Ra Uru Hu was the founder and messenger of the Human Design System. He was a beloved teacher, friend, husband, father, sibling, and son. Born as Alan Robert Krakower on April 9, 1948, at 00:05 AM in Montreal, Canada, Ra Uru Hu touched the lives of countless people around the world.

As we approach what would have been his 75th birthday, we celebrate his life and legacy by sharing a recording of an exchange between Ra and his eldest son Loki, then a 16-year-old high-schooler, who interviewed his father as part of a media studies project. This candid 11-minute exchange provides a unique glimpse into Ra’s personal life.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Montreal, Quebec in Canada. Great town actually, because it was very different. It wasn't a typical North American city. It had a kind of European, French flavor. It was a pretty hip place. When I think back to it, it was a great place to grow up. I went to school there, went to university there, Sir George Williams University. It was basically the formative years in my life. I was there until, I think I was 20 or 21 years old. I was lucky. I grew up in a good home, it was cultured, there was lots of music and art. The thing that when I think back to my past is how much pressure there was on how you were going to survive in life. I think that was really the thing that I remember most about growing up in that kind of an environment. There was all this pressure on "What are you going to do? What are you going to be?" And I didn't know. I mean, I really didn't know. I had no idea. So yeah, it was a great way to grow up. Yet at the same time, it seemed like everything about life was what you were going to do and how you were going to survive. All those patterns laid out in front of you.

Why did you leave Canada in 1983?

Oh, I don't know. That's as much a mystery as anything else. Life is full of those mysteries. I guess I could come up with reasons, if you know what I mean. People do that all the time. People are always making up reasons. It was obviously time for me. I was in a very different life. I was running a media company and I was making television commercials and doing specials for TV and stuff like that, rock and roll videos. I was a pioneer in all of that. One morning I woke up and that was it. I honestly don't know why. I mean, I do today from hindsight, having seen what happened to me when I took that journey. But I was a legitimate, disappeared person. I didn't even know where I had gone, if you know what I mean. I just, from one day to the next, it was time to go.

What happened in Ibiza?

Oh, you could write novels about what happened to me in Ibiza. I guess for me, Ibiza is the place where my life really began, and it began as Ra. My first person that I met asked me my name, and I heard myself say, "Ra," there was no "Bert." I knew something was happening, as they say. Basically, I went through a deconstruction process. I grew up in the upper middle class, well-educated, all of those things. I grew up in a world that was dominated by materialism. All of a sudden I was a wild man. I mean, I was living in a tree.

All of those things that had been so important in terms of culturally what you're supposed to be as an adult and all that, it just all began to just fall away. And the balance for me while I was going through that process was that I was teaching in the local country school, which was really one of the better experiences I had in my early years in Ibiza. And slowly a new life in a sense unfolded. I was about to go through some very bizarre and exotic experiences, and I went through a period of preparation to get there.

Can you tell us about the encounter?

See, I never would've believed anybody like me, ever. I think I was born skeptical, and I thought of myself as a nihilist when I arrived here on the island. I met all these weird people that were into all kinds of stuff, been to the east, and they followed gurus, and they all had all this kind of stuff. I didn't know anything about any of that. I was neither spiritual nor mystical nor religious. I wasn't any of those things. So for me, the encounter is something else. For me personally, the encounter was a wakeup to how blind I had been in my life, how ignorant I had been in terms of the assumptions that I made about the nature of being and the way things work.

For me, that was very special. I think it's the most special thing of all is to know that there's something beyond the veil here. There's something beyond the mask that we all see. The other side of it, of course, is what it brought. That is, the experience in and of itself is really extraordinary because it all had to do with something that was logical. I mean, most crazy people who have crazy experiences, because that's basically the way you can categorize it, something tells them a story. They so-called channel this or they get that or whatever, and Pleiadeans are talking to them and whatever. I didn't have anything like that. I went to school. I was taught a system, which is what I've been doing ever since. So from that perspective, it's really a phenomenal thing. I mean, I look at it from the outside at this point in my life. I look at it and I just say, "Wow, what a thing to happen." And then I look at all the people in the world that are impacted by it and it's just—you don't even like to think about it all because it's too much. I just like to stick with my business.

What is your response to those that say Human Design is just for profit?

(Laughs) that's sweet. Well, if Human Design... You know, I'm an entrepreneur. Everybody I've ever trained in Human Design is an entrepreneur, everyone. The only way that people in the world know about Human Design is that I've managed to make some money doing it. Otherwise, nobody would know. I mean, nobody would know. This is the modern world. Human Design is two things. If you're going to take an education in Human Design, then Human Design is really for profit. We run a school, we pay teachers, all those kinds of things. But if you want to find out about your own Design, if you want to get all the information that you need in order to operate correctly in this life, you can get it all for free. I mean, we offer so much stuff for free it's really quite amazing. I mean everything: free software and free education and all kinds of free films, and I mean it's endless what we offer that's free. So it's both sides of the coin. There's the general knowledge that's there for anybody anywhere in the world, and there's professionalism, people who want to be trained as a professional. You go to school and you pay a fee.

What makes Human Design different from other systems?

Well, it is all other systems. I mean, the thing that makes Human Design so fascinating is that it's a synthesis. It's not some isolated strain, it's a synthesis. It's a synthesis of esoteric and exoteric knowledge of everything from physics to astrology. So you have all of these components that are integrated into this one system. It's what makes Human Design in the end for those who experiment with it so incredibly accurate, because its traditional roots are into every place that humanity has ever looked, and every way they do look. I mean, the grounding of Human Design is that it displays your genetic imprinting. So we have this incredible flow of movement of information that is derived from history and derived from modern science. All comes together in one thing. It's what makes Human Design so profound.

What do you like to do in your free time?

What do I like to do in my free time? Two things: I love to watch movies and I like to garden, and I think that both of those things, they're very relaxing. I mean, the one thing that I've done all my life is play music. I play music every day. I love to play, I love to sing. It makes me feel good, it tunes me. But I find that because I teach so much, and I teach at a very specific level, that I like to get to those places where I don't have to think, and movies do that. You get lost in them. I do. It's very easy for me to just surrender to a movie, even the worst of movies, and just surrender to them. And the other is gardening. I've discovered this late in my life that it's something that I really enjoy. Just raking leaves, pulling out weeds, just being in contact with the earth.

Do you use social networks?

I use Facebook. I think it's amazing. I don't know how they managed to do all that, I really don't. Because to handle the accounts of 350 million people is really an amazing thing. But I think that it's a fascinating medium. It is something really new that's arisen out of the virtual. I mean, I've seen everything in my lifetime now, and I've always been attracted to technologies. And I must say that Facebook is really quite remarkable. It allows a lot of people to have access. I use my Facebook page as a place to just keep people informed, give them all kinds of free stuff to look at. And it really is a way to connect to anyone anywhere. It's like the way I teach. I mean, I teach in a virtual environment. My classrooms are always filled with people who are from literally around the world. You never get a classroom with less than seven or eight countries being represented. It's one of the exciting things about living in a virtual age, and I think Facebook is a way of tapping into the collective consciousness, because that's really what it is, it is this flow. If you look at a live feed on anybody's Facebook page, you know, you see this live flow of contemporary consciousness—for good or for bad, for silly or brilliant, it's just interesting to watch it flow.