Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Ari Wallach on Unlock Your Purpose for Something Greater than Yourself EP 177

Starting point is 00:00:00 Coming up next on the Passion Struck podcast. It's not just about avoiding the worst things, but it's about actually going to the things that we actually want, which is difficult because we have to be able to be creative and think about what it is that we want and have intentionality behind that. So those two things came together to help me think about a different way of seeing tomorrow and kind of got me into this kind of, again, the term that I don't love, but this kind of classic idea of future owner or being a futurist. Welcome to PassionStruck. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles.

Starting point is 00:00:28 And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors,

Starting point is 00:00:57 CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 177 of PassionStruck. Ranked this week by Apple is one of the top five most popular alternative health podcasts. And thank you to each and every one of you who comes back weekly to listen and learn at a live better, be better, and impact the world. And if you're new to the show, welcome.

Starting point is 00:01:28 If you'd like to introduce this to a friend or family member and we so appreciate it when you do that, we now have episode stutter packs both on Spotify and on the PassionStark website, which are collections of our fans' favorite episodes that we organize into topics to make it so much easier for a new listener to get acquainted with everything that we do here on the show. Just go to passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started. And in case you missed my interview from earlier in the week,

Starting point is 00:01:53 it featured Dr. Islet Fishback, who's a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, an expert on the science and motivation, and we discuss her new book Get It Done. And in case you missed my episodes from last week, they featured Dr. Valerie Young, who is the co-founder of the Imposter Syndrome Institute and the leading authority on the topic worldwide. We also had on Dr. Kara Fitzgerald, who is a worldwide expert on reverse aging, epigenetics, and DNA methylation.

Starting point is 00:02:25 And she talks about how you can reverse your own bioage and increase your health span. And lastly, we had on a very important interview with Rabbi of Remi Zippel, who talks about the 10-year period of child abuse that he underwent. The consequences from it and how it has now transformed his life into one of advocacy. You don't want to miss any of them. And if you like today's episode or any of the other ones I've mentioned, we so appreciate it when you give us a five star rating or review, they go so far in helping promote this podcast and making it more popular so others can learn themselves, how to grow more intentional in their life. And that's a great lead in to today's discussion because what we're gonna discuss today

Starting point is 00:03:07 is absolutely what this podcast is all about. How do you create an intentional life? And we're gonna do that by discussing it through the lens of our upcoming guest, new book, Long Path. But before we get into that, let me introduce our guest to you. R.A. Wallach is a futurist

Starting point is 00:03:22 and the founder and executive director of Long Path Labs, which focuses on the thinking and behaviors that will positively impact future generations. As AgJunked Associate Professor at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, he lectured on Innovation AI as well as the future's public policy. Ari's TED Talk on the Long Path mindset has been viewed over 2.6 million times. He has written fratlets like the BBC and wired and hosted fast companies, FACTCO Futures with Ari Wallach. Today, we do a deep dive into his brand new book

Starting point is 00:04:00 which launched earlier this week titled Long Path, becoming the great ancestors of our future needs. In our discussion, we go into what it means to be a futurist and why it's a title that RE doesn't really care for. What RE means when he says short-termism, what are the foundational principles of the long-path philosophy? What he means by transgenerational empathy, what he describes as future thinking and tell-os and goal awareness, we provide a few perspectives of long path principles that are at work today, what stands in the way of having long path working, and what is the payoff for planning for a future we won't be around to see.

Starting point is 00:04:40 We also go into a few quick changes that the listeners of today's podcast can make immediately to shift their own thinking. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. I am so excited for this interview with Ari Wallauk on the Passion Struck Podcast. Welcome. Ah, thank you. Thanks for having me. Well, all right. I just wanted to say congratulations on the release of your book,

Starting point is 00:05:14 What a masterpiece you have written, and I love that you call it your lifelong calling. So congratulations on that, and for the viewers of this on YouTube, we will make sure that we put a picture of it. So people can see it's amazing cover. Thank you. From listening to some of the other podcasts you've done, I found the story of your parents background very interesting and how it shaped you into who you are today. Can you talk a little bit about that and why your father's story looms so large in your life?

Starting point is 00:05:47 Yeah, of course, John. When most people are asked kind of for their background, they almost always start with their own birthday. Like I was born in this year, and then you kind of move forward, and you'll see the theme plan as we talk about the book and about long path. So when people ask me about like my background,

Starting point is 00:06:01 I always start really in 1922, which I'm not obviously that old, I'm not a hundred years old. 1922 was when my father was born in a kind of medium-sized village in Poland. It's now actually part of Belarus. And he was 17 years old when World War II started. And he had some older brothers and younger sisters,

Starting point is 00:06:20 and obviously his parents. And within the first week of World War II, he lost his two older brothers to the front lines, as Germany kind of blitz creed through Poland. Within a couple of months, they had taken all the Jews in this very large city and kind of compacted them into a ghetto, which is what the Nazi regime did. And in that, very quickly, he kind of lost his mother

Starting point is 00:06:43 and his sister. They went to labor camps and they later perished in Auschwitz. So that was kind of a big part of the story of my life. And obviously my father's. But what ended up happening was his father was killed in front of him actually in this very kind of like atrocious weird thing that the Nazis did. And within a week, he and his brother basically escaped the ghetto and he joined the Jewish underground. So we're two and a half years, he lived in

Starting point is 00:07:07 the forests of Poland. And instead of fleeing, and there wasn't many places to actually flee, he actually stayed in FOT. And after World War II, he was a kind of off the books, Nazi hunter, and kind of made his way through Europe, playing semi-professional soccer and doing business and a whole bunch of other stuff to Cuba. Now he was in Cuba through the revolution. He's one of the few people who spoke fluent Spanish and Russian. And once Castro realized that my father was not going to kind of be a partner in Castro's policies, he kind of kicked him out and he sent him on a... It was a round trip ticket, but he was told never to return to Mexico. Meanwhile, my mother was born in 1945, kind of classic baby boomer, and she was an artist living in the Bay Area, working with Bill Graham and Janice Joplin and the dead and doing the kind of

Starting point is 00:07:55 the posters and whatnot for concerts. And she eventually became a student of Buckminster Fuller, kind of this renowned architect and classic kind of futurist, created a geodesic dome, came up with all sorts of great ideas. And he said to her at one point, listen, the way you think and the way you're kind of designing doing your art is amazing, but I want you to kind of expand your horizons. So she ended up doing through UCLA.

