Forging The Future: Ari Wallach on The Longpath Mindset, Telos & Transgenerational Empathy

We as a global society currently face challenges—some of which are existential in nature—that simply cannot be solved with the mindset, institutions, and paradigms currently in place. Instead, these solutions require that we think beyond current economic, political, and social constraints—and even well beyond our individual life spans—to consider deeply the impact we will have on many generations into the future. Indeed, these solutions require an applied mindset that Ari Wallach calls Longpath—an active way of being that cultivates future-conscious thinking and behavior to build more hopeful visions of the future, turn those visions into action, and foster more meaning in our lives and legacy. Ari is a futurist (although he hates that term), a social systems strategist, and the author of a new book out this week, aptly titled (you guessed it) Longpath, which extends a discussion he began with his 2017 TED Talk, Short-termism is killing us: it’s time for Longpath which has been viewed over 2.5 million times. This conversation asks a simple question: how do we become great ancestors to our future descendants? The future is not a singular certainty. Nor is it solely fueled by technological advances in some far distant point in time. Instead, the future is manifesting now—and it is very much human. In this fascinating conversation Ari explains why. Watch: YouTube. Read: Show notes. I really enjoyed talking to Ari. I think this one just might leave you reevaluating your path and priorities in a positive way. Peace + Plants, Rich Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:05Speaker 01

  If we want to move forward as a species, if Homo sapiens are going to go further, one of the things we're gonna have to do is look to the past. The book starts off with the story of Hone. So Hone is walking down a path one day. This is a story from the Talmud. Hone is walking down, and he sees this older man planting a carob tree. And he says to him, he goes, "Why are you planting this carob tree? You're an old man. How long does it take for this carob tree to have fruit and leaves and become a tree?" He goes, "Oh, 30 or 40 years." He goes, "Well, why are you planting it, then? You'll be long gone." And the man answers him very simply. "When I was young, I played in the shade of carob trees. I ate from the fruit of carob trees. Someone planted this for me to be in.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  Therefore, I will plant it for the next generation." And so, if you just drill a long path down to like a sentence, are you doing something for the next generation or not? We're in this pivotal moment. What we do or don't do over the next 10 to 15 years will have a knock-on effect for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.

• 2:21Rich Roll?

  Let's be honest, we as a global society, well, we currently face a few challenges, some of which are actually existential. And these challenges simply cannot be solved with the mindset, the institutions, and the paradigms that are currently in place. Instead, these solutions require that we think beyond certain economic, political, and social constraints, and beyond our individual lifespans, to consider deeply the impact we will have on many generations into the future. In fact, they require an

• 3:03Rich Roll?

  applied mindset that today's guest, Ari Wallach, calls "long path," which is this way of being. It's a verb that cultivates future conscious thinking and behavior to build more hopeful visions of the future, turn those visions into action, and while we're at it, build more meaning into our lives and our legacies. Ari is a futurist, although he hates that term. He's a social system strategist and the founder and executive director of Long Path Labs, which is an initiative focused on bringing long-term thinking and coordinated behavior to the individual, organizational, and societal

• 3:46Rich Roll?

  realms in order to ensure humanity flourishes on an ecologically thriving planet Earth for centuries to come. Ari is a recent adjunct professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. He's also the author of a new book out this week, aptly titled, you might have guessed it, "Long Path," which extends a discussion he began with his 2017 TED Talk entitled, "Short Termism is Killing Us, It's Time for Long Path." And that video has been viewed over 2.5 million times. So this conversation asks a simple question: How do we become great ancestors to our future descendants?

• 4:31Rich Roll?

  And the answer lies in upending our traditional thinking around the future. It entails developing something called "transgenerational empathy."

• 4:41Rich Roll?

  And it involves orienting your life around something called telos, a life quest that is bigger than you, that will help you make peace with death and gird your lived experience with greater meaning, greater purpose, and greater fulfillment. I really enjoy talking to Ari. I think this one just might leave you reevaluating your path and your priorities in a positive way. And it's coming up directly after a quick message from the sponsors that make this show possible.

• 5:20Rich Roll?

  All right, let's do the show.

• 5:24Rich Roll?

  Super nice to meet you. Thanks for doing this.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  My pleasure.

• 5:27Rich Roll?

  Excited to talk to you about all the long path ideas. It's been really fun immersing myself in your world over the last couple of weeks. But before we get into any of that, we got to clear up a little business around our mutual Andrews.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Yes, sure.

• 5:42Rich Roll?

  So, a couple of weeks ago, on the very same day, I got text messages from two of my favorite Andrews, Andrew Morgan and Andrew Huberman, both of whom have been on the podcast a couple of times urging me to check you out. And I know, I think, if memory serves me, you went to sixth grade with Andrew Huberman?

• 6:02Speaker 01

  So Andrew Huberman and I go back to the sixth grade to summer camp. So I know there's Andrew Huberman of today, as we all know him.

• 6:10Rich Roll?

  The explosive internet sensation that is Dr. Andrew Huberman.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Yes, I know him as the explosive sixth grade sensation.

• 6:17Rich Roll?

  Take me the picture of a sixth grade Huberman.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  Hasn't changed much. Still an amazing mind, an amazing friend, kind of sees around corners. In many ways, some of the stuff that we'll talk about in the book, especially on the neuroscience side, came from my interactions with Andy. That was an area that in some ways was kind of not an area that I normally explored or was going into. But when you have a friend like Andy Huberman, it's kind of hard not to think through a kind of neuroscience lens.

• 6:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  And, you know. Andy has been there, births of my kids, weddings, mitzvahs he was just in New York for, and I'm fortunate to have him as a friend. So he's my old, one of my oldest friends.

• 6:58Rich Roll?

  Hmm, that's pretty cool. And the other Andrew, Andrew Morgan, filmmaker, are you guys working on a project together? Or what's the story there?

• 7:05Speaker 01

  I'll tell you the story. So Andrew Morgan, so I have these two Andrews, right? Young, you know, Andrew that I've known for a very long time. And there's the new Andrew, old and new Andrews.

• 7:13Rich Roll?

  Very different Andrews.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Very different, but still amazing human beings. So Andrew Morgan and I met not that long ago. I'd been working on an idea for a TV show. And in many ways, it's kind of a lead off from what you read in the book, right? I mean, there's parts of the book that I wanted to explore even further. And kind of the big part is, well, what does the future look like that we want? And how do we get there? How do we back cast into it? And so what was happening was, as I was kind of surveying the media landscape, looking what's out there, everything, and I say this not as an anthropologist or a social scientist, but as a father, everything that I was seeing on TV or reading in the young adult section that had to do with the future, especially on the fiction side, even on the nonfiction side, was dystopian.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  It was all about the end of the world. It could be The Hunger Games, or whatever, whatever it is, it was out there. And I realized in doing research for this book, that much like sports psychology, and that's kind of like my background was growing up doing sports and kind of visualization. And I was a pole vaulter. And so I never thought to myself, while I was lying on my back, running through my steps, running into the box to vault, what does it look like for me to miss? Right? That's not what you visualize. You visualize what does it look like to stick it and do the jump? But there was no kind of media or content out there when it came to thinking about the future. There was some kind of techno-solutionist stuff out there, like Gee Whiz, monorail futures, but nothing about these kind of broader, more magnificent flourishing futures.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  And so I was fortunate enough to kind of get into a meeting with Catherine Murdoch, who has a, really a background in funding a lot of climate change communications and research. And we started having this conversation, and one thing led to another, and then with her. And then now joining us is Drake, as another executive producer. We're creating this show called A Brief History of the Future. And Andrew Morgan is our director.

• 9:03Rich Roll?

  Fantastic. So is it a documentary style or narrative?

• 9:08Speaker 01

  It's a little of both. So A Brief History of the Future will be a six-part docu-series. We're doing it on PBS, and I'll explain why in a second. But basically, it's kind of this on-the-road, Bourdain-meets, kind of thinking about better futures and better tomorrows. So what I'm doing is I'm kind of out there, meeting the folks who either have ideas, or concepts, or prototypes, and they could be in technology, or it could be in regenerative agriculture, or even in rethinking kind of criminal justice, so prison abolition, and having conversations with them, and then kind of we step back, and this is the cool part, using VFX, or CGI, or even watercolor, we're gonna say, "Okay, what does this look like scaled out? What does this look like in the 2030s, 40s,

• 9:51Speaker 01

  50s, or 60s?" And so every episode, we'll be kind of dealing with these major issues of our time, but not just saying, "Oh, this is a problem, and here's how you solve it." And so, here's an issue, here's a crossroads, be it technology, or obviously the persistent horizontal that is climate change, and then if we're going to kind of solve, or work, or rethink it, what does that look like? What does that look like at scale? So every episode will have me kind of going back and forth throughout time.

• 10:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's very cool. And the psychological implications of forecasting a better future are profound, because, to your point, when you look at media culture, or just contemporary culture at large, and what we consume in the context of what is gazing into the future, does tend to be dystopian. So it's almost like this massive psy-op, right?

• 10:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:41Rich Roll?

  Like, okay, well, if everything that we consume about what our future might or could look like is negative or dire, then we all inhabit that awareness, and it doesn't give us anything to aim for.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  No, I mean, look, there's a, you know negativity bias. We're, in some ways, if we go back several hundred thousand years, we are primed, at the amygdala level, and we'll get to the prefrontal cortex later, but at the amygdala level, to actually seek out things that are bad, because the things that are bad are the things that kill you. And the one thing you want to do is live. And so it's not so much about having visions of things that you want, but about having visions about the things that you don't want. So it makes sense, in some ways, that the content that is out there is dystopian, because in some ways, it's signaling, saying, "Hey..." You don't want this. Now, we gravitate towards it, and that's the interesting market dynamic, right? So on the one hand, you want to put it out there, and people say, oh, we really don't want that world or that vision. But then it keeps getting created because

• 11:37Speaker 01

  it keeps bringing people into theaters and they keep buying the books. So it's kind of this perverse incentive model. We know we don't want it. We know it's not good for us, but we keep doing it.

• 11:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah. But to extend your athlete metaphor, like as an athlete myself, you can't achieve a goal unless you can envision it for yourself and then work backwards from that to create a roadmap to get there, right?

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 11:58Rich Roll?

  So if all of our future casting is negative, we're not really constructing, you know, an admirable, you know, bullseye that we can all collectively, you know, kind of cohere around and work towards.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Exactly. What we are building is the anti-bullseye, which is, in some ways, could be, in terms of maybe social genetic fitness, a good thing, but net-net for global civilization and population in this year, you know, 2022, it's not a good thing. And in the absence of that, it becomes a vacuum that we're trying to fill with this show. So we should start shooting that probably in the next few months.

• 12:35Rich Roll?

  That's pretty cool. So let's define our terms here for a minute.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 12:39Rich Roll?

  Explain to me, or to the audience, what you mean when you use the term "long path"? What is this all about? And then perhaps, you know, also kind of paint a little picture about your background and how you got interested in this area.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  So, "long path" is an applied mindset, right? So a lot of times, people will say, "Well, this is the solution that we need to solve this problem." And what I've found is, more often than not, at least personally, when someone comes out and says, "Well, this is the solution. This is the solve," I tend to have a reflexive, like, reaction to it. The antibodies come out. When someone says, "Well, this is the way to do it," right? I haven't, obviously, you see that a lot in maybe religion, but a lot of self-help books. It's like, "These are the 10 steps to solving your issue, whatever issue X is." So first and foremost, the reason it's a mindset is because I wanted to find a way that allow people who read the book, or to practice and be part of kind of Bringing Long Path into their life to not feel that it was overly prescriptive

• 13:39Speaker 01

  or dogmatic, or this is the way you have to do it to see the results that you want. It was more like, here's how you activate and live in this moment so that you can navigate it in a positive sense. So that's what Long Path is. It's a mindset, pure and simple. But specifically, it's a mindset to navigate this moment. So what I talk about in the book is that we're in this intertidal phase. So the way to think about an intertidal, at least when you think, when you go to the intertidal zone in an ocean, obviously, I use it as a metaphor. It's that piece of land that is always either above water or below water based on the tides. And in the intertidal, you kind of have both this massive chaos. It's a very disruptive zone, but also massive creativity of muscles that learn how to keep water

• 14:23Speaker 01

  so they don't, you know, they don't suffocate and all these other things. But intertidal, in some ways, is kind of like an interregnum, what Gramsci used to talk about, which is kind of the old ways are dying and the new ones are yet to be born. So I realized in the work that I've been doing at Long Path Labs and previous work for 20 years, that we were in this intertidal moment as a global civilization. And so if we want to kind of positively navigate it, we're going to need a mindset that's kind of bespoke to the moment. And so Long Path is, sure, maybe 40 or 50 years ago could have been an interesting mindset, but I really kind of created and did the research for it so that it could be used right now in this intertidal moment.

• 15:04Rich Roll?

  So essentially, it's a mindset, it's an active verb, it's an approach to living, thinking, and problem solving that considers not just future generations and the implications of our actions now on, you know, a future that has yet to be written, but also importantly, has to consider the past as well, right? Like there is this, you know, in the book, you talk a lot about like how we can't solve these problems and think about the future we want without really contemplating and understanding the past from which we come from, our ancestry.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, look, the so your previous question is like, how did I get to this? Like, how did I come to Long Path? You know, everyone has an interesting story, an origin story of how they got there. Mine starts off, unlike most people, when they talk about their story, they're like, well, I was born in this year in this location. Mine starts off in the 1920s, when my father is born in a small town in Poland, kind of a shtetl, if you will. It was Poland then, it's now Belarus. And he was 17 years old when Germany invaded Poland. And within the first seven days, he lost his two older brothers to the Russian front. And within months, all the Jews had been kind of put into the Jewish ghetto. So it was him, his father, his younger brother, mother, and sister.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  And within several months, the mother and sister had been shipped off to a forced labor camp. We later found out they had been sent to Auschwitz. And so who was left was my father, his brother, and dad, his dad. And at one point, the Germans, as a kind of sick and twisted, I don't know what game, decided it'd be interesting to see what would happen if they shot my grandfather in front of my dad, but told my dad that if he leaned down to help him, he'd be next. Would he actually kind of break or not?

