Dhru Purohit Show - Breaking Free of Our Brain’s Negativity Bias to Create a Better Future with Ari Wallach

Episode Date: October 6, 2022

This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers and WHOOP. Many of the problems we face today, from climate change to work anxiety, are the result of short-term thinking. We are constantly bombarded by notifications and “breaking news” that overwhelm our central nervous systems, forcing us to react in the moment and ultimately disconnecting us from what truly matters. But there is a solution.  Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru talks to Ari Wallach about how we face challenges that require us to think beyond our individual life spans to the impact we have on future generations. They discuss how we can become the ancestors the future needs through an applied mindset Ari calls Longpath that implements shifts in thinking, decision-making, and behavior that move our society and species toward future-consciousness.  Ari Wallach is a futurist and social systems strategist. He is the founder and Executive Director of Longpath Labs, an initiative focused on bringing long-term thinking and coordinated behavior to the individual, organizational, and societal realms in order to ensure humanity flourishes on an ecologically thriving planet Earth for centuries to come.  In this episode, we dive into:    -Why we’re so driven by short-term behavior and thinking (2:05) -How short-term thinking gets us into trouble (4:10) -What is driving our short-term thinking (7:27) -The principles of the Longpath perspective (15:10) -How the world is getting better, not worse (20:30) -Why we’re hardwired for negativity bias and how to move past it (30:55) -Transgenerational empathy (42:19) -Why it’s important to start with the past when creating change (54:15) -Dhru’s gratitude practice (1:05:46) -Steps people can take today to shift their thinking towards a Longpath perspective (1:33:24) For more on Ari Wallach, follow him on Instagram @ariw, Facebook @ariwallach, Twitter @ariw, and through his website, longpath.org. Get his book, Longpath: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs, here.  This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers and WHOOP. Magnesium Breakthrough really stands out from the other magnesium supplements out there. BiOptimizers is offering my community 10% off, so just head over to magbreakthrough.com/dhru with code DHRU10. WHOOP is a personalized digital fitness tracker and health coaching platform that monitors your physiology 24/7 and provides personalized recommendations based on what your body needs. For me, it's been a game-changer to optimize my sleep and improve my fitness, performance, and overall health. To get yours, go to join.whoop.com and get 15% off your membership with code DHRU15. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is what I'm doing right now going to ensure that the generations to come, that they are going to be in a better place tomorrow than we are in today? Welcome to the Drew Perot podcast. Each week, we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Ari Wallach. And on today's discussion with Ari, we're talking about how to break free from short-term thinking and step into your true life's purpose, not just to improve your own life, which is great,

an important part of today's discussion, but to be a better ancestor for future generations. Ari is a futurist, social system strategist, and the executive director of Long Path Labs, an initiative focused on bringing long-term thinking both to individuals and organizations. Ari's TED Talk on the Long Path approach or methodology has been viewed over 2.5 million times and translated into 19 different languages. In addition to all his accolades, Ari was most recently an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University of International and Public Affairs lecturing on innovation, AI, and the futures of governance and public policy.

If you're interested in the topics of how to break out of our brains now, natural negativity bias. If you're interested on how to step out of the fear that often the media drums up and tries to distract us on. And if you're interested on how to become a nuanced and independent thinker who's asking himself, how can I become a better ancestor for future generations? This podcast is absolutely for you. Stay tuned.

Ari, welcome to the podcast. A pleasure to have you here. I've been loving listening to interviews that you've been doing with friends of mine and diving into the book, I want to start off with a big picture question that I feel like is a great container for this conversation. It will help our audience follow along with everything that we'll build from here because we have a lot of layers we're going to get through. A lot of layers. Why are we as human beings, homo sapiens, me and you and everybody who's listening? Why are we so driven by short-term behavior, short-term thinking? And part two, is that a bad or good thing?

Well, you are starting off in the kind of the big container for the whole conversation. So first of all, thanks for having me. Look, if you and I are walking, you know, 15, 20,000 years ago in the Serengeti or, you know, on the Russian steps, and all of a sudden a very large animal jumps out from behind a tree and starts chasing us. What you and I should immediately do is immediately react. We should be very short-termism. We should allow our kind of amygdala to kick in, right, our limbic system, and we should start running. Adrenaline should start pumping. That's short-termism. What we should not do. We should not do. We should be very short-termism. What we should not do. We should not do. We should allow our am is sit around and have a conversation. Why did we take this trail? How did we end up getting here? Right? That's kind of more long-term thinking. So short-term as in-of-itself is not a bad thing. The issue becomes when it becomes the overriding mechanism by how we live our lives. And by that I mean at the individual layer, right? So like how I react to a conversation with my wife or with my children, how we react in organizations, how we react as countries, and at the highest level, how we react and are behaving as a planetary civilization of Homo sapiens. That's the moment we're in right now, where we have this exaggerated sense of short-termism and short-termisticness in our lives, and it's kind of

dictating everything we do. So in the book, I say Long Path, it's an antidote for short-termism. It was very important to kind of put that on the cover because I wanted people to know what is it that we're kind of up against. And what we're up against isn't this thing that kind of came out of nowhere. It's always been part of us. The issue now is because of the moment of the moment that we're where we are in human history, it's now overriding kind of everything. It's exaggerated and it's amplified. And it's leading at the individual to the global level for us to start making decisions that are not in our best interest in the short term and in the long term. And when I mean long term, I mean hundreds if not thousands of years. So for example today in our modern society,

what are examples in ways that short term thinking on an individual level and then we can talk societal level, starting off individually, like, how does it get us into trouble? Yeah. Like, it sounds obvious, but just, like, really try to connect it. Yeah. So, you know, I talk about this in the book. You know, I have a, like, between every kind of, you know, action, there's a reaction. And in the middle, there's kind of that micro pause. And that's kind of like where our brain kind of kicks into decides what we're going to do. So the individual level, look, here's a really great example. Like, I was in my hotel last night here in Los Angeles. And I was thinking about, I was really hungry and I hadn't eaten. And that was my,

you know, my own fault. And I was thinking about like, well, what do I want to eat? Right. And there was, I was kind of faced with kind of this one thing. I was literally at the store and there was like a pint of ice cream, right? And next to it was like the paleo salad that I knew would kind of be better. And it's kind of on my plan of what I'm doing. My brain instinctively wanted to go for the high fat, high sugar, like ultra short term. I know I'm bringing this down to a very, you know, very, very, very something, very almost seeming mundane. But that's where short term is kind of kick in. And the prefrontal cortex is kind of taken out of that conversation and immediately I'll go for the thing that's kind of like the quick win, right? That's how to happen to the individual. Or when, you know, your spouse or

your partner says something to you and you immediately kind of flare up without kind of thinking about that, the bigger picture. And what I mean bigger picture, and we'll talk about this later, is kind of what came before to that point and what's going to come after that point. And a short termism will mean basically, I need to win this fight no matter what. Like this battle is the end all, be all battle, even if it's just about how we stack the groceries in the bag, right? That's short-termism at an individual kind of hyper-exaggerated level. And that's where we are. That's how we are reacting right now to almost every single issue. And I guess are there any benefits that come along with it, right? Besides just like immediate gratification, search of dopamine, everything else like

that, are there any good aspects to that? Before we get into the long path, you know, the long path, and before we get into long-term thinking and everything that that means, just trying to ask for the counter, are there any benefits that are there that we've benefited from as a society from that level of short-term things? Look, sometimes when we are faced with an acute emergency, right? It could be a flood. It could be a fire. It could be something that actually needs to be to react to you right away. We're really good at that. You know, we just kind of went through, through a very big anniversary of 9-11. And when we think about kind of the first responders who went up the stairs, when everyone was running out, like, that was very short-term thinking. A long-termist stance would have been like, you know what, these buildings are on fire. I shouldn't go up the staircase. I should help just people leave. Like, sometimes we need, if, you know, there's a fight or flight or freeze or those kind of those three reactions, sometimes we need to fight. Sometimes we actually need to step into it and do something that's really just in terms of the short term, a thing that's going to be of benefit in the moment. sometimes. So again, I'm not knocking short-termism. I'm just saying the issue becomes

when it becomes the overriding way that we behave in almost every single situation, be it intrapersonal, interpersonal, or societally. So let's talk about some of the drivers today. Again, modern society that are really accelerating that short-term thinking. And I think that in a lot of different places, media and the dissemination of information is under scrutiny and sometimes fairly, sometimes unfairly, but how much is that a part of the equation? And it's a part of it, but let's step back and actually blow the, we'll blow the context out a little bit more.

So I talk about very early this kind of in this conversation. In the book, there's a moment in time where we are as a society. And when I mean society, I really mean kind of the west, the global north. And we can unpack that later, why I kind of focus in on there. But the fact of the matter is we're in what I call an intertidal moment. So if you look at kind of in the marine biology sense, an intertidal is that area between high tide and low tide. So it's an area that it's a piece of land basically that sometimes it's exposed and sometimes it's underwater. And we're in that kind of psychologically, emotionally, spiritually as a society

because the old ways of doing things. And what I mean old, I mean at least four to 500 years old, coming off of really the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. There's this way of seeing the world as binary, as kind of mechanistic, as something that you can take a part of force for little bits and fully understand it. That way, and by the way, we needed that. We needed enlightenment, hyper-rational thinking to kind of push back against the power of the church. And I don't mean this as a theological argument.

I mean this almost as a bureaucratic. The church controlled everything we did. So then we pushed back on that, and then we kind of got into this kind of new narrative of being able to kind of break the world apart, and it wasn't about the spiritual, it wasn't about anything that we couldn't kind of measure or quantify. We're now seeing that that way of doing things isn't working. We're destroying the planet.

We're destroying ourselves kind of internally and psychologically and emotionally. And so as we're seeing that, and we're losing trust and institutions across the board, we enter into an intertidal moment. And in an intertidal moment, what that means is, you know, the old ways aren't working, the new ways haven't yet been born, and we're kind of like stuck in this interregnum and this in-between moment.