Starting point is 00:08:22 She did kind of a study abroad program, which was kind of rare in the late 60s for folks to do that. And in Mexico City, she studied kind of pre-industrial Mayan architecture and city planning. And so it was kind of like how do we do, even we think of these things as very modern things, but even back then, thousands, hundreds, if not thousands of years ago,

Starting point is 00:08:42 they were thinking about how do we actually bring people together to maximize kind of flourishing. And so it's in Mexico that my parents met. So it was kind of this mashup of my mom who was kind of raised an artist kind of futur. So she was always thinking about how we got to this point, what is the point, and what do the next several hundred years look like. And my dad came from a kind of a very much kind of a darker

Starting point is 00:09:05 past and upbringing and was very much kind of in the present. And it was less, how do we get to a point that we want to get to? And how do we avoid having what happened to him in the 40s? So I kind of grew up in this really interesting home where we were always kind of talking about issues, but always across like 100 to 150 year time span, going back to the 1920s, all the way out to the 21-20s.

Starting point is 00:09:29 Yeah, it's interesting. Part of my family is from Poland, and if people don't understand what happened to them around World War II, it's pretty devastating, because on one side, you had the atrocities that were committed by the Germans, but on the other side, it wasn't any better had the atrocities that were committed by the Germans, but on the other side, it wasn't any better with the atrocities that were committed by the Russians. So they really got snagged

Starting point is 00:09:54 in the middle. Yeah. Well, one of the quotes that you had in the book is actually from your father who said, if you forget the past, you don't have a future. What happens tomorrow started yesterday. And I wanted to bring that up because you said it altered your conception of time. How so? Folks like me who are considered futureous and we'll get into the sickiness of that term later tend to think about tomorrow from the vantage point of today, like right now, what's going to happen next 20, 30 years, but we really kind of do it where we're standing here in the present moment looking forward. And what my dad taught me was that actual sense of time and kind of reverberations a bias that what's happening now somehow kind of exists in a vacuum. But the reality is who we are as individuals, who we are as countries, and who we are really as a species has decades, if not centuries, and really millennia kind of background to that goddess to this point.

Starting point is 00:10:57 So from a kind of an evolutionary perspective, evolutionary biological perspective, when I hear a loud noise, which I did earlier, my first instinct was to kind of turn around and see if there was danger coming. That the process that allowed that to happen goes back hundreds of thousands of years. At the same time, I write about this in the book, my wife and I kind of got into this argument about it, the silly argument, and you'll read more about it in the book, kind of how she had put the frozen goods in with the non-frozen goods from Tader Joe's. And I kind of snapped and got mad when she did that. My snapping about that had to do a lot with my relationship with my father and his mother and all these other things. So the fact of the matter is who we are at any given point

Starting point is 00:11:37 and how we react for better, for worse, and hopefully for the better. And that's kind of many of the things that I work on and talk about in the book is based on things that happened a long time ago. Sometimes hundreds of thousands of years, sometimes decades, it's intergenerational. And sometimes it's something to happen to you when you were five years old. But this idea that the future is this blank slate based on where we are today is just totally false. That's what that quote, and that's what I learned

Starting point is 00:12:00 from a very early age for my father. Okay, and continuing down this thread. So you are a futurist today. I've heard it's something in a way of a title that you don't really care for, but was there a defining event that created your journey to become one? I think there was a couple of defined events and I'll hit a couple of them.

Starting point is 00:12:25 Part of it, again, for better or for worse, was consistently hearing these stories about World War 2 from my dad, right? And so I would come home in middle school or high school and whereas maybe most parents or this will sound like a broad sweeping cliche, like a dad would be watching sports or something else on TV. My dad was watching World War Two movies Right, the black and white ones remember those in the history channel, but he wasn't watching them as history It was almost like he was watching Videos of his own being raised and understand trying to grapple with what happened because he only understood World War two through a very narrow vision field which was his actually lived lived experience. And this actually created much larger context.

Starting point is 00:13:06 And I remember a series of conversations with him where, and the quote that we just talked about was in one of those conversations where he kept saying we heard the stories in the 1930s about this kind of rising authoritarian figure in Germany. We heard these things that were happening, but we didn't do anything. No one thought that future could happen.

Starting point is 00:13:27 People would kind of talk about it, but no one actually activated on it because it was out of the realm of the possible. And so I remember in those early conversations thinking, why is it that we get stuck on this kind of official swan events very early on. So I think those early conversations kind of set the tone for my thinking more critically and seriously about what could happen. So kind of the classic scenario planning that we know is futurist. And then the next event was when I was in the third grade, I broke my femur. And back then, they didn't do surgery like they do now. So I spent two and a half months in traction in a hospital bed, followed by two and a half months in a body cast at home. So that's a long time to kind of sit there and think.

Starting point is 00:14:10 There was no internet, we didn't really watch TV. And so these books had just come out called Time Machine novels. They were kind of like chooser and adventure, but instead of all happening at one time, these books, this Time machine series about 30 books, would always be an historical period world work to the age of the samurai.

Starting point is 00:14:30 And you kind of go back and forth in time but kind of choose different pathways. And I think it was reading every single one of those books in the set that got me thinking about time and time differently in different pathways. And I think those are kind of the two big events that got me thinking, huh? Thinking about tomorrow in different ways and helping people and societies and organizations. I

Starting point is 00:14:52 wasn't thinking this in third grade is something that speaks to me because it's also very creative. And so on the one hand from my dad's side, I was kind of thinking like, how do we prevent these worse things from happening, right? Because that's really what I got from my dad, right? Like, how do we go back and think, okay, 1933, these things were happening, how do we see these things? So we can bend us towards a positive from my mother's side as an artist and kind of as a radical optimist. It's not just about avoiding the worst things, but it's about actually going to the things that we actually want, which is difficult because we have to be able to be creative and think about what it is that we want and have intentionality behind that.

Starting point is 00:15:29 So those two things came together to help me think about a different way of seeing tomorrow and kind of got me into this kind of, again, the term that I don't love, but this kind of classic idea of future or being a futurist. Well, I like that you brought up the time machine because I actually have that first book and I also have the original edition of a comic book which was the time machine as well. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:15:55 So many things that I think we can learn from that series as you've just pointed out. So in the book, you have a chapter that talks about two gardeners that had a lot of influence on you. And it was interesting for me because in my upcoming book, I have a chapter that I titled Gardener Leadership. But I think it's important that we use this as an example to set up the rest of the interview because this podcast is all about how do you live an intentional life, which is what a long path mindset is all about how do you live an intentional life, which

Starting point is 00:16:25 is what a long path mindset is all about. We're going to talk a lot more about that. But I was hoping maybe you could introduce it through this lens of these two different gardeners in your life. In a book I talk about in middle school, there was the gardener who kept the grounds and I mean to make light about it up because don't know if he was a reenabir, whatever it was, whenever you would kind of mo the big sock, this is kind of classic Bay Area, California schools with a couple of soccer fields.

Starting point is 00:16:54 And instead of kind of moaning them in a straight line, he would always kind of just kind of go willing nilly. He would do figure eights, he would do all sorts of things, and we were always like, and it was somewhat humorous, but it would be this uneven field, so you'd be like dribbling with the soccer ball in one inch grass and I'll just hit four inches and then back to one inch and there was never a pattern to it. And for over a reason, he kept doing this for years. So there was that form of gardening. So

Starting point is 00:17:18 patches of weed here, there, the other. And then fast forward to just not that long, I get about 20 years ago, which is not just yesterday. I was given the opportunity to study under one of the kind of the lead really master gardeners who had flown in from Kyoto from the Royal Temple to see in Diego where I was taking a course on Japanese garden design. And it was both kind of larger tea garden design, but Iqibon and also bonsai. And there's in many ways the exact opposite, right?