• 16:54Rich Roll?

  So awful.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  And so, you know, clearly, my dad didn't lean down because I'm here. But soon thereafter, he and his brother escaped, escaped the ghetto. And they joined the Jewish underground and they joined the resistance. So for about two and a half, three years, he was part of the Jewish underground, rose to become kind of a commander, and soon after the war, became a Nazi hunter. And there's a whole story there.

• 17:17Rich Roll?

  I mean, what a ballsy thing to do, because most people would have just fled, right?

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Most people would have just fled. The story that I'm telling you is one of the first stories I remember being told, right? This is where I learned the idea of agency and where you can actually make a difference, even if it's small. You know, people often ask them, why didn't you flee? Right? And, and his reply is somewhat grim, but it was basically like, every Nazi I can kill is one less Nazi that can kill us. That was it. It was, it was visceral and it was real, but that, that was his reality. So after the war, he, he was arrested by the Americans and placed into like an IDP camp because he was smuggling Czech orphans to Palestine or pre-Israel, right? To the Palestinian mandate. And they arrested him and he's kind of given a choice, either work with the Americans or work with the Russians, doing more intelligence

• 18:05Speaker 01

  work, or basically stay in this IDP camp for who knows how long.

• 18:10Rich Roll?

  Wow. And what is he like 22 or something like that at this time?

• 18:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so what he eventually does is with the help of some cousins, he escapes. And that ends up being, becoming basically, you know, post-war Europe was a mess. So he would go back and forth between racing motorcycles on the autobahn and playing semi-pro soccer. And eventually he and his brother, uh, through Portugal, decide they want to go to America. To him, Europe is dead. There's, that is, Europe is a graveyard, both of his family and everything he's ever known. And decides America is where he wants to go. But at the time, America's not letting any Jews in. So the only place that would let him in, in that general direction was Cuba. So he lands in Cuba in 1952 and soon after he's in a, you know, this is, this is obviously pre-Castro Cuba.

• 18:54Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 18:55Speaker 01

  He is in a casino and there's this old man behind him, you know, sitting on the couches, kind of whistling a tune, but it's an old Yiddish tune, right? From the old country. So my dad kind of like whistles the tune with him. The guy, oh, they start talking. Well, the guy ends up being Mayor Lansky. So if you know, Mayor, you know, so-

• 19:12Rich Roll?

  Your dad's life is a movie. This is, this is the movie I want to see.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  So I'm giving you the, but I'm, you're going to see this kind of convergence. So he's doing this for about 10 years through the revolution. And eventually, we don't know the full story, but he and Castro have some sort of falling out. And they show up at my dad's factory one day and say, you gotta go, you gotta go.

• 19:29Rich Roll?

  But that presupposes that they developed a relationship of some sort at some point.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Of some sort.

• 19:34Rich Roll?

  Around something.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  Around something of some sort.

• 19:36Rich Roll?

  Your dad becomes this like industrialist, right?

• 19:38Speaker 01

  He's an industrialist, but he's one of the few people in Cuba at that time who was a fluent speaker in Spanish and Russian. Right? Who had been in Cuba.

• 19:45Rich Roll?

  That makes him very valuable to Castro.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  Very valuable. Valuable enough and friendly enough that they kicked him out, which is great. Cause that's not what, a lot of people did not get that option. They were just.

• 19:54Rich Roll?

  So what, if you had to guess, what do you imagine the falling out with Castro was about? I'm sure you have theories on that.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. The theories, it has to do with him dating Castro's sister and other stuff like that. Those are the.

• 20:05Rich Roll?

  The plot thickens.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  I mean, knowing my dad, as my dad. And so there was, there was something. So Mexico wouldn't accept you if you didn't have a round trip ticket. So for many years, we had the return ticket from Mexico City back to Havana, but he was told never come back. But he kept, he kept that return ticket.

• 20:22Rich Roll?

  So were you born, you were born in Mexico?

• 20:25Speaker 01

  I was born in Mexico. So, so we're going to pause on that story and it's the mid 60s. Meanwhile, so my dad's born in the twenties, my mom is born in 1945. And she's kind of a radical artist student in San Francisco Bay area. And she's working with Bill Graham and Janis Joplin and doing all the posters for the film more. And she starts studying with an architect and engineer that's known, but not totally known by the name of Buckminster Fuller. So Bucky becomes my mom's teacher.

• 20:54Rich Roll?

  That's so nuts.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  And so she ends up spending a bunch of time with Buckminster Fuller. So you're starting to see, you're asking where Long Path came from, but we have, there's a, there's an etymology here.

• 21:01Rich Roll?

  Sure. No, I get it.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  And so spending a lot of time with Bucky, he kind of helps her see the world in very different ways. Right? And kind of thinking, but what he eventually says is he goes, look, you're only going to get so far in your thinking. If you stay within this kind of American context, you need to go abroad. But this is like the 60s. It's not like today where you can jump on a plane and go anywhere. So the furthest her parents would let her go were Mex- was Mexico. So my mom ends up in Mexico, 20 year difference between her, you know, my dad and her. They get set up on a blind Shabbat date and they're married. So you have this kind of Nazi hunting, Antifa, anti totalitarian and capitalist industrialists.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  With this kind of artsy, bucky, younger American. And myself and my two older sisters are born in Guadalajara in the 70s.

• 21:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, unbelievable. And when you trace that etymology and the kind of strains of thought, the polarity between your parents, you can extract from each of those individuals, aspects that, you know, work, kind of mend fluidly to create the person that you are today. Because it's this, it's this combination of being somebody who really understands systems and how to move entities, corporations, individuals, political organizations forward in a progressive way, but also this flair for creativity and out of the box thinking.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the funny thing is, when you're saying that, I didn't know which parent you were talking about.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  Because there's a little bit of both of them. My dad-

• 22:30Rich Roll?

  Well, I was thinking, the systems comes from the dad.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, but Bucky was also a system. My mom only, my mom only saw the world in, in systems. And so, it's interesting, there, there was a little bit of both in both of them. Obviously enough that there was an overlap. It wasn't, you know, vinegar and oil water. It was like, there, there was something there, but there was enough overlap, but 100%.

• 22:48Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but also the shared DNA being this, you know, kind of thinking that's untethered from tradition or expectation to imagine a better future.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  100%. I mean, this was, when my dad finally became an American citizen in the 80s, he was like, this is it. Like, I'm done. And we were like, well, what do you mean, you're done? He's like, this was my revenge on Hitler. My revenge on Hitler was getting to a free country and having children. Because all that he wanted for the Jews is that we would all be killed and we'd always live in a fascist state. So for him, that telos, that ultimate aim was, for better, for worse, not set up as something that he necessarily wanted from the get-go of life. It was something that he developed by realizing he wanted the antithesis of the person that he most hated in life. That's not always the best way to go about doing it, but given the circumstances, it makes sense.

• 23:37Rich Roll?

  So at what point does this young family move from Mexico to the Bay Area?

• 23:41Speaker 01

  So in 1977, we're in Guadalajara and once again antisemitism is kind of rearing its head in Mexico. And even our Jewish day school would have like armed guards following the school bus. And eventually, I say, it's funny I say eventually as if, of course, it's going to happen. But eventually, the doors to our synagogue are kind of machine gunned on Yom Kippur as kind of a warning. And my dad's like, I've seen this before. And within two weeks, we moved. Didn't sell the business, didn't sell the house. Kind of gave everything over to other people to take care of. Moving trucks came at two in the morning. No one knew.

• 24:15Rich Roll?

  And the Bay Area because your mom had roots there?

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, my mom had roots in the Bay Area. She came from an old kind of, you know, three generations in the Bay Area, but before that, Odessa, Russia.

• 24:24Rich Roll?

  Right, and so you're all of what, like eight or something like that at the time, younger?

• 24:28Speaker 01

  I'm younger, I'm four years old.

• 24:30Rich Roll?

  Wow.

• 24:30Speaker 01

  Four years old and English at that point is my dad's 12th language.

• 24:35Rich Roll?

  So you're this young kid, you're getting indoctrinated and all these amazing stories. You're intuiting, you know, the kind of sensibility of your parents. I'm sure there was interesting characters coming through the house.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:47Rich Roll?

  You're a kid, right?

• 24:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:49Rich Roll?

  All of this is seeping in, like, what was your sense of who you wanted to be as a young person?

• 24:54Speaker 01

  I mean, look, so you're right, like, coming to the house, you know, one day it could be like former Nazi hunters with just these crazy stories. And the next day, it would be someone who was like, look at this geodesic dome I built in the desert, Ten Segredus structure.

• 25:08Rich Roll?

  Was Bucky dropping by the house?

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Bucky was gone by then.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  I don't know when he, I think in the late 70s, 80s, but he was no longer part of our picture for whatever reason. And so, and I talk about this a little bit in the book, but so in, family time was very important to my parents. So we ate together probably six nights a week. And the stories would always range probably over 150 year span. Right. So my dad would be like, oh, when I was growing up, my parents would tell me these stories. So we're talking like the 1910s, something from the shtetl. But then my mom would talk about, well, you know, in 2118, we're going to have this. And they'd always be kind of looping them back in together. So I always saw time, the way I thought about it was, well, of course, I'm living in this kind of 150 year present.

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Like it was never just the future, never just the past, but these things kind of overlapping and kind of folding in on themselves.

• 26:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And no sense for how unusual or unique that experience was. It was just normal.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  It was just normal.

• 26:09Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  I just thought.

• 26:10Rich Roll?

  It's so interesting because like I had, I could, I don't know that I could tell you much of anything about my great grandparents. You know, it just wasn't part of the storytelling or vernacular around our dinner table growing up.

• 26:23Speaker 01

  Oh, it was parents, grandparents, great grandparents, what recipes, what they ate, what they wore, everything. Like, look, in many ways, for better, for worse, and we're talking about like how I got to Long Path and a lot of the kind of the elements in it and around transgenerational empathy. My dad was stuck in the 1920s or 30s. Like when I would come home from soccer practice or track or whatever, he'd be there watching these kind of black and white World War II movies, but not watching them historically, watching them because he was trying to figure out like, could he have done something different? What happened? Like that was the wor- it would be like, you know, us watching movies from the eighties consistently.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  And our kids are always coming home and we're always watching, you know, like me watching Fast Times at Richmond High.

• 27:10Rich Roll?

  Yeah. But you as the teenage, you know, Ari, aren't you thinking like, come on dad, like get over it. Like your dad's like, there's threats around every corner and kind of this fear mentality, right? Because of his upbringing that I'm sure you were like, I don't see that happening in my neighborhood.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  I don't see it, I don't see it happening in our neighborhood, but I, every time we went out to eat in a restaurant, we would change tables often because my dad never had his back to a door.

• 27:37Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:38Rich Roll?

  The trauma of that experience.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Or being pragmatic.

• 27:42Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, for him, it was both trauma and like, at any moment, who's coming through the door? Because he had been in enough situations where someone usually did come through the door.

• 27:51Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Right? Or something like that. So I was kind of, I knew something was up by that, because I knew I was living this existence in the Bay Area in the eighties, and everything seemed fine. But my dad was somewhere else. He was very present, super present, but it was obvious he was always kind of, you know, when we think about kind of core traumas, core acute traumas, those, we either process them and integrate, or they hang over us. And him coming from that kind of silent generation where they weren't doing therapy, they weren't integrating, they, it hung over him. And so therefore, it hung over our house, and it hung over the kind of how I saw the world, not so much from a fear-based modality, but

• 28:34Speaker 01

  from a kind of, okay, when bad things happen, we have to work through it, we have to reconcile. I mean, we solve for it, but we have to be open about it, because I can see how you get stunted and what could happen if you don't, at an individual layer. And that's why in Long Path, when I talk about things like transgenerational empathy, about at the individual organizational or civilizational layer, that's like, earned experience. Because I see what happens when you don't do that.

• 29:02Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And the sense that, from a transgenerational perspective, it's almost incumbent upon you to arrest the cycle so that you don't perpetuate some kind of epigenetic thing where you're carrying this fear-based trait, or, you know, the negative aspects of your dad's sensibility into the generation to come, into your kids and beyond.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  And very early on in our conversation, you're getting at the core of the book. Right? If we want to move forward as a species, if Homo sapiens are going to go further, hundreds, if not thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years. Look, there's probably been between, depends on who you ask, anywhere between 80 to 100 billion Homo sapiens alive on the planet. Over the, once we start kind of saying Homo sapiens and kind of tracing it. Let's say 100 billion so far to date. We are looking at trillions of us in the future, right? If we kind of account out for the next several thousand years. So the question and why I wrote this book is, yes, we have to make it through this intertidal.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  But if we don't start thinking about how we arrest and work with those things that hold us back as individuals and hold us back as societies, we won't move forward. We'll actually start devolving. So in many ways, the book is kind of an attempt, the mindset is an attempt to say, hey, look, if we want to build these futures, these flourishing futures, one of the things we're going to have to do is look to the past and reconcile. Doesn't mean let the past off the hook. Doesn't mean the people who did atrocious things are, oh, it's okay now. But we're going to have to unpack and work with that if we want to move forward.

• 30:39Rich Roll?

