they're not going to be transformed, they're not going to feel different after them before. I feel like that's not always true. That's not true. As much in VR, because it is so novel, you know, we still are riding the wave of novelty of this is my first time doing it, you know, it's not our first time making the film, but it is often audiences' first time watching these films. And even if it's their second, it can still be very, very emotional, very dramatic, and impactful and long-lasting. With that ability to create those kinds of memories. You know, we're able to create memories for people that although they may never see the humanity that lives on the side of Gaza, that side of the wall, at least they'll remember it as if they've been there, they'll remember it as if they've gotten to have a meal or spend time with a family that was on the other side of a wall that they don't really have a lot of visibility into. And so that I think is a win even if people don't necessarily change how they vote. And, it's a slow exposure therapy sort of agenda, multi generational agenda. When we think about, you know, ROI on these things. Now, one piece of the story actually is, My Mother's Wing, although it isn't credited with raising all that money that that Clouds Over Sidra did, but My Mother's Wing went to the UN Security Council, and on a day when they were discussing the lives and livelihoods of the Palestinian people, they got to watch My Mother's Wing and experiencing that kind of film, that kind of rich media experience, when you know, when they're making those decisions about how we're going to spend money, how we're going to spend our energy, and where. What's our voice going to say as the UN or as the Security Council, the UN, you know, I think it can only help. It can only help to inform those kinds of stories. So that's kind of the story on that. It took a long time to get permission to get into Gaza to get the paperwork to go to Gaza. It's not something even Israelis go to. You can't go there, you know, most people can't go there. Yeah. So that, in and of itself is a challenge, an administrative challenge, a logistical challenge. Then again, you know, we worked with a local on-the-ground agency, they know a lot of families, and they kind of helped us find some of these families that would be willing to talk to Western media and just be willing to share their story with the world in a way that is, it's a tough decision to make, of course, they're all going through some form of trauma, you know, living in a warzone. So to allow in this film crew, and even though we're small and smiley, we still, we definitely change their lives for a few days, or for a few weeks, even. 

36:03

It was, honestly, it was one of the most intense experiences of my whole life going to Gaza and making that movie. I grew up Jewish. And in Georgia, which is a fun place to grow up Jewish, because not a lot of us. But I always kind of looked at the world through this, like, hippie Jewish lens. This idea that, you know, Jews were good for the world, they help people, they helped Israel, they were like, gonna be, you know, it's all a democracy. It sounded great growing up, but, and I think that vision is an interesting vision. Sadly, you know, in order to get that land where they all get to vote, they won that through war, in recent years. And ever since there's been this sort of push and pull with the border around Israel, and the populations that live there, which are in the millions. And unfortunately, I think, you know, we've like, my, this making this movie going to Gaza and getting to see what life is like on the other side of that wall. And it's just, I mean, you really, it changes, like, who David and who Goliath is, and the story sort of, and it really broke my worldview and broke me as a human for a while, because when you come back from these documentaries, from any of these places, it's really hard to relate to other people to share your experience. You know, no one wants to hear a sad story. I think I did go through a lot of like real internal trauma in that experience more than others, because the stories of Israel and Palestine were so part of my identity. And then I had to face my, you know, those stories head on, and it was different than I had thought of before. 

37:51

So you went through a transformation yourself? 

37:53

Big time. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And it, I would say it was a really eye opening experience, because, of course, some at some points, your biases are confirmed, you're, you know, they're holding guns... it really is, they have statues of war heroes, famous Palestinian war heroes that have obviously killed a lot of other people. And so, you know, it's kind of like a complex web. And you don't even find out these things until you go to these places, and get into these stories and start to realize how complex they all are, and how complex solutions can be. You know often, my childhood itself wants to just solve problems, and it's taken me a long time to learn to do more listening, and more, kind of, in some ways, similar to exploring media with Clouds Over Sidra, more explorations, rather than solutions. And not that I think, you know, at the expense of finding solutions, just that it's sometimes the path to success isn't always paved so clearly.

39:09

You know, Barry, it strikes me that when you were talking at the beginning, when you were talking about the intentions of this film, and the subject matter, this is a topic that you said, no one's gonna change their mind about, like, people were pretty set in their ways. You were set in your way, you had a very specific worldview, right? But it's almost like not as a spectator, not as a consumer of the media. But as a creator of the project. There was almost this bigger transformation that was possible. I mean, it's always interesting, this idea that when we're making projects that have the intention of changing others, it has this interesting and awesome byproduct of changing ourselves. 