Starting point is 00:17:48 Instead of kind of being willing nilly about how you garden, it's being very, very intentional, down to almost like the pine needle on the bonsai branch of the small tree and what that represents. And so I talk about that in the book because the garden obviously becomes a kind of metaphor for our mind. So we have this idea, and we'll talk about that in the book because the garden obviously becomes a kind of metaphor for our mind. So we have this idea and we'll talk about this in a minute, that even our inner voice that we

Starting point is 00:18:11 hear all the time is just kind of just randomly there and it has our best interest in mind. But that also has a long history, the kind of inner voice and the messaging that we give ourselves. And so in the book, I say, look, if you want to think about and develop a strategy for tomorrow that you want to see manifest, you have to decide whether or not you want to be the Willie Nilly Gardener, or if you want to be like the master Gardener, do you want to actually cultivate with intentionality, how you think and see the world in a proper way, a, because it leads to a better present, but b, and in some ways kind of where my interest

Starting point is 00:18:50 very much so is, is how does this help you think about tomorrow and plan for the future in a way that's less about being kind of short-termistic and reactionary and much more towards your own individual long-term flourishing? Really importantly, how does that set up future generations as well? We'll be right back to my interview with Ari Wallach. Need to supercharge your hiring?

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Starting point is 00:19:52 so much. Join more than 3 million businesses worldwide that use Indeed to hire great talent fast. Start hiring now with a $75 sponsor job credit to upgrade your job post at Indeed.com slash passion struck offer good for a limited time. Claim your $75 credit now at Indeed.com slash passion struck. Indeed.com slash passion struck terms and conditions apply need to hire you need indeed. Now back to my interview with Ari Wallach. Well, I think you might like this story. I know at one point you considered going to West Point, you ended up going to Berkeley instead, talk about a complete paradigm shift.

Starting point is 00:20:37 But I ended up going to the Naval Academy, but as I was reading grit by Angela Duckworth, she starts the whole book out about talking about West Point, and she uses it as the core example that it was the combination of perseverance and passion that got these cadets to graduation and beyond. And as I contemplated that, and I thought about my own experience and talked to some of my classmates,

Starting point is 00:21:04 yes, grit was an extremely important part of it, but I think the one missing ingredient that she really missed was intentionality, because you can have as much Gryt as you want, but if you're not intentional about how you're deploying it, you're not going to get to where you want to be. 100%. And I think this whole analogy of the gardener is an important one, because if you're a good gardener, you have to be intentional about your choices that you're making, the activities you're doing, and everything that you're doing, you're not going to cultivate anything. So I thought

Starting point is 00:21:39 this example was a really good one to now introduce This example was a really good one to now introduce this concept of long path and what a long path mindset is. So I was hoping you could explain that and what some of the guiding principles are. For sure. And I'll dovetail a little bit off of this kind of this gardening because anyone who's garden knows that you have some big choices to make specifically when you're planting anything perennial. So any of that's going to keep coming back year after year. So I live in the Northeast outside New

Starting point is 00:22:07 York City. So we see kind of plants come up and go down and come up and go down and they're in the winter. And it was that way of thinking we should think about kind of perennial intentionality, not just in our own life, but also in the life spans to continue, right? And the generations to follow. And so that in many ways was where the long path and how the long path mindset was developed. For 20 years, I've been working with large organizations, the UN, the White House State Department, Fortune 100 companies, helping them think about the future.

Starting point is 00:22:36 What I found is two things happened over the past several years. One, when they wanted to talk about tomorrow, it went from being, let's talk 20 years out, Ari, to let's talk six months out. So I saw this exponential rise of short termistic thinking, and I was trying to figure out, okay, short termism is as a human, we're hardwired for it. I mentioned this earlier, if John and Ari are walking through the serengeti and a large animal with big teeth comes after us, you and I don't sit down and have a long dialogue. We react and we do something about it, right? So we want that fight or flight response that's kind of in the amygdala. It's okay. It's what God is here. And it's something that we want to be

Starting point is 00:23:14 able to leverage. The problem is when it becomes hyper activated. So why does it become hyper activated? Well, mostly when we live in a kind of perpetual state, either a fear or anxiety. Now, what brings that about? So yes, a lot of people talk about social media and technology that obviously plays a role in kind of triggering that cortisol response, that constant amnesty. But I make the argument in the book that what we're going through right now,

Starting point is 00:23:40 especially kind of in the global north in the west, is what I call an intertidal. So intertidal are especially kind of in the global north in the west is what I call an intertidal. So intertitles are these kind of moments between what was and what will be. And so in our personal life, we have intertitles all the time when we go through kind of significant life transitions and moments, the passing of a relationship or the passing of a parent, for instance. We are going through that at a kind of civilizational level. And what that means is the old stories and narratives about how the world works no longer work for us. And so specifically

Starting point is 00:24:13 this entire title is the transition out of probably about four to five hundred years of where we've been as a society in terms of how we think about how the world works. So that's obviously coming from the Renaissance and see enlightenment, it's the rise of industrialization, which means at its core, if you break down individual, if you take a complex system and you break it down to individual pieces, it'll tell you how it works. But any doctor or biologist

Starting point is 00:24:41 or someone who really thinks about leadership, we'll tell you that's not actually how the world works. So what I found was we're in this intertuttle moment, kind of a breakdown of trust, rapid climate change. People not being sure about what tomorrow is going to look and feel like, and so that leads to kind of a heightened anxiety. And so in working with clients and organizations and different folks, I realized we needed a framework to help us kind of navigate

Starting point is 00:25:06 this title. The best way of thinking about a framework is really through a mindset, which is kind of a set of assumptions that we operate and go through the world with. And so the genesis of long path was, as a strategist, was thinking like, okay, we have this problem or in an inter-title, we want to successfully navigate it. How are we going to do that?

Starting point is 00:25:26 Mindset thinking, if you will, is the best way to do that. Where long path came from? If we think about long path that's almost an applied mindset to help leaders and everyone basically live with intentionality in our current moment in a way that doesn't just help Ari and John in this current moment, but from a kind of normative and ethical perspective, help us set up future generations. Why? Because A, they need all of our help right now because they can't vote because they're not here. They can't take actions that we need to do it on their behalf. But B, potentially even more importantly, acting in such a way that has high regard for future generations, which could be hundreds

Starting point is 00:26:04 of billions, if not trillions of homo sapiens over the next 10, 20, 30,000, hundreds of thousands of years, actually gives intentionality to the moment right now. So it's no longer about how R.E. makes it through his day for R.E. or how John makes it through his day for John. How do we do that in such a way that lives in alignment with future generations gives us a sense of purpose and meaning right Victor Franco man search for meaning right how do people make it through traumatic moments you're obviously what about world war two in the Holocaust He said he found and this is the basis of his logo therapy was that people who had something to live for Were the ones who were able to flourish in the moment.