  Right. And I want to get into the practicalities of that. But to kind of dig a little bit deeper into this intertidal notion, like, I think that that is what is sort of informing the urgency of this book and your work, because it is a moment of chaos and it does feel like we're sort of, you know, at this Rubicon moment where if we don't figure this out right now, it is going to be, you know, cataclysmic. And so the time is now to really start thinking about and practicing these ideas, because truly, it does feel like, and I'm interested in whether you agree with this, that like, the future of humanity is at stake right now with the existential crises that that we're facing and grappling with.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  100%. Look, we've been here before, right? The probably the last major global intertidal was, again, depending on who you ask, about 10,000 years ago, the move from hunter gatherer to an agricultural society. We literally went from you and I kind of walking in the in the Serengeti, eating what we need to eat, resting where we need to rest and sleep, getting up in the morning and kind of moving on, right? There was that. And then all of a sudden, we realized that we can move away from living in that way and kind of rest and start, you know, sowing and growing and. All sorts of things come out of that. The one thing that comes out of it, though, is that we have to start making new stories and new rules and new ways of being. So, and other people have written about this. Probably one of the biggest things that comes out of the agricultural revolution is this

• 32:05Speaker 01

  idea of God, right? Because back in the day, if it was just 30 of us in a tribe moving around, I knew everything that you did. You knew everything that I did. Morality, in a certain sense, was instantaneous. Like, if you shirked off your responsibilities, we all knew it. But what happens in the agricultural revolution is as we start kind of urbanizing and moving into cities and literally start building walls and rooms, we're no longer all around each other. So there's no longer this all-seeing rich or Ari. And so we need something to kind of lock down rules so no one in a kind of prisoner's dilemma screws around.

• 32:42Rich Roll?

  The omnipotent accountability machine.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Yes, or the panopticon, also known as God, right? Because God is in every room. God is all-seeing. Now, there was gods, and there's God, and we can play with that. But the idea being, this is how you kind of structure and order society. These are now the rules. There's now something bigger than you that's going to kind of push us forward and help us evolve. Now, that's the last kind of major intertidal. I would say another one, and this is through, obviously, a Western perspective, is the fall of the Roman Empire, right? And most intertidals, much like today, come about because you have kind of ecological collapse, mass migration, you're overspending on wars. I mean, it does sound kind of familiar. And you let your kind of domestic situation fall apart, and it goes, you get inequality.

• 33:29Speaker 01

  We had this in the Roman Empire, the East and the West. There's actually two of them. One was taking care of the other, and the whole thing fell apart. Now, what came about in that intertidal was obviously the rise of the church.

• 33:41Rich Roll?

  And hence, the Middle Ages.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Which, we don't use the term-

• 33:44Rich Roll?

  That was an intertidal that went sideways.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  So that was an intertidal that went bad. I mean, we used to call it the Dark Ages, but we realized that's a very loaded term. But we say the Middle Ages, and it was not a pretty time. Now, one thing to note about what happens in an intertidal is people start to freak out. Because as you noted, there's chaos, there's flux, the old rules and narratives kind of start to melt away, and people are looking around and saying, whoa, what's going on? Like, what are the answers? And so in that intertidal, the church comes along and said, well, this is it. These are the rules. These are the answers. Do it this way and you'll be okay. You'll be saved in the afterlife. An amazing invention, right? Because then all of a sudden you start doing everything in this little thing of your life. Because for all of eternity, you're either going to be here in heaven or hell. So it's a great kind of command and control mechanism.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  The big takeaway there, though, is that people are seeking an authoritative voice when you move into an intertidal moment. And so, fast forward to now, we are in a similar thing. We have all those same issues. The difference now is, whereas technology would almost be an amplifier of an intertidal, it would kind of like, oh, the wheel or canal systems. Now, technology has the ability to actually rethink what it means to even be human. So this is obviously CRISPR genetic engineering, artificial, uterine, AI, machine learning, brain, machine interfaces. So now, technology is actually part of that. The thing that I am most kind of sensitive to, given what we talked about, my upbringing,

• 35:13Speaker 01

  is what happens to people when, in this intertidal moment, kind of this official future that we've been living in starts to die and there are no answers, we start looking for strong voices. We've seen that around the world. We're seeing it right now. So now, I'm going to add another thing onto the table. So you're, yes, we're facing kind of, we're in this pivotal moment. What we do or don't do over the next 10 to 15 years will have a knock-on effect for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. On top of that, at the very time, we need to maximize our ability to cooperate globally, planetarily. We have the rise of voices that are kind of retrograde futurists, saying, "I alone can fix it. Follow me."

• 35:56Speaker 01

  And the way they're able to kind of command and control is by saying, "You're either with me, or you're against me." They're either with us or against us. And so that's the second thing that is making me kind of the most nervous about this.

• 36:10Rich Roll?

  Well, and that's also compounding this increased level of distrust in organizations from, you know, everything political. Medical to media oriented. So the whole fabric of the way that we communicate and create consensus is under threat at the moment as well, which clearly, obviously undermines our ability to problem solve in a coherent manner.

• 36:32Speaker 01

  And people say, well, how do you know you're going to, you're kind of entering into an intertidal, you're in an intertidal, like what are the metrics behind that? And we'll talk later about the metricization of everything, but a metric in that is people's levels of trust in institutions, in the institutions that have been guiding us since the kind of last world that we were in, the last tide. So we can kind of trace this back, what we're coming out of really is we're coming out of the enlightenment, right? Where Bacon and others, and obviously the Renaissance, but then we go into the kind of the scientific revolution and the enlightenment. And one of the most amazing things that comes out of that is they undercut the power of the church, right?

• 37:10Speaker 01

  The problem is we throw the baby out with the bathwater. We take away the kind of power dynamics of the church, which is great, but we also take out kind of the mystical and spiritual. And we'll get back to that in a second. So now what we have is a world where we can start to understand everything as we break it down by its basic component parts. So this microphone, I take it apart and there's a thousand parts on the table and I can figure out how it works. And that makes sense for hundreds of years. The issue is that's actually not how the world works. That's not how the planet works. If you go to a rainforest and you take out one tree here and a little bit of dirt here, the whole thing collapses. There's interdependence, but the systems that we've been in for the past several hundred years don't allow for that.

• 37:52Speaker 01

  And so what ends up happening is those institutions, be it finance, governance, Congress, whatever it is, they're now breaking down under the pressures and the strains of this moment. And when they break down, people like you and I, who live in this system because of the social contract, start to lose trust, right? When I see people running to crypto, people look at it a lot of different ways. I see that as a lack of trust in banking systems. You know, when I see people running to certain things, I'm like, what institution are they no longer trusting that they're now going to this? Again, to me, signs of the intertidal.

• 38:33Rich Roll?

  But within all of these breakdowns and the precariousness of the moment, the other aspect of the inner title is this opportunity, right? Like this, this like Petri dish for creativity. So now is our moment. The long path mindset is this kind of optimistic, hopeful antidote to the cynicism with this mental model that is requiring us to think more long-term. And from my perspective, or the way, you know, I'm kind of like absorbing this material in your book, I'm confronted with my own kind of limitations or hardwiring as a human being. Like, I just think, and you talk about, you know, like the hardware-software problem of the human, of the human mind.

• 39:17Rich Roll?

  Like, I'm just not wired to think like that. Like, it is a practice, and I'm sure with practice, you can expand your capacity to, you know, think about these pillars that you talk about, but it's so counterintuitive, and it runs against, you know, all of my, you know, kind of built-in incentive structures.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes, and when we, we have to talk about what, when you say wired, we have to talk about what that means, right? Because we often think and fall back on this idea that, well, actually, Homo sapiens are hardwired for short-term, well, short-term thinking and short-term action. And so, yes, you and I were back 15,000 years ago on the Serengeti, and a big animal with big teeth starts chasing us. You and I are not going to sit down and have a conversation about, well, what should we do? How should we deal with it? How do we get in it? We're gonna run, and we're gonna run so fast that we're running before we've even processed it. So that, obviously, that kind of, that limbic system, the amygdala, is taking over, thank God, and getting us out of that situation. Now, at the same time, though, let's go back to the agricultural revolution.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  There are two things. Marty Seligman, University of Pennsylvania, talks a lot about this. I don't know if you've had Marty, but if not, you've...

• 40:27Rich Roll?

  No.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  So Marty talks about, you know, one of the issues is, he calls us Homo prospectus, right? So he's the father of positive psychology. So the kind of, the first big idea he had, and this comes up a little bit in the book, is that... We always are focused on our pathologies at a psychological level. Like, what are the things that are wrong? Not, what are the things that are right? What are the things that lead to us being more flourishing? So the DSM IV, V, and VI, and VII will consistently clinically look at the things that put you on the couch because something's wrong with you. But the field rarely looks at what's right. How do we actually get better as humans? So that's one thing Marty did that shows up in Long Path. The second is, he says, "Look, the thing that separates Homo sapiens from any other mammalian, or really any other species, are two things. One, our ability to cooperate.

• 41:14Speaker 01

  And two, our ability for prospection, to think ahead." Right? So other animals can do this, right? Other animals, you can see this in primates. Sapolsky talks about this. They'll kind of cooperate on something. Maybe they'll all get sticks to kind of go into the anthill. But what they won't do necessarily is say, "Hey, let's create a factory of sticks, and we'll bring these orangutans here at this time." Like, they don't do that. We do that extremely well. That is, thankfully, the prefrontal cortex, right? That's this executive function that allows us. This goes to the hardwiring that sits on top of the limbic system that allows us to actually plan for the future. Now, what ends up happening is, yes, so we're hardwired for this. We're hardwired to think long-term. But then the incentive structures of society. So here's where it gets interesting.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  The actual cultural code, and again, I'm tracing this back to the past 400 years, the Industrial Revolution, and we'll get into that. Those are the incentive structures. So you, biologically rich for the past 10,000 years, you're golden. You can do this. This is already in you. It's what's around you. It's how we monetize. It's how our ego gets fed. It's all these other things that have been incentivized because of the way we run our society and economy today that leads to it becoming difficult. So Long Path as an antidote to short-termism isn't an antidote to the amygdala or the limbic system. In many ways, it's an antidote to the systems that we have kind of been surrounded by that have incentivized our behavior over the past couple hundred years. Yeah, I mean, I think it's...

• 42:42Rich Roll?

  Almost all about incentives, right? Because when you look at some of the largest, if not the vast majority of the largest problems that we face, whether it's world hunger or climate collapse, we actually have everything we need right now to solve those problems. Everybody could be housed and fed, like there's enough resources for everybody. The impediments are all human or human constructed, and a lot of them track back to the incentive structures that we've created that drive bad decisions, at least bad decisions for long-term solutions.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%. So what you just said is a quote that I heard at a very early age by Buckminster Fuller, which is, "We have the ability to house, clothe, feed, and educate everyone on the planet. Why don't we?" And so I was asked this at a very young age, and it just kind of always hung over me. So that's why I got, you know, what I ended up studying at UC Berkeley was Peace and Conflict Studies, which is this interesting major that's both international relations and psychology with a little bit of religion thrown in. So that question, "Why don't we?", is the one that has been driving most of my work for most of my life.

• 43:48Rich Roll?

  Right. So, and you see it cutting across every sector. Politics, we have election cycles. Raise money, get into office, and it's all about, you know, making sure you stay in office. Quarterly earnings, like, you know, everything, right? The incentive structure is set up for short-term gain without consideration for the long-term implications. So without eradicating those incentive structures and building better ones, and maybe this is what you're doing at Long Path Labs, like how to do this, you know, without that, we're sort of shouldering it as individuals, like, "Well, you should be thinking about", you know, like, that's not going to solve it, right? Like, it's a good practice, and we should all be doing that. And obviously, there's a ripple effect to that that seeps into our institutions and

• 44:32Rich Roll?

  how we conceptualize them and conduct them. But, you know, we need both that grassroots individual shift as well as institutional revolution, really.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and look, we're starting to see this, you know, there's, you know, they're creating the kind of the long-term stock exchange, where the longer you hold a stock, the more you actually have voting power. Like, we see some Of these new things being built, interestingly, out of Silicon Valley, which in many ways has been driving rampant short-termism. But even from that, that kind of disruptive spirit is getting to us, things like the long-term stock exchange. It's my belief that it is both. It is kind of a bottom up and a top down. But the top down, more often than not, is only in a response to something coming from the bottom. Everything that I've seen in terms of social change over the past several decades, the very, I'm trying to think of an example where it was coming from the top that actually made the change. It wasn't, it may have come from the top, but they were really kind of seeing the signals down below, right?

• 45:27Rich Roll?

  So in terms of like getting into the practicalities of how to achieve this, I mean, we should probably talk about these pillars. I mean, you've talked a little bit about transgenerational empathy, but there's a lot more to that. And then you have these two other pillars as well.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  So in my twenties, maybe like a lot of people in their twenties in the Bay Area, I spent a lot of time at Green Gulch, kind of the Soto Zen Center, Central Zen Center. So I'm a kind of a culturally religious Jew. I'm thinking about going to rabbinical school. I'm doing a bunch of stuff at a kind of a Soto Zen Retreat Center. And I'm also reading a lot of work by Krishnamurti.

• 46:01Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  Right. So this is kind of like my, you know, you're familiar with all of this, right?

• 46:05Rich Roll?

  And like with. You're like this perfect Bay Area prototype.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  Such a cliche, like driving to my old Subaru.

• 46:11Rich Roll?

  Going to Berkeley.