Going back to your earlier question, part of, I would say, a byproduct of being an intertidal is increased short-termism because you really don't know what's going to happen next, right? So you're just kind of reacting, reacting. There's no kind of bigger story that you can attach to yourself to. Remember, pre-enlightment, that big story was God, right? God dictated what you did, what you didn't do. And most importantly, God dictated what happened to you in the afterlife, right? you went to heaven or hell. So you had this whole kind of storyline written out for you both

in your living life, but also in the afterlife. So along comes, you know, the enlightenment and a scientific revolution, industrialization, and we kind of eradicate God in many ways, and in comes this way of kind of seeing this world in a very mechanistic way. Awesome. But as I said, that's no longer working. So we've lost that story. We don't have a narrative to replace it. And in this intertidal moment, we're going to be really, really short-termistic, right? Because we're kind of all freaking out. We don't know, we don't know what comes next, right? So that's this kind of larger scene setting for your question, is being in this intertidal moment. Now fold in, it's like making an omelet. Now you fold in technology and information and the speed at which we are getting information

and ideas and conversations. And we have to recognize that this hardware system, this biological entity that is Ari was not meant for this level of speed. We don't have the bandwidth capabilities to take this in and we get even more overwhelmed. We get even more short term because we now have this feeling that we're just basically out of control. And so in this intertidal, we have all of those things I just said. And now the final thing to put into the omelet, which you kind of touched on, is technology. And by that I mean social media. By that I mean the thing in our pocket that is engineered to basically keep us on our toes, to keep us hyper-vigilant and hyper-aware, right? That's notification. We've all seen the social dilemma. We all know kind of what it does to us.

What's happening now is you have all of those layers. You have the intertidal. You have the loss of narrative, the loss of God, and technology that you literally carry around with you that is constantly kind of asking you for kind of a dopamine hit. And you realize we are in a massive, massive, short-term vortex that's making it very difficult for us to make decisions that are good for ourselves in the present and also for future generations. This episode is brought to by bi-optimizer's magnesium breakthrough. If you struggle with chronic fatigue, muscle aches, brain fog, anxiety, hormone imbalances, headaches, constipation, or as my business partner, Dr. Mark Hyman likes to call it,

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respiratory rate and uses these numbers to give me a recovery score. This recovery score number lets me know how hard I can push my body the next day, which is very important for me to manage my expectations and feel my best. And it calculates my physical stressors and gives me a strain score, which is super helpful for giving me the nudge I need on busy weeks to make fitness a priority. Right now, Woop is offering my community 15% off their WOOP membership. Just go to join.wup.com and use the code Drew 15 at checkout. That's join dot W-H-O-O-O-P.com and enter the code D-H-R-U-15 at checkout for 15% off any Woop membership. We talked about the challenges of short-termism and what that gets us into. And we also talked about why we're in there,

the intertidal. So give us the counter to that, the long path. What does it look like and how can we begin to think about it as a perspective that we embody not just for ourselves, but for society as a whole? Yeah. So long path is an applied mindset. So you have to step back and say, okay, I'm a futurist, right? And I've been doing this for 20 years. I work for really large organizations. The UN, the State Department, the White House, a whole bunch of really interesting folks have been bringing me in for a long time to help them think about what comes next and what they can do to best prepare for what comes next. And the timeline has usually been in terms of how far they go,

anywhere from, let's say, five to 15 years. And part of being a future means you're kind of constantly reading the culture and saying, like, where are we? What's working? What's not working? Because that starts to kind of set you up to kind of read the signals. Sometimes they're very weak signals of kind of like what's popping up. What are the mega trends that have been with us for decades,

but are actually also just starting to emerge, right? And so in doing that, I started to kind of, I stepped back, really around 2016, and I said, okay, something's not working here because I'm working with all these organizations and I'm working with philanthropists. And we realize that we're all kind of looking for a very succinct methodology that is a very obvious answer about what the future is going to be, like the singular future. But it's not working anymore. And that's where kind of, I kind of jumped ahead in the story.

That's where kind of using my historical anthropological kind of training, I was like, oh, what are we in? What's this moment? We're in. So instead of kind of looking into the future, I looked really focused on the present, and that's where I was able to kind of surface this idea of the intertidal. Now, what's really important in an intertidal is folks keep asking, okay, you're a future. It's like, what's going to happen now?

Everyone wants the answer. They just want to know, they want like a clear peg of, is it going to be okay? it not going to be okay? And what became very clear to me, and this is from some of the, some of the Soto Zen training I did in my 20s, also doing kind of a lot of work and off-sides around the Indian philosopher, Christiani, and others is, it's really important that we try to be in this moment, not with those answers, not seeking those answers, but with the mindset that successfully helps us navigate the intertidal. And so that's what Long Path is. It's an applied mindset, not to give you the answers, not to say, oh, everything's going to look like this,

it's going to be perfect in this way, to give you a way, almost to act like a GPS. So it's not the answers, but kind of locates you where we are in this moment and helps us successfully move through it to actually get to the other side. And then part of getting the other side successfully is then being able to kind of co-create those futures that we want. Because that was kind of the biggest takeaway for all the research that I did and have been doing to kind of build out this mindset is it's having an idea of what can be on the other side that is going to kind of pull us through. So that's what long path is. It's a mindset. Now, it's basically built up of three pillars. And I'll go through them and then we can like go deeper to each one of them. So the first thing is what I call futures thinking. This idea that there is not a singular future, but there are multiple futures with an S.

I talk about this in the book. I'm often asked to speak on panels and they'll say, oh, we want you to be on this panel on the future of transportation. the future of housing, the future of water, as if there's only a singular vision of what can be out there. And so I've said now, like, I refuse to be on panels where it's a singular future, right? So in the book I go into it, obviously, a lot more, and we'll go into that. The second kind of big pillar of the mindset,

and I would say kind of where everything kind of rests on, is this idea of transgenerational empathy. It's transgenerational in the sense that it's for the generations before, it's empathy for yourself in the present, self-compassion, and empathy for future generations. And the third pillar is what I call telos, which is kind of ultimate aim and purpose. And again, all three of these make up this mindset,

and the mindset itself is really a practice. It's something that you're kind of, once you kind of read the book, you become aware of it. And we were talking earlier, kind of like the feedback that I've been getting from folks, and they're like, oh, I just see everything radically different. And it helps me be in the moment in a very different way, which is exactly what I wanted to focus to get out of the book.

and then what they're able to start doing is finding others and thinking about solutions and visions of what they want tomorrow to be that both kind of pull them through this moment, but also kind of open the aperture to what's possible. So, you know, it's interesting. The folks that, you know, when you write something like this, you're like, I'm going to write, I'm going to put it out there. I don't know. I don't know who's going to respond to it. And it's been parents. It's been CEOs. It's been people in national security, which is just,

amazing. I'm having a conversation with some folks in a couple of weeks. Because again, this idea that we're in this moment that is being driven by these ultra short term considerations and it's not allowing us to actually think about what we want is speaking to a lot of people. I want to go back to something that you kind of were touching on a little bit. I think a big picture question that a lot of people are asking themselves right now is, is the world getting better or is the world getting worse? And I'd love to get your perspective on that from this framework that you have. Yeah. So look, there is no other time in human history, homo sapient history, the past 150,000 years or so,

that I would rather be alive than right now. It is getting better. Look, we have a lot of issues, right? From race and class and caste and gender and politics and the environment. I'm going through all these, like, terrible issues. those are all out there. Don't get me wrong. But the fact of the matter is,

if I was to, you know, unfortunately, like, cut myself on something sharp under your table, I could go to the drugstore, put an antibiotic cream on it. We wouldn't even think about it. You'd be like, oh, it's my first day you could put a ban on it. That could have killed us not that long ago, right?

So just on that level, I have two teenage daughters. A lot of what it means to be a young woman in society today, in terms of the things that I thought was getting better is our being, we're walking back on some of those things. That being said, there's no better time than right now to be a woman, especially in America.

That doesn't mean we don't have a whole host of issues, but writ large, this is an amazing time to be alive on all fronts. Doesn't mean we don't have a lot of problems and a lot of issues, but things are getting better. The question is, do we make it through this intertidal in a way that will lead to the long-term flourishing, of Homo sapiens, not just the next 10 to 15 years,

but the next 1,000 years, the next 5,000 years, the next 10,000 years. I wrote this book because I really believe the next 10 to 15 years will dictate that long-term course for us as a species. Another element that's related to that question, are things getting better or worse? And by the way, I agree with you.

This is like, you look back and we were talking about the group summit series. A few years ago, I went on a trip with them to my home country, the country that I was born in, that I haven't really spent much time. And that was Kenya. And we spent time with this modern-day nomadic tribe, cousins of the Maasai, called the Samburu. And they mostly subsist on cow milk and goats milk. And then occasionally when there's not enough milk and grass and everything like that to feed the cows and they're not having babies, they feed off of blood, but they typically don't kill the cows. And you see that even still with all these like clinics that are popping up and trying to support them, infant mortality is still high amongst those groups. Sure, the ones who make a past infant mortality generally because they're living in a way where they don't have processed foods and other things like that. But their life is still, there's a lot of stresses that are there. Yeah. And I think that people romanticize the past and they think of it as this beautiful village that we're all in.

But if you look at like the acts of violence, you look at sort of war in the past, you look at so many other components, food insecurity, weather, other components like that, it was rough. It wasn't easy. Do you know why we shake hands? Like when you greet someone, why you shake their hand? Do you know why we're shaking hands? Well, I know why in India they didn't shake hands. Well, yes. But I don't know why they don't shake hands. Why they do shake hands. Well, traditionally when gentlemen greet each other and they shake hands, it was showing that we didn't have a sword in our hand. that I come in peace. Like, we don't think that. Now we just shake hands, you know, if we're, if we're feeling that, you know, with COVID-nol, we can shake hands. But we shake hands. We don't even think about it. It's just kind of like a customary greeting.

But that greeting was to show, look, I'm not armed. I'm not going to stab you right now. Right? So that wasn't that long ago. Yeah. So look, again, I'm not making light of we, we have direct acute violence. We have structural violence. We have structural systemic racism.

especially in this country, if not globally, in between the North, global North and the Global South. But things are much better in the fact that I can shake pretty much anyone's hand in the world, if they're open to it. I know they're not going to stab me. I don't even think about it, but I used to have to think about that. Yeah, not to mention, you know, social media gets so much negativity, but it's also the voice of the voiceless.

