Transformative Rites of Passage - A Conversation with Abby Falik

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

So imagine if it was a shared expectation as young people entered adulthood that they had some form of launch year, some kind of humbling, disorienting experience that helps them make sense of who they are, what the world needs, and how they're going to drive impact at the intersection.

Hi, thanks for joining me for another episode of the Future Learning Design Podcast with me, Tim Logan. The podcast is brought to you with the support of Notosh. This week's episode is a great follow-on from the previous episode with Alex Budak and Wida Mahler on the way that education and social impact work are connecting more and more. It was a huge pleasure to be able to connect with Abi Falik this week, who is an award-winning social entrepreneur committed to launching the generation of leaders that our world needs now. In 2010, she founded Global Citizen Year, a nonprofit that uses the transition after high school to teach the real 21st century skills: resilience, empathy, agency, and leadership. As CEO, she raised and deployed over $65 million in scholarships and equipped thousands of diverse emerging leaders to change the world for good. In 2022, she joined the Emerson Collective as an entrepreneur-in-residence to incubate new models to transform how young people learn, launch, and lead. Using Global Citizen Year as a blueprint, she's on a mission to reinvent the gap year as an accessible, purposeful, and transformative rite of passage. She's a recognized expert on social innovation, leadership, and the changing landscape of education, and has been profiled in the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. Abby's a frequent speaker and has been featured in many forums such as the Aspen Ideas Festival, the Obama Foundation Summit, and the Fast Company Innovation Festival. In 2018, Abi was named one of America's top 25 philanthropy speakers by the Business of Giving. Abi currently serves on the advisory boards of World Learning, Teach for All, and Harvard Business School, as well as on Fast Company's Impact Council.

Hi, Abi.

Tim! Hi! Good morning.

Good morning.

How are you?

Well, good.

Firstly, thank you, Abby, for joining me on the podcast.

Thank you. I'm really delighted. Uh, been looking forward to this conversation.

Brilliant. Well, so clearly you're passionate about transforming education, higher education, and maybe we can get on to K-12 a little bit as well, which is more my space. But I think the gaps in between those systems and some of the transitions in the way that young people move from one to the other, or— because I love what you're doing in that kind of intersection between different sectors, which I think is such an important space to be working in because when you're in the weeds and in the kind of depths of one particular sector like higher education or K-12, it's just really difficult to affect change. But I think there's something magic potentially in the intersections, which I— that caught my eye particularly.

Thank you for reflecting that back. That's helpful to, to hear. And I do feel like it's so core to how I envision the future of education also, which is preparing young people at those intersections, whereas I think historically we've tracked kids in a way that it sort of misses the opportunity in the connectivity between things.

Brilliant. Well, so I mean, firstly, you are, we should say you're on a farm in Argentina practicing what you're preaching as you're off with your family around traveling the world and having some amazing experiences.

So yeah, if COVID taught us anything, it was to pay attention when the stars align. And my husband and I both had an opportunity to create some space between one professional chapter and the next. And we decided that our young boys, who are now 6 and 8, were prime age for a global adventure. And it's really allowed me to practice what I've preached about learning in new contexts, learning beyond the classroom, and also for me to shift my perspective again, to have some space from the water I've been swimming in as I start to envision new possibilities for what I'm building next.

Brilliant.

Well, that's amazing. And actually, I mean, that's the first thing I wanted to ask you was that one of your pieces you wrote, which I loved, was about the power of the pause and finding that space where we can have a bit of chance to reflect. So perhaps first off, you could just talk a bit about how did you end up in this kind of space where you could see that power of the pause, whether that's space between high school and higher education, or, you know, the other places that we can find pauses for reflection and potential transformation or development. What led you to those those kinds of insights and starting your career building around that kind of idea?