• 46:13Speaker 01

  Going to Berkeley. Yeah. So I'm thinking a couple of things as I'm seeing this in my twenties is that, and this is really the influence of Krishnamurti, who I came to, by the way, through David Bohm, the physicist, right? So I didn't, I wasn't seeking out Krishnamurti, this Indian philosopher. I was actually looking at how we think about quantum mechanics and quantum physics and nuclear fusion energy to solve the Middle East crisis. This is my major at Berkeley. And so somehow I read an article by this guy, David Bohm, and the holographic universe. And then I see all of a sudden he's in conversation with this guy named Krishnamurti. And that I'm off to the races with Krishnamurti for the next 10 years. And one of the things that kind of the takeaways from Krishnamurti was, and I talked about this earlier,

• 46:56Speaker 01

  is that anytime, well, look, Krishnamurti's, one of his kind of famous sayings is, "Truth is a pathless land." Which means you only come to truth by knowing it through yourself and by investigating your own mind. And anytime anyone puts out a very kind of specific dogma of steps, you are now following in their steps, you're not following the truth to your own mind. And so that was always in the background when I was thinking about this kind of mindset that I think we need to navigate this inner title is one that would have pillars, but not steps. So that's why, that's why I'm circling back to this idea of pillars. So there's really two pillars, or two and a half, depending on how we slice the chapters.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  So the first one is transgenerational empathy. And I'll come back to that in a second. The other is futures thinking, so future with an S. And part of futures thinking is T-loss, or ultimate aim and ultimate goal. So those are the three pillars of long path. Transgenerational empathy is having a kind of understanding and a constant activation that you are part of the great chain of being. You are part of what came before you. You are present in the moment and aligned with what's happening, and you are part of what's going to happen in the future. Now, the reason that is so, it sounds obvious when you hear like, oh, of course. But we have this, what I call lifespan bias. So if you look at, go to the bookstore, every kind of self-help book is about like, you know, rich from birth

• 48:24Speaker 01

  to death, like, here's what you can do. And I realize, and that's a very Western modality, right? It's a very kind of truncated, it's all about you. It's a very kind of, no offense to anyone, but it's a very kind of almost narcissistic way of thinking about your role in the world, is that it's just from your birth to your death. And it discounts what came before you and what's going to come after you. So transgenerational empathy asks you to look back at your parents and your grandparents and your great-grandparents at an individual level, and understand that what they did shaped who you are today, for better or for worse. And at the core of it, and the reason why it's not transgenerational

• 49:04Speaker 01

  thinking, but empathy, it's so that you can connect with them and understand what they were going through. Why did they make those decisions? How is that impacting you? Now, it doesn't mean you let them off the hook. If your parents did something terrible, transgenerational empathy doesn't mean, well, you know, I absolve you. But it means, it means having a conversation, if they're alive or if they're not, and investigating that. It's a kind of, it's looking at the emotional inheritance that you received from those who came before you at an individual level, but also at a societal level, and saying, okay, I understand that that is present in me in these certain ways, but it doesn't have to define who I am. So if we go back to the story of my father, yeah, anyone listening to this is like, oh,

• 49:48Speaker 01

  that dude's dad definitely had PTSD, right? Undiagnosed and untreated. And that definitely manifests in Ari's life with his anxiety and the way he looks at the world, da, da, da. So transgenerational empathy is understanding what my dad had, why he had it, why my dad harbored kind of anger towards his parents for not leaving Europe, for not existing and not living through it and making different decisions. So it's understanding that that came, and it's, and that's the individual layer. And at the present moment, it's about having self-compassion for yourself. So empathy for yourself means, okay, I am who I am. I'm doing the best that I can, as opposed to kind of constantly beating yourself up against a metric and saying, well, I could be always, I could be that much better. I could be that, you know,

• 50:32Speaker 01

  because a lot of us are strivers. Like, we're always, the only yardstick we use is this imaginary one that we somehow develop. But we didn't somehow develop, just like the voice in our head. That came from something before us. So it's about looking, doing this kind of emotional, it's almost like archaeology, like looking, going through the layers, saying, okay, that's who I am. I'm doing the best I can. Now, what do I do to align myself to the present moment and take action and change my behaviors, not just for me right now and those around me, but for those who are to come? So transgenerational empathy is asking you to connect in a true, authentic, emotional way with unborn generations.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  It can be your, your own spawn, your own, or just those are to come. And so, you know, someone might be listening to this and like, well, that's, that's great. Why don't you just skip to the end? Just why don't we just have empathy with the future? Why do we need to go to the past or the present? Well, everything that I learned as a kind of futurist and a strategist and kind of thinking about how we develop a mindset for this moment, developing long path, is humans don't do a good job of just jumping forward. The way that, so the way the hippocampus works, right, it sees, it constructs the future off of past memories. So in some ways, when I ask you to think about the future, the images that you conjure up are kind of these pixelated, changed images of the past. And so if we don't work to kind of clean

• 51:58Speaker 01

  up those images of the past, of what brought you here, you're only going to kind of project that trauma and those issues out into the future. So the reason transgenerational empathy has you start in the, in the past, is so when it comes time to go forward, you're doing it with as clean a slate as possible.

• 52:15Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah, I really like that. So the distinction between something that might be called transgenerational understanding into transgenerational empathy is due to the fact that you have to heal that relationship with your forebears, right? Like, to empathize with them is to truly understand them so that you can, you know, kind of embrace that legacy from a perspective of love rather than resentment that you will then project onto future generations. And then some kind of vicious cycle ensues.

• 52:48Speaker 01

  And so in, so I mentioned this, my glory days, so I ran the four by 100 in track in high school.

• 52:54Rich Roll?

  Oh, that I didn't know.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  And, and so, so anyone who's run track knows, or especially a relay race, knows you win or lose these races in the transition zone, right? And so when you're, when you're running up into the transition zone, you know, you yell stick, and the person in front of you puts their hand out to grab the stick. They can't look at you, because if they do, they'll go out of their lane or they're missed the zone and they'll get disqualified. So there's a, there's a huge trust there when you yell stick in this transition zone. And what I learned very on from my coach, Coach Ted Tillyan, is If there's been a mistake at some other point, the way you're going to, yes, you're going to run as quick as you can, but they're also really quick. But where you're going to actually change the future outcome of that race is in that transition zone, is in that handoff.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  So when I think about transgenerational empathy, it's to your point, how are we giving as clean a stick as possible to future generations at an emotional level? You notice we're not talking about where we haven't gone and where folks may, well, why aren't you talking about AI or climate change or big? Yes, in the book, I talk about mega trends and these massive issues. The fact of the matter is, most of us are not in a position to directly impact where we're going to get our power from, or where all these other issues. We can do it at a micro level, and I'll talk about that in a sec, with trim tabs. But it's how we consume or how we vote. But in general, our legacy, what we pass on to future generations is those emotions.

• 54:21Speaker 01

  It's what we either have or have not cleaned out, that when we say stick and we hand it to other people, it's on us, what we pass forward.

• 54:29Rich Roll?

  This is tried and true in psychology. Like, I just know from my own personal lived experience, unresolved issues that I have with my mother or my father that are not adequately healed, I see getting played out in the manner in which I interact with my kids. Right? And my wife is the first person to say, you're doing that thing again. If you don't go back and heal that thing from the past, you're perpetuating something that is going to show up in their lives throughout adulthood, and the time is now. And so, basically, Long Path is a way of kind of telescoping up on that idea and looking

• 55:07Rich Roll?

  at it as a cultural phenomenon with massive ripple effects in how we co-create the future, whether it be something that is of our utopian dreams or of our dystopian nightmares.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so, and you hit the nail on the head. We can start to actually extrapolate this into higher layers, right? So what that means is, as a society, how do we do that? We were seeing this kind of, so in South Africa, there was a truth and reconciliation commission after the end of apartheid. It wasn't perfect, it didn't heal everything, but it allowed people to kind of come together and have a process to try to kind of not eviscerate the past, but to understand it in a way that they could kind of move together and kind of create these. Literally these scenarios about what South Africa is moving forward. Bryan Stevenson from the Equal Justice Initiative says, "There's no way I could go to Germany if they had kind of," and I'm paraphrasing, "if they had torn down all the concentration camps, if there were no kind of monuments.

• 56:08Speaker 01

  I couldn't do it because they're living in a kind of an unreconciled and unlooked at way of the past. Instead, when you go to Berlin, I was just there, you know, in the middle of Berlin, there's a huge memorial to the Holocaust. Every house that was taken from a Jewish family has a plaque on it. The camps are still up, Germany and Poland, they're still doing it. You come to America and it's like the exact opposite, like we hide it, right? We, it didn't, it didn't happen. And so what you see now happening, or it has been happening, is like, you know, we're, we're taking down statues, we're doing some of the things that we should have done in one way or another. Now, it feels up to me, the statues that have been taken down, instead of necessarily melting them down or scrapping them, we would actually put them somewhere and we would go visit those parks and look at that, like, that's who we are.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  Like, that's a part of us. Just like when German kids go to visit places in Germany, they say, "Oh, this is part of our software, this is part of how we were wired at some point, and we have to pay attention because it's a slippery slope to get back there." And what worries me is a society that doesn't do that, that doesn't have an honest conversation with its past.

• 57:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and we're not very good at that. I mean, truth and reconciliation is such an amazing example of long path mindset because it considers the implications of how its citizenship is going to interact with each other for generations to come, and it recognizes like, we need to deal with this now because if we don't, our, you know, our nation will be fractured in the future.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:37Rich Roll?

  And you look at the United States and you can't help but think, how would things be different had we, you know, enacted reparations, like meaningful reparations or some form of truth and reconciliation? Because when you look at the fractured race relations that we're, that we deal with right now, it really all tracks back to our failure, inability to reconcile appropriately.

• 57:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, you know, the question is like, so why do we do that? Like, why do we fail? So, I know we're in transgender empathy, but we can't go forward if we don't talk about fear. Right. And so if we think about the things that we do or do not do, and again, this is the evolutionary biologist in me, and many people would differ. I trace a lot of what we do and don't do based on Ari and Rich in a cave 20,000 years ago, like those kind of reactions. So if we kind of have a truth telling about something that went wrong, God, Rich may push Ari out of the cave. I might not make it through the night. And so our kind of our innate, we think our innate survival instinct is to kind of push past the things that were wrong and kind of just move forward and kind

• 58:39Speaker 01

  of ignore it and kind of brush it under the rug. And time and time again, be it in terms of race relations, in terms of world wars, in terms of couples counseling and couples therapy, the things that we don't talk about are still there and they still rear up. And so part of why we have transnational empathy with the past, present, and future is so that when it comes time to have interactions with the future, future self, we are kind of ready and kind of clear about what it is that we want. We're not taking that baggage with us.

• 59:12Rich Roll?

  Yeah. And there's some interesting science about that piece of kind of forecasting into the future and being in conversation with your future self. Can you talk about that a little bit? Because I think it's pretty revealing.

• 59:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we'll get to the other pillars in a second, kind of futures and telos. But one of the things what we want people to do is obviously connect to future generations, right? But before you can connect to future generations, be it your great, great grandkids or even unborn generations, hundreds of generations from now, you have to actually connect with your future self, right? You have to understand that there are some kind of limitations already right there. So one of our advisory board members, Hal Hirschfield at UCLA, does this amazing research where he'll, you know, it's always freshmen students, right? It's like half of our science is basically freshmen being stuck in fMRI machines. Just to be totally clear, that's So he'll kind of, he'll, he'll, he'll put them into FMRI machines, right? So you can kind of see the oxygen flowing, see where the energy is if you, if you go in

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  the brain. And he asks them a very specific question. He goes, okay, I want you to think of yourself right now. And, you know, this is not technically what it is, but like this part of the brain will light up, right? Like around here, but it's everywhere, but we're not going to crack my head open. So this part will light up. And then he'll say, okay, I want you to think of, and it changes, but he's like, I want you to think of Matt Damon. So it's someone that like everyone kind of knows, but ostensibly doesn't know, know. And so like this part of the brain will light up. And then he'll say, okay, I want you to think about yourself 10 years from now. And you know exactly what happens. For almost everyone, the part that lived for Matt Damon lights up for their future self.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  That's how disconnected we are from our future self, what we call kind of future self continuity. It's how we measure it. So Hal pulls them out, and other people have done this, but I think Hal does some, some of the best work. And he'll do all these different kinds of interventions. And the two that are, well, there's three, but the two I'll talk about is he will take an image of them and he'll age it 10 years. And I'll have them look at it every day for a couple of minutes. And then another thing he'll do is he'll have them write a letter to their future self that will get delivered to them 10 years from now. Now, the, the third thing that he does is he's kind of the combination of the first two, but they'll actually scan you and they'll put you in a VR environment where you're kind of walking around and all of a sudden you look in a mirror and there you are aged 10 years.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  So that's like the, that's the more sophisticated version of this. So you know what happens, right? They put them back in the FMRI machine 30, 60, 90 days later. People who, you know, who had nothing done, it's the same distinction, you know, current Ari, future Ari. Those who have actually looked at photos of themselves aged or have written letters to their future self now start to have much more overlap in their regions. So they connect, future self and current self are almost completely overlapped. And we would do this at Long Path. We would run these kind of experim, well, I shouldn't say experiments, these kind of interventions with crowds that we would, you know, gather in New York City for these kind of evening of Long Path-ing. And what we have them do is, we would, it's a simple test, actually, that how develop a

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  kind of a way of how connected you are to your future self. You would draw a circle on a piece of paper, and that's you right now. And then you'd say, draw another circle that represents, let's say, you in 10 years from now. And so you kind of know what happened. For most people, the circles would always be pretty far apart. Where you want to get people to is where the circles are actually overlapping each other. Where your connection to your future self and your current self are almost one and the same. Now, you're like, well, all right, this is really interesting. Who's funding all these experiments? Who do you think is funding the experiments? Mostly life insurance companies, right? Companies, not mostly, people who need to figure out how to get people to put away savings for the future. Now, we've taken that work at Long Path, and we've integrated it into the work that we do.