39:48

Yeah, I really love that. And you know, the things we design they inform how we are, you know, of course, and so from buildings and everything else and fashion and filmmaking and documentary making, and specifically in these films and in my case, definitely. So I was in the Peace Corps after my time in University. So I've spent decades literally just in this kind of social impact space that's for good space. And there's two sort of pathways that people often take in that sector, let's say, one is a more cynical pathway, one can be a kind of like, this is never going to get better, these are intractable problems, I've realized how complex it is, and I give up. And there's this other path in the for good world, which is about personal growth, and about being able to see the connection between fixing your own backyard and helping others fix their backyards, let's say, so whether that's personal practice, whether that's how you act with your family, whether that's how you move in your town, you know, at whatever size scope, and then sort of relating that and seeing how that connects back to whether you're doing grassroots work or scaled impact work, or whatever work in the social good space. I love the idea that that's kind of a dialogue that goes on through life. And, you know, for myself, I'm a vegetarian, I take daily decision make daily decisions around personal my own backyard, let's say, sort of upkeep and, and through that, although, you know, I could lose probably 20 pounds, but other than that, I'm trying to be pretty good. And it's always like kind of reacting and in play with the work that I'm passionate about doing. 

41:31

Beautiful, well said. So Barry, over the years of doing your work, I understand you put together what you call levers for empathy, techniques, strategies that you've used in your design, or you've noticed that are successful in eliciting that emotion. Could you talk about that a bit?

41:53

Yeah, definitely. As we look to create this sort of content, the question of just how do we create empathetic content that fosters empathy in, in audiences, and it kind of check through a few different strata, one being physical memory. And just the idea that, you know, in VR, we have this new opportunity. Unlike other mediums, to not just sit on a couch, not just sit in a chair, not just being a reading nook, but to actually embody these stories in a way that promotes memory to realize that you've been there, you've done that thing, you've, you've experienced it in a way that they're really, it encapsulates your whole body, maybe reached up to pull yourself up onto the top of Everest, maybe you reached out to make to shake someone's hand in the experience, leaning into that physical memory, both embodying the experiences, but also just understanding spatial awareness and how that can add to retention, memory retention, I think that's really a cool place to play and for fostering empathy with VR, other spaces, this personal connection, something VR can really do in a unique way, in a new way, is create personal connections create true, seemingly true eye contact, create, you know, avatars that know your name. There's opportunities, I think, to leverage that kind of human experience. And to help that to let that help us sort of meet each other in the middle to just have a shared perspective of what another way to think about it. I think I mentioned it was just would just be the height of the camera, you know, that, that making sure that human connection can actually thrive in VR, in the experience the design, by camera placement, height, and making sure it just, you know, really seals the deal on the trick of it feeling like, I'm a person, they're a person and we are connecting in this new way. That often, you know, when we read novels, or watch compelling traditional films, flatties, you know, you might have a sense of Oh, I feel like I have a bit of a personal connection to this character. You know, this character. I've spent all these years reading a whole series of books, you know, Sherlock Holmes, or whomever it is. But at the end of the day, if you were to do that same story through VR, I think there's really a big opportunity to just lean into that personal connection so that people come away feeling like they know that person like they've, they have a memory that is shared with someone else. I think that it's a really powerful tool in our tool belt. Another one would be accessibility. And just thinking of, you know, how do we communicate the lives of others when they're far away when they see me very different than our lives, you know, maybe someone in Indonesia, that's, you know, that's a goat herder or maybe it's someone in in Gaza City, and they're just trying to survive their life there. You know, it's kind of this, this ability to speak across cultures without, without speaking the same language, this ability to communicate at the most basic level through through body language through shared objects, if you know we can, we can identify what a book bag looks like, you know, backpack of a kid. And when you see that backpack, whether it's, you know, dirty, or ratty, or whether it's really clean and well kept, you know, that says a lot, it says a lot to a lot of people and says a lot in a lot of languages. So looking for ways to just communicate the story outside of maybe English speakers first, you know, an opening, broadening up that the accessibility I think is really allows for more people to just to foster that empathy. Right? Yeah. And lastly, would be to reinforce humanity, you know, often we get caught up in the NGO trap of numbers, statistics, to millions, co2 tons, 474,000 people, 2 million people, 6 million people, 2 billion people, those kinds of almost, let's call them platitudes, sort of hard to grasp hard to grok numbers and sort of ways of storytelling that, that lean on data, which is not necessarily intrinsically bad. But it I think that the idea of making sure to reinforce humanity throughout these kinds of stories, really, again, it just brings us back to that personal connection, it brings us back to those nuances of humans, you know, what is it that we love about different characters in movies and novels? We love their little tics, their little idiosyncrasies, and so you know, where's that human moment that helps you understand what that other person's going through? And is it that, you know, they have to kind of, they pull their hair in front of their face, or they, they they avoid eye contact, it's this perfect sort of storm of something you can relate to something that makes them those characters feel more human. And it's something I try and focus on when we're capturing content. And it's definitely something we focus on, as we're, you know, in post production and putting it all together in the end, just to make sure that we don't lose that, that each of these characters are real people. They're individual. And they're the sort of like, unique in a way that makes them compelling. Those are my levers of empathy.