There's so many people that primary way of hearing about an idea, a perspective, even the more recent movements that are there. It is largely spread through the birth of social media and the free flowing of internet education. I have a top help podcast in the past. When I first got started on this, I just turned 40 this year. So when I first started learning about health and wellness

around like 18, 19, I couldn't even go to the library. They didn't have that many books. I had to go to like the health food store and then you don't know what's real and what's not real. And should you listen to this book or not? But that was your only access that was there. And I think another component

that I often think about is that is, that is, you know, this is not really about blame, but I'm trying to understand the landscape, right? Because it's hard for a lot of people to hold that duality that you just shared, right? Largely this time and age that we live in is better than any other time in history when you look at a lot of components, including access to clean water, poverty levels, et cetera, and all the things you mentioned. And we still have these other issues. It's tough for people to maintain a duality. Yeah.

Because they feel that it's either got to be one or the other. And I think that part of that is that when you have messages that are being sent to you every single day that the world's going to end, we're all going to die. And listen, I'm not saying that those are not important things to pay attention to. There's a little bit of a thing of you constantly feel under threat. You started all this conversation from looking at like an evolutionary biology perspective and saying that it's hard to think long term when we're thinking about daily survival. And I would say that it seems that a lot of people, whether it's in politics, whether it's in different areas of

life, areas that people call divisive, a lot of people do feel like, even though their life is pretty good, they're in sort of this fighter flight survival. Yeah. Well, look, so many things to unpack there. One, part of that fighter flight, I already talked about it, is kind of just been in this intertuttle moment where we don't have these we can talk about this and it's like these official futures that kind of help us get through the moment but if we step back and i mean and i don't mean this i don't not mean to be like subversive or insidious or conspiratorial but like threat cells right getting people amped up on things being bad sells it can get you elected make you make you make you president in the United States by saying we're under attack right um it can film movie theaters and it can sell a

whole bunch of books, right? So I mentioned my, my teen daughters who will be mortified when they listen to this because I even, you know, mentioned them. I was in their, in their separate rooms, looking at their bookcases a while ago. And, you know, they're reading all the kind of tween teen novels, all the fiction. Every single, huh? Vampires? Every single book on that, I'm not going to name any names or anything. Every single book on that shelf that has to do with the future in any way, shape, or form is dystopian. Every vision of the future they see, be it hunger games or the Handmaid's Tale or the Hundred,

every TV show, every book is about us basically having gone through some cataclysmic event or some major threat. And by the way, it can be vampires, which in many ways is kind of like, or zombies, which I think is actually a projection of our fears about climate change. We can talk about that later.

So what ends up happening is we're in this moment of constant, kind of feeling of attack and threat because it makes a lot of people a lot of money, right? And again, I understand. And by the way, when I talk to folks in media about this, I was talking to a major publisher who publishes a lot of these books, she was like, you know, I never thought about that. She's like, I just know these books do really well. But I never thought about what we're doing to the mental environment and what that's doing. It's almost like, it's like prefigrative trauma. Like we're bringing people into a threat matrix that they don't actually have to be in because it benefits somebody else.

So one of the things that I always ask folks to do is if you feel you're kind of in this fight or flight stance because of what's coming inbound to you, the question is like, where is that coming from and who benefits from that? And when you kind of take that step back and kind of up above it, all of a sudden you see that this moment we're in, as critical it is, especially around climate change. is being driven from a narrative level from folks who may not have our best interests at heart. There's this podcast that I listen to, and, you know, their opening is, to some degree, I'll paraphrase here, is that, you know, they cycle through.

And again, I think mainstream media is an easy target and it's just like people can throw different things to it. But I think in this sentiment, there's a lot of truth that's there and it builds off of what you're saying, saying it's a, you know, Fox, MSNBC, and CNN, are ripping us apart, making us hate each other,

and they're getting rich off the process. I think there's some fair criticism that's there, and I think there's a lot of good journalism that's out there too. And you can see, even in the news, like all the ad dollars of all these companies are down massively when you take out some of the most divisive figures

that are not in office, and they're scrambling and they're trying to think, like, how do we drum things up? And I guess my question on that is also, going back to your daughter's situation where you were talking about the books that are there, is that new? I mean, you would look at like, you know, I mean, obviously, this is still recent history, but, you know, Brave New World, 1984. Like, how far do we go back where this wasn't different, right? And even in a way, are some of our biblical text and different textures that are out there. Of course, they're good versus evil. You know, your Jewish background, my background in sort of the Vedic traditions and everything, it's good versus evil. But there was also this sort of thing. If this doesn't happen, we're headed towards a dystopian future. So how much of that is recent and how much of that has just been part of humanity? Well, so I'm going to go even further back. Please. Right. So,

we are, again, I'm going to go back to the referring to us, less as a society more as like the homo sapiens and how we're wired. So, as I'm sure many of your guests have talked about, we are hardwired around a negativity bias. Why? We're always looking for things that could go wrong. That's how we stay alive, right? When I walk out on the street or I'm walking 15, 20, 50,000 years ago, I'm not thinking, huh, what can I do right now that will allow me to flourish and maximize an individual? in this kind of mazzling way. What I'm thinking about is what's going to kill me, right?

Because if what's driving my genetic fitness is surviving the moment and passing on my genes, I'm going to mostly look for things that are going to harm me, right? Things that are going to be negative. So we are wired to kind of look and focus in on these things that are negative. It's going to kind of hype us up and we're going to draw our attention to it, right? We're going to get very laser focused on it. We're going to not be wide. We're going to kind of zoom in.

Huberman talks about this on his podcast, right, about how we get very narrow focus in moments of danger. By the way, you can see that with animals too, right? When my dog gets really upset, his pupils dial. He gets very focused on what's right in front of him. He's not looking and thinking along path. He's thinking right now, short term.

So this has been with us for a very long time in the sense that we're kind of constantly aware of things in the environment that may cause us harm. And then therefore, we want to react very quickly to them. But going back to what we said earlier, the harm comes when we actually are living in a pretty okay time. And in some ways, an amazing time. But there's a lot of profit to be made from people getting basically hyped up into a fight or flight stance. So it's been with us and it's always probably going to be with us. The question is how do we move past that negative tity bias?

How do we move to something bigger and actually move towards a long-term goal, what I call in the book, telos that's around human flourishing. So negative tinius will always be with us. We're always going to look for the negatives, right? Because that's how we survive. Now it's time to actually layer up, or to really to level up as individuals and as society and say, okay, these things are bad. We know it's bad. Poisons in the environment are bad. We have to take care of it. But what are, what's the good, right? What are the things that we actually want to see? And we see this in psychology, right? Marty Seligman talks about this. He talks about the positive psychologist. He He says, one of the big issues he had kind of with Freud was it was so focused on the neuroses

and all the things that were bad about human behavior and human psychology. And that's kind of what Freud gave us. And we haven't really talked about human flourishing. And so you're seeing in this kind of positive psychology movement thinking, okay, these are the things that can happen. This is what kind of pathologies and neuroses and other issues look like kind of the DSM4, right, or five, if you think about it. These are all the things that can go wrong with us.

Where are the books on all the things that can go right? And the books that are kind of like, well, how do we make it go right? To your earlier point, religion has done this in some ways, in some areas, and some of the books on this shelf have done this. And society, we're in this intertidal pivot where we're now starting to say, okay, we understand there's bad there. But how do we move beyond that and start thinking about what we really actually want and want in a way that's even bigger than our own life, but actually as a society and as a species over the next several thousand years? I want to take a pause right now here before we get into some of the concepts, we break them down. And we really sort of like help people understand the tools that you've created. And I want to talk origin story.

Yeah. And I'm just going to pass over the mic to you to, you know, fascinating when I first read about this and heard about this, like, and how this all fit into how you think about your work. It just kind of blew me away. So I'm not going to say more than that. I'm just going to pass over you. Let's talk about 1920, your grandfather and origin story. and take us on that journey. Well, it's interesting.

So you said, you know, 1920, my grandfather, actually 1920 is where my father was born. Sorry, your 1920 was your father. Your grandfather was... But that's how crazy the story is, right? You want to say grandfather when you say that year. That's like already you've kind of like slipped into why makes the story so nuts. So 1920, so my father is born in a small town called Boranovitch.

And then it's in Poland. And he's born into, you know, a medium-sized Jewish family. And as you can imagine, he lived kind of a simple life, right? If you've ever seen Fiddler on the roof, that was kind of like my dad's life, right? And very much so. But, you know, later, when he was raised, it was obviously a few decades after Fiddler on the roof. But you get the point. And so along comes the Nazis in World War II.

And he loses two brothers on the front in the first weeks of the war. his mom and sister eventually he loses their son to Auschwitz and they're killed by the Nazis. What's left is himself, his brother, and his father in, they basically took all the Jews in this relatively large town and they pushed him into a ghetto, right? This is how the Nazis started their extermination and liquidation regime for all Jews in Europe, was they would kind of put you in these ghettos and eventually he sent you to the camps. So at one point, my father, it's crazy, story, but he's basically being shot at and chased by the

Nazis, and he, his father, and his brother basically end up kind of escaping the ghetto, but his father gets shot in front of him and basically says, you know, keep going. And he knows if he stops to help his dad, he also will be shot and killed. So he escapes into the forest, into the Polish forest, and ends up joining the Jewish

underground, which were basically folks who had escaped, who decided that instead of kind of fleeing, and not that there were many places to flee, would actually stop and fight. So for several years, my father fought against the Nazis, mostly doing kind of demolitions and kind of hit and run, all sorts of crazy things, right? And then after the war, he ends up being a Nazi hunter. And there's a whole story in there. And to be honest, he never really talked about it that much.

But it was a time in his life where as a very young man, he had to make decisions about what he felt was the right or correct way of writing the injustices of the past. So that's my father's story. And so I'm relatively young. So for someone my age to have a parent who fought with the Jewish underground, it's actually very rare, but it's because my father had me when he was 50. So I'm jumping ahead in the story. I'll go back. So after the war, he plays semi-professional soccer in Europe. He's motorcycle racing.

And he realizes he doesn't want to work with Russian intelligence and do what they want him to do. And he ends up kind of saying, look, it's time for me to go to something. He actually said to me at one point, Europe is dead to me. It's nothing but a graveyard of all of my family and people. And he decides he wants to go to America. But America doesn't actually, isn't letting any more Jews in. So he makes his way to Cuba. And he's in Cuba for 10 years through the revolution.