• 1:02:59Speaker 01

  And so if anyone, by the way, if anyone's interested in doing, writing a letter to your future self, or looking at a photo of yourself aged 10 years, you can go to longpath.org/futureme. And we've kind of set up two different ways of doing that. You can write a letter to your future self, and you can age yourself 10 years. Now, I don't want to give this away, but I'm about to. It's not about receiving the letter, it's about writing the letter that actually does it. Now, I want to go back to something that you picked up on earlier, which is it's not transgenerational thinking, it's transgenerational empathy. So as we're kind of closing out this pillar, this empathy for future generations, yes, first and foremost, we have to develop empathy for our future self. So these kind of experiments and these kind of ways do that.

• 1:03:44Speaker 01

  And there's a bunch of exercises in the book that also allow that to happen. But then the question becomes, why emotions? Like, why do we ground the work in this mindset through what we call pro-social emotion? So it's not transgenerational guilt, right? It's not transgenerational anger. It's transgenerational empathy, this pro-social emotion.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  The reason we do that is because, and this is from David DeSteno's lab and Northeastern and a bunch of other people, is that we often, and this goes back to Marty Salomon, we often think of emotions as something about how we deal with the past. But what many folks think and believe, and I do, is that emotions are actually there to guide future action. They're actually there so when it comes, so you know, you hurt when something bad happens and you feel emotionally pained, it's so you won't do that again in the future. So you won't date that guy again, or someone like him. That's why you hurt in a breakup, right? So the reason we have empathy for future generations and we ground it in the pro-social is because, based on how it's working in others, what actually will drive Ari or Rich

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  to execute against a goal or to take specific behaviors for that goal, for those future generations, is being emotionally connected to them.

• 1:05:00Rich Roll?

  Sure, sure, yeah. I mean, you can, we all intellectually understand that it's in our best interest long-term to, you know, save money or do all of these things that, you know, basically, a lot of us don't do because we're not, we lack that emotional connection. And what I think is so interesting about what you just shared is, beyond creating the empathetic connection to our past, long-path thinking in terms of future casting starts with your relationship with yourself. And as these FMRI studies demonstrate, our brains are neuroplastic, that when we do these exercises, we can actually create new pathways that hopefully, over time and with practice, become more and more entrenched.

• 1:05:45Rich Roll?

  And that emotional connection to your future self is really what drives behavior. It's not the intellectualization of it. That's the potency in the whole thing.

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  I can show you a million PowerPoints on why you should save for the future, why you should floss, but if I show you an image of your teeth falling out 30 years from now and then ask you, "How do you feel?" Seeing that, you're gonna start flossing.

• 1:06:05Rich Roll?

  Right, but you also have to develop that empathetic connection to your future self before that will even work, right, is what you're saying.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  And before you, and what I'm also saying is before you can have that empathetic connection to your future self, you have to develop that empathy with the past and that self compassion. Because if you aren't connected there, there's too many blockages, there's too much trauma and anger for you to actually project out in the future. You become locked into, so what I write about in the book is this kind of presentism, right? This, we're like, the here, and not presentism in the Buddhist sense, but presentism, we're like in a hall of mirrors, where we become ahistorical, there's no future, there's no past. And in that feeling of kind of yuckiness and anger, we become unable to move forward in any way, shape, or form. And so, part of why it's transgenerational is we're breaking ourselves out of that presentist moment, right?

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  If you look at ISIS, or if you look at kind of any hard-right political movement right now, it's, they're very ahistorical in a certain way, right? Because what they're doing is they're tapping in to our frustrations about, and distrust of the current moment, and then amplifying it. And so, part of what transgenerational empathy does is it breaks you out of it. It breaks you out of this kind of ego fold of it's just me and just my life, so you can expand both forward and backward.

• 1:07:21Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and the presentism is interesting because not that long ago, I mean, I think we all can kind of, there's a consensus that we are in this intertidal moment, but it was not that long ago when it was quite fashionable to say that we were living in a moment beyond history, right? It's all good, we're just, we're locked in, this is the way it's gonna be, which makes it all the more shocking to be in this chaotic kind of, you know, culture and environment that we find ourselves in.

• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  Look, I was going to UC Berkeley when Francis Fukuyama wrote "The End of History", and for someone who's studying international relations, I mean, that's what this article, what, what am I studying? It's over. Like, the liberal west is, why look backwards? We're now, it's the end of history, we're in this kind of steady state, and that's going to be it. And... Anytime anyone has ever said that, they've always been proven

• 1:08:08Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  Wrong, right? Like, we're always kind of growing.

• 1:08:11Rich Roll?

  You're augering like, you know, a shift just by saying it out loud, I think.

• 1:08:16Speaker 01

  And so what ends up, the reason, so the reason Francis, I won't speak for Francis Fukuyama, but one of the reasons I feel he wrote that is because what he saw was a world in which the official future, the narrative about the kind of the shared set of assumptions and belief about what tomorrow will be like, had actually now locked in, right? So this is the second pillar of Long Path, is futures thinking

• 1:08:42Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  versus future thinking. So in the official future, the singular, we all kind of decide, well, this is what it's going to be, and this is what it's going to kind of look like over the next several decades. The official future has always been with us, but it's always changed. And the thing to know about the official future are two things. One, someone usually comes up with it and develops it for us. And we can talk about that in a sec. And two, we actually want it. It's cognitively taxing to live in a totally open world where anything could happen. There's certain homo sapiens going back to our wiring, like, we need some constants. We need to know something is going to be constant. Because if it's consistently chaotic, it's too much and we overload, we kind of like, we kind of burn out.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  So this kind of intertidal where we talk about the things that are dying and the things that have not yet been born, the things that we were living through that Fukuyama was looking at was kind of this enlightenment mechanistic neoliberal world order where, you know, there's the famous Clinton quote, "Two countries with a McDonald's have never fought each other," right? Which obviously it happened when there was one in Ukraine, one in Moscow. That's the great example, I never thought about it, of actually the real, you know your intertidal, when two nation states with McDonald's fight each other. It goes against Clinton's axiom.

• 1:09:57Rich Roll?

  Thought of it in that context.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  The Clintonian axiom, right? And so... The official future now that we're kind of in has very much been dictated, at least over the past several decades, by kind of the industrial revolution and technology. So if we think about the 1930s at the World's Fair in New York, there's an amazing exhibit called Futurama. Futurama, right? That's what else you need to know. But it was actually paid for and put together by General Motors. So it's all these amazing visions of tomorrow, the kitchen of tomorrow, the community. But the one constant, as you kind of went in these kind of chairs around the Futurama exhibit, is everywhere you went, there was four and eight-lane highways, right? Because that was baked into the official future. Now, if you're General Motors, that makes sense.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  You better have eight-lane highways in the future. So the official future through GM's perspective was a car-centric one. And you better believe that's very much how we developed, at least here in the US for several decades, because that was the official future. What ends up happening in intertidal is those official futures start to break down, right? And the one we have right now, and we're actually seeing a kind of a battle for official futures, right? There's the uploaders, singulatarians, techno fetish folks. There's neo-romantics. There's all these people trying to say, well, this is the solar punk. I'm agnostic on that, because I have to be, because I'm not saying it should be this one or it should be that one. What I'm saying is, we have to think in the intertidal through a futures lens, that there are potentially multiple tomorrows

• 1:11:26Speaker 01

  that we could be heading towards, and we have to judge each one on its own merit. And by the way, those could all kind of coexist. So this idea of the official future that we all have to live within, I think is something that we kind of put to the side. So why it's a pillar of long path is in much the same way that transgenerational empathy kind of breaks you out of your stupor about the past dictating the present and the future, futures thinking breaks down this narrative that there can only be a singular future. I get invited to speak on these panels all the time, you know, the future of food or the future of transportation. And I always say, look, unless you put an S on it, I'm not coming. Because what you're saying is, what we're going to talk about is this one singular

• 1:12:06Speaker 01

  thing, and there isn't one kind of singular thing. So that's the core of futures thinking, and the kind of futures cone, which we can go into, is why that's such an important kind of pillar of Long Path.

• 1:12:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you have this illustration in the book of this cone, I forget the person who came up with this idea, but basically, over time, as the cone widens, you have this official future that's kind of the center of the cone, and then from there, concentric circles, or sort of almost a semi-Venn diagram, kind of way of displaying potential futures, and differences in what might be. And I think, I understand everything you said, the part that maybe you can help me with a little bit, that I'm not sure I totally understand, is the dissonance between the importance of forecasting that future of your desires

• 1:12:59Rich Roll?

  as a kind of benchmark to work towards, to use to extend the kind of athlete metaphor, like you can't achieve your goal unless you know what you're working towards, versus this sort of panoply of multiple futures. Like, that becomes confusing, what exactly do we have consensus around here, and what are we collectively aiming for?

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  So this gets into the second part of that futures pillar, which is telos, which is ultimate aim and ultimate goal. So, first and foremost, we have to realize that telos isn't an endpoint, it's not kind of a noun or a place, it's a horizon line. And so, different people, if you're an athlete, your telos, an ultimate aim, is a level of fitness and way of being that allows you to flourish on a physical, mental level, as let's say as an individual. It's not like, "Oh, I will weigh this much, and I can do this many reps," but it's something much bigger than that, is when we think of the ultimate aim. So the voros cone, the cones that are in the book. So there's this official future in the middle. So so far in our conversation, we've kind of gotten away with that official future.

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  And part of the way the way voros originally did it was it kind of the cone, the ice cream cone on its side, if you will, starts in the present. So we've done it long path, it's kind of expanded out and bring the past into it. So we're saying, well, you never just start in the present. You're actually starting from something that was given or foisted on to you. So let's start there. So that's our slight change to the voros cone. So in the center, we have the official future. Now, we've talked about why that can be disingenuous in terms of us kind of trying to move the ball forward as individuals or as a species. And so you've talked about these different circles. So the next kind of concentric circle is this idea of plausible futures. So these are the things that could happen outside of this official future.

• 1:14:48Speaker 01

  And so what you do is you kind of play in that space. And so it depends if you're talking about an athlete, or a country, or a world, or a species. Well, a couple of different things could happen. We could upload, we could falter, we could go extinct, we could go towards flourishing. So it allows us to not be totally Pollyannaish. And the way we kind of wring the rim around that is by talking about the kind of the mega trends. So there's mega trends in the book. They're in the back of the book. But at Long Path, we look at 21 different mega trends across science, human condition, psychology, climate. These are kind of tectonic forces that have been with us for decades. And so what they do is they almost act as guardrails about what are kind of some plausible futures. Now, there's always going to be possible futures. We could be, you know, that's the next kind of cone that kind of...

• 1:15:32Speaker 01

  What we want to do is say, we're not totally circumscribed by the plausible. So some of the possible, maybe aliens come, so that's even outside of the plausible. But we want to show that we're open to that. The final one, which is what you're getting at, is this idea of the desired future, or what we call in the book, examine desired future. The reason it's examined is it's not just a future that you want to aim towards because you've been told by society that's the goal, to become a doctor or a lawyer, make a billion dollars. It's what you've examined it by looking at your past, how you were shaped. Again, this is individual or societal, and then saying, okay.

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

  I was shaped and told that my desired future should be X. But when I examine this kind of emotional baggage or inheritance, for better or for worse, I realize that my desired future maybe shifted over a little bit. And that becomes your personal goal or society's personal goal. You can still have multiple examined desired futures, but as long as they're examined.

• 1:16:30Rich Roll?

  Right. So, an example in the Futurama context would be to examine this eight-lane highway. Like, what's behind that? Well, fluid transportation. How do you get from one place to the next expeditiously? Well, to examine it would be to say, what if we didn't need cars? Or what if we had cities where we shrunk the distances between the places that you need to go? Like, that would be an expansive way of deconstructing that solution, rather than just taking it as fact.

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so, it's a great example, because it's actually one that I worked with one of the world's largest auto companies. So, I got introduced to them, it was a couple of years ago. They're like, we're the first or second, I won't say it is, like, largest automobile company in the world. And right there, that already told me something. That they see themselves as an auto company, not as a transportation or mobility. So, already, I could see their kind of official future was selling more cars over the coming decades. And so, where we got them to was, well, is your desired future to sell more cars? Or is your desired future to still be in business and growing and helping the world? And then, you know, they're like, oh, yeah, it's that. It's actually that. And I said, okay, well, if we put this within the context of increasing urbanization,

• 1:17:43Speaker 01

  and kind of where Gen Z and Y is going, and where Europe is going, they're seeing an increase in these 15-minute cities. So, now, your examined desired future is to be a relevant mobility provider in these 15-minute cities. And the reason that 15-minute cities are so popular is they allow for more human interaction that had actually been disaggregated by the automobile in the suburbs in the first place. So, their examined desired future, their EDF now, is actually, in a sense, being regenerative to the issues that they actually helped cause over the past couple of decades. That's the one thing I talk about in the book, is you know it's kind of examined, if you will, if you're now being regenerative about it. You're now actually, whatever it is that you're doing is making up for...

• 1:18:26Speaker 01

  It doesn't have to be necessarily past harm or past trauma, but things that happened in the past that took us away from being our best selves, either as an individual, as a company, or as a species on this planet.

• 1:18:45Rich Roll?

  And to bring it back to telos, I mean, telos really means to figure out a way to make your life meaningful beyond yourself, right? Like to gird your life with meaning that is rooted in the past, but is really about making the world better for future generations, and acting almost getting to a place where you're intuitively or instinctually acting altruistically.