Well, I'll say that it didn't start that way, which is probably part of much of what has drawn me to this concept and to pausing as an antidote to so much of the freneticness that's hardwired into our culture and our paradigms and our educational treadmill and conveyor belt. For sure. I was, you know, what we would now call an excellent sheep. I was really good at playing the school game, excellent at what I was doing, got into Stanford, but, you know, had little idea why I was doing these things. And nobody had really encouraged me to step back and ask bigger questions about what I wanted from my education. Who was I when nobody was expecting things of me? What did I do when nobody was watching? What were the questions I couldn't not chase down answers to? And I remember reading this quote by Viktor Frankl, which is still, you know, on my computer when I reboot it in the morning. But it says, between stimulus and response, there's a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. And I share that now, and I revisit it daily because I think the power of a pause may hold the key to our personal freedom and the opportunity to move the world in the direction of what I believe it's trying to become, which is more equitable, more peaceful, more sustainable. And it is the insight that between an action and a reaction, we have the power to choose our response. And that might be between one breath and the next. That could be the moment we wake up in the morning choosing to embed a, an intention-setting transition between getting up from bed and launching full force into our day. It could be a day of unplugging each week. It could be, as I do, I take a week each year to unplug completely. I do a silent meditation retreat. And then I would expand it even further, which is what if we took a year each decade to step out of our habitual ways of living, to change our perspective and to recognize that we choose our choices. And I believe that social change and the trajectory of the world depends on our ability to shape ourselves and young people's futures. And so in many ways, this notion of creating a pause in the transition is so consistent with everything I'm focused on practicing, uh, but also how I believe we can transform our education.

Yeah, that's so good. I mean, as you were saying, that kind of treadmill that, you know, we're, we're so often pushed into that kind of productivity mindset and mustn't waste time, must maximize, and it is actually in order to kind of experience the agency that you were, you were kind of referring to there, you do need a moment sometimes to just to stop and kind of reflect and understand that as you say, you do have choice and that's the systems that we've built really don't prioritize that, do they?

No. In fact, they prioritize the opposite, which is reactivity, speed, production, tangible outcome, up into the right row. And I mean, it's very obvious what that's doing on a planetary level. And hopefully it's becoming more apparent what it's doing to us individually as well, which is we are more stressed, more burnt out, less healthy with, you know, higher incidence of mental health challenges than we've ever had before. And it is the speed and the emphasis on performance, perfection, and valuing more how things look than how they feel. And so a key element for me in thinking about what the future of learning and future of school needs to look like is helping young people learn their own minds, helping them understand the relationship between themselves and their thoughts. We can't stop our thoughts, but we don't have to believe them all. So again, that's the pause. It's that juncture. It's the space between a thought and a reaction or necessarily believing it to be true. And fundamentally it comes down to knowing our own agency. And to me, that's the key to building the world that's possible is unleashing a generation of young people who know their agency to drive that kind of change.

100%. No, I completely agree. But, but as you were saying, sometimes we need a bit of a prompt or a support. And what I've understood, I mean, the amazing work that you've done since 2009 building Global Citizen Year is to kind of provide that support because it, you know, the treadmill, the productivity, the performance, sometimes it's driven by fear, right? You know, fear of parents or fear of students of falling behind. And therefore that idea of pausing and saying, at the end of high school, look around, look up, look at, you know, just understand the world. Who am I? What do I want? Where am I going? Rather than which the system is telling you to do is just keep going, just onto the next thing, apply for that Ivy League or, you know, go do all the things that the world is telling you you should kind of rush to rather than looking up and looking around. And so What was the initial kind of impetus behind you then creating Global Citizen Year to kind of structure that? You know, maybe some of the— what did you find as you were building that 14 years ago?

So my, my vision for Global Citizen Year came very much from my own lived experience. I had finished high school and desperately wanted to take some time to, as you say, look up, look around, look inward, look beyond what had been laid out as a path ahead of me. And I couldn't find an opportunity that matched what I was looking for. I recognized that I could join a religious mission if that compelled me, or military service, but there was nothing that was in the service of our shared humanity and of me learning myself that would allow me to leave home, carry some questions, find new teachers, reorient my relationship to myself and my life and my education before I went to college. And I remember calling the Peace Corps who said, go to college first, you need a college degree, call us in 4 years and feeling really frustrated that there was this missed opportunity in that really juicy developmental transition between childhood and adulthood, dependence and independence, high school and college, or whatever comes next. And there was no mainstream, accessible, expected, encouraged pathway that would help young people launch in new ways. And so ever since I was frustrated when I was 18, I have focused on how could we make that new pathway available to many more and more diverse young people worldwide.

That's brilliant. And so what, what were the kind of initial stages of doing that? And because obviously the, the signifier of Global Citizen is kind of, as you said, perhaps to give it a differentiator away from something religious, as you say, or something more militaristic, or something more like the Peace Corps. But How important is that kind of idea, that concept of developing global citizens? Is that an intentional part of the outcome of, of Global Citizen Year? Or is, as I say, is that just a kind of a way to differentiate it from the other things that might structure that year?