And it turns out that, again, he and Castor had some sort of falling out. But remember, my father was one of the very few people who spoke fluent Spanish and Russian. So that's why they all loved him. But he realized he didn't want to be under an authority. regime again, right? That's why he left and fled from the Russians. So he made his way to Mexico. Now, meanwhile, my mother, who's born in the United States and California, is an artist, and she's studying under Buckminster Fuller, who's probably one of the most famous kind of architect, engineers, and futures of the last century. And he says to her, look, Susan, what you're doing is great,

but you kind of need to expand your horizons. And at the time, in the late 1960s, it's not like today where you could kind of jump on an international flight and go to Bali or India. Like, you couldn't go that far. So she went to Mexico, and that's where she met my father. So there's a 20 age difference between the two of them, and I was born there, my two older sisters were born there, and not until the 70s did we move to the United States. Now, where this kind of manifests in Long Path is at almost every one of our dinners, I had, you know, to the left of me my father, who in many ways was kind of, like I said, Fiddler on the roof, was kind of stuck in 1920s, 30s, Poland. he was constantly kind of trying to process what happened in the war. Could he have done something? Could he have saved his dad?

Could he have saved his mother? You know, real, real heavy and intense stuff. And on the other hand, I had a mom who's kind of this artist visionary and who trained under Buckminster Fuller. So she was always kind of thinking about the future. So regardless of whatever we were talking about at the dinner table, whether it's the, you know, the Persian Gulf War, whatever it was, we always kind of looked at it through this 100, 120 years. span of time. My dad would always talk about, well, what happened to get us to this point, right? He was

always kind of thinking about the history of the moment. My mom would then also say, okay, we're at this point, but how does this play out? Where is it going to go? So I grew up in a home where kind of transgenerational thinking was kind of the predominant way of thinking. So yeah, we talked about the present and what was happening with our homework and our friends and whatnot. But in general, I always existed in this kind of way of thinking and seeing the world through a futurist kind of artist lens of my mom and through a historical and I would say very pragmatic father who had seen the worst of humanity. And that all kind of goes in to creating long path. So much there. Such a rich story. So many layers that are there. When you think about your father and his focus on the past, just like a little side note question. Do you think that there was some part of him that blamed himself for what had happened?

Of course. I mean, look, we're all, let's step back. I'll answer the question. I'll go meta and then I'll go personal, right? We all have this inner voice. And rarely do we stop to think, like, where does that inner voice come from? Like, that's always kind of like running in our head. We think it's this voice that is kind of neutral.

It's like the Switzerland. It's just there. It's not just there. It comes from society. It comes from our own personal history. It comes from systemic trauma and individual trauma. And so I think for my father, he always had this inner voice that was somewhat blaming of what he could have done differently, right? In the war, after the war, during the what have you.

And so I think that that obviously comes up in the book. A lot of the work that I do especially, and I talk about when I talk about transgender, transgender empathy, especially empathy for the self, it was from seeing what my dad had. done that made me realize what we do have to do, right? He was on that silent generation that didn't talk about it, that didn't do the therapy, that didn't do the work that we all have available to us right now. And when you don't do that, that inner voice can kind of trap you in a swirl. And in many ways, that's where we are right now as a society. We're kind of in that swirl. And I'm advocating and staying in Long Path as a precondition of kind of navigating this intertidal and making it through as an individual, as a society, and as a species,

we have to kind of reconcile with that inner voice and with that swirl. And again, I love my dad. He was amazing. But really, I had a first, you know, I had a front row seat to what happens when we don't reconcile with the past with what we could have done and what we could not have done. And we see what happens when that kind of takes over. You know, one of the things that you've talked about and that you share in the book is that it's important to start with the past first.

You know, when you try to apply the layers of this transgeneral empathy to the present moment, you get trapped and caught up in a lot and a lot of different things. We'll talk about those in a second. But if you now with time and with time comes with time comes perspective, with this perspective, if you look through the time period that your, you know, your grandfather and your father were alive in and everything that happened specifically, let's say with like the Nazis and the war and everything, if you were to apply this perspective of transgenerational empathy to this time period, knowing that most people are good human beings, they want to be good citizens, they want to do

well, but you had this crazy horror. What would you see if you were applying it? Give me, give me kind of that time period with the lens of transgenital empathy. Well, you know, this is not a theoretical question. This is something I've been grappling with for a very long time, right? Because I realize my, a lot of my trauma, like everybody else is, is inherited, right? But I have these really interesting layers because I have my dad's specific acute, but as a, as a, a member of the Jewish faith, this is what I was raised in, was kind of this larger kind of context of the Holocaust of how did this happen to us? Why did they do this to us? How did this happen? And it becomes very kind of binary in the thinking. Jews is good, Germans bad, right?

That's a very easy way to do it. That being said, I've had to kind of have my own way of reconciling with the past, specifically the German past as part of who I am. So I had many opportunities to go to Germany when I was younger and didn't go until about 15 years ago. And when I was there, I went to Berlin and I visited basically in the middle of Berlin, this memorial they have to the Holocaust and the Jews that were killed. And what I realized in that moment, and again, and I keep referencing, but I write about this in the book a little bit, is what allowed me to kind of reconcile with what happened to us

at a family level and at a peoplehood level was that they were also starting to reconcile with their past, right? So in other words, if they had torn Auschwitz in the camps down and they didn't have a memorial and they said, well, let's not think about it. Let's not talk, let's erase it. Let's have totally erasure of the past.

It would not only be difficult for me to move on, it would be very difficult for the German people to move on. It doesn't mean you move on and you forget about it. It means you understand that what happened happened in a way that was both traumatic and it doesn't let anyone off the hook. But you have to work on yourself to make sure those things don't happen again. And you're actually doing something about it. Very differently, by the way, than what we do in America,

where we kind of erase what we did to Native Americans, where we erase in many ways up until recently, really kind of, the role of slavery in the making of this country. And so it's that erasure that can lead to the trauma moving forward. So when I go back and I look at that time and I apply transgender empathy to that time period, it takes a lot of work. But when I see others doing that work, especially those who perpetuated the evil and the wrongness, it allows me to then kind of reconcile and move forward.

I guess a second layer to that question is from both, you know, kind of like a historian's perspective as well as a personal perspective, how did a group of generally well-meaning, well-intentioned citizens get hijacked to allow for such what a lot of people would call wrong or bad in the world through this, through this lens. Like what was the similar themes that were going at that time period where somebody was able to come in and sort of hijack the narrative?

and blame the other, which is a big part of this transgenerational empathy, is that understanding that anybody who's trying to get you to otherize another person and not humanize them is now all of a sudden naturally going to drive you to short-termism. Yeah, yeah. Look, it's, I don't know if you're going there, but I'll go there. It's similar to what we're going through right now, right, in many ways, in terms of some of our leaders trying to otherize other people because what they're able to do when people are hurting

and they don't have a sense of who they are and where they are going. They're susceptible to an authoritarian who can say, listen, it's not you, it's them, right? It's not us, it's them. They're the cause of all these problems. So we saw what Hitler was able to do really in the, start of the 1920s, really 1930s and 1940s to the German people. Yeah, were there anti-Semitic people there, xenophobic,

and people full of hate from the get-go? Sure. But to create an entire kind of war and death, machine means that you're able to tap into, and there's historians who've written about this much better than either. There's a book called Hitler's willing executioners on this. But after the trauma of World War I and the defeat that the Germans had and basically the Treaty of Versailles and how humiliating it was, folks were ripe for someone to comb along and say, I can save you, I can help you, I can give you a future. I can make Germany great again. And so once again, that's why

when speaking, I'm trying not to be political here, but that's when I hear someone say, I alone can fix it and take us back to our glory again. What that means is they're tapping into the destabilization that's happening in society. Right now it's an intertidal. We're not going through a global intertidal, but I would say in the 1930s,

Germany was going through its own micro-intertidal. They had lost their official future, right? They had lost an ability to think about who they were because they were so badly humiliated that they were ripe for psychic capture, for someone to come along and fill that void of purpose that they no longer had. And my fear for this intertidal that we're in right now is we are as susceptible to that as they were in the 1930s. Now that I'm not, I'm not saying, contrary to what I said earlier, I'm not saying that to be a fearmonger. I'm saying I've seen these patterns before.

I've seen what happens when people lose a sense of purpose and meaning. Right. On the flip side, Victor Frankel wrote, Man's Search for Meaning, right? This is probably one of the bestselling books of the last century. And he wrote it while he was in a concentration camp. And from there, he created Logotherapy. And what he basically said was

when he looked at the people who survived the camps and didn't survive the camps, and obviously some of it was arbitrary, but the people were psychologically able to make it through, it's because they had a meaning and a purpose bigger than themselves. For him, it was actually writing the manuscript of the book and working on Logotherapy.

be. My argument taking from Victor Frankl, from the Holocaust, from the camps, and then looking at the moment we're in right now, is we too are suffering. We don't have that larger sense of purpose and meaning. Remember I talked about kind of God being eradicated? And so we don't have that audience to play for anymore. Like, what's the audience? What's the bigger purpose outside of the American dream or getting that car or getting that date or getting a certain number of likes on your feed? What's the bigger purpose and meaning both to your individual life and blowing that up to homo sapiens writ large? We have lost that. My argument is we have to find that.

If we don't find that in a collective ethical moral way, we as a people, someone or someone's will come along and give it to us and it may not be in our best long-term interests. And I think that the complicated part of today is that you actually, you know, just touching on the politics, you see it kind of happening on all sides of the spectrum, the other rising. Yeah. Right. Now, there's different degrees. There's different components. But anytime somebody wants to make an entire group the other, that's playing into it.

You know, George Bush was famously known for saying you're either with us or against us. But if you look at what's being said today, there's a version of that that each side uses as their own justification to try to get their group to rally. And I think that, you know, people talk about this time being a very polarizing time. I sort of feel like out of all this polarity has come, you know, and there may be a lot of bad that's out of that. But there's this whole spring up of more independent thinkers, nuanced thinkers who are saying, I'm not going to let one group hijack my belief systems. I'm not going to use identity as a way to say that I'm completely with this group because that means that I'm against with this group. Instead, I'm going to see each situation for what they are.