47:49

It's good stuff. I love it.

48:03

So I thought that was a really insightful conversation we had with Barry. Yeah,

48:06

Yeah that was a good one. Both you and I were kind of VR naysayers for a long time. Yeah, we're doing work that's in the real physical world. And it's all about having a heads up experience with other people. And I think that something about the aspect of VR being closed off, was a bit of a turnoff for us. And so I think it was interesting that it took us this long to experience a movie that came out in 2015. Yeah. And, you know, when we finally did, it wasn't what I expected. In a good way. I've been thinking a lot about the formula of the story, you know, it seems like our culture is and has been for quite some time locked into this really tired formula, where all our stories have to have a good guy and a bad guy. And what I absolutely love about both these films, is that there's no side to the story. There's just people. And I think it's a really powerful example of what happens when we shake loose of these old tropes, that they're so deeply entrenched, we hardly notice them. It's like the air you breathe. It's just if you really look at most of the movies, and books out there, there's a good guy and there's a bad guy. And I think the world needs more stories that are broken free of this old formula.

49:32

Yeah. What did you think of his levers for empathy?

49:37

I love the levers for empathy. I mean, it's, great when you can boil down insights that you've learned doing the work into concrete tools that can be applied in other situations. I don't remember what they were offhand, but

49:56

I was gonna ask you which one's your favorite what He talked about physical memory, everything promoting physical memory. That one stuck out to me. Because when I remember the film, or have memories of the film, it's not a memory of watching the film. But it actually registered, I think in my brain has a memory of being there and experiencing some of those scenes. And I think that's what he's saying when he says, you know, promote physical memory, like you're actually creating memories of being somewhere, rather than just watching a film. And so I think that's powerful. I told you this actually already, when I first watched the films, or when I first got the headset, but I kind of experienced the opposite, where VR is not just creating a memory, but it's triggering a past real memory in like a pretty powerful way.

50:57

Yes.

50:58

Yeah. Like you said earlier, I never really been a huge fan of VR. And I was like, hey, let me watch these films. I bought it. After I watched those films. I was like, let me see what else has been made. It's been years since this thing's been out. And I want to like, actually see what are people making. And so I went on YouTube and started watching some 360 films. And like he said, there was actually a lot of poorly made 360 content out there. But I happened to watch a film about India. And as you know, my family's from India, and I grew up going to India, like every other summer. So I just felt like I wanted to watch a film that was made there. And they followed, I would say many of the principles that Barry mentioned, within a few, maybe 30 seconds of the film, I was in tears, maybe I think it was like this market scene I looked, I turned around, I was looking around, I felt like I was there. And it felt like literally dozens of summers, my memory of all of that time and all of the emotions, like the fond memories, compressed and compacted into those few seconds and like hitting me, right? A gush of emotion. And so I started crying. And I was like, What am I feeling? You know, it was like happiness, because I felt like I remember those tender memories, but sadness, because I haven't been there in a while. And I don't know when I'm going to go back. Maybe I guess you could say it's like nostalgia. But intense. I don't think I've ever cried, feeling nostalgic. And so that's when I was like, Oh my gosh, this. This thing is powerful. Right? I've watched obviously many films that were set in India, or about India, and like, I've never felt that

52:31

and you and you let your son try to

52:34

Yeah, I did. It was really heartwarming watching him. So he's four, and has never been to India. But as we've told him stories, and he understands the concept of a place called India, and I put it on him the same film. And he really thought he was there. I mean, he was waving to the people. at points, he would get scared, he would like hold my hand. Very calls keeping the trek alive. Right. So I think that when it's done really well, it really does make you feel like you're there. And that one film, which and now I can't find it like I went back to find it on YouTube, and I can't find it. But they did a really good job.