No, it was built that way very deliberately with this notion that we live on one fragile shared planet and we are all on the same team, whether or not we care to realize it yet. And quite literally our fate and survival depend on our ability to see beyond the borders we've constructed. And it can sound sort of woo-woo to talk about global consciousness and connectivity. But to me, it's the hardest data we have is that if we don't shape our behaviors in the spirit and service of something beyond ourselves and where we come from, if we don't recognize that our climate crisis, and our migration and polarization and sort of the threats that face us cannot be solved by one country or community or culture alone. And so the opportunity for young people to feel a sense of affiliation, identity, and social obligation beyond where they come from is really at the heart of the kind of work that I want to be doing in the world.

Yeah. And, and how initially, kind of when you're thinking about looking to the high school experience coming out of that and then looking on towards the university or college experience, was there any kind of pushback or challenge or what were the particular difficulties of positioning that kind of an experience? Because as we've said, the power in the pause, right? But sometimes, as I also said, people are reluctant to take the pause because it feels like, well, everyone else is gonna be moving on with their career and I'm gonna get left behind. So what I'm interested in, what were some of the kind of initial challenges around just kind of persuading people that this was a good idea to take that pause?

There is such a fear of missing out, a fear of slowing down, a fear of getting off track. I think in the US in particular, there's a sense of don't lose momentum. You might get behind. Parents overparenting and not wanting to disadvantage their kid in some way. I mean, I'm quite convinced that the disadvantage of the future will be moving straight from high school into more school without having taken some time to figure out what your questions are, which ultimately will equip you to be a much better student and, and a much more engaged citizen and leader over time. So I think while other cultures and societies around the world, including in the UK and across Europe and in religious groups and others, have recognized that there is the opportunity for a developmental formation experience at that juncture as you're leaving home, but it has never been normalized in the culture in the US or more broadly. So yes, I think there was a lot of pushback initially and there continues to be though in the US. I am sensing that the conversation is really starting to change and COVID has accelerated that transition, that transformation, I would say, where 50% of Gen Z now questions the value of college.

Yeah.

And everybody is stepping back and asking, is this the best or only path to getting the skills and credentials I need next? And there's much more interest in learning how to do things than just how to know things.

Yeah.

And I think we're on the cusp of a really dramatic reimagining of what a higher education can be.

Yeah. I mean, that, that implication of the kind of broader systemic change, I'd love to get into a little bit with you a bit later, but just thinking, I mean, personally, I absolutely benefited from stopping. So I, I graduated high school and then I didn't go to university until I was 20, and so I had two— in the UK they're called gap years, right? Or in Europe they've become known as gap years. And I struggle with that terminology because actually so much of my own learning and growing happened in those years. And I— it's not like it was a gap between important periods of my life. So it's interesting, right? Because it's like calling it a gap year is almost like, well, I'm just going to pause and not do very much, and then I'll go back to the important stuff. And I think flipping that script would be interesting to, you know, because that is where the good stuff happens, right?

I couldn't agree more, and I'm so glad you pointed that out. I hate the term gap year, and in fact, I think that's a lot of what's held this concept back because it suggests that it is the absence of learning, that it is an unconstructive pause in some way, whereas in reality, when this year is done, or years, or period of time is done by design, not by default, and in a really deliberate, intentional way, it becomes the experience that fills in the gaps that are left by classroom learning. And so we need new language. I prefer to call it a launch year, a purpose year. There's so many better ways to describe what you get from these kinds of experiences as opposed to what you might lose or miss out on.

Yeah, I don't know. Are you aware of the folk high school movement in the Scandinavian countries? I've been interested in that recently because I think that's the historic example of that kind of space being created quite intentionally. And that was a national citizenship initiative to start with, but I think it's evolved into something much more personal and about personal growth. But I find that interesting because that's an experiment in a way, a national or a regional experiment in using that space as you have done with Global Citizen Year for the growth.