I'm going to talk about the truth in those things. and yeah, sure, you may disagree with me, but let's at least talk it out. So I feel like that's the sort of silver lining in this time period. I've never seen as many independent thinkers that includes journalists, that includes people that are finally speaking up like scientists, saying that, hey, we need to take a look at this aspect or angle. That includes podcasts, you know, some that you've been on that are out there. And I feel like that's a good time period.

And I think in the past, it was harder for those voices to come to the surface, but now I feel like it's absolutely needed. So it wasn't just a monologue that I wanted to go on to. I guess the question I'm asking in that is that have things had to get kind of so bad that we have to have this conversation? Yeah, I mean, look, there's a lot there to unpack. Yes, in an intertidal, we see the kind of chaos and creativity, but it can go two ways, right? So if we think about, not that podcast or animals, but if we think about the animals and the creatures, features that kind of flourish in the intertidal zone. It's mad creativity, right? There's, there's muscles that will actually close up with seawater and almost make their own oxygen

tank in a certain sense while the water goes out, right? So this creative moment when we're in flux, when all bets are off, is what we're in right now. So you can have crazy creativity and crazy problems. And so what we are seeing is the rise of both polarizing camps. because everyone's trying to figure out what's going on. And at the same time, the rise of individual actors are saying, I'm going to take a little bit from here and a little bit from there. And I love this moment for that.

My concern is when we center independent thinkers so much that we take them out of a larger context. So this is a part of transgenerational empathy. That's about empathy for the past because we can't ever be so independently minded that we don't take into account how we got to this point, either at individual level, right? Because we can never fully escape that or a societal level.

So we are in this moment that is begging us to think about what is the world that we want to create. And the reason I'm with the book is because I want people to understand and have a way of thinking about this moment that doesn't put them into the left camp or the right camp or any necessarily camp. The camp that they're put into is one where they're thinking, not so much about themselves, but they're thinking about future generations in such a way where

they're asking themselves a very key question. Is what I am doing right now making me a great ancestor or not? Is what I'm doing right now going to ensure that the generations to come, whether they're from my genetic children or not, that they are going to be in a better place tomorrow than we are in today? If we use that as our filtering mechanism, then we can start having kind of conversations about ideas and questions, but against an ethical backdrop about the world, not as it is, which is important, but the world as we want it to be. Going back to transgenerational empathy, let's talk a little bit more about why, I said that we'd come back to this, but really help us understand, like, why is it important that we start

with the past? And when people are thinking about their past today, you know, a lot of people actually don't know a lot about their past. There's many people that are listening that maybe didn't even really have relationship with their grandparents or stuff. People are growing up in homes where they may be a single parent, whatever. How does one begin? And does it have to be their past or can it just be this collective pass?

And what do you do? Do you take something that just angers you? Yeah. That you've been taught to, again, say this was bad or this was good. Like, how do we start with the past for the person who's listening today? Is it you pick something that you care about, an area of life that you want to make better? Like a lot of the people that listen to this podcast are individuals that care a lot about sort of quality of food, soil integrity, and, you know, they've heard a lot of statistics

like we only have like 60 more sort of harvest before we sort of we're out of top. Yeah, we're out of top. And part of that is that some people feel within that that we've kind of been hearing some version of like this, we only have 10 to 15 years left for a while. So how much of this is true. We keep moving that back, yeah. Right. We keep on moving that back and a little bit of like the Matt Ridley conversation on

innovation is that humanity always rises to the occasion and sort of uses innovation to sell the problem. So yeah, so let's talk about this audience here that cares about, let's say, like food, you know, they're worried about things like GMOs, they're worried about toxins, pesticides, other stuff. How would that group begin to look at transgenerational empathy for matters that they care about? Yeah, I mean, look, so we can start with GMO because that's near and dear to my heart, right? So I try to avoid foods that are genetically modified because I have a kind of a reaction to that. The fact of the matter is... You have a reaction to that, just to clarify a little bit. The reaction is like, I want healthy food that comes from a germline that is heirloom that goes far back,

that it wasn't intermixed, right? Because I intuitively, I feel that is probably in the better long-term interest, not only for myself and my own health, but for the health of the planet, right? And at the same time, I realize we're going to soon have 9 to 10 billion people on this planet. And as much as I consume organic food and regenerative, biodynamic agriculture, what we try to bring into our own home, I, from my understanding, as I see it, like, the land and the resources that we need to do that may not match the accelerated rate of population growth. So then we need GMO, right? And I'm being overly simplistic about it, because I'm trying to set up kind of how we go to the past. So when we look at the folks, especially in India, we're kind of around the green revolution,

where we kind of started creating GMO-based foods to feed hundreds of millions of people, we were able to actually lift the reason we had the green, one of the reasons of the Green Revolution in India was we were trying to move hundreds of millions of folks from having nutrient poor diets to nutrient-riched diets. And because for climate reasons and political and industrial and other reasons, they were able to get those needs met. So along kind of came GMO, for instance. So transgenerational empathy, yes, when you read about it in the book, it's about your parents and your grandparents and what made you.

And it's kind of a much more psychological. But if we take it to the kind of a larger kind of almost policy area like you did with GMOs, we have to understand that folks who did that more often than not had good interests at heart. Not always, but sometimes. So what transgenerational empathy is instead of kind of looking back and saying, okay, the people who created GMO were just evil and terrible human beings and why could they have done that? super anti-GMO, we have to look back and say, okay, let's think about the context that they were operating in. Why did they did what they did? And how can we kind of take the best of that and move forward? Look, there are sometimes going to be very difficult to have transgenerational empathy in a sense of trying to find the good in it. We talked about the Holocaust. There was no good in that, right? There was like, I understand how the folks got to the point, but there was nothing great at the core of that at all. But when it comes to GMO or other issues, we have to

to say to ourselves, okay, maybe the vector that got us to this point isn't when we agree with, but what was the larger thing they were trying to accomplish for? Feeding hundreds of millions of people is a good thing. So then we take that and say, okay, now moving forward, how are we going to meet the needs of those people within that issue area? Let's say food and nutrition. Transgenerational empathy, what it does is it really looks at what we've inherited and instead of saying it's evil, it's terrible, it's traumatic, saying, why was it done in that way? What was the context of it? How can we take the core that was part of it, at least the part that was about flourishing, and move that forward into the future? So that's how we take kind of transgenerational empathy to help us kind of reconcile,

so we're not always kind of battling Monsanto or Bear or these companies that created GMO and saying, oh my God, they're evil and terrible. It should only be this one way. It's more like, where were they coming from? and what are the needs that they're trying to meet? And then how do we meet forward in a way that is aligned with our ethics and morals, if not those specific technologies? So the book, again, is more for kind of the individuals and parents and leaders, but that's why I'm having this conversation with national security folks. Because they're trying to reconcile, like, okay, we got to a certain point,

but if we're thinking about national security over the next 100 to 200 to 300 years, what does that look like? And I'll tell you what, one of the things that I will be talking about, is the Westphalian nation state. So even embedded within the idea of national security is the idea of the nation state, which is only 300 years old. Now, I'm not saying the nation state is going anywhere anytime soon or should go anywhere anytime soon, but we have to kind of put everything on the table and recognize what is it that we're really talking about. When we talk about national security, more often than not, we're talking about borders and terrorism. The reality is

national security is really about protecting the humans within a certain boundary. We know those boundaries are going to be changing because of climate change. So we have to rethink even the entire notion of national security over the long term. That's transgenerational empathy because we're now thinking about the actions that we have to take for humans on the move in the year 2150 because of climate change is a very different conversation. So that's how transgender empathy can manifest both as an individual layers we talked about, like with myself and the Holocaust, but also these major kind of issue areas. Going back to you talking about GMOs, you know, the way I look at it is like, classic sort of like, what are the first rules and education that people get if they take debate class? In debate class, they specifically have you argue for the side that even if you don't agree with it,

because the better you can argue and understand somebody else's argument, even if it's completely on the other end of the spectrum of what you internally believe in, the more that you will able to actually make your argument, because you know everything that they have to say and the reasons why they did it. it's always funny to me when I hear people say, I just do not understand why X, Y, and Z, a corporation, a person, a group. I cannot understand why this group does this. I cannot understand why that. Actually, that's our work is to understand.

And if you don't understand, there's a pathway forward because if you leave it at that, you leave it as this group or these motivations are either crazy or conspiratorial. And I don't have the quote in front of me here, but Naval Ravikant has this great quote that I'll paraphrase here. He says, we can't chalk up to conspiracy what can be simply explained by incompetence and like financial gain, right?

Like so much of what we think of. And so it's like, yeah, okay, cool. You have a big company. You think you have a way to sort of corner the seed market. And then you also able to have the right pesticides for it. You have financial grain. Your stock price is going to go up. Amazing.

Sure. Are there a lot of people that are in that, that want to feed people, of course, are there other components? And I guess the other layer of that looking back, just using that GMO example, is that often there's a history of, you know, industry kind of testing a group as a human sort of experiment. So on a personal level, I'm like, okay, I get why people might want to try to use GMOs to feed. I think, you know, Paul Hawkin and some of those guys have a counter argument of way of feeding people that is, you know, a little bit different, It doesn't have to be that pathway that's there.

I get all aspects of it, and I can still fight for the things that I care about. I don't know if that's the right word fight. I can advocate for the things that I care about, but I don't need to dehumanize anybody in the process. Yeah, well, once you dehumanize, you've actually, what you've ended up doing is you've moved back into this binary set. Very early on our conversation, you talked about kind of polarization and kind of binary thinking, but you intuitively said it doesn't feel right. binary zero one thinking, zero-sum thinking, is in many ways the probably most obvious manifestation of

enlightenment thinking. You can break everything down into zeros and ones. It's what we actually use in our computer code, right? It's zero's one on or off. This kind of black and white way of thinking is probably the biggest vestige of scientific enlightenment thinking. Not that there's anything wrong because we need zeros and ones, but if we think about, it's kind of stretch the metaphor, where we're going with quantum computing, right? So you know quantum computing is zero, one, and maybe. There's like super symmetry, right? It can be either on or it can be off. That's the moment we're moving into. And so if you haven't read the book yet and you're listening, I'm going to give you a little bit of a kind of a trip into the future of the book as you're going through it.

Transgenerational empathy starts with the past, but really as you move to the book and the exercises, is you'll see as you kind of start doing empathy for yourself, right, and kind of self-actualization and understanding how it is you got to this point. What you end up actually doing is revisiting your empathy with the past because you realize how much of what makes you, you, that inner voice, what drives you, your behaviors, how much of that comes from things outside of you. As you kind of start to see that for yourself, you can now start applying that to your past, be it your parents, or society, and yeah, you guessed it to those around you in the current moment, right? That's why empathy is the superpower that we need to get us through this moment.

One, so we can cooperate properly. But two, what it really does is it starts to kind of clear, it really kind of clears the racks for us to think about the futures that we want. Because if you don't do the work, you know, and you just say, well, I want a future to look like X. This is my desired future. what you're really doing without doing the work and looking about how you got to this point and the work on yourself, your desired future might be a manifestation of things that were kind of foisted onto you without you being very clear about it. So in the book I talk about the difference between a desired future and an examined desired future. And the examined part is when you start to actually recognize how much your own mental environment and past have influenced the way that you are today. Once you've done that work, you can start moving towards those futures that are actually examined as opposed to the ones that are just foisted on you. So once somebody's gotten a chance to do the work, and I think a lot of this comes back to also, you know, you're sharing that, you chat a little bit about this in the book, people are so hard on themselves for their past, which inhibits their future.

You know, I always laugh a little bit during January 1st and, you know, end of the year is people are trying to set goals. but when I talk to people about their goals and I talk to them about what they want to do, largely there's a little subtext that's there that says that I'm not enough, I haven't achieved enough, I'm not done enough, that's a little bit of the subtext behind their goals.

So a big part of my goal setting process, I've created this whole methodology, we've had a bunch of people in this podcast to do it, they've reported back with a lot of really great experiences, is that first we want to have gratitude for the past. Yep. And, you know, a mutual friend, Andrew Huberman, he talks a little about this as well, going back and acknowledging the things that went well this year.

And specifically I asked three questions. I ask, you go through every month and you ask yourself, who's somebody that I did something for this month, no matter how big or small, who's someone that did something for me? And no matter how big or small, what's something tough or challenging I did? And when people go through that for an entire year, they have, even if the year didn't end up the way you wanted, to and this goal didn't happen. You didn't hit this weight or financially or whatever else. You have so much empathy for yourself, which actually gives you this energy of like, okay, I went through a year.

I'm a human being. I did the best that I can and I love myself. And I want to acknowledge all the good that's there because we have this brain that goes to the negativity bias. Now, okay, set a goal. Yep. Is that a little bit kind of like the going from the empathy now to like the future component?

It's extremely extremely. extremely similar. What's interesting is when you start to have, so again, not trying to give too much away here, the third, because I want people to do this in order, but the third exercise in the book is about having gratitude for your ancestors. It's for that very same reason and understanding that not everything they gave you, not all of the baggage was negative. Some of it was actually good. Some of it actually shaped you into being a great human being. And by the way, that could be your genetic ancestors or could be thousands of years of ancestors. What that does, though, is there's a little slight a hand in here.

As you start to have gratitude for your ancestors, what it actually starts to do is it lets you kind of ease up a little bit on yourself, what you got to, because what you're really doing by having gratitude for your ancestors is you're starting to have gratitude for yourself in the sense of how future generations will look back on you. So more often than not, when we're kind of, I'm not doing enough. I'm not this enough. I'm not that enough. Part of that is we're not feeling enough in our lives connected to a larger purpose. But when we realize that we're not in this 100-yard dash, but we're actually in a much larger marathon, right? I used to run track and I did the 4x100 relay. And it wasn't about how fast the runners moved, which is what you were thinking of a race. It was how fast the baton moved, right, and how it went. It sounds silly because the runners are the baton, but it's not. because if we stop seeing ourselves through our purpose and our meaning in this world and this reality right now as purely between Ari's birth and Ari's death and start seeing it as part of something much

larger, what I call in the book The Project, kind of this long-term flourishing of our species for thousands of years to come, we realize that what can give us meaning and purpose isn't just about how much we accomplish in our own life, but how much we accomplish and can do to set the next generation up, to move that baton forward, right? In the 4x10 relay, we call that area where we hand the baton off the transition zone. It's also an inner title. It's where we are right now. So the work that we do on ourselves right now isn't just about us. It's about those who are going to come after us. And by the way, you don't have to have children to do this. You know, a lot of people who are reading the book or writing me and say, well, I don't have children. Can I still do this?

I don't have children. Just fuck the future. No. But you are making the future right now by your behaviors and by your actions. Yes, you should vote us. You can vote for the future. You can consume for the future. You can advocate for the future.

But what I talk a lot about in Longpath, and this comes from Buckminster Fuller's idea of the trim tab, it's your everyday actions and reactions that are future making. So the way you look someone in the eye, the way you show gratitude to, to what you did over the past year. The way you're showing gratitude at the end of every day and to every human action, because emotions are contagious, because they reverberate over time, you actually start to have a meaning and purpose that transcends your own life. That actually is about something really much bigger than yourself. And when we talked about how people can kind of fall prey and victim to authoritarian thinking in an intertidal, because they don't

have a purpose bigger than themselves, what I'm saying is we do have a purpose. We do have a purpose bigger than ourselves. The purpose that is bigger than ourselves is for the generations to come and ensuring we are leaving this world, both in terms of it, the physical world, the emotional world, the spiritual, the mental world, in a better place than we found it so that every successive generation can build off of that. That is how we get to this idea of a world that is better than it is today. That's how we get to the, in my tradition, the land of milk and honey, or the messianic moment. It's not about someone, in my feeling, it's not about someone coming out of the work and saying, oh, everything is, we're at peace now. It's about recognizing that the world as it is,

is the best it's ever been, but we are not at the end. We are just at the very beginning of this Homo sapien project. And the things we do or do not do internally, the work that we do on ourselves is as vital to ensuring the long-term longevity of Homo sapiens over the long-term, as much as how we kind of vote and what we consume. And that's the moment that we're in. That's how we set goals bigger than ourselves. It's goals about passing the baton properly that are bigger than us just kind of running this singular race

called My Life from Birth to Death. I want to ask about this because you've mentioned it a few times and that's the topic of climate change. And I'd love to get your perspective, again, through the long path approach, knowing that all groups on every side of the aisle can be guilty of sort of dehumanizing the others. And I think that one narrative that is there right now is there's both the sense of fatigue that people have of like, I'm hearing this is a big issue, everyday new article, a component, another thing.

And the question is like, how do I play a role in it? And another part of it, which is I do think that there are well-intentioned people who really care about climate change who want to dehumanize. the other side that they feel that doesn't care about it or companies that they feel that are contributing it, forgetting that duality of like if we literally evaporated gas tomorrow or some other sort of, you know, classic sort of fossil fuels, our world would be in a short term like economic collapse situation, right? We're dealing with a little bit of an energy crisis right now with everything that's going on with Russia, Ukraine, etc. So if you were to give some guidance and you're on the panel of the futurist and you're saying like using this humanizing approach,

using this methodology, the steps that you outline, how would you shift a little bit of the narrative that's happening right now, if at all, when it comes to this topic that it seems like you care about a lot yourself on a personal level, too. So I'm going to be working with the UN over the next couple of years on these questions. So what I talk a lot about, not as much in the book, but lately, is about how do we transition with empathy? How do we center the human in what we are trying to move through in this very process? So to your point, you know, we know that fracking is bad for the environment and the low,

I mean, there's earthquakes where they're fracking, right? I also know that fracking employs hundreds of thousands of people and pays for mortgages, it pays for college, it puts food on the table. And made the U.S. energy independent. And we made the U.S. energy. And we can argue whether even that is actually even a good thing in a certain sense, but we don't have to go there. So when I talk to folks on team climate change is the number one concern, and we just have

have to eradicate and stop everything. A team that I'm in some ways very much on, I say, okay, that's fine, but these are mothers and fathers and sisters and cousins and uncles on the other side of it, especially if they're in the extractive industries. So as we transition, and we have to transition, we have to ensure that the folks that are involved directly in these industries are taking care of. And what often happens more often than not is we dehumanize them. they're just a coal miner. Oh, you know, they're just a fracker. These are humans, right? And look, by the way, the same thing. We talked about food earlier. I have no doubt that at some point in the future, it could be 50 years, it could be 300 years, whatever it is, that we will figure out that the consciousness of animals is much higher than we think it is. And folks are going to look back on us and be like, how did they eat meat? Like, how did they, how do they have factory farms and not run to them and kind of, you know, close them and throw everyone in jail. So I raise that because we have to have empathy for the folks who are earning a living, even if we don't agree with what it is and how

they're going about it, if we want to kind of bring them over to the other side in transition to something that is going to be more regenerative and more climate safe for future generations. So that is how I'm working on climate change is by ensuring that the folks who are on all sides of the issue, and those are the most impacted, be it the person who is doing the fracking or the kid in the inner city who has the dirty bus depot burning smoke and has increased asthma, making sure we take care of everyone as we transition to a clean post-fossil fuel future. Because if we don't, if we just dehumanize, then what we're going to do is we're going to create these visceral short-term reactions. It's going to be fight or flight, and it's going to be fight, and we're seeing it right now,

and it's not going to get us to where we want to be. We have to have the larger goal in mind. So I'll create the pivot to kind of the third pillar of Long Path, which is Telos, which is ultimate aim and purpose. If our ultimate aim and purpose is human flourishing on planet Earth for thousands of years to come, and then we can kind of backcast from there, we start kind of rethinking some of our base assumptions about how we're going to get there. We talked about this, I think earlier before we started around nuclear power. So those of, you know, I was a classic green lefty. I volunteered for Greenpeace in the seventh grade. Very anti-nuclear. Now I'm starting to rethink that and say, okay, if we want to move as quickly as possible, and we want to transition, and we want there to be

jobs, and we want to take care of future generations and their environment, there is new nuclear technology that is coming online. It's not perfect, but it's probably better than fossil. And people could argue that. I'll get a bunch of hate emails about that. But we have to be open to those new ways of thinking if our ultimate goal is ensuring the long-term flourishing of our species over the next several thousand years. I think nuclear is a great example because not just yourself, but a lot of people are rethinking it. And it's not like the knowledge around that wasn't known for quite a bit of time. So part of this, like the layered and nuanced approach of actualizing and creating a better future is also this ability to,

it's like not being open to your idea changing, your ultimate destination is still there. But how you get there, there has to be some openness. Because the idea, and there's a long trend of futurist being completely wrong on aspects, the idea that you single-handedly know the exact pathway that's there

and people get so indoctrinated into that approach, and that's in every category, right? We're talking about energy right now, but that could be anything, is very tough, which makes it harder. And then we were chatting a little bit about this when we record, but I'll ask you now,

it's sort of like consensus takes over. And if you're somebody at all that says, hey, listen, we should look at nuclear again. You know, many years ago, you know, it was a few articles where Bill Gates was looking at, you know, smaller nuclear opportunities in there. actors, yeah. And basically was shut down primarily from the left of saying, like, you cannot work on this. And no sort of municipality was even remotely even willing to allow the test projects to even get started over there. And essentially the project got, you know, shafted for a little while. So I'd love to talk about that because navigating consensus, we're dealing with that in medicine. We're dealing with that in a lot of different areas. And getting people on team's sort of future. requires a little bit of like, hey, I'm willing to have more debates and discussion.