Starting point is 00:26:45 And so long path gives us something to kind of live for that beyond ourselves, which is how do we ensure future generations flourish? So that's the background on long path. Now, what are the three main components of it? So the three components are futures thinking. So that's future with an S, transgenerational empathy, which is almost like a therapeutic component, T loss thinking, which means ultimate aim and goal.

Starting point is 00:27:11 And so those three pillars, when you work with them and do the work, and this is the kind of the middle section of the book, are what kind of shifts you from a short term reactionary mindset to a long path mindset. Does that all make sense so far? Yep, that all makes sense. So let's start with futures thinking. So more often than not, and this goes to why I have issues with the term futurist, because when you say, oh, I talked to the futurist, I'm a futurist, people have this idea that what the futurist is gonna do is prognosticate

Starting point is 00:27:42 or predict what's gonna happen tomorrow. It's a singular point we're heading towards. So once every couple of days, I get invited to be on a panel, the future of X, the future of cars, the future of love, the future of money, the future, but it's always in the singular, as if there's only one future. Now what that does is it creates a kind of aperture cone

Starting point is 00:28:03 so that there's nothing else that you can do outside of what that official line is, that you can do outside of it. That official line is that official features what I talk about in the book. Now, there's a reason we all need an official feature to be totally open to anything happening tomorrow at an individual level. It's nice. It's like, oh, I could do this. I could do that. The future is full of possibility. At a societal level, at least to kind of chaos. So there needs to be a story about where we're heading. But what often happens is we get locked into that story

Starting point is 00:28:29 because it becomes the future in the singular. And anything outside of that narrative of that story is seen as crazy, right? Like a great example. This seems like a small example. But I remember three years ago, I was talking to a large organization about, well, we need more work from home, we need more flexibility, we need to be able to do more kind of zooming.

Starting point is 00:28:49 And they're like, no, we don't do that. We need everyone in the office five days a week and that's all we'll ever do. And then we saw get ratted, obviously that get radically disrupted. And lo and behold, there was now a different future about what could happen, but we were so kind of cognitively locked. So future spanking is an acknowledgement there are different probable futures that we can go towards, but that it kind of opens up this context, it's called a Voroscon, it's in the book about different

Starting point is 00:29:15 directions that we could go into. Now, it doesn't mean we can go willy-nilly and decide, well, in this future landscape, John and Ari are going to live a castle in the sky, and that's the future that we want. Potentially, and that maybe, that starts to get kind of improbably out of the cone. So, what we do is to kind of allow people to think about different futures is we call them mega trends.

Starting point is 00:29:37 So, these are these big tectonic shifts that are happening kind of below the surface, mostly almost always human-made, they're decades in the making, and they're going to kind of impact how we move forward. So you can kind of almost think about them as guardrails. So whatever John and Ari think about different futures for our self and society, we have to recognize these these mega trends. So at longpath.org forward slash mega trends, we have the 21

Starting point is 00:30:02 mega trends that we kind of use to help us think about different futures and kind of stay in that cone. So that's pillar one. I talk about that in the book. And even that simple idea of future versus futures, all the sudden starts to kind of shift how you think we can be in this moment and how all of a sudden, not just even at that level when I talk to folks, they start to think kind of obviously very differently. Then the the core of the book is really around transgenerational empathy and what you and I were talking about earlier, which is how do we connect with the past, right, our ancestors and it could be our parents, but it could go back tens of not hundreds of not thousands of years. So it's empathy for them. How do we have self-empathy in the moment,

Starting point is 00:30:47 so self-compassion? And then the final is how do we have empathy for future generations? And it's both the how and the why is the core of long paths. What it does is it moves us out having a lifespan bias of just like how does John live with intentionality from birth to death? That's like 99% of the books out there are just about John's birth to death or Ari's birth to death. The argument that I make is while that's great, it starts to rob the future of the resources they need and it actually takes the intentionality that we want to have in the moment working on our own behalf and their behalf out of the picture. So transgenerational empathy is a way of kind of connecting

Starting point is 00:31:28 with the past, yourself and the present in the future, that places you out of this lifespan bias and more into a much larger chain of being, which then kind of removes this existential dread of, well, who am I and why am I here, towards who are we and why are we here? So I'm not just about spirituality or theology, it's about connecting to something much larger. And the final pillar of a long path mindset is telos, which means ultimate aim and goal.

Starting point is 00:31:55 And the idea there, and this is this comes, I mean, we, I'm sure we both did, I know I did sports, I did pole vaulting, you have to have an idea and a visualization of where is it that you want to get to. And you know this, it's kind of classic. And we talked about long path as being a way to navigate the entire title, but navigate towards what, right? So Odessia's in the Odyssey

Starting point is 00:32:17 wanted to return to Penelope in Ethica, right? Had an ultimate goal and destination of mind of how we got through this crazy Odyssey. If we in the society are going to positively navigate this intertidal moment, we have to have an idea and a vision of what is it we're trying to get to, but recognizing that Tilos isn't where John gets to at the end of his life or where Ari gets to at the end of its life. It's something much more dynamic. It's not static. And it's for, and I have a little bit of a bias here. It's for Homo sapiens writ large over the next several thousand years. And I know that sounds very sci-fi, but if you think about it, so think about the

Starting point is 00:32:55 year 4,000. It seems very, very far out there. But most of your listeners or viewers know about ancient Roman, the gladiators, and we've seen the movies. We're as close to the year 4,020 AD as we are to the times of the Romans and the gladiators in the Colosseum. So, even though we've seen movies about it and it's kind of this historical going backwards, if you flip that, that's the year 4,000. So the telos has to be something that is that but goes even further than that. What I put out in the book is something very simple, which is human and planetary flourishing, which means a tomorrow better than today where everyone is able to have their needs met,

Starting point is 00:33:36 not at the expense of others. So it sounds kind of pying the sky, but in reality, it's something that we can do. Leaders do it all the time. People leaving with an intentional life, do it all the time for themselves. What long path is saying is we can do it for ourselves and for these far off future generations. And it actually helps us in the present. Well, there are so many directions I can take what you just unpacked because there are a ton of questions I want to ask, but I'm going to start out by saying this, the whole concept of being passion struck

Starting point is 00:34:12 really goes along the lines that you're talking about. I use the tagline, be better, live better, impact society. And the third one is the most important, because what I'm really trying to get people to start thinking about is we are so individual, holistic in the way that we live our lives. And we need to be world centric if we're going to change the different patterns and megatrends

Starting point is 00:34:38 that are happening to us, which we'll discuss here in a bit. And two recent interviews I did on this show, and I'm just putting them out there for the listener to go back if you haven't heard them, are really good primers for today's discussion. One was with Jeff Walker, who is someone I think are you know. Jeff is the former vice chairman of JP Morgan Chase, led their private equity group.