• 1:19:08Speaker 01

  Altruistically for the present and for the future, right? One of the things that, and I touched on this earlier, one of the big things that gets in the way of us thinking long-term and acting on behalf of future generations is our own death, right? It's amazing, and Ernest Becker talks about this, kind of the anxiety. So humans are the only species that we know of that at a very early point is aware that it will actually cease to exist in a biologically, if you look at most of it, you know, my dog, Ozzy, I love my dog. Ozzy doesn't sit around there anxious thinking, God, one day I'm going to die. I better do X and Y and live in this way. And Ernest Becker took it much further, and he said, "Look, the reason we have religion and culture and everything is just us trying to deal with our own death."

• 1:19:51Speaker 01

  I don't necessarily go that far, but what I do take away from that, and it shows up in Long Path, is it becomes very difficult to think about a moment past yourself, because to do so requires you to run up against the wall that is your death. And so we have, there's some exercises in the book, and we do some things at Long Path Labs, and we do these things called Long Path Gather, when we bring people together, that are basically death meditations, right? It's a way of kind of taking you out of your own bias, where you can only think up until your own life, and thinking about what comes after. What we have found, Kimberly Wade Benzoni, who works with us, who's at Duke, has an amazing work on legacy, and she mostly works with CEOs in the business. What she's found is if we can find a way for people to see that their actions in the

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  moment create legacies for future generations, in a sense, that hooks them up, that puts them in a better place than where they started, people stop being as afraid of death.

• 1:20:46Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:20:46Speaker 01

  Because they see they actually live longer. So the, it's a little bit of a secret, but I'll tell you, part of how long path was devised, in that sense, is in a way to kind of help us move past our anxiety and terror towards our own death. Because when our enriched take actions that benefit future generations, it could be voting, it could be consuming, but I will argue in a second, that can also be microinteractions and how we interact with each other as humans, that that actually becomes an immortality project.

• 1:21:19Rich Roll?

  Right. It gives you like this, this light dusting of immortality on your life, right? Because everything that you're doing will live on beyond your years.

• 1:21:26Speaker 01

  Hundred percent. Now, the way that, look, if you're, if you're in the development department at a university, this is your sales pitch, except your pitch really is, give us a hundred million dollars and we're gonna put your name on the side of this building. You will live forever in this building, right? And it's a great way to raise huge gifts, is to connect someone's legacy with a, you know, they put, they always do it in marble. I always find it interesting. The names on the sides of buildings are the same kind of marble they use for tombstones. I don't know, it's always amazing to me.

• 1:21:53Rich Roll?

  I never thought of that.

• 1:21:54Speaker 01

  But like, look, I'm not gonna have hundreds of millions of dollars to put my name on the side of the building, but what I, I have three kids, a wife, aforementioned Ozzy, and a whole bunch of people that I interact with, thousands of people that I interact with. So how I am going to build a legacy of making tomorrow better, is how I am going to interact with those people on a moment by moment, day to day basis. That becomes my legacy. Look, like I said, I have three kids. So based on some math, about two, three hundred years from now, I'm gonna have eight to nine thousand descendants, right? Assuming, you know, certain things happen. That's a lot of people. Now, sometimes when people say that, they're like, oh, it's genetic. I'm not talking about genetic. I'm talking about ways of being, right? So I said earlier, as, in my family, we grew up

• 1:22:39Speaker 01

  having dinner together, and we talked about things. We're doing the same thing in my family. The way I interact with my colleagues, with the humans that I know, the way I hopefully interact with Rich Roll, what that ends up doing is creating a kind of... And this is, you know, complexity theory or chaos theory, many ways reverberations that go throughout time, that becomes my legacy, not my name on the side of a building. So that's what long path is, it becomes a kind of immortality project. Your name's not connected to it, but your character and your way of being in the world is. And if we want to kind of set up these hundreds of billions, if not trillions of humans to come, we have to start acting like that.

• 1:23:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah. What I love about that is it really recalibrates our relationship with this idea of legacy. It's a very expansive definition. I mean, traditionally, we think of legacy as, you know, what are they going to say about me when I die? And how much money did I have? And what are the accomplishments that are going to show up in my obit? Or what, you know, is my name going to be on a building for the, you know, very few people? But really, we all have a legacy, and that is completely detached from accomplishments or your bank account or social approval, because then every interaction that we have throughout the day has an impact, and there are ripple effects that go from that. So to think about legacy, not as we're nearing the end of our professional lives, but to

• 1:23:59Rich Roll?

  really embody or to be contemplating legacy even as a young person, I think is a really powerful lever for how you think about constructing your life and the avenues for your energy and attention.

• 1:24:14Speaker 01

  Where you put your energy and attention and how you behave with yourself and with others are heirlooms in the making, right? We often think about heirlooms as furniture or as jewelry, but there's also emotional heirlooms, right? There's these waves of being, right? Look, and I've seen how those can be bad, right? If we look at a lot of kind of consistent, terrible systemic traumas that are happening, domestic abuse and a whole host of other things, all the experts that I've talked to say, well, you know, anyone who is doing that right now, that happened to them, and that happened to them. And that's at the acute horrific scale. Now, we can flip that and say, well, what does that look like on the opposite side?

• 1:24:57Speaker 01

  So if we start, you know, I was in the room, a very large room, like with a Dalai Lama once, you can feel that that energy, right? And I read about Mother Teresa and Krishnamurti and Gandhi and the brilliance of Einstein and all these folks. And they're, from things that I've read, the legacies

• 1:25:18Speaker 01

  Are about how they were in the moment with folks. So now, think about, yes, the His Holiness the Dalai Lama is an enlightened one. But what you can say is very clearly, he has chosen and made a decision to be love. Constantly, consistently. So if we think about how we want other future generations to live and exist, not in a kind of mechanistic society where we each see each other in an instrumental way, these kind of industrial enlightenment ways, but we want to see something very different. How do we choose that? Because that, because what I talk about in the book is the project. When I talk about this larger telos, I talk about human flourishing. Moving from, I need stuff, to I want, to a sense of being and a sense of caring.

• 1:26:03Speaker 01

  But those are the words that I use because, and I do use love, but that's really what it is. Right? That's what we want to be. That's what we want to, now, it's very difficult to do. You know, I write about in the book, I get in these arguments with my wife and my kids and all these things. I can't, you know, it's kind of like, you know, you see people with these wristbands, like, what would Jesus do? And it's like, well, what would the Dalai Lama do? What's, what would the Dalai Lama do? How would the Dalai Lama react and be? That's really what you want to do. Because as you start doing that, and this is, and we know the science behind this. We know about adrenaline and cortisol and dopamine. And if we want to start kind of tweaking those, so, because on the one hand, we have Silicon Valley, totally tweaking the levers, right? Just like ramping up the dopamine and cortisol and shock and da-da. So we're, we're the change. The way we interact with others is what's going to start shaping the future.

• 1:26:48Speaker 01

  We're the firewall. Our moment to moment actions are the firewall from having a world dissolve into one of kind of anger and bitterness, as opposed to kind of one of human flourishing and love.

• 1:26:59Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm. So with that, though, this idea of telos and embodying a certain type of sensibility and orienting your life around something bigger than, than yourself, you still have to build into that. This notion of what your horizon looks like, right? You call it like your Ithaca, like what is your Ithaca? And which begs the question of whether we as a society or humanity in general has ever had an Ithaca. So, explain that concept.

• 1:27:30Speaker 01

  So, you know, so this goes back to my time at UC Berkeley. When I was writing my honors thesis, I called it Ithaca lost, right? And it was kind of this idea that we had lost as a society our Ithaca. So, so let's go back. In the Odyssey, Odysseus.

• 1:27:44Rich Roll?

  You have to go way back.

• 1:27:45Speaker 01

  Let's go way back. Odysseus is marooned and what, and he wants to get back to Ithaca. He wants to get to his love, his Penelope, but it's really Ithaca. But we could argue whether it was Penelope or Ithaca back to this, you know, back to the ruling power, which one it was. But let's just say it was a kind of Ithaca, Penelope combination, but we'll stick with Ithaca right now. And he wanted to get back. So he went through all these different things and the monsters and the sirens and all these things. But it was his goal was to kind of, his ultimate aim was to return back there. And so what Thilo says is what, and yes, Ithaca in a certain sense was a place, but it's really a kind of state of being back to home, back to where you belong, back to something bigger than yourself. And what I write about in the book is really questioning, like, do we have an Ithaca right now?

• 1:28:29Speaker 01

  And though we, I know we had an American dream, you know, like a picket fence. And I know there's different, and I know it's also coming from Western privilege because when I walk out of here, I'll be able to get into my car and go buy food. So on a Maslowian sense, kind of the first two steps on that pyramid, to say, to even have this conversation of a larger Ithaca for Homo sapiens, first and foremost, we have to bring everyone up to a certain level. Let's start there. This is kind of the, the bucky thing that you talked about earlier. But then within that, and I would argue that without this larger Ithaca, we won't even be able to get to that. Where is it that we want to get to as a species on planet Earth? Because right now, look, this is one of the things, so the Treaty of Westphalia that ended the, you know, 100 years war, created the nation state, about 400 years old. Right?

• 1:29:14Speaker 01

  So that's another thing that we should kind of dissolve at the end of this intertidal is even the idea of a nation state and borders. So putting the nation state aside and just saying, as a species on the planet, regardless of whether or not there's kind of nation states involved in this part of the conversation, what do we want it to look like 2, 3,000 years from now? Because like, here's the thing, the year, so. I've seen a bunch of movies from like Roman gladiators and I went to go visit the Colosseum once with my family. It was amazing and it seemed like so long ago, right? But here's the thing, the year 4020 AD, which seems like so, like think about most of the science fiction we see, none of it goes up to the year 4000, right?

• 1:29:54Speaker 01

  But the year 4020 AD, we're closer to that than we are to the Colosseum in Roman times. So even though what I'm, it sounds like what I'm talking about is really out there, it really isn't, right? We're literally kind of flipping the lever over on history. So if we want to get to that, we have to have a real, honest conversation about where it is that we want to go to. Not just because we need to have the conversation, but because what I alluded to earlier, that without having that conversation, that emotional connection of what that protopia could look like. So it's not dystopia, it's not utopia, which means no place, but protopia, a term Kevin Kelly came up with, which is a tomorrow better than today. If we want these

• 1:30:32Speaker 01

  protopias in 4020 AD, if not sooner, my argument is without that vision of what that looks like, what that land of milk and honey looks like. Remember, when we were, well, I won't say we, I won't bring you into my story, but when we, the Hebrews were slaves and we left Egypt and we didn't want to go further, or say, no Moses, we can't go further. He came back and said, no, no, there's a land of milk and honey. Here's a vision of a place, a way of being. And I know that's myth and metaphor, but man, there was some good marketing in that. Because without that land of milk and honey, without that Ithaca, it's going to be very difficult to move us as a species through, not just this intertidal, but then to do the hard work that we have to do to get to a place that looks very different

• 1:31:17Speaker 01

  than where we are today. That gets us to the place that you brought up earlier, this kind of Buckminster Fuller, feed, clothe, educate, and take care of everyone on the planet. We need that vision if we want to get to there.

• 1:31:27Rich Roll?

  Sure. There's no chance that we're gonna arrive at that type of future without some architecting around it from very smart people. And I know your organization does this, there's other organizations that are doing it, but it doesn't feel like it's occurring on a mass scale. And what I see, and I'm interested in your perspective on this, is, you know, sort of in In place of that considered architecting around the future that we want to inhabit, we're seeing this future that's sort of being dictated by Silicon Valley, this techno-monk ideology that the future that we want and that we're aiming towards and that is inevitable because

• 1:32:11Rich Roll?

  of our sort of built-in desire to continually innovate is this transhumanism, like this idea that we're going to merge technology with humanity, that technology holds the answers to all the problems that ail us and we shouldn't really worry about these existential threats because we've always innovated our way out of it. And in this model, I feel like we're just being reactive and we're kind of blindly innovating forward, but there isn't like a sort of master plan as to why we're doing this. And my kind of lens onto this comes mostly through what's happening in health span and longevity science.

• 1:32:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:51Rich Roll?

  And I, look, I had Peter Diamandis here, who's, you know, all these like Singularity University folks who are, who are sort of Pollyanna and overly optimistic about where we're headed with all of this.

• 1:33:01Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:33:01Rich Roll?

  But what I, my problem with this, and I've pointed this out to these individuals who have sat across from me, is that what I don't see is an honest reckoning with the moral and ethical implications of these technological advances. They're sort of acknowledged in passing, but kind of also dismissed without what I feel to be a responsible consideration. And I heard you talk about, you know, the difference between Moore's Law and the innovation of the, you know, the chip and computing power, but what's lacking is any kind of Moore's Law with respect to how we're maturing from a moral and ethical perspective.

• 1:33:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, look, so I came of age in dot com 1.0 and lived, lived in the Bay Area. And so Moore's Law was kind of like, we lived by Moore's Law. And so I think of the hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars that have gone into kind of ensuring Moore's Law that a chip speeds go faster over time, you know, and the size of the chip gets smaller. Like, and I think, God, what if hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars went into kind of evolving our moral codes and our ways of being with each other in the world? And, look, this is an obvious, what we're seeing, and, you know, all of your guests are amazing. But what?

• 1:34:19Rich Roll?

  That's okay.

• 1:34:20Speaker 01

  Go ahead. I also know they control the servers.

• 1:34:22Rich Roll?

  No.

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  Begone it would be like.

• 1:34:25Rich Roll?

  All is safe here.

• 1:34:26Speaker 01

  It would be like the Avengers.

• 1:34:26Rich Roll?

  We're in a protective womb.

• 1:34:28Speaker 01

  Snap in the, yeah.

• 1:34:29Rich Roll?

