Excuse me. Am I in the right room? Oh, yes. Thank you. Come on in. Hi. Nice to meet you. Hello. Hello? Yes. Have a seat. Thanks. Wow. This is a beautiful office you have here. Thank you. Thank you. Well, thank you for coming in today. You are Abraham Bergson, correct? Good. Abraham. Is it okay if I call you Abe? Are you good? I prefer Abraham. Excellent, Abe. It is very nice to meet you. Indeed. As you know, I am the mayor of civilization. With that comes special privileges. Sure.
A nice little office here, as you can see. But really, I see myself as a mere public servant. Okay. Yes. The people that elected me to carry out their will. For many years now, I did my job as they wished. We built many towers, a fair amount of walls, and of course, made enough plastic that the mark of our times shall be remembered for generations to come. Yeah, that's a lot of plastic. But I'm afraid public opinion is changing.
The people's view of themselves and their relation to the world is changing. And as their humble servant, I must change with them. You're quite right. Quite right. You see, things have not been working too well. The seas are rising. Our infrastructure is crumbling. And people are generally dissatisfied with the condition of our global society. People want what is being called a societal transformation. Mm hmm. No, Abe. I'll be honest with you.
When they told me we were hiring a professional to help with this transformation, I thought it was going to be some Silicon Valley tech genius. But it says here that you are an experienced designer. And if I'm being frank, I can't for the life of me figure out how that could be relevant to transforming our society. Well, I am aware you have written a book on this precise subject. My assistant has provided me with a copy. It is an odd little book. I thought we might explore this text together.
Shall we begin? Sure. Let's. Let's do it. Welcome to Human Nature Odyssey, a podcast exploring the interactive, immersive experience we call civilization. I'm Alex. A true odyssey is marked by the fellow travelers one meets along the way. It's important to stop and share perspectives on where you've been, what you've seen, and where you're headed. You may have noticed from the graphic, this episode is no normal episode. That's because this is the first installment of Human Nature Conversations.
A companion series that will start to sprinkle in here and there to enrich our odyssey. Last year, we focused on the novel Ishmael by Daniel Quinn about a telepathic gorilla's conversation with the narrator on re-imagining our species role in the world, something I love about Ishmael is that it's a dialog. Something happens when two people are in discussion. New ways of thinking can be born.
And while we'll have many more episodes of Human Nature Odyssey, that will be more like the ones you've heard before, where it's primarily me guiding us through ideas that expand upon the ideas introduced in Ishmael. It's time to throw some conversations into the mix. And today, Abraham Bergson, architect, author and experience designer, will be just the person we need to get us started. Why? Well, okay, first, let me tell you a little story.
Ever since I was 14 and first read Ishmael, I knew that one day I would create some kind of thing inspired by it. Maybe it would be a documentary, maybe a book. I didn't know that was for future Alex to figure out. And over a decade later, I realize now I was future Alex. And it was finally time to figure it out. So I started rereading Ishmael and taking lots of notes, though I still didn't know how to best express and share them.
This was in 2018, coincidentally the same year the author of Ishmael Daniel Quinn passed away. And also that year, my good friend introduced me to something called immersive theater in art form, where audience members can actively participate in the story, sometimes even change how it unfolds. And as we were getting into this, it occurred to me Ishmael, too, was sort of about an immersive interactive experience, a one on one conversation with a telepathic gorilla.
Maybe I could create that interactive experience in real life. So I started adapting Ishmael into an interactive experience where participants went on an adventure through their neighborhood. While we had a conversation over the phone, and that's when I met Abraham Erikson. Abraham is an experienced designer. We'll explain exactly what that is shortly. And the co-founder of Odyssey Works, which creates personalized, immersive, transformative experiences for participants.
He's thought a lot about how to create interactive experiences that people find meaningful. Over the pandemic, I participated in this program. Abraham co-led for people designing their own interactive, immersive experiences. While I developed the Ishmael experience, which I finally ran for dozens of people, guiding them on an adventure through their neighborhood.