Yes. Well, and so I am obsessed with the Nordic folk schools and Nina Anderson, The Nordic Secret. And I remember reading the book and thinking, This is it. This is the insight, which is take kids out of their comfort zone, give them an experience of connecting across lines of difference, focus on inner development, not just memorization and regurgitation. And what you just said set off a light bulb for me right now, which is what's needed in today's world. So those schools evolved as a response to the Industrial Revolution and a recognition that you had all of these rural communities and citizens who were going to need to feel connected to a national identity as they moved in towards cities. Now, what's needed today is the next evolution of that model, which is not just developing national identity, it is developing a global identity. So what is the equivalent of those Nordic folk schools at a global level? And I've started to envision a network of global leadership academies worldwide where young people enroll after high school for an immersive kind of experience with other young people from around the world they wouldn't have otherwise met, developing the inner reserves, tools, and skills that are most essential in today's world, but that schools are not equipped for.

100% agree. I think it's such an important space. But one of the things I am interested though is often with the, as has been called the gap year or those life-changing personal experiences that you often go and have in that space, whether it's traveling or often doing more structured, some kind of volunteer social impact kind of project work. The impact often of those years, or certainly for me, if I'm speaking personally, the impact really was for me. I'm not actually sure how much positive impact I had on other people around me, but the learning and the growing, absolutely, I was the beneficiary of, right? And there's this, I love this term voluntourism, kind of idea that we go abroad and to kind of support communities in need, dig wells, build schools, all these different projects that, you know, we know often they're well-intentioned, but there is a danger around that kind of voluntourism of really who are the beneficiaries and it, and the power structures and power relations in play and all of those kind of complex dynamics and inequalities that are, are involved in that. I wondered, you know, just in relation perhaps to Global Citizen Year, how did you engage with some of those ideas and think through those?

It was very clear to me from the outset that the primary beneficiary and the primary intended outcome would be measured by our young participants, our fellows' learning and development. That, you know, I was already at the time, and I am now even more skeptical of anything that suggests this is about taking action or having a local impact.

Right.

The inappropriateness of sending young people away from their home to be of service or to be helpful before they've actually had that kind of experience of being deeply humbled by the world, exactly as you're saying, reinforces certain neo-colonial dynamics, power dynamics. Exactly.

Yeah.

And good intentions are not enough. So they often do more harm than good. And they often emphasize what I call the feel-good over the real good. And I had early experiences like that in high school and during college, spending time in Latin America working on different projects. And I look back and I, I cringe. I see how well-intended I was, but how misguided it was to think there was anything I could do that was of real lasting local impact or value. But what I did learn was how little I knew. And this was key to the design of the Global Citizen Year Fellowship model. Which was we needed a model where young people would stay longer and go deeper than traditional fly-by volunteerism programs. There are plenty of those out there. They are now a dime a dozen. You can find and sign up for a Take Action trip somewhere around the world. And the unfortunate part is it often reinforces preconceived ideas about, about power, about a culture you don't yet know, about your role in fixing or saving or helping. And so the Global Citizen Year fellowship model immersed young people for 8 months living with a local family, working on a local project, not as a volunteer, but as an apprentice, where their job was to observe, to look at what was happening from their own perspective, to figure out how that was affecting their own personal growth and development. And I, I will never forget one of our early fellows coming back from 8 months in Senegal, and I sat down with him and asked him what the most salient learning had been. And he said, you know, at the end of 8 months, I feel like I had started to learn how little I knew, and I had finally begun to form a really good question. To me, that felt like success. The whole concept of service learning needs to be flipped on its head. It needs to be about learning service. We need young people to be humbled by the world and really understand their appropriate place in it. Before we even pretend that you've got anything to give or do.

It is so interesting. It's such a delicate balance, isn't it? Because at the same time as trying to essentially empower young people to experience their own agency and all the things we've said, but also I think that's so powerful, that idea of learning their own humility as well, right? That's a huge part of understanding context. And I mean, it's almost like an anthropologist. I then went on and studied anthropology and that's what kind of rang a bell there for me is like, you know, putting them in that apprentice role, I find really interesting 'cause you're almost saying, yeah, just observe, just participant observation as you do in anthropology. It's like you're, you're there, you're part of it somehow, but you're not trying to bring any answers. In fact, you're just trying to, as you said, develop questions. That's so interesting.

Yeah, I would, I would add to what I shared about the length and depth of immersion that to me is really what what distinguished the Global Citizen Year Fellowship and what I think the world needs more of and has too little of. In addition to that, it is a scaffolding of really thoughtful, deliberate curriculum. So it's recognizing that before a young person leaves home, they need a grounding in a framework for interpreting and understanding the experiences they're about to have. And there's only so much that can stick in advance, but we brought our fellows together for a week of a deep orientation that I sort of think of more as a disorientation before they travel.. And the idea there was to give them a, a broader context for thinking about their role. Again, their, their intentions could be whatever they were, but it's about being connected to a curriculum, some coaching, a cohort beyond your lived experience. What are the things that can continually check you and keep you putting your experience in a broader context that I think can be a really important counterforce to all of the traditional dynamics and their, you know, and how problematic they are.