So how do we now at scale, once we've done this with ourselves, how do we at scale start to bring other people into the long path approach? Yeah, I mean, look, this is the beauty of the scientific method, right? We have ideas, hypotheses, we test them, we collect data. Part of what you're talking about is we've started kind of shutting that down and saying, we can't go there. We can't even create the data to see. We can't even talk about it.

And it's partially because in different areas, we're very attached to the old ways. We're attached to old goals, right? And what I'm advocating in this kind of within Long Path, within Tilos level action, is you need to have a larger goal in mind that transcends your own lifespan and transcends maybe even the next couple of centuries. and from there, especially if it's, and what I advocate for,

so one of the things in the book I don't do, I say, I never say, someone wrote a critical review of the book and they say, well, he never tells us what the future should be. I'm like,

clearly you didn't read the book because I say multiple times in the book, I'm not going to tell you what the future should be. What I'm going to tell you is do the work, examine your past,

examine where you are right now, think about how you want the future to be, have an emotional connection to future descendants. Because by the way, the emotions are what's going to drive the action. So think about what you want that world to look like for your descendants thousands of years from now. What you want them to feel like? What is that like? And then from there, backcast the things that have to happen to get there. The reason I put that

in the book, and you picked up on it, you read between the lines is it means you're going to have to question consensus and question what is the right way of doing things, right? So you talked about energy independence. So I'm going to question that right now. I'm a believer in this idea that Buckminster Fuller kind of first developed this idea of the global energy grid right so you think about the internet the original kind of internet now we use satellites in many places but it's kind of fiber optic cables that go all over the planet

it's kind of like a web around the planet there are folks and actually this is being pushed by the CEO of China grid the state corporation that does the grid in China so it's something to consider of a global energy grid of direct kind of DC high voltage cables that would wrap around the Earth so you could have nuclear on one side, solar here, wind there, and we would start moving electricity around the planet because we do have to electrify everything. Let's be totally clear if we're going to move off a fossil. And that would be the opposite of energy independence, right? What it would basically mean,

it would be like the internet, and there'd be multiple hubs and nodes. So if the solar grid in sub-Saharan went down, the nuclear in Brazil could take over. And we would move from a place of kind of energy insecurity to energy abundance that's all clean and green, but it would require us to rethink national boundaries in the sense of national energy sovereignty and moving away from energy independence. Now, I'm open to that idea and I want to have a debate about it, but more often than not, it will get shut down from folks saying, well, for national security, we can't do that. So it's an example of if we want to have an empathetic connection to the future, we're going to have to be open to pushing outside of consensus models, but to do that in an ethically, morally just way,

we have to have empathy for the other folks who are doing it and assume best intentions. And even if we can't find those best intentions, it's incumbent on us to have the conversations to find out what it is that they really want to achieve. What is their long-term goal and vision? And then you have an argument about that. Because sometimes I've gotten into conversation with people around nuclear energy or other issues. And what I find is we just have very very much. different visions of futures for homo sapiens over the next several thousand years, right? They're coming from a kind of very xenophobic, white supremacist's point of view that wasn't apparent at first. But when you kind of dig into it, you see like, oh, they really do want a separation

of people like that. These are probably people I can't work with. It's far and few between. You'll find folks like that. More often than not, when you actually talk about what are the futures that you want to people across the aisle, you'll actually find you all want the same thing for your kids and your descendants, and from there you work backwards to kind of blow open that consensus and start looking for new ideas afresh. Yeah. Also, sometimes I've had a little bit of that with like hardcore environmentalists who actually their approach, and just using that as a general term, because that could be used a lot of things. And I understand them saying it in kind of a derogatory way. I apologize for anybody who's offended. But you'll get what I mean by this,

is that there's a group of people that want to go back in time. And that can be on all sides of the spectrum. If we only went back to the way of the way of the, past. People who want to go back to this kind of romantic past exist across a spectrum. Across the spectrum. Every spectrum, every area. There's people in food, you know, that sort of thing. There's people who think that we should go back to a hundred, gather, societies and stuff.

It's just not going to happen. We're not going backwards. And we forget about the rest of the population of the world that is excited to get to the same things that we have as the national, that's a, as a luxuries in our life, that it made us, you know, everything, you know, better. I want to chat and sort of pivot for. a second over here, with these different groups that you're invited to speak at, at these conferences that you get a chance to go to. And you have this sort of entrenched thinking that I'm

sure you hear and also this hopeful thinking. I'm sure there's a little bit of an age. Well, let me actually ask it. Is there an age difference in the openness for the long path approach, generally I've seen that people who have lived longer are a little bit more stuck in their ideas, although it's primarily not age, it's really mindset. You can have people that are 80 years old that have a mindset that's like super young. But in general, do you see a difference in terms of how this framework is received by young people versus old people? Yeah, so the answer might surprise you. What I'm seeing, this is all only personal data live difference is the folks who are most open to long past thinking either are 65 years and older

or like 18 to maybe 35 or 40. Why? Because one is now thinking about what is the world they are leaving behind. What are the actions that we have to take? Again, those are the people that I'm interacting with. Right. The other is they're not so entrenched in the system that they have to consistently kind of reify and amplify the given norms of the system. And I can, I'm 47 years old. Like, I'm in the heart of, like, I'm thinking like, ah, I'm like 10 years into my 30 year more, you know, 30 year mortgage and all these. So like, I'm most likely going to be not wanting to shift anything. Because I'm kind of like in, in general, in America, you're kind of like hitting your striding your career in your 40s and your 50s. And you don't want to change much and you don't want

anything to change much. But before that and after that, you're the most open. Now, that's in general. So I'm finding kind of people in their 20s and 30s are like, yes, I want to live long path. And I'm really seeing a lot of people in their 60s saying like, I never thought, this is what I want to do. I want to dedicate the kind of, this, you know, the back third, the finally find in the next phase to kind of how do I become a great ancestor? It's the folks in the middle that are kind of the most entrenched in the given system that I find it can be a little bit more difficult with. Sometimes probably out of just even survival. Yeah, 100%. dealing with kids, dealing with that, whatever, getting set up. And as I say that, and though,

that's at kind of at a systems level, but in terms of how you are in your own home, the biggest uptake, the most emails I get about Long Path in terms of how it's kind of changing what they're doing are like moms in their 40s. Really? They're like, they're saying like, oh, I was kind of on this rat race hamster wheel. Like every test score matters and oh my God, if I don't do this, they won't get to the right college. They don't get in the right college. They won't find the right partner. They won't. Like it's kind of this common narrative,

especially that we have kind of in this moment of hypercapitalism in the West. And what I'm hearing back from these bombs and dads too, by the way, is, oh, I see something much bigger here. It's about raising a good human and from them ensuring that they raise good humans. So I got this, I didn't think of this. This was a super insightful email I got from a mom two weeks ago. She goes, you know, I realized the way that I'm raising my children, children, she has younger children, isn't just about me raising them. I'm actually modeling behavior

and raising my grandchildren. This is a woman with a eight-year-old kid, you know, sex that I'm a year, but she realizes the way what she's doing, this goes back to transgender empathy. The way she is modeling behaviors and raising those children, she said, is going to impact her grandchildren and her great-hand children. Her kids are under the age of 10. But she's understanding that what she does now has these long-term ramifications. That email, like for all the struggles of getting this book out in the late nights and the editing and this and that,

getting that, I was like, oh, yeah, she gets it. This is why we're doing it. You helped her connect the dots. Yeah. You know, you've mentioned Buckminster Fuller. You know, there's another, not at that scale, but another sort of thinker in the world of sort of design and green and everything.

I'm not sure you're familiar with him, but William McDonough, Cradle? Yeah. Yeah. He shared this story a few years ago that I heard in a talk that he was giving where he was saying that they were building a sort of a waste site to carry and hold nuclear waste in a safe way in this area that was less populated. They had made an agreement. They were getting some pushback from the state. Like nobody wants to not in my neighborhood.

Yeah. Yeah. Don't get this over here. And they had made, they were looking at, if my narrative is correct, they were looking at. they were looking at maybe partnering with like an Indian tribe that was there. It was on Indian lands and they were open to it and there was some incentives to do it. And the community in the town was making sort of an uproar of like what if, you know, in like 500 years, like people try to build over here or other things. And that group had shared and either somehow it came to him or he was involved or he had heard the story.

I'll find the details out later on. But that group was like, don't worry. Like if it's in like 500 years like our tribe will tell them. Yeah. And that was just such a beautiful little anecdote that I thought of as a group thinking like seven generations ahead. Yeah. And putting themselves in a place of like, no, we have this. Like we're not going anywhere.

Like we're here. And I think when people understand that they're part of a legacy that plays into that, it's just a completely different psyche and a way of sort of treating not only your immediate environment, but the people around you, if you understood that the person that you're trying to make the other right now, that your kids and their kids are their great grandkids and their great grandkids are not only going to be playing, but they're going to get married. Yeah. It's a whole different approach to how you talk about problems and how you look at solving problems. Yeah, seventh generation thinking, look, what I say in the first part of the book, I say, look, there's a lot of long path

that's kind of new. I brought a lot of kind of neuroscience and applied neuroscience from our friend and a hero and other neuroscientists and different types of psychologists and sociologists who are on the board of Long Path Labs. My organization, I brought them into the book. But the fact of the matter is the ancient wisdom traditions, the ancient wisdom technologies, Judaism, monotheism, multi-faith, even poly and Hindu, those all actually already have kind of long path in them. We've just kind of forgotten it. So in some ways, and I'm not saying this to be derogatory towards my own book, but it's taking the kind of the old with the new and putting it into a form factor that people can use for today. But Long Path is hundreds and hundreds of books, and a lot of the books that I've

read that went into this and into my thinking are based on indigenous and First Nations people wisdom that go back, really go back thousands of years. And that's, you know, I start the book with a story about, and it's from the Talmud. This is a, you know, several, many hundreds of years old the story. And there was this man, Honi, and he was coming down a path. And he came across a much older man who was planting a carob tree. And Honi said to him, why are you planting this carab tree? You're like, you're like in your 80s. You're so old. How long will it be until this tree, you know, bears fruit or has shade? And he goes, oh, it'll be 30 or 40 years. He goes, why are you doing that? You'll be long gone. And the man answers them and goes,

I'm planting this carab tree right now because when I was a kid, I ate from a carob tree that somebody had planted. I rested in the shade of a carib tree that somebody had planted. It's incumbent upon me to plant carib trees for the next generation. That's the essence of what you were just talking about in terms of seven generation thinking. It's the essence of a long path. It's the essence of what this mindset is and what I'm asking people to do is to constantly be thinking, am I just resting in the shade and eating the fruit from this tree? Or, and there's nothing wrong with that. So, or, and am I planting one for the next generation? That could be something really real. Like, am I helping bring in kind of new ways of bringing clean energy into my community? That's a care of a tree, right? Am I raising and talking to my kids in a specific way that will impact my great, great grandkids?

That's a care of tree. Am I being good to myself right now? Am I showing kind of gratitude and compassion for, for, for, Ari, for who I am and how I got to this point, that is a carab tree. That's all in here. And it's what I'm trying to ask people to do is to return to knowledge and wisdom that's been with us for thousands of years that we have forgotten. In addition to picking up your book, link in the show notes, everything, it's out there. Please, it's a fantastic read. What do you think is like, we zoomed out a bunch. Yeah. And we've given, you know, some, we're giving the framework that allows

people to start applying it to their own life to think about what do they care about. how can they forgive themselves and sort of their ancestral past and everything how do they create a roadmap and a vision for the future but if there was a tiny step right yeah i'm a big fan of like the work of like bj fogg tiny habits everything like that if there's a tiny step that people can do today yeah that starts taking them in the direction of this thinking and and can they can apply it to their life today is there something that you have in mind yeah i mean so i talked about this a little bit earlier. So Buckminster Fuller, my mom's teacher, was asked by the

U.S. Navy during World War II to help them with a very big problem. They had these giant ships, and they couldn't build rudders big enough to turn them because the hydraulics that were necessary to turn these giant rudders were getting so big and cumbersome. The mechanics didn't work anymore.

So he came with this idea and this solution, which was to put literally a four-inch piece of metal at the very end of the rudder, and it was called a trim tab. and he found that if you just turned that small little trim tab just a little bit into the

force of the oncoming water it would actually swing the entire rudder around so this kind of trim tab thinking the small actions, great effects is unbelievably powerful and it is that kind of micro thing that you're talking about

Bucky believing this so much that on his tombstone it has his name it has the year of his birth, the year of his death and then it said call me trim tab because he felt that in every part of our life and every part of our day, we could do these micro trim tab actions that would change the future. So sometimes it's something very big and grandiose. Like you run for president and you do a bunch of laws. That's something pretty big. Most of us aren't going to run for president. We just have the kind of

what's in front of us right now, these trim tab ways of being. And so for everyone to answer your question, it's going to be different. For some people, it's just going to be when they see the security guard and the office building, they actually hold the gaze for a second. and rehumanize them and don't just grab their pass and keep going. It's something small that actually starts to amplify over time. For a lot of people, it's going to be something as very simple as basically, and this sounds kind of self-serving, but that's why I put it on the cover of the book, is when you're going to make a decision that seems consequential or even not totally consequential, that microaction you can do is just to pause and ask yourself,

is what I am about to do or decide going to make me a great ancestor or not? It sounds like there's a lot of hubris in that, but it can be very, very simple. I used that the other night when I was at the market shopping for what I was going to have for dinner. I chose the organic biodynamic salad. I chose the thing that would be better for me and my health

that will put me in a better state of mind for your podcast, to be with my family in a few days, for the farmers, for the communities where that food was raised. It seemed very small, but that was the question I asked myself. And so sometimes we want it to be these big grandiose gestures that change the future. And sometimes that's just pausing. And by the way, that could be for consumption and it could be for that argument you're about to have with your partner. Is what I'm about to say leading towards me being a great ancestor and us as a people or is it going to lead us down a different pathway?

That's a very small thing. Start there and then build up. Can I throw out one more My version of it and you can genuinely critique it? Don't be nice just because I'm the host here. Yeah. That's a stupid idea. You know. I was very fortunate to grow up in a household where

my grandparents are pretty much there all the time. Yeah. And I recognize it's a complete sort of privilege in a way to be in a situation you can do that. And the more people I talk to, the more I see as every generation kind of goes up, we not only do we not have, not have that much experience with sort of people as they age.

You know, we put them away in this, uh, in the society. We, we, we, we, you know, they also want their own freedom. A lot of older people that are there. They want their own freedom. They want to move somewhere else. They don't want to sort of be in the same environment as like their kids or their grandkids other stuff. But along with that, you also see this very vulnerable and beautiful place where

when you're getting a chance to talk to somebody when they are not too far away from death. Mm-hmm. And when somebody who's. older or in that period where they're getting closer to death, oftentimes there's, you know, the nature of conversation can kind of change. So my version of that, that one small, tiny thing is if you're somebody that hasn't really had a chance to spend a lot of time with people, especially as they're aging and getting

older, going to a senior citizen's home, going somewhere, volunteering your time, or even going to your friend's place and spending some time with their grandparents and asking them questions. And I feel like a few themes end up coming up, right? If you can talk to somebody that is here and hopefully, you know, Alzheimer's hasn't taken its toll and dementia and other stuff is that there's a lot of things that didn't matter. Often if people are being vulnerable enough, their true regrets show up and you can start to see patterns and themes, areas of their life where they wish they would have been more courageous

or not worked as much or, you know, done their own thing. And I think that that helps with this process of perspective. I feel like so much of what I was reading your book, I felt like this is kind of what we used to get from our grandparents and great grandparents of like being in the same home with them. And we don't have that same luxury. So if we can get a little taste of that in the smallest way, which is just simply spending time. I do that here. There's a senior citizen home.

Actually, Ronald Reckin used to be there. It's down in Santa Monica when he was diagnosed with dementia, unfortunately. But a few of my friends there went there. Obviously, with COVID and everything, it's a little bit different. And we just sat down. We spent some time. We're just asking questions. Tell me what your life is like.

You know, tell me, you know, not trying to force wisdom. of it, but wisdom naturally just comes. And I always feel like I get a different perspective when I leave those conversations. So that's my tiny version of it. I am not going to critique that. I think that's amazing. And what I would ask anyone who's listening to this, if you're, you know, Twitter or Instagram, tag me, you know, it's at R-A-W. It's very four letters, very short, with what your trim tab, what your small kind of thing is. Because I would love to kind of, and I'm doing that. I'm hearing, I mean, this is the first time I've heard that. That's beautiful. and it's amazing and it's 100% correct.

It's very much kind of living long path is to do the things that ensure that we maintain our humanity in inhuman times. And sometimes it's going to visit those folks and sometimes it's doing, you know, helping them, it may not be in the visit, it may just actually be looking in the eye or helping them across the street.

The things that as we move into these kind of, this intertidal time that is going to be a little bit rougher than we want it to be, just as change kind of becomes more tectonic. What's going to keep us moving forward, yes, is this grand vision and goal of what we wipe. This telos is what I call the project human flourishing over 1,000 of years. But at the micro moment to moment layer,

it's going to be that we see each other as humans de-otherize the way we've been doing it so that we move forward together on this collective path, not on the individual path, not about my life from birth to death, but about all of us moving forward from hundreds of thousands, of years ago to hundreds of thousands of years from from now. It's a beautiful and important message. Ari, thank you so much. The book is out there.

Long Path, Becoming the Great Ancestors, Our Future Needs. Any final places you want to direct our audience that they want to keep in touch with you and your work? If you go to Longpath.org, you can sign it for the newsletter. On social, it's REW everywhere, but especially tag me with your ideas because, like, I'm going to kind of resurface those and put those together.

we're going to be starting back up again Long Path Gather, which is where we bring people together in different cities around the world. We're just starting to kind of beta test this before COVID. And we're kind of shut it down, obviously. And we're bringing it back up. So if you're interested in that, you can sign up for that at Longpath.org as well. What does that look like?

Decentralized Meetups, people are just getting together? Exactly. So Scott Heverman, who started Meetup.com actually helped me, was one of the kind of people who helped me kind of think through this. It's about folks coming together. We have a curriculum, something called the Long Path Journey. So it's kind of like a workbook. So it's the questions.

you find in the book, but a layer deeper because at the end of the day, and now I'm giving away something from the last chapter, Long Path can't really be done alone. It's a relational mindset. You have to be doing it with others. So a place to kind of practice, a gym, if you will, of becoming a great ancestor is what Long Path Gather is. The idea is that you start with the journey, you start with the workbook. These are pretty much self-run in many ways and in many cities. and then from there you decide what you want to do as a group. Look, what I would love is a Long Path Gatherer. It could be one in Santa Monica, reads the book, does a Long Path journey,

and one of the things I end up doing is going to that senior center in Santa Monica every week and just showing up and hearing those stories and being a familiar human face in difficult times. Beautiful. Longpath.org, you can find everything over there. Ari, thank you again for coming on the podcast and for dedicating your mission, your work, all on helping us think about how to be better ancestors. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.