Starting point is 00:35:02 But for the past, a number of years since retirement, he has dedicated his life to systems change and how we go about doing that to solve many of these issues. And the second one I would recommend people listen to is with Jean Allwing, who's the founding CEO of Virgin Unite, which is Sir Richard Branson's philanthropic arm. And that one is really interesting because she talks about the elders, which some people might not know about, but it's a collection of very senior leaders

Starting point is 00:35:32 who have kind of gotten to the point that their sole focus in life is fixated on, how do we fix some of these societal issues? And then the B team, which is a bunch of CEOs from across the world who are really focused not only on quarterly revenue, but on how do we bring long-lasting change to society. So both of those are two good ones. But I use that to open up this topic of shortism.

Starting point is 00:35:57 And I wanted to do it through an example for me that's very personal. When I was a senior executive at Lowe's, which is a public company, the thing that I really loved about the Lowe's culture is everything was built on a very strategic long-term strategy. We were looking out 5, 10, even many more years from that, and everything that we would do for the initiatives of today all had to be guided by where we wanted the company to be way, way in the distance future. So what I really liked about that culture was the capital expenditures we were making were very long term thought out. And then I happened to go to Dell and at Dell, another public company

Starting point is 00:36:43 about the same size, our strategy existed in the next quarter. We were barely looking out six months, and I've never been in a culture, especially when you're leading the technology organization where so many projects were started and stopped for no apparent strategic reason. And it really showed me kind of a clear example on the importance of long time thinking, futuristic thinking, versus the short-tism that you bring up

Starting point is 00:37:14 throughout the book and you've brought up earlier today. So long-worded intro to this, but my question for you was, how do you recommend people shift their mental modes about the short term? I mean, it wasn't a long, it was a perfect intro, right? Because this is what we face all the time. We'll talk about the book, I know this sounds self-referential, but the book is called Long Path becoming the great ancestors are future needs, right? An antidote for short termism. Carefully thought out all of that. What does it mean to think and act like a great ancestor,

Starting point is 00:37:47 first and foremost? And it means that you're acting in accordance with the needs, and we know this from the Iroquois Confederacy, that there's this idea of seventh generation, right? Act as if though all of your actions we'll have, and think about the ramifications that we'll have on the next seven generations, right? So a lot of what's in long path is not necessarily new. It's my kind of studying understanding from a lot

Starting point is 00:38:11 of different wisdom traditions from around the world. And so from looking at those kind of wisdom traditions shifting from a short termistic to a long path or say long term, but a long path mindset. First and foremost is what I call the kind of the ABCs. So it's awareness beliefs and cultivate. And this goes to the kind of the gardening that we talked about earlier. So first and foremost, it's being aware that you're in that situation.

Starting point is 00:38:35 It sounds silly, but first and foremost, kind of recognizing the role that short-termism plays in your life, keeping your daily life, how you parent, or how you're a a partner or how you are in business and work And it's basically what I have these kind of conversations with leaders around the world What I take for granted is that most people aren't kind of constantly scanning for short-termism in their life But once you've heard this or you read the book all the sudden you'll see it kind of playing out everywhere So it's just becoming first and foremost kind of aware of it.

Starting point is 00:39:06 As you were able to see that between Lowe's and Dell, but most folks are kind of, we're so stuck in this present-tisted moment. We're kind of everything's happening all at once because of technology in this intertinal moment. It's like we live in a hall of mirrors. We don't realize the role and impact short-termism plays specifically because we have a culture built around it,

Starting point is 00:39:26 the quarterly earnings reports, the fact that I get notification on an app, if my daughter misses an assignment by 30 seconds, and I get almost every day updates on her work, we've moved into an overly kind of metricized world that amplifies kind of short-term behavior and thinking. So again, it's that awareness. The second is the beliefs. Are you willing to think differently and have a kind of,

Starting point is 00:39:52 this is dux work, a growth mindset that short-termism isn't all that. It has a role to play when John and Arir being chased on the Serengeti, but it's not the default mode that we should be living our lives. So it's recognizing it and wanting to have a different belief towards that. And then the final is kind of cultivating that garden, cultivating that intentionality, that mindset. Now, the book is in many ways all about the sea cultivating that mindset. And so there's a series of kind of exercises, almost a dozen of them in the book that really help you shift from short to long term. And the way they're kind of placed throughout the book, it's the way to kind of say, okay, here, present Ari, and future Ari. And then towards the end of the book, it's no longer just about me.

Starting point is 00:40:49 Because first you have to start with yourself, right? And then in the book towards the end, we start talking about how do I cultivate space for thinking about ancestors writ large, those around us in the current moment and future generations that aren't Ari. And so to answer your question of how do we start that shift, the entire book is meant to kind of shift you, right? So they're relatively short, but people are reading about three hours. It's not meant to be the super dense.

Starting point is 00:41:14 It's meant to kind of take you through a process that in and of itself becomes a framework of how you view the world. The short answer is read the book. The longer answer is as you run and short answer is read the book. The longer answer is, as you run, and all the exercises in the book are based on research that's happened at Berkeley, Northeastern, and Stanford, and a bunch of other universities. So these aren't willing to exercise. These are ones that I created based on kind of the leading edge of research on everything from temporal discounting. So for anyone in business knows, we often put a discount.

Starting point is 00:41:46 We'd rather get a dollar now than two dollars in the future, so because we discount the future. But we do that to the detriment of ourselves in the present. So we take the research, let's say in temporal discounting or mental time travel, and we apply it and make it part of the exercises of the book that help people create that shift. So again, this is all kind of based on neuroplasticity. We can actually change. It's not just kids who can think differently. It's us adults as well. So in the book,

Starting point is 00:42:14 you kind of go through that process of creating that shift. Yes, and I wanted to perhaps take the audience through one of those exercises. As you said, you have a bunch of them, but I recently interviewed Dr. Casey Holmes, who is formerly a professor at UPEN. She's now at UCLA, but she has a new book coming out called The Happier Hour. And in that book, she talks about a eulogy exercise. You mentioned something similar in your book.

Starting point is 00:42:39 Can you describe it and how a person could use it? Yeah, so we can talk about death at any point if you want to, because it's a part of the book, because part of what prevents us from thinking about futures beyond our own lifespan is we come up against the obvious roadblock that our cognitive roadblock is, that we have to actually reconcile and think about our death, right, which is very difficult for most of us,

Starting point is 00:43:02 because in Western society, we do everything we can to push old age and death out of the room. And so we're kind of always in our perpetual 20s. So I recognize that even us going into this kind of eulogy exercise is difficult because we're we live in a context that even doesn't even like to talk about it. And I talk more about why we don't talk about that in the book in In terms of this, and I bet about uses all the time with leaders, I say, okay, if we're thinking about your obituary, in one zone obituary, the first paragraph is going to be about who you were and kind of the classic thing. The second thing are those who you kind of left behind. The third is going to be about what you did in the world and how it

Starting point is 00:43:44 changed the world. And so the very simple exercise in the book, which is kind of eulogizing your adventures. If you think about anything that you're working on, does it make it into that third paragraph? Yes or no. If it does, what was it that helped you put that? What why was that so important? And if it doesn't make it into that third paragraph, I don't mean necessarily the project you're working on this week, but the larger work that you're doing.