53:17

Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah. The other thing that stood out to me, you know, most of us go throughout our days having this experience of myself being inside my body piercing outside at the world through these little holes in your eyes. And so so you have this illusion of yourself as this thing that is separate from everything else. But what's interesting about VR is that it can be designed as this totally disembodied experience, you know, in some VR experiences, they actually visualize your hands and your arms, so you have an avatar. But in both of Barry's films, I have no arms, I have no hands, I don't even have a head. I don't even see the blurred edges of my nose as you would if you're looking down or kind of closing one eyes. So you don't have this sense of being inside a body looking out. You are simply this floating awareness, just observing what's happening, you're not aware of being you. Yeah. And I think that has a really profound effect on your experience of the story.

54:21

You know, that's actually related to something I noticed as well. So as you know, I've been studying empathy for a while and some of our work and I speak about empathy kind of generically, but there's actually a lot of nuances to like if you talk to a psychologist or a scientist, they'll point out differences in different types of empathy. One of them is the difference between empathic distress and empathic concern. And I had read about it, but I didn't realize what it meant really until we watched these films because later, I actually went back and watch them again after the current with Barry, and I noticed what you noticed, you're dis embodied. But in the science in the research, when you feel empathic distress, it's usually because you are imagining yourself to be that person. So you were like literally stepping inside the shoes of the other person. an empathic concern, which is what you're really trying to aim for with this type of work is where it's a little bit more like compassion, and you do distinctly see yourself as like other from the person that you're observing. And you'll notice that in both films, you are not actually standing in Sidra's shoes, or in the mother's shoes, right? In My Mother's Wing, but you're sitting in front of see draw on the carpet, and she's looking at you and talking to you. So that causes you to feel concern for her, rather than feel her pain in a way that's going to cause distress. And the reason that you don't want to cause distress is obvious. Because when you're in distress, you're going to tune out, you're going to shut down, your brain goes into like defense mode, and you're not actually going to want to act. So I thought that was really interesting. I think like that little nuance could actually make you act versus shut down. And I think it's also related to like, some of the other Doomsday narratives that we experience when it comes to whether it's the climate crisis, or the refugee crisis, or anything else where we shut down when we feel like it's hopeless, like we can't do anything about it. And that's also been shown that hopelessness is cognitively associated with inaction.

56:41

Yes, yeah. So, there was one point where we were talking about the process, this adage of, you know, what we create, in turn creates us. And that experience that Barry shared about how his time in Gaza totally broke his worldview. I love that about the nature of this type of work, because this is frontier work. In there are no set rules. And it was almost kind of like framed as an experiment, like, we're not really sure what's going to come with this. There's a certain liberating freedom to be open to the creative process and to let what wants to happen emerge. And that's a very different kind of creative process. You're not really sure where you want to go. But you have to be very observant. And you have to listen, and you have to look. And you just have to kind of guide this thing that wants to be born. And I feel like this project had that quality. And I just wonder how much of that that aspect of it being this type of project contributed to the change that he experienced himself?

57:52

I mean, I think what you said about being, they don't quite know what's going to happen. And it's an experiment, I think you're open, right, your mind is open to what might happen. And if you don't have a preconceived notion of this is exactly what I'm about to create. Then your mind opens up to other possibilities. And when your mind and your heart is open, then you you can change, right?

58:18

Yeah. And I think as designers, there's a really interesting lesson we can glean from this because, you know, it's easy to think that you know, but you don't know. It's like a way of approaching creativity, where the thing you're trying to create can become so much more, if you only let go of it a little bit. Yeah, well said. All right. That's it for today. Thanks so much for listening. To learn more about Barry and his cinema for social change, visit Barrypousman.com or to dive deeper into this episode and see the show notes you can visit us at outsideinpodcast.org. If you like what you hear, please consider supporting us by subscribing, or leave a rating and review wherever you listen to your podcasts. See you soon.

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