No, I think, I mean, I would agree. I think it's often a lot of these, as you said, kind of dime a dozen, perhaps slightly less well thought through initiatives and don't have that level of thought around some kind of a curriculum. I like, I like the fact you're calling it a disorientation. I think that's—

Yeah. Yeah. I remember a story of a mission trip. A group of kids had gone from Texas into Mexico to build a school, and it was months after they'd returned that they learned that every night when these high school kids were sleeping, community members came and undid the bricks that they had laid and rebuilt them so that they could actually end up with a solid construction. And it was just this moment of, yeah, what business in the world would these high school students have coming into a place to build a school, let alone sort of figure out what could be taught in that school. But I think it's just a really important reminder of how little sense that kind of approach makes and how crucial it is, back to our conversation about global citizenship or responsible leadership, how crucial it is that we see our roles as collaborators, as equals, as partners, as humans with different perspectives on the world. And at the intersection of our perspectives come solutions that we might not have been able to come up with on our own.

Yeah. One of the things you shared about the fact that you are currently and now kind of thinking about this idea of global rites of passage, I also think is fascinating. And maybe you could say a bit more about that, but I think just from what we've been talking about, that idea of this transformative experience as well as some kind of guided curriculum or, or support in that learning, I think that's, that's a really interesting idea. That as you also said, the primary beneficiary is the person going on that Global Citizen Year rather than the, you know, the welcoming community. But there's something really powerful in that idea of a rite of passage, I think.

Yeah. And again, it's something that religions and cultures and countries around the world have honored. Exactly.

Yeah.

And I think there's a moment and opportunity to envision that at a global scale. So imagine if, It was a shared expectation as young people entered adulthood that they had some form of launch year, some kind of humbling, disorienting experience that helps them make sense of who they are, what the world needs, and how they're going to drive impact at the intersection. And I envision, you know, disorientations, immersive experiences, rigorous reflection, connection with other young people from around the world so that over time we build a critical mass of humans who are oriented in a very new way, who understand their own agency, who have the resilience and empathy and vision that's needed to take risks and drive the change that's needed. And that we've, you know, replaced our notion of higher education with something that's much higher than that type of education.

Yeah. And it's deeply, I mean, this is kind of stating the blinding obvious in a way, but it's deeply experiential.

And I think, yeah, I've just finished reading The Extended Mind by Annie Paul, which I think is just a gorgeous book and rigorously researched around all of the ways that sort of brain-bound learning is constrained and the importance of learning through experience, learning through physical expression and movement, learning in coordination with others. I mean, we're seeing even in the last few weeks, the gains in AI's ability to do things like, you know, write high school essays that are going to get a passing grade and pass the college entrance exam. No longer can we outsmart the bots by feeding our brains with more facts. We need to extend our notion of what it means to prepare the mind. And so maybe it's not play in the context that I'm thinking about, but I do think of it as practice and reflection.

Yeah.

And practice in the real world and then a structure around reflecting rigorously on what these experiences might be teaching you.

Yeah. I mean, I think you're right. Annie Paul's book is amazing and I've spoken with Olga Yoshie-Hansen on the podcast before about some of that. And she's spoken with Annie on her podcast. There's, you know, we've been talking about that idea of, yeah, The embodied mind, the extended mind, that kind of the idea of collaborating with others and that kind of collective distributed intelligence that also comes when we connect across. And none of these things really is our K-12 or higher education space taking seriously yet. Not enough, right? And that's why—

No, no.

I think that's why the spaces in between are quite interesting because they are opportunities to to do something differently, as you were doing with Global Citizen Year, and hopefully, you know, you're doing still now in different ways. So how then could we begin to support change up the age range into higher education, and also, I hope, down into K-12, to bring some of these ideas of embodied learning and really deeply experiential learning and all the things we've been talking about?