Starting point is 00:44:10 If it doesn't make it into that, should you be doing that? Now, I recognize it's a privilege to even have that conversation when it's vast majority of people on the planet are just like day to day, hour by hour. But if you're in a place of privilege where you can start to kind of think about this, are you working on something that should be in that? And if not, maybe you should rethink the things that you're working on

Starting point is 00:44:31 so that they make it in that third paragraph and your descendants who are reading it, have a better understanding of why you did what you did and why it was important to them. And if you can't answer that in the affirmative, it's a good way of kind of checking yourself as to whether or not you should be doing it. Okay, well, I have a great follow-on question to this and I know you're a study of the Stoics. I think some Lorda me and Epictetus said, nothing great has created suddenly any more than a bunch of grapes or a fig. If you tell me you desire a fig, I answer you that there must be time, but at first blossom, then bear fruit, then ripen. And so my question looking at that quote is, how does taking this long path approach to life help us prioritize

Starting point is 00:45:10 what truly matters, what she were just talking about, and recognize what doesn't? That's a great quote. Long path the book opens up with a similar story, right? It's about Hony, this is from the Talmud, Jewish Talmud. And Hony is walking down a path and sees an older gentleman planting a caribtree. And he says to him, you're old. Why are you planting this caribtree? This takes so long to actually bear fruit and take leave. Why would you do that? Why are you planting trees right now in your old age? And he says, well, when I was young, I rested and played in the shade of a caribtree. And I ate from its fruit and someone planted this well before I was on the scene.

Starting point is 00:45:52 So it's incumbent upon me to plant caribtrees for the next generation. And so on the cover of the book is a cover of a small caribtree, right? As a one-numely planted. And I asked kind of throughout this book, is your actions, is what you are doing planting caribtrees or not? And there's something in the act of planting a tree that feels good for you in the present,

Starting point is 00:46:14 but it's also kind of thinking about these future generations and the future writ large. And so when you, I think about the question is, what comes to mind is, when we come to a decision point that we have to make, is it planting a tree for the future? By the way, it doesn't have to be future generations. It can just be future you.

Starting point is 00:46:33 It can be making those kind of investments that you talk about at Los versus Del. Or are you just chopping down trees? Are you not thinking about kind of future you and you're living so much in the present? Long path becomes a way of helping you make decisions. Is this going to help me and future generations live a more flourishing, intentional life or not?

Starting point is 00:46:51 And so it becomes a way that when we're faced with these kind of gourding and not, these very difficult choices, it helps us to contextualize these in a much broader time span. And then we can make those investments and other people in ourselves that, yes, pay dividends down the road, but also pay dividends for us in the present because what it does is to be

Starting point is 00:47:12 able to plant that tree, that figure or carib, you have to have a certain kind of pro-social awareness of empathy and self-compassion that very much helps you in the present. So there's a little bit, there's a little bit of spinach in the brownie here. So when you're planting those trees and making those decisions, yes, you're helping the future and future you, but you're also getting something out of it in the present, right? We see people lower stress and up their oxytocin when they do things for other people be it, other people being their, their future self or other individuals. So you can make the decisions through this kind of framework or the strategic filter in a way that only has kind

Starting point is 00:47:50 of benefit and tensionality to your life. Well, I think that's fantastic. And if the audience didn't understand what you were talking about with mega trends, I just wanted to spend a little bit of time on them. When I think of mega trends, I think some of them are things such as food and water shortages, demographics shifts to urbanization,

Starting point is 00:48:16 this growing income equality and the decline of the middle class that we're seeing, impact of technology disruptions, climate change, etc. And then this huge rise of pandemics because we're infringing an environment now that we've never touched before, which is opening us up to lots of new diseases and other things. So this is all what you mentioned is this intertidal. And to me, I'm a big believer in social impact theory, which is that history repeats itself.

Starting point is 00:48:52 And you mentioned earlier, about going 400 years back, and I think about the time when we were back at the printing press and people at that time were mostly tradesmen, you had blacksmiths and et etc. And I think we're going right back in that direction because we're entering this time where if people are not seeing the reality of it, 400 to 700 million jobs are going to be displaced, which means you're going to have no other choice but to relearn and do it on a much more frequent basis.

Starting point is 00:49:25 So I think what's happening to us now that is so different is you've got all these mega trends, but they're all colliding. And it's creating these huge shifts and what you describe in the book as an earthquake. And so my whole thought process around this is how do we shift this mindset of individualism that is causing many of these mega trends to occur and has permeated society to one of transgenerational concern. And what are the steps that you outlined to do that? Yeah, it's not that. So when we, so all the mega trends you list are are many the ones that we also, you know, think about and and you are correct in that many of the

Starting point is 00:50:09 mega trends, but by the way, mega trends are necessarily not necessarily, oh, we we we should almost see them as in some way somewhat neutral, right? Because they can be positive or negative increased urbanization could lead to a decrease carbon footprint as a society, but it also leads to other things. So they can go up and down in terms of their impact. Your analysis is correct. The question, which is how do we shift from a me culture to a we culture? It's literally just literally searching the M upside down becomes a W. And you're now as a cracked, and then so what I wanna add is the historical component. Remember I talked earlier about the past 400 years

Starting point is 00:50:51 kind of us kind of breaking things down from very complex systems to their individual components. Well, that also happened in terms of where we put the priority as a species in terms of how we function. So what that means is we over indexed on hyper individualism. We saw the society that we live in as not this kind of interconnected lattice,

Starting point is 00:51:15 but much more as these individual parts, basically John's life, Ari's life, Sharon's life, and we broke down to this meat culture, which in a sense is part of kind of the archetype of the best, it's rugged individualism. And by the way, for what it's life, and we broke down to this meat culture, which in a sense is part of kind of the archetype of the best. It's rugged individualism. And by the way, for what it's worth, we needed to break the collective lattice that we had through the middle ages, especially in the global north and the west was driven by the church. I don't mean this as a kind of a theological critique, but as the, if you think of the church as like the all consuming power structure for several hundred years in, in the West, what it meant was everything you did was on

Starting point is 00:51:52 or for their behalf, and there was no individualism or no individual autonomy. And so the, the enlightenment kind of broke that up and allowed us to be individual actors, which was great. Because then John could pursue his interests or he could pursue his interests. But what we lost when we threw the baby out with the bathwater was a collective sense of meaning and purpose. And so what you're arguing for as I am too, is how do we still maintain individual agency, autonomy and intentionality,