  Just imagine this Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome. It's its own Faraday.

• 1:34:34Speaker 01

  Do you have Faraday cage? Yeah, but do you have your own cloud servers? Because I know with that, then all of a sudden we disappear. There is a desire among a certain group of individuals to move as quickly as possible through the biological instance that is a Homo sapien towards something that doesn't have pain or worry or death. I totally get that and I understand that.

• 1:35:02Rich Roll?

  And how much of that is being driven by a profound fear of death that we were talking about earlier?

• 1:35:09Speaker 01

  100% of it is by that. And so, again, because I'm trying to answer the question without going after anyone.

• 1:35:15Rich Roll?

  Sure.

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  So we'll talk about this in the aggregate. Or if you will, folks. So have you been to Japan?

• 1:35:21Rich Roll?

  No.

• 1:35:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:35:23Rich Roll?

  On the list.

• 1:35:23Speaker 01

  So the first time I went to Japan, I was there for a couple of weeks and I spent time in Kyoto and on this thing called the philosopher's walk. And this was right after our twin daughters were born. And something that's just jumped out at me, and you'll see where I'm going with this, is that a number of the people that were there, their gardeners or monks, mostly monks, who were walking around, were very okay showing their age. Right? There was lots of like gray around, which may not seem like a big deal. But from that trip, I landed back in San Francisco and I went to a bunch of stuff in Silicon Valley. And I noticed there was like no gray, even on people that should have gray.

• 1:36:07Speaker 01

  Right, like this idea, so in Japan, we look at being older and moving through these arcs in life. Chip Connolly talks about this, Seabrooks is talking about this, other folks are talking about it. It's like, what does it mean to age and become wise and think about our legacies? Like, there's that. And then there's a kind of certain subset of folks who like, don't want to die and are stuck in the kind of perpetual present. And I don't, and I don't, and this is my question too. I don't know what it is that they're waiting for. What is it that they, what do you think it is that they want to stick around for? Not, look, don't get me wrong, I don't want to die anytime soon, but I recognize, like, without death, there is no meaning in life.

• 1:36:49Speaker 01

  To live forever means you don't pass gifts, you don't cherish the moments that you're in.

• 1:36:54Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the philosophical discussion around what would it actually feel like to double our lifespan, I think, is not being adequately wrestled with. And look, it's human nature. I like living, I want to live as long as I want to. So there's nothing implicitly wrong or bad about that. And I think that gets matched with how kind of sexy and exciting it is about breakthroughs in science and technology that could actually, you know, sort of solve a problem that historically, we've never been able to solve. And there's, that's enthralling. So, you know, the extent to which each of these players or individuals are being propelled by some kind of unhealthy relationship with death is, you know, I don't know.

• 1:37:38Rich Roll?

  I'm not a psychologist, or, and I don't know these people that well either. But certainly, it comes into play. But I think you're, you're right. Like, the extent to which we feel our lives have direction and meaning and purpose and fulfillment is inextricably wed to the choices that we make every single day and the implications of those choices in terms of how it's benefiting others. I mean, you know, the science, the philosophy, faith traditions, all of these things, you know, demonstrate that this is true. Yes, we'd like to extend, you know, the term of life, but there has to be an endpoint, or it drains it all of its meaning.

• 1:38:17Speaker 01

  Exactly. And that becomes the question is, you know, this is a quantity over quality in some senses. And then where I come at it, in terms of long path, is thinking, look-

• 1:38:30Speaker 01

  Whether I live to eighty or one hundred and fifty, what's more important is how I'm showing up every day for those around me. Right? Because that's my legacy, not like that, not that. And I'd like to be around, and don't get me wrong, I'd love to live to one hundred and fifty, healthy one hundred and fifty. But what's more important to me is how I am with every human, or non-living thing for that matter, interacting in the moment to moment, because it gives meaning to my day to day, but it also allows me to live in such a way that I know I'm doing what I can, at least for our species, over the next several thousand years, over the next hundreds of billions, if not trillions of us,

• 1:39:13Speaker 01

  that we are setting up every generation successively to live a better, more flourishing psychologically, mentally, spiritual life than what we came into, right? That, to me, becomes... So if we took this kind of... And by the way, that's Silicon Valley, right? So like every generation, the computers just will get better and better and faster and faster. What if we took that same mentality to kind of our morality, our moral code, as opposed to just our software code? If we said to ourselves, every generation of humans will be morally better, will be happier, will have more purpose and more flourishing, that is our end, that is our telos.

• 1:39:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, that's the bigger point that I wanted to make. It's not necessarily about longevity science. It's really about the importance of building that back into how we're thinking about and crafting our culture and our future. Because we don't see that right now. And you, as you kind of trace in the book, when you look at the antecedents for kind of our cultural values, you can trace them back to the Stoics and the Age of Reason, Enlightenment and all of that, all of which, you know, have lots of great things to say about how to live, but contemplate it only in the context of one lifetime. And really, for the most part, do it at the expense of our, you know,

• 1:40:32Rich Roll?

  kind of emotional and spiritual lives, right? And I feel like, given the fact that we're in this intertidal moment, the solution lies... In a revolution of consciousness, like short of really elevating our moral and conscious game, we're not going to be able to solve these problems. We can future cast and do all the other stuff, but we really need to elevate the manner in which we're thinking about ourselves and our responsibility to humanity and future generations in a really, you know, material way. That's, that seems to be the thing that has to come first.

• 1:41:10Speaker 01

  I mean, so, what you just laid out is why I wrote this book, right? Because we're at a moment where if we think about consciousness, we are at a, for the first time, contrary to every other, by the way, there'll be other intertitles, I'm sure, but this is the first intertitle where we are actually aware that we are in it while it's happening. And so what we can do is we can kind of let the wind take us wherever it wants, or we can be conscious about the evolution of consciousness in this moment to help see us through, right? And so that, the long path mindset isn't saying, well, do this and consciousness will evolve. What I'm saying is, this is a priori of conscious evolution is thinking in a completely

• 1:41:54Speaker 01

  different way, moving from a way where you only look at the world through your own lifespan to one that goes beyond yours and one that came before yours, that puts you into a larger context, right? So you talked about the dome earlier, you're saying, so Buckminster Fuller created Geodesic Dome, and the way that Geodesic Dome works is, they're amazing if you ever, if you've ever been in actual a tent like one, or you played it on monkey bars, is all the triangles are in like tense integrity, they're in tension with each other. And so long path as a mindset, only, you only get about two thirds of the way there, in terms of kind of really kind of it manifesting in your life, if you're doing it alone. Right, so you said earlier, kind of like, we have to co-create these futures.

• 1:42:39Speaker 01

  We have to kind of co-create our long past, our kind of our links in the chain have to start coming together with those in this current moment. So it's not only, no longer just empathy with future generations and with the past and with our own present, but with those around us and we start carrying the load together. Right, so if, if we want to just take individual actions for a better tomorrow, it's like Lincoln Logs, like one on top of the other. And the one below just carry, holds the weight of the other. But if we're in this kind of dynamic tension, and what that, what the dynamic tension means in this kind of geodesic dough metaphor is, and this goes to your idea about different examined desired futures, is we're not going to agree on all of them. You and I may have very different ideas about the examined desired future for ourselves as individuals, or even for a society. That's okay, as long as we're having the conversation.

• 1:43:23Speaker 01

  Right now, we're not even having that conversation. We've kind of gone to our different corners and it's like a battle to the end. Right, it's a battle to the death about what are the visions. I firmly believe that a lot of the kind of political discord that we're going through in this country, if not the world right now, isn't about today, it's about different competing visions of tomorrow. But we haven't actually kind of elucidated what those are. So instead, we have these weird proxy battles today. But what we're really saying is, how do we want to be over the next several centuries, if not millennia? And this gets into questions of religion and the impact of religion on deciding that and, and you know, the four horsemen and all this other stuff. But that's a conversation I'd like to see. I'd love to see people on the senate floor, instead of battling over this or that text

• 1:44:07Speaker 01

  of a bill, saying, hey, let's talk about where we see ourselves in 500 years as a country.

• 1:44:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and why don't we have a Silicon Valley for that kind of teleology? Why don't we have a Manhattan Project around how we're crafting the future and how we're grappling with our moral compass? I mean, one of the suggestions you make, which I love, is this idea of a US Department of the Future with a budget that equals the Defense Department budget.

• 1:44:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:44:36Rich Roll?

  Like, if we really want to take out an insurance policy on our future, we have to be considering these things and not just blindly kind of rolling forward and seeing what happens.

• 1:44:45Speaker 01

  And that's what, right now, the future is washing over us. Right? As opposed to us thinking of the future as a verb and it's something that we actually create and do. It's like, in an applied way. And so it's just that, the Department of Defense in the US is highly reactive. The State Department, we have USAID, which I've worked with, who actually does some really good work in developing countries. What we need is this Department of the Future whose sole kind of task is not to figure out, well, do we invest in crypto or 5G or whatever? But to actually say, okay, it's 2022. In 2122 or in 2222, where do we want to be? How are we going to measure if we're going to be successful? Right now, by the way, the way countries measure success is by GDP, gross domestic product.

• 1:45:30Speaker 01

  So what that actually means, though, is if I sell you cigarettes and God forbid you get cancer and I treat you, the GDP goes up. If I sold you cigarettes and all your chemo and all that.

• 1:45:39Rich Roll?

  The metrics are all, and it goes back to incentives.

• 1:45:41Speaker 01

  And the incentives are all gone. Whereas, whereas the Department of Future would say, okay, we're gonna, we can look at what Bhutan does, gross happiness product. But I know there's issues there. But we can rethink of the incentives and say, well, okay, it's not about how many people are in prison, how many people are not in prison. Like, a metric that I would love to see is, how do we close 99% of the prisons in this country? Right? Just how do we do it? Because when I brought that up to people, they're like, that's crazy. That'll never happen because people always commit crimes. I said, well, why were those, why are they committing those crimes? Like, where did that come from? And there's different ways of thinking of human nature. Well, there will always be criminal. There'll always be that. That'll always happen. If that's how you think, we're not going to get very far in the conversation. But if we start to go back and say, and by the way, this goes back to our conversation

• 1:46:26Speaker 01

  about reconstruction and slavery in America. If we want to close 99% of prisons in America, we have to go back a few hundred years. Right? And actually think about what got us to these points, the projects, reconstruction, post-World War II, the internal migrations, how we did and didn't handle those things properly, mostly very much improperly. And then start saying, well, instead of maybe building fewer prisons, let's think about how we invest in schools or in communities and take those dollars. I was, I was asked to be part of a group in the US government that thinks about the futures, kind of the futures across different agencies. And the guy who invited me was actually the futurists for the Bureau of Prisons. Like, why does Bureau of Prisons have a futurist? He's like, well, it takes 10, 15 years to find the land and build a prison.

• 1:47:10Speaker 01

  So we're looking at demographics and economics and that's how we're planning. So they're planning on how many prisons to build based on what's happening now, kind of pre-cogging, kind of big data to see what they should build. And you're thinking exactly what I thought. Well, if you know all those things, unemployment and families and this and that are going to lead to that, why don't we work at those root cause issues and not build them?

• 1:47:34Rich Roll?

  That doesn't drive GDP.

• 1:47:36Speaker 01

  Doesn't drive GDP. It doesn't drive GDP yet. The incentives aren't there yet. I mean, we are seeing certain bonds that are being kind of created. They're trying this in Boston where you actually, where not-for-profits will actually get money if people don't go back to jail. It's kind of these like anti-recidivism bonds where it's like, well, we'll pay you $50,000 if this guy who's about to get out doesn't offend again in the next five years. And that's how they get actually their budget. So we kind of see new incentive systems coming, but this needs to be at a much larger level. One of the other things I put in the book is this idea that is very simple. I talked to someone who's an architect. He said it wouldn't be that hard. Is to literally take out one of the walls, either on the Senate or in the House side

• 1:48:18Speaker 01

  in the US Congress and replace it with a big, like 10 by 20 foot window. And on the other side of that window, it'd be soundproof, would be a nursery for kids. It could be people related to the members of Congress or in the community. And the reason I want to see that happen is because think about it, when you are in-

• 1:48:36Rich Roll?

  Are you going to behave that badly when there's kids watching you?

• 1:48:39Speaker 01

  It's not about behaving, but it's about recognizing that the bills that you are passing is in that other room. More often, look at the age of most of our leadership, in their 70s and 80s, which is great and amazing, but they're not going to be around for a lot of this stuff that my kids are going to be around for. I would love to see my kids and babies on the other side of the wall of Congress. So when they're passing, or not as it is right now, not passing certain legislation, they see who's going to directly impact.

• 1:49:05Rich Roll?

  Right. The pessimist in me immediately, my brain immediately goes to- Campaign finance problems and the election cycle. And it's like, yeah, you can put the window in there in the nursery. But until you deconstruct the mechanisms that are driving the decisions that are antithetical to the best interest of future generations, we're not getting out of the gate.

• 1:49:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so, yes, we need ranked choice voting. We need to rethink gerrymandering and take it into a nonpartisan or even like computers, all those things. My argument would be that for us to actually start, one way for us to start enacting those systemic changes that we need to see is by giving people a vision of a future that we want, right? We want to see, but here's what a functioning, this is the TV show that we're doing.

• 1:49:50Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:49:50Speaker 01

  This is what a functioning democracy looks like. This is what a functioning education system, a functioning criminal justice, this is what it could look like as opposed to, you know, the wire or as opposed to all these things that we see, it could actually look like this.

• 1:50:04Rich Roll?

  So in your, in your kind of day job at running Long Path Labs, you go into government organizations, corporations, you mentioned this auto manufacturer, I'm sure you have tons of NDAs and you can't talk about anything specifically, although, you know, it would be great to be a fly on the wall. I'm sure there's been some amazing experiences. How receptive do you find these clients to these notions? Like, are they really thinking in a long pathway? Are they just thinking about like, hey, by next year, I've got to get my numbers up? Or, you know, what does that look like? The practicalities of trying to get people's minds to bend around these concepts?

• 1:50:45Speaker 01

  So it's, yeah, a lot of NDAs. Here, here's what I can tell you. What I've learned, which is not what I thought was going to be the case, is the folks that are most receptive to this tend to be on the tail end of their careers. So I thought it'd be like the younger folk, like, yes, I'm 35-year-old vice president, I'm in this meeting with this futurist, Ari Wallach at Long Path, let's do this. They're the ones who are like, whoa. This is, whoa, too much. We can't reconfigure our business. I just bought a house, a 30-year fixed mortgage. Like, they're not, which is always the way, I always thought it would be something very different. Whereas the people who are now thinking about their legacy, so it's like people in their 50s or 60s are like, okay, here's what we did. Maybe we could have done this slightly better. How do we start to kind of rethink this? What is going to be my legacy?

• 1:51:30Speaker 01

  What am I going to pass on to future generations? How am I going to be seen as a great ancestor? Right? So this book just came out by Jack Welch. So all these people celebrated Jack Welch while he was doing what he was doing. And now people are starting to look back and say, oh, my God, this is what destroyed America, this form of capitalism.

• 1:51:47Rich Roll?

  Yeah, those pendulums tend to swing.

• 1:51:49Speaker 01

  They tend to swing. And so I find myself in these rooms with these folks who are open to the ideas. What we have found is more often than not, and this will not surprise you, is one of the first things I get these senior leaders to do, be it in government or in finance, you know, family offices or corporate, is we have a very long conversation, obviously about their legacy. So we emotionally connect them to the work and what they're doing. But then we say, okay, let's create a vision, examine desired future that you want to see for your organization. That, and this is the important part, that is after you are gone. Now, you are gone could be after your death or after you're retired and you move to Boca

• 1:52:34Speaker 01

  Raton, but you are no longer here. So you're either looking back up from the clouds of heaven or from your whatever. What does that vision look like? And you would think that'd be a very quick, that's the longest part of the process. Because the desired future, we can usually get to pretty quickly. The examined requires them to go back into the past, to think about how they got there as an organization, as a government agency, right? Even if we think about kind of national security, or we work with police and stuff like, you know, police came from slave patrol, like, thinking about all of these deep past inheritances play a role in how we shape and create these examined, desired futures.

• 1:53:16Speaker 01

  Sometimes we have to go through some kind of choppy water to get there, but more often than not, reckoning and reconciling with the past opens the aperture about what tomorrow's could be in a way that is important to them and their organizations. And then, to your main question, that vision becomes a catch anchor that can pull them through. Do you know how a catch works? A catch is an anchor on a ship. You kind of swirl and you throw it, in this case, you throw it 20 feet, it sinks, it's connected to a rope, and then you pull yourself to where the anchor is, right? So these visions become a catch to allow you to pull the organization. Look, frogs won't leap if they don't see the lily pad. Humans won't move if they don't see what they're moving towards. In the work

• 1:54:00Speaker 01

  that we do, super important to figure out what that vision is, what that both examined, desired future is, and then wrap that within that telos. What is the ultimate aim? More often than not, we always come back to that being around flourishing, right? Being in a place of care and of being, and ultimately of love.

• 1:54:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, and that sort of altruistic, empathetic aspect to the whole thing is kind of like the high-minded driver, but it's also anchored, like, the legacy piece feels to me more like the thing that activates self-interest, right? And your receptivity or your kind of consideration of legacy tends to happen near the end of the career because you start to fear death and you're pondering your mortality, right? So the trick becomes, how do you get young people to start thinking about legacy earlier? And how do you create an environment where altruism and empathy and all these things that we've talked about become core values and drivers of decision-making?

• 1:55:02Speaker 01

  Yes, so I was saying... Earlier, right before COVID hit, we were experimenting with this. We were doing these things called long path gathers. You know, like WeWorks. We were doing, yeah, we were like a couple dozen WeWorks on the East Coast. That's a whole other story. But a couple dozen WeWorks on the East Coast. And we were bringing specifically kind of young entrepreneurs into these sessions that would be 60 minutes. And it was a combination of the exercises that you see in the book, also with guided meditations and kind of mindfulness training and journaling, kind of all the different ways we think about our stories and what God is there. And what we were finding is that folks become more receptive to thinking about their legacy when they think, no surprise, about the legacies that they have inherited. Right?

• 1:55:47Speaker 01

  So if you say, well, what do you want your legacy to be several generations out from now, people are like, I don't know, I'm like 32 years old and I just raised my A round. Like, leave me alone. But then, but so, so Yaakov Trope at NYU said, you never start bringing people in the future, you always have to go back. Right? And then from there, because the way the hippocampus works, the way the brain works is, once you've activated them along a continuum from the past, which they know very well, they're more likely to be able to think about the future in a constructive way. And so that's what we started doing is, and we started, look, right up until COVID, we started seeing some really interesting traction and people starting to say, you know what? Like, I, it's amazing, we'd have these conferences, and this is just maybe a silly example, but then folks would be like, you know, what is a B Corp? Like, what does that mean to actually be a public benefit corporation?

• 1:56:31Speaker 01

  And like, they started having these larger, because Pete, look, ultimately, we all want a sense of kind of purpose and meaning, right? Like, to what end for our own life? And for hundreds, if not thousands of years, the to what end was given to us by God, religion, but God in general. As the fastest growing cohort in the US, when you ask people that question on Pew, they don't say any specific religion, they say spiritual, but not religious. Right. So, so there's a God-shaped hole in almost all of us, not size, but shaped hole, that can only be filled by something. And this is, I said this a lot earlier, the Enlightenment kind of killed God in that way, right? It took the mystery of it out.

• 1:57:13Speaker 01

  And so, how do we fill that God-shaped hole with something that is non-ideological, non-dogmatic, and just basically not, not terrible? The closest thing that I've been able to come up with to fill in that kind of God-shaped hole, because God was, it was an audience that you played to because after you died, God then decided what happened to you. So you're always kind of doing the good thing to play to that. What's in Long Path, what is, what I think can help fill that hole, and I don't mean this necessarily at a psychological or spiritual level, is future generations. Our generations, the hundreds of millions, billions and trillions that will come, are, will be kind of looking back. You are playing to them. Your legacy and your actions and

• 1:57:58Speaker 01

  your behaviors, why you do good stuff, what your purpose is, is to ensure that they have a flourishing reality. That, I think, is one way that we can fill that. So when we would talk to these younger folks at Long Path gathers, that would be the conversation. You are doing this product, or whatever it is that you're developing, yes, it's in the, you need it now, but I'll be honest, a lot of folks would come out of some of these and be like, "Oh, that's a crappy idea. That thing I'm working on isn't, that's, that's not hooking up 2122." This is just, like, we did, I can't say it, we had an engagement with a major social media platform, asking them all these questions and doing all of this. Within two or three months of our, like, kind of engagement on this, almost

• 1:58:40Speaker 01

  the entire team had quit. Right? Which is not what you want to bring us in for, but because we were asking those questions, and I'll leave you to think about it, but they were like-

• 1:58:47Rich Roll?

  You just shook the tree a little bit.

• 1:58:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:49Rich Roll?

  Shook the carob tree.

• 1:58:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, shook the carob tree. I mean, look, this, exactly. Are you, look, the book starts off with the story of Hone. So Hone is walking down a path one day, this is a story from the Talmud, Hone's walking down, and he sees this older man planting a carob tree. You know, and carob trees, and he says to him, he goes, "You know, why are you planting this carob tree? You're an old man. How long does it take for this carob tree to have fruit and leaves and become a tree?" He's like, "Oh, 30 or 40 years." He goes, "Well, why are you planting it then? You'll be long gone." And the man answers him very simply. When I was young, I played in the shade of carob trees. I ate from the fruit of carob trees. Someone planted this for me to be in. Therefore, I will plant it for the next generation.

• 1:59:33Speaker 01

  And so if you just still long path down to like a sentence, is what you are doing planting a carob tree or not? Are you doing something for the next generation or not? And here's the thing, and to your earlier, and to your earlier point, it's not totally selfless. There's a lot of self-interest in that. That's the beauty of it. When you plant something for future, you feel good. There's no greater, I can tell you this, because this is what I do with my day job, no greater kind of oxytocin dump than doing, in your brain, than doing things that you know are going to hook future generations up. It's just because you, you start to have a sense of camaraderie

• 2:00:15Speaker 01

  and connection to the universe that goes beyond the ego, that goes beyond just your own life. Because not only does it obviously take you forward, but you realize someone had done this for you. So it also takes you backwards. So it's this mortality project that isn't just about you living forever, but you start to actually realize you, you, you're part of something that's been around before you and will be here after you.

• 2:00:39Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:39Speaker 01

  And there's no greater feeling.

• 2:00:40Rich Roll?

  What I love about that is that it's wired such that even if your motivations are entirely selfish, it still works. Like, let's say, I don't give a shit about my future, whatever. I just know I'm going to feel better if I do right by future generations. And then you feel better. And then ultimately you will come to, it's like an act as if thing. You will come to inhabit that sensibility.

• 2:01:01Speaker 01

  And look, and like incentives, right? Like, we all, like, at the end of the day, we are highly, highly evolved primates. So there are certain things that are wiring that we have to, we have to work to. I'm, I'm full of hope and awe for who and what we can become, but I'm not blinded to what we are, right? I, my dad informed me of that every night at a dinner table. Don't forget, look, he inscribed for my bar mitzvah, he gave me like a seidur, like a prayer book. And he wrote in Yiddish, which I had to get translated after he passed away from someone. And what it basically said was, never forget what the Nazis did to your family. And that's heavy, super heavy. But it was him saying, be realistic.

• 2:01:44Speaker 01

  Do the work that you have to do, but be realistic with what you have, and then move it forward.

• 2:01:51Rich Roll?

  My friend, do you know Scott Harrison from Charity Water?

• 2:01:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:54Rich Roll?

  He says, he always says, "Don't fear work that has no end," right? Certainly, long path is work that does not have an end, but the pursuit of it gives you meaning in all the ways that we've discussed today. And I think maybe, you know, a good way to kind of end this is with some thoughts about, you know, how you think about work that has no end. And, you know, as somebody who's devoted to this, to this journey, like, how is it that we're going to get to scale this so that we can solve problems in a truly meaningful way that will craft the future that we're, that we're, you know, aiming for?

• 2:02:30Speaker 01

  Look, there, to your earlier point, like, there isn't a, you know, $3 billion empathy fund.

• 2:02:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:38Speaker 01

  Right now. But there are philanthropists and foundations and teachers and parents and folks that are starting to understand that if we're going to make it, we have to start cultivating the skill, right? Empathy, empathy is not a fixed trait. Empathy is a muscle. It can be learned, just, right? You can actually, and Jamil Zaki at Stanford has shown this, that people, when asked to kind of empathize with other individuals, especially if there's dollars put to it, will do extremely well. You won't be surprised if it was men who did this. Like, it's like, how do you think these people are feeling? They're like, "I don't know." It's like, "I'll give you five bucks, you get it right." They're like, "Ah," they're feeling like this. So it's, it's something that is innate in us because it helped us from the Serengeti to today. If we are to make it, which I profoundly think we are,

• 2:03:23Speaker 01

  we have to start finding the people who are doing the work that is making the world better for us here today and for future generations. Yeah, yes, buy the book, read the book, talk about it. I don't even, you know, someone told me the other day, they're like, "Well, how you feel if people read your book and start doing the long path mindset, but don't actually refer to it as long path?" I was like, "Great, even better. I don't need it. The book is already, it's done." So whether it's through that or however you find a, to be honest, some sort of practice that makes you be your best self, not just for you, but because becoming your best self is actually what is how you best pass that baton

• 2:04:07Speaker 01

  in the transition zone that we are in right now. And so what it looks like is scale is having that vision for the world that you want and sharing that, facilitating that. You know, one of the things that we do when we go into organizations, immediately next to whoever the grand poobah is, you know, there's always someone sitting to the right of them. I say, hey, can you get out of that chair? You know, and they, okay. And they think I'm gonna sit there. I go, no, no, no. That chair, leave that chair empty. That chair represents future generations. So in every decision that you make in here, be it auto or government, look to that chair. Always look to that empty chair and say, are we doing right by them?

• 2:04:43Rich Roll?

  Isn't that a twist on the Bezos thing of leaving the empty chair for the customer?

• 2:04:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. So in this sense, the customer are future generations.

• 2:04:52Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 2:04:53Speaker 01

  And what we've seen is even something small like that, right? Leaving that chair open, or in my home, like most people's homes, we have photos of all of our kids up. So there's parent, you know, in our, in our armoire, and there's photos of my parents and my grandparents and myself, my wife and our children. And I've set aside, people think this is crazy, but that's okay. There's an empty frame.

• 2:05:16Speaker 01

  And no pressure on my kids to have kids, but the empty frame is for like another generation to come. And so when I'm making decisions, and I don't mean like big profound decisions, I mean, sometimes just in terms of like how I'm interacting with my kids, and I catch that empty frame, it's the long path single, right? Long path started as a mantra, just as a word. I was getting into it with my son the other day, and my wife was there. And anyone who has a, has a wife like mine knows that the end of the day, they're the ones who keep it going in that way. And I was kind of going at my son with this thing, and she just looked at me, she goes, long path.

• 2:05:49Rich Roll?

  She has