How can we support change there, do you I think it starts by stepping back to ask, what do today's young people most need to learn? And then we need to redesign the systems around that. And that is not a slight tinkering around the edges or a changing of the curriculum in small, modest ways. That, in my view, is a complete and total overhaul. That means that the future of school looks nothing like school. We need to redesign our institutions around embodied learning, experiential learning, competencies. We need businesses and institutions of higher education on board with issuing new types of credentials that don't just value seat time, but they actually give credit for what I believe are the power skills of the future. I have a framework I'm using called the REAL 21st Century Skills. R-E-A-L. Resilience, empathy, agency/adaptability, and then leadership. Leadership as a lifelong practice, not a position or an arrival point or a title or a salary. And I think if we could come up with some shared framework around the new credential that is the currency of the 21st century, the schools then respond. And, and whether it's looking up toward higher education or back toward the K-12 system, we're going to need real pressures that show that real skills are what's most needed and the way they've done things before no longer works.

Yeah, yeah. I find that, I mean, that whole space of those kinds of competencies and dispositions also really fascinating, especially as they feed into the way we assess them with credentials. Because I think there is also a danger, and I'm seeing this a bit, that within the current system, we'll take things like resilience or empathy or adaptability or leadership, and we will almost weaponize them with an assessment system as it currently stands, right? So you end up up with this kind of constantly looking for objective evidence of progress in these particular competencies. So we define them right down to the last, and then we create rubrics, and then we kind of almost walk young people through this developing progression of these skills, which some people might argue, do argue, that that strips out the magic and it kind of, it almost kills them because they're not human skills anymore. They've been turned into these recipes of certain actions, and suddenly we're back in these kind of treadmill systems that we were talking about at the beginning. And so I, that's one of the things I find interesting is that there's again, well-intentioned work around competencies and those dispositions, but we've gotta shift the way that they are considered and evidenced and assessed as well. Because otherwise my, my fear is that we end up kind of recreating the same problem, but with a different object of analysis, if you like.

Yeah, I totally agree. And I think assessment is a lot of what's gotten us to a system that is standardized and likely measuring the wrong thing. We measure things that are easy to measure, but that are actually very clearly not the most important things to be teaching and learning. And so we need to combine new modes of teaching and learning with new forms of assessing that competencies and abilities have been mastered, not just that tests have been passed.

Absolutely. And I mean, it's like, it's like trying to define what should be a transformative experience in a, you know, in this amazing launch year, right? It's like trying to pin that down and say, well, you have to meet this criteria. So you have to do this, you have to have this kind of part of the experience, and then you have to do this because you have to show this competency. And suddenly you're really limiting the type of possibility that can emerge from that experience. And I find that an interesting tension, you know, to a certain extent we need that level of assessment and evidencing, but how do we create it in a way that's very human and the way that can be, you know, reflective of your own personal experience, right? So just to finish up, I don't know whether there's anything that you wanted to reflect on in relation to some of the things that are emerging for you right now, because obviously you've now moved on from Global Citizen Year and onto exciting projects. As you said, you're on a pause, so maybe just some of those things are still emerging, but where do you, where do you hope to be putting your energies next? What's developing for you?

Well, I'm really fortunate to be spending this year as what's called an entrepreneur in residence with the Emerson Collective. So this is Laurene Powell Jobs' philanthropy, and so I've got a salary for the year to be entrepreneurial, and it's allowed me to step back and recognize the impact of what we built with the Global Citizen Year Fellowship and to now start thinking about new paths to scaling what works, recognizing that no one nonprofit alone is ever going to scale a solution to the size of what's really needed. But we need to be thinking in broader cross-sector, cross-context ways about how we scale interventions to the size of what's needed. And so I am thinking about a whole new set of opportunities that both change perspectives, practice, and possibilities for young people and, and I'll be excited to share more as it emerges.

Brilliant. No, very good. And hopefully you'll be joined on the journey by some of the, the big monolithic education organizations also hopefully thinking about this. And this is my, my optimism speaking rather than any kind of realism, but I, I hope that the things that you are building will inspire some of the education systems or schools, at least colleges, universities to push into a bit more of this kind of work. 'Cause I think it's absolutely essential.

I, I know I know they will. I know they will. I think what's needed right now are sort of unifying, bold visions that are disruptive and not just more of the same. And I think the pressures on our current approach to education will continue to build in ways that lead all institutions toward thinking in very new ways about what their purpose is and how they measure success.

Great.

Well, thank you, Abby. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you, and thank you for joining me from your farm in Argentina, and I wish you I wish you all the best as this emerges. Very exciting stuff.

Thank you so much. It's been great to talk.

Thanks, Abby. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.