Starting point is 00:52:21 but within a nested within this kind of lattice or matrix of all of us working towards something bigger than just our own cells. And so the mega trends that we are looking at, in many ways, are manifestations of this hyper individualized thinking. That's where these things came up from. Because I can tell you, a lot of the megatrends that we're dealing with right now, if it was a society that was more focused on collective, as opposed to individual, solely individual flourishing,

Starting point is 00:52:52 we wouldn't have so many of these negative knock-on effects. So the question is, as you said, if we're in this intertidal moment, and we're dealing with these megatrends, how do we have a mindset that shifts us from me to we? So in many ways, I think long path is answering. It's developing a sense of transgenerational empathy for not just past and future, but for the present and part of part of empathy for the present is not just about yourself. So it's not just self-compassion and awareness for our

Starting point is 00:53:20 year for John, but it's for those around us who are all going through this at the same time. And so what long path thinking and acting does, and in many ways kind of what you're getting at is living long path, is takes us out of these individualized silos that make these mega trends become overly negative and turn them into positive, right? So it gets us actually thinking from a space of, how do we all flourish in the present, as opposed to just compete with one another, which is that competing with one another, that like free market on overdrive, which is a natural manifestation of the past 400 years, how do we start to turn that? So we start thinking about kind of instead of living an

Starting point is 00:54:04 extractive life. So we see each other as things to extract from, and one that's more regenerative and building towards features that we want. And I think that within the book, that's in many ways what those exercises are meant to kind of cultivate, kind of when we think about the gardening metaphor, again, is living like that. Well, listening to what you just said, my mind went right to Joseph Campbell's power of myth. And if the listener hasn't read that book, it is, to me, one of the most important reads

Starting point is 00:54:36 you can do because in it, he lays out that many of these religions that are here today, whether it's Buddhism, Muslim, Judaism, Christianity, Catholicism, they were all these frameworks that were introduced to guide society around them. And as he eludes to, and this was written back, I think in the late 70s, early 80s, we haven't had a new framework in thousands of years. So because of that, no one can relate to the frameworks that are here today because they were built for people thousands of years ago. So I think you're really on to something here with this framework that you're discussing. It doesn't have to be a religious framework. And in fact, if you look at the growing populations, less and less than them, are following theology. And I think it's because these theology that's out there is becoming

Starting point is 00:55:35 something that they can't comprehend or doesn't. Or relate to, there were frameworks that were developed for a time that we are no longer necessarily in. Long path is kind of a framework but spoke to this moment, but to your point, it's not religious, it's not theological, it's very secular, it's interesting. I've been in conversations over the past couple of weeks with rabbis and priests and imans who've all said the same thing, I've given them advanced copies and they're like, this is great. I can actually take this long path framework and use it to kind of co-innovate the framework that I've been using that's thousands of years old. So long path is in, it can be a standalone framework, but it can also be one that can be kind of incorporated to different kind of religious

Starting point is 00:56:21 practice. I'm not making an argument that it's supposed to replace anything, but it's almost like scaffolding for however you're thinking right now that in many ways kind of amplifies your empathy and your ability to kind of navigate this moment. And you're right, look, part of what happened, as we are moving out of this kind of this 400 years that we've been in, is, and I talked about this earlier,

Starting point is 00:56:44 we kind of went, by the way, very much focus on science and still am. So what happened was, when we decided that God was dead and we kind of eradicated the mystery that we got from religion in terms of giving us bigger ideas and kind of meta and answering meta existential questions, we created and we basically killed God in that sense. We created a God-shaped hole in our life. And that hole is very specific. It's almost like a lock in a certain sense. And to your point, one of the mega trends that we have at Longpath is the rise of spiritual but not religious as kind of a larger cohort. And so what we have to do as a society is we have to figure out how do we feel not that whole with a new God or a new religion

Starting point is 00:57:32 but recognize that there is an intrinsic longing for something bigger than ourselves in our own lives. I'm still practicing Jew, but like some people don't necessarily still practice religions and they're looking for a framework to connect into something that isn't theological. I'm not saying long path is it. What I'm saying is as a society, we have to start thinking about moving forward into the future in a way that needs our existential needs beyond just the overt secular.

Starting point is 00:58:02 And so long path as a mindset is not an attempt to fill that whole but it's an attempt to get people thinking more seriously about what is it that they need to become more connected not just to their own life but to those that came before and those that will be coming after. And so I think you're right Joseph Campbell kind of gets at the bespokeness of those old frameworks. And at the same time, we have to recognize that we need new ones and many new ones if we're going to navigate this moment. Yeah, what's interesting, the book I've got coming out, I've got another chapter that's the five plateaus on the journey to becoming passion struck. and there's so many overlaps between becoming passion struck

Starting point is 00:58:45 and long path. And the highest level, I don't call it passion struck. I call it a term I've created called a creative amplifier and it coincides with chapter four of your book. And it's really how do you learn to flex our future capacity through creativity? And I think you're thinking the exact same thing. So I wanted you to kind of discuss that

Starting point is 00:59:15 through the lens of what happens over this next period of time that we're in we'll decide the fate of the entire species by the choices that we are making right now. Yeah, so what I talk about in the book is this term and I referenced early on about my mom was kind of studied under Buckminster Fuller for a while. So Buckminster Fuller was asked by the US Navy in World War II to help it with the challenge. And the challenge was that as the ships were getting larger, it became more and more difficult to actually steer them,

Starting point is 00:59:45 because you needed these massive rudders for these quarter mile long cargo ships, but that required a whole bunch of hydraulics that could no longer fit in the ship. So they were now limited by how big they could make the ship because of the rudder on the back. They couldn't mechanically make it work. He came with this idea called the trim tab, which was literally, instead of having a 20 foot rudder, you could now have like say an 8 foot rudder, but to turn it, you attach just like a 4 inch piece of metal at the very end, which was the trim tab. And so by making by just shifting this 4 inch piece of metal at the end of the rudder, it

Starting point is 01:00:20 created a negative pressure gradient that would turn the entire rudder itself. So you no longer need massive hydraulics for the big rudder, you just needed a little bit to turn that small thing, that trim tab. And so, Buckminster Fillard believed in the power of trim tab so much that on his tombstone, he wrote, call me trim tab, which meant that in our lives, the actions that we take, even if they are seemingly small, when they reverberate over time, they can actually have massive dramatic impacts and effects.