I'd like to do that again some time, and that experience and the conversations I had with people eventually morphed into this podcast, Human Nature Odyssey. And while I was working on a podcast, Abraham was working on a book experience design, a participatory manifesto. And Abraham's book has a lot to say about how we, as individuals and communities, can design the very world we live in, which is perfect.
Because where we last left off on our odyssey, we talked about the need for a societal transformation. So please welcome Abraham Garretson. Hello, Abraham. Thank you for joining us on The Odyssey today. So before you had the words to call yourself an experienced designer, you worked as an architect. I'm curious, how did your work as an architect lead to your work as an experienced designer?
I love that question, Alex. First, I want to say I'm just really excited to be talking with you about this. I love Human Nature Odyssey. I think it's been so fun. I've been recommending it to everyone from my earliest days. Even when I was a kid, when I began to be interested in architecture, I wasn't interested in the buildings. I wasn't fetishizing the the the doorknobs and the patterns.
Of course, I loved those things, but I was always fascinated with the fact that when I walked into a building, I was different. When people walked into the Cathedral of Saint John, the Divine or or especially important for me were the were the masks. In Istanbul, where I am when I was 1920. They were changed. And it didn't take long for me to learn that this is not entirely by accident. It's not just a nice property piece of architecture. This is by design. Architecture changes you.
It is perhaps about walls and windows. But when you look at it from the point of view of experience design, it is about creating transformative spatial experiences for people. When I saw that, when I started to feel that, I started to look for that everywhere I went. And the more I looked at different practices, the more I saw that they in fact, all could be understood this way. Poetry, I discovered, changed me when I read Wallace Stevens and 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.
I was changed just by some words on a page. How is that possible? Hmm. What is this weird superpower that. That words have to reorient me in the world, just like the mosques in Istanbul. And so I've been experimenting for 20 plus years and understanding how the things we create affect us and that is experience design in a kind of simplified explanation causing transformations. You know, it's funny, I'm sure you've heard this a lot.
When I was getting into immersive theater and people ask like, what does that mean, immersive? And I would explain vaguely. And they'd say, Well, well, then isn't everything immersive? Is it? Well, yes. Yes, it is a similar I imagine you get that with experience design too. It's like, well, what is an experience isn't everything we're doing and experience. Absolutely. I think the big switch, the mental switch, we're not actually designing discrete objects called experiences.
We are designing for the experience or outcomes of whatever the things we make are. That is to say, I'm designing a house for you. Mm hmm. The thing. A home is an experience. And so when I design that thing, that house, like a traditional architect does, I am also designing the experience of home, an experience designer starts from the home, not the house says, what would it be to design a home and then takes a step backwards and says, okay, what is the house that makes that home possible?
Really interesting things happen when you do that. We can think about a much larger site for architecture than just the building itself. We can start to really address changing lifestyles. There's, you know, this problem that we encounter with efficiency. That's really it's really depressing, actually. Right. You studies and I and I want them to be wrong and maybe they are.
But there are these studied energy efficiency laws in California which say that they've come up with LED bulbs and all these rules about energy efficiency and, you know, better windows. And in the last 20, 30 years, I can't remember when the laws were passed. The technology and each home has transformed totally. And yet people are using the same amount of energy. Mm hmm. They are not different. They haven't changed. The technology has.
That's the difference between a thing based approach to architecture and an experience design approach to architecture. The experience design approach to architecture doesn't say we're going to get these technologies into the house and experience design approach to architecture says we need to create a relationship with energy consumption, with the environment, which is totally different.
I really love how you put this distinction in the book when you say, quote, Traditional design practices invite us to design things and to use those things to solve problems. But experience is not a problem. It is life. And so if designing experiences is not about solving problems, what is it about designing experiences? About creating the life we want to live? And if we start from a problem solving point of view, we're only going to ever get to zero.