Starting point is 01:00:51 And so this moment that we are in, 2022, that we are looking at issues, obviously around climate change, but also around artificial intelligence and bioengineering, kind of the big three. And obviously there's loss of biodiversity, you know, whole hosted other wicked problems we're looking at. But really the three decision points around climate change,

Starting point is 01:01:12 what we do or don't do, AI, what we do or don't do, and bioengineering will have reverberations for decades, if not hundreds or thousands of years. And so the decisions that we make right now at these macro are unbelievably huge. Now, I talk about that in the book, but I think what you're getting at is also the next step down, which are the actions that we take at the trim tab level, that John, that Ari, that our listeners take, that while they may seem small, how we interact with people, how we are in meetings, the little things that we do, in aggregate, as those happen across millions,

Starting point is 01:01:50 if not hundreds of millions, there are obviously billions of people, those will actually shift and change the future. So those first three examples were these kind of big external mega-trient decision points that we have to make, and that's gonna be about how we consume, and how we vote, and those kind of actions we take. But I'm making the argument in the book that it's also the

Starting point is 01:02:09 how we live our life with intentionality towards ourselves and future generations that in aggregate. So if you think about the millions and billions of trim tabs, which are us as individuals, those will have a massive knock on reverberation effects for the next individuals, those will have a massive knock on reverberation effects for the next hundreds of not thousands of years. And so we have to be very creative about how we do that in terms of not talking about necessarily organizing the billions of us into a massive trim tab, but how we decide to live our moment to moment life with that intentionality will dictate the ultra long term for our species.

Starting point is 01:02:50 I don't know how I could possibly say that any better. I think that was great. And I also liked in your TED Talk, which I encourage any listener to watch. It's got over two and a half million views. You talk about the need for moral evolution to be as prevalent in our mindset as technology evolution because it's going to impact a sentence as you just said thousands of years from now. So the listener has heard a lot about this topic all today. What is the payoff for them for planning for a future they won't be around to see? Look, the payoff, so there's two payoffs, there's the payoff that you won't be around to see, right? So then, so what is that payoff? If the question we're asking ourselves, and we've continuously been asking ourselves for thousands of years, is who am I and why am I here? And if you want to answer that question solely

Starting point is 01:03:46 for your own life, then there are set of decisions that you can make and that, to be honest, most people make. If you want to see yourself as part of something bigger, what I call in the book, the project, which is really kind of homo sapiens over the next several thousands of years, the trillions of us to come. If you wanna see yourself as part of that and taking actions on their behalf, what ends up happening is you get immediate payoff in the present. So this is a little bit of a kind of a look behind the curtain of long paths.

Starting point is 01:04:18 Because when you start doing that and you start viewing your decisions through that strategic filter, what ends up happening is, and I've seen this in my own life, I've seen this in people who ran the book and have been practicing the long path mindset for a while, is a decrease in the anxiety, in the tension of living a life that now has purpose for something bigger than yourself.

Starting point is 01:04:41 And so the immediate payoff of making decisions for future John, future r a future generations is that you are now finding that the things that you do and the interactions that you have with yourself, your own inner voice, where that are humans, the things that you consume, the ways that you vote are no longer just about you. And what that means is you're no longer alone, right? The kind of the underlying dread of the moment is loneliness. And by the way, you can be lonely in a room of 100 people. But what actually making decisions with the intentions of future generations

Starting point is 01:05:17 is you're no longer alone because you're no longer alone temporally across time. You see yourself as part of this chain with those that came before us for thousands of years, and those that will come after us for thousands of years. And if you start seeing your day-to-day life like that, the immediate payoff is you are now connected to something bigger than yourself.

Starting point is 01:05:38 And I will argue that we have been missing that for a while in society, because we have been told it's all about John, it's all about Ari. By this, do this, it's you, you, you, and that leads to a very kind of isolated way of viewing the world because it all becomes about the ego and the kind of that you are the most important thing that has ever existed and that should ever exist. Look, there's a biological reason and imperative for that, for genetic fitness, but man, it doesn't help you sleep all night. But doing and thinking like this starts

Starting point is 01:06:13 to kind of open up a different way of viewing yourself in your actions and that existential dread that kind of hangs all over us, I think you start to see that kind of decreased when you're living and thinking this way. Okay, and Arya, I just have one question left for you, and that is, if there's one thing you wanted a reader to take away from your book, what would it be? That you're a part of something much bigger than just yourself.

Starting point is 01:06:41 And when you recognize that you start making decisions differently, and you start to be honest, living a much happier life. Okay, and if the listener wanted to get in contact with you or understand more about what you're doing, what are some ways they can do that? Not putting the show notes. You can go to longpath.org,

Starting point is 01:07:00 you can sign up for our newsletter, we're gonna start actually having more live events as we get through this latest variant. We were doing that before code. We're going to start doing them around the country around the world. And you're on social. R.A.W. at Instagram will be kind of where you'll see updated things and you can kind of connect and you can connect through Instagram or to the website. Okay. Well, Ari, thank you so much for sharing your incredible new book with us. Congratulations on its launch. And hope to stay in touch. We will. Thank you so much for sharing your incredible new book with us. Congratulations on its launch and hope to stay in touch. We will. Thank you so much, John.

Starting point is 01:07:30 I absolutely love that interview. What a great one it was with Ari Wallack. And I want to thank Ari, Dailin Miller and Harper One for the honor and privilege of having him here on the Passion Struck podcast. Links to all things Ari will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you buy any of the books from the authors that we feature on the podcast. Any proceeds goes to supporting the show. Videos are on YouTube at John R. Miles,

Starting point is 01:07:56 where we now have over 370 of them. Avertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. I'm at John Armiles, both on Twitter and Instagram, and you can also reach me on LinkedIn. And if you want to know how I book all these amazing guests, it's because of my network. And my biggest advice to you is go out and build yours before you need it. You're about to hear a preview of the Passion Struck Podcast interview I did with Ellen Stein, Jr., who is an experienced keynote speaker and author of the book's Raise Your Game, High Performance Secrets from the Best of the Best, and

Starting point is 01:08:32 Sustain Your Game, High Performance Keys to Managing Stress, Avoid, Stagnation, and Beat Burnout. The one thing I've noticed among all high performers is they have a very strong reverence and respect for the fundamentals of their craft. The building blocks the basics. They don't try to skip steps. Working on mastery of the basics toward in the unseen hours is something that they do consistently every single day of their life. A certain level of motivation is certainly important, but it's been my experience, even in my own personal life, that motivation is fleeting. It's like any other emotion. I mean, there's sometimes where I feel highly motivated and there's other times where I don't.

Starting point is 01:09:09 I want to make sure that I'm showing up as my best self as consistently as possible. So if I'm only showing up as my best self or I'm only doing what I need to do when I feel like it or when it's convenient or when I'm feeling motivated, then my performance is going to be like a rollercoaster. The fee for this show is that you share it with family or friends when you find something useful. If you know someone who would be interested in long path thinking and many of the concepts and discussions that we went into today, definitely share this episode with them. The greatest compliment that you can give this show is sharing it with those that you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear

Starting point is 01:09:48 on the show so that you can live what you listen. And until next time, live life passion struck. you

Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Ari Wallach on Unlock Your Purpose for Something Greater than Yourself EP 177

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