But if we sit down and say, What is the life we want to live, we can get to that life. At least we have a fighting chance. But if we haven't even outlined that, how are we going to get there? Mm hmm. Every thing we do, every design we make, every widget that's created, every service interacts in every home, every immersive theater experience, every podcast can tap into any of these questions about how we want to live. Because this is what we're doing. We're living with the things we've created.
We're completely surrounded by our designs, especially if we consider our designs to be not just objects, but services and. Traditions and rituals. What's so fascinating about this book is that not just the things that we interact with are the experiences, but also the cultural designs that we bring. So storytelling rituals, New Years, the concept of New Years, a calendar is a design.
And you know, we are at New Year's way with bated breath as completely artificial numbers, countdown and a completely artificial four digit number changes. Just because it's artificial and it's designed, doesn't it all make it not real? It's actually very transformative. I mean, so many of us, it compels us into changing our behavior often or compels us into shaming ourselves about not changing our behavior.
And, you know, language is a is as you describe it, and something that we've designed football games, weddings, funerals, a conference, a protest. These are all immersive, interactive experiences that we engage with. And your book gives us some incredible tools to think about how to design those. So like you're saying, not just to solve problems, but to have at the forefront of that design be, well, what what do we want to experience from these things?
The thing that I love that you brought up right there is is the linear nature of it. It's all scalar. We can design, we can make it, we can design a tiny little world and a tiny little event. We can tell a short story that is a there's a whole world we've designed. We can have an immersive theater experience and a tiny little theater for one on on on Times Square. That's something a friend of mine created. Or we can go and create a revolution in our head.
These all exist inside the same practice. It's the same practice that we utilize when we when when we throw a surprise birthday party for a friend. There's this power of the imagination to generate a different world and to allow us to step into it.
And when we step into a different world, if it's really well done, as you felt, probably in a great experience of immersive theater, but also in a great story, when you step into that different world, you sometimes can esthetically, but also in your mind experience living in a totally different way. Then we have the opportunity to act upon these things. The world we create determines who we can be and we can move around. We are not actually any specific. We're not fixed to any one identity.
We are stepping into these ways of being that are provided to us by the world we're in. It's that. So then we could consider redesigning that world. We can consider making interventions in those identities. We can consider what those roles that are laid out for us result in and how they are contributing to a world we do or do not like. We have this idea of a kind of fixed self and then it's determined by the world we're in.
What it doesn't mention is that that world that we're in is something that we design with every action. One way I wanted to frame this conversation too, because I wanted to hear what you think about it. So in Ishmael, for those who haven't already heard me blab about it enough, Daniel Quinn proposes that we as a global civilization are destroying the world, not because we're inherently flawed as a species, but that we are held captive.
It's not that we actively want to destroy the world or are too innately selfish or greedy. It's that we live in a society where our individual survival depends on our collective suicide. So the need for unlimited growth, endless consumption of resources, the sixth mass extinction. These are not accidents. Our society is actually set up this way. It's things are going as they were intended or designed. They weren't designed by one person or a nefarious group, but by all of us over time.
And so I wanted to ask you, how does design work on a societal level? It's so interesting, isn't it? There's the question, how did we get here? And I think you you said it so well. And in that quote from Ismail that we are entrapped in this, we are in this world, and there are various ways that this was built, various different work. A whole civilization has a lot of designers throwing their hands in over. Many generations. Over many generations.
But there's also singular individuals who make huge moves in those changes. And we look at leaders, but we also look at artists. We also look at technologists. There are moments where you see big changes happening. And in the book, I talk about Dondi. You know, what he did was essentially world building in a way that contradicted the world in which he lived. He did world building that contradicted the caste system.
He did world building that contradicted how one engaged economically with life in India, with salt, with transportation. He did world building that contradicted a logic of violence. That was the logic of colonization that did not play with that narrative. And when he did so, he overthrew the greatest empire since Rome. And I think the job is to take a look at any society and look at look at all those elements. What is the origin story? What is the narrative? What is the myth?
What are the roles that we are occupying? How are they encoding in us this way of being and then saying, okay, what is another way of being? Can we embody that? Maybe we're going to embody that in a piece immersive theater. Maybe we're going embody that in a short story. There's incredible value in the adventures of the imagination, in worldbuilding, in allowing us to see another way of being. This is what Gandhi did when he traveled the world, before he got back to India.
This is what Che Guevara did. This is what revolutionaries always do. They go on journeys and they live in other worlds and they come back and say, Oh, I understand how it can be different. We need to do that. And we have the tools we can create, experiences that let us see in a different way. And once we've done that, then we can gather our friends and say, What if it were different? Hmm. We move between worlds when I'm in my home with my family, I'm in one world.
When I'm teaching at the college, I'm in a totally different world and I'm never that same person in both worlds. I'd be a real jerk to be acting like a fool with my wife, right? And I'd be like, really questionable. But acting as I did with my wife, with my students at recess. Right. And so that the totality of the context is the world. And so worlds have these qualities. Every world has a history or a myth, an origin story. Every world has a particular physics.
I'm talking about experiential physics, not Newtonian or Einstein in physics. All right. This is how you move around, how you affect things. Who can do what? How bodies behave. What's expected of. You, what is expected of you? Worlds also have populations and languages. What is code switching? Code switching is the way we we move between our roles in different populations and change our language to suit. And we can do it very fast.
We're actually quite brilliant at this, especially people who have had to move between a lot of worlds like immigrants. One way I want to frame the world building concept because world building and the fact that we live in many different worlds is a fundamental part of your book that I think is so fascinating and a crucial way to understand experience design. And the funny thing is that worldbuilding is usually associated with fantasy books or preparing a Dungeons and Dragons campaign.
Wikipedia describes world building because I did a little research coming into this as, quote, the process of constructing an imaginary world or setting sometimes associated with a fictional universe, unquote, but you don't see it confined to just imaginary worlds at all. You see, worldbuilding is something that we all partake in every day and exist in in our real world. Absolutely. And or you could flip it around.
I mean, what were the what were the framers of the Constitution of the United States? But people engaging in some kind of crazy sci fi, they were imagining a world out of some pieces of paper. Right. That is a mat creating an imaginary world and then stepping into it. And because they can imagine it, it could be real. And I think this is our first job to imagine the other world. I wanted to ask you to that you say in the book that a world is not neutral. What do you mean by that?
Every world has a set of values embedded in that. If you go into a courtroom, it is really strictly built like there are laws about how high up the judge said, what kind of wood you have. There are a very limited number of actual rules you can play. You could be in the audience, you could be a juror, you could be a judge, you could be the bailiff, you could be the defendant. Maybe less than ten different roles in that in that little world. And the ethic the core ethic is justice.
Is it well served? That's a different question. The court ethic of the design of that world is justice. You go into a playground. The core ethic of the design of that world is clay. If you go to a jail, what's the core ethic of the design of that world? Right? Misery or hypothetically repentance, but not. Often, right? It's a really important question and it's one that's been asked through the years.
And I think it's really important to take this notion in pretty deeply, because we look at a world as neutral. We say, well, the world is just what is. I say, it is not. I say the world has always embedded within it a value system.
If we take a look at that, values system and measured against the value system we would like to be living with, we can see all these different ways in which it would probably change every little design move from the architecture to the social dynamics, from the holidays to maybe what New Year's is from different roles we would play to the origins story. It's all it's all pointing like iron filings towards that moral core.
Why aren't we taking a look at what that moral core is and starting there instead of with the LED light bulbs? When we talk about world building, it is a chance to reimagine activism. I think that we're at this place culturally where activism is something that only certain people choose to do. It's it's almost a hobby for some or a job as opposed to something we're all inherently doing all the time. You know, you make the point that we create and recreate the worlds we inhabit.
So in a way, we're all activists. When I'm drive to work and then stuck in traffic, I am an activist on behalf of the fossil fuel industry and which is something I am an activist of, unfortunately, constantly, and especially in the 21st century.
I think that after the sixties, a lot of the institutions that were challenged by social change back then got better at incorporating a certain kind of activism that it's almost like in activist today is seen as someone that's participating in a game that's already been established and you're trying to win that game as opposed to what you're talking about with world building and activists like Rosa Parks, who refused to participate in the world of segregation, or Gandhi
who refused to participate in the world of British colonialism. It's not about playing a game that's already been established, but completely challenging the the design of the world and the roles and the expectations. And I think that's a really powerful way to reframe how to push for social change and what our role is. It's something that we're already all doing all the time. We're already designing experiences just by going through the motions of what's already been set up for us.
I think that also that points to a few things. One is we can have a much broader view of seeking social change if we think about not just going out and protesting, which is absolutely hazardous, has its place, but asking the question where we are most actively and generally participating in the design and maintenance of our world. We've been we're often told we have this list of bad things. You know, you're bad for driving, you're bad for taking the plane. You're bad for not voting.
You're bad for voting wrong. Right. And it's very it's very thing it's very checklist. Right. But we can actually step out and say, okay, first of all, we live in a world that is designed. We have stepped into it. We have a role. We only have so much agency to actually change the way we get to work, to actually change the way our house is insulated. We only have so much money, etc. There is there is a certain amount of privilege necessary to do a lot of these things.
And I think we need to have sympathy for the challenge that is just to live. But we can also broaden the question of how it is that we are participating in building and maintaining the world. And we each do it in different ways. Lots of ways we educate our children. We perhaps we're teachers and we're educating other people's children. Perhaps we are designers and we're designing things. So we have the opportunity to think about that design process in a totally different way.
Perhaps we are in a religious organization and we can say, How do I understand this religion, this origin story of this religion in a totally different way, in a way that supports this other view of the world I'd like to live in. We all have agency in various different ways and we can say, okay, maybe I'm not going to go out and protest because I need to get to work. But I am involved in this other this other mode of maintaining and reproducing the world, and I can work with that.
There are a thousand ways and. We're talking about origin story. There's a major way that I found that your ideas overlap with Ishmael. You know, in Ishmael talks about how a culture is a people who share a story. And this isn't just a story that people tell out loud. It often goes on, said, or is expressed more subtly. It's a story that people act out essentially. It's an imaginary game for grown ups.
So how does this fit in with how you see the role of narrative and worldbuilding and experience design? This is the origin story, right? It's the story. We act out both performatively and quietly, right? We have rituals in which we reenact them. What is July? What's happening on July 4th? What's happening on Independence Day? Why are we watching fireworks? We're out a joyous celebration of bombs exploding in air, shooting, exploding in.
And we're celebrating that violence we are reenacting historic. We're all historic re-enactors in this kind of symbolic way. Some people actually go and do that. Some people just go and play out Gettysburg or play out the American Revolution, dress up and that and more subtle ways in our lives. Once after we've gone and reinforced that narrative collectively, we go ahead and reinforce those narratives.
Personally, you look at religion, people are going and walking the stories of the various religions. You look at nationalism. People are walking those stories, people are reenacting them. And half of the of the purpose of events and holidays is to reinforce and reenact these narratives. There's a kind of norming. Some holidays don't work anymore. Nobody does much around Arbor Day. That's my favorite holiday. Every Arbor Day, I climb a tree, and I know that would be cool. Maybe I should do that.
All right, well, what if it were your favorite holiday? What would it take? How many people would have to be involved? What if Arbor Day was a spectacle on the scale of July, Fourth of Independence Day? And if it were, what narrative would we have to be reenacting around trees to actually be building the world we want to have? I think it's a perfect example. The the the the sort of facile nature of it tells us a lot.
We have the holiday, but it doesn't actually connect to a resonant narrative for us. We see in small scales communities like intentional communities, devotional communities, professional communities, the Apple campus, right?
These narratives are able to be developed and holidays and events are able to be developed that do do that right, that do sort of invent new modes of engaging with the narrative and that those narratives are incredibly powerful because is on board, because that's why they're there in the first place. They join that community for that reason, it helps to have a calendar that supports that. What does a calendar calendar as a way of walking the narrative of your world over time?
It is a dance score, essentially, and if you are dancing to the score of that calendar, you are telling the story again and again together, and eventually the dance is in your body. Yeah, well, that's the funny thing about enacting a story is because it involves a mindset shift, which is an abstract thing. It just takes place in your thoughts and how you view the world. But it's not just about shifting that mindset. It's actually about how you're playing.
Pretend that that mindset is real, how you're acting that out in the world, and there's this kind of interplay that you're describing where it needs some actual real world action as well. And by having maybe an event that separate from a normal day and bringing people together to act something out, it can help shift the mind in other people and make it more real over time.
One thing I'll because again, I want to bring you on because Ishmael leaves folks with these big picture changes that need to happen. We want to stop enacting Take your mythology, which puts simply tells us that the world belongs to us and we must conquer it. And we want to instead enact lever mythology, a lever story where we belong to the world. And the book kind of leaves it there. It's like, okay, so go off and enact that you belong to the world.
And I think it's very fair for many people to read. It's like, okay, how, how? And I wanted to ask you, as someone who is thinking a lot about this, obviously you know, the answer needs to be personalized. And what I respect so much from Daniel Quinn is that he's not prescribing specific steps that folks can take. It needs to be individual to where people are at, what their community needs, what they experience.
But I'm curious, how would you want people to frame asking themselves questions about how we go and enact the story that we belong to the world? I think that we're not going to do it by guilt tripping ourselves and guilt tripping one another. I don't know of any great historical change that was the result of a guilt trip. And I also think that we're and I think you brought this up earlier in the podcast.
I think that we have this really problematic end of our narrative story, which has an apocalypse. It sort of assumes we have all these post-apocalypse fictions and sort of assumes that's where we're going, where there's something that has been made exciting and appealing about that. I think that's a problem. I don't think we should be really excited about everything failing. Yeah. Yeah. Good news is we love worldbuilding. We just love it. Y y it is sci fi and fantasy.
It's just hop off the shelves in bookstores. While we was very, very so into Harry Potter and Game of Thrones, why is the imagination so set to flight? But by these great acts of worldbuilding, I don't know for sure, but I can say there's there's some excitement, at least for me, in stepping imaginatively into a whole other way of being. It's an invitation. It's a fantastical invitation. It's in a way, the same invitation that sacred books have. You could step into this whole other way of being.
And in doing so, you'll be different, you'll be among different people, and you can step imaginatively, esthetically even into this other way of being. I think we need to lay out these imaginative worlds and invite ourselves and others to step into them and those that can take place in zones of fiction, that can take place in immersive theater, that could take place in human management, that could take place in myriad different ways.
But it needs to be an invitation that speaks both to our sense of fantasy and our sense of intelligence, to our sense of responsibility and our sense of community. And if we can engage this love that we all have of worldbuilding, I think that we have an opportunity to make that fantasy real. Just as those who wrote the American Constitution did, just as Gandhi did with his imagination of an independent India, just as so many people did, or changed the world. They're just acts of the imagination.
But they all functioned, from the point of view of an invitation to a different world, not a list of things that we need to change. That's thing based design. That's fixing problems is not going to fix the problem. Being bold each in our own way and finding what is our version of stepping outside of the world we've been born into and trying to create world build for ourselves.
That feels like you're saying not just shaming us into doing the right things, but that feels actually exciting because I think for many of us, the world that we are inhabiting is not that exciting. It's it's pretty limiting and it's stressful and it's not something that we designed. Our friends didn't design it. It doesn't bring us closer to our neighbors. It doesn't have us feel optimistic about the world we live in. And there are certain realities that we can't control.
We can't control the world around us, but we can try to challenge the world and world, build it in a way that is more thrilling for us and wakes us up. One other thing I think is an interesting point, again, that I see some overlap with Ishmael is in episode seven, we talk about how to create a societal transformation. The goal is not to go into a boardroom and create a declaration, some abstract laws that we then go back out in in force.
But it's an intergenerational transformation that is focusing on what actually works for people. And so the way you put it is a good experience. Design is about the present moment and you must design for the unknown. It's implicitly not about controlling every factor, but creating enough of a structure and some guardrails that then chance and random circumstance. What other people need to bring in things that we can't possibly foresee can interact with it.
How do you find the balance between structure and the unknown when you're designing experiences? It's so important because without the unknown, there's no life. Without the unknown. We're not really inviting anybody to participate. We are trying to control people. And I think if we look at many of the experiments of the 20th century, you see the problem with trying to control people and the evils that emerge from that.
We need to trust that there is in the heart of most of the people that we are engaging with something great that has to be there and our designs need to be invitations to that greatness. Our designs need to be invitations to the imagination. If we find a fellow traveler who is asking the same questions as we're asking, our job is not to give them the answer, but it's to provide a context in which their brilliance can participate in creating that answer.
In the book, you say that the the unknown, the uncontrollable is a feature, an experience design, not a bug. And it's a bug in regular design and it needs to be controlled for it. This is one of the major changes and we saw in the 20th century people were trying to change society by fiat and before that as well. But really it was with good with good industrial means in the 20th century. And yeah, a little extra gusto. Yeah, a lot of gusto.
But I think one of the things I've seen as a teacher is that people are rarely asked to find the answer themselves. They're they're generally asked to choose between options that are put in front of them. I think what a great leader does is provide the possibility for whatever is brilliant in those people.
Whatever is longing, whatever is whatever, might allow a person's basic question, their their conscience to align with the world you've created, to come out and be a general take part in the creation of a better world. This is our job as experience designers. The designer says, This is your job. You do X, the experience designer says, Here's the world we're trying to create.
We want to create a world which has perhaps something that is not a take or mythology, that loves the planet, that has a different relationship with the planet. And we don't have all the answers, but we want to invite you and support you and love you in the process of finding that together. This is a place and a community and a narrative that will make that possible you are invited to step in.
And I think anybody who's had a great experience of education has felt that that was what their teacher, their professor, their instructor brought to them. Not they did the system well. Mm. For people who want to help generate a societal transformation in their own way, want help redesign the experience of civilization, of society, what would you suggest they ask themselves? I think the first thing they would have to ask themselves is what would that world look like?
I imagine what that world would look like. Have I had an experience of a better world? And then they can ask, What is my role in building the world? That is not that. And what role have I played in pushing the world towards that. Mhm. And then things start going and the next question I think is who can help me in this, who's working with me on this. Right. Where is my community. And then we have energy and then change can happen. Thanks for listening and you to Abraham for joining us today.
You can find a link to his book, Experience Design, a participatory manifesto. In our show notes. Until next time, I hope you'll consider what kind of real world world building you might want to take part. How would you redesign? How you and those around you experience the world? And I'd love to hear what you think. So feel free to reach out and leave a comment on our Patria and to give you a sense of the road ahead. This is going to be a summer of conversation.
Each month we'll speak with a new fellow traveler. We meet along the way. And then in September, we'll continue with episodes from our flagship series and explore ideas from authors, thinkers and, you know, human nature odyssey related things. Our odyssey is long and the road is winding. Thank you for being a part of the journey. And if you'd like to help keep the journey going, please share this show with a friend.
Leave a review wherever you enjoy your podcasts and consider joining our Patreon there you'll find more from this conversation with Abraham and other audio extras, transcripts of episodes and audiobook readings. Your support helps make this podcast possible. As always, our theme music is Celestial Soda Pop by Ray Lynch. You can find a link in our Shownotes notes and thank you to Michael for his help with this episode. Talk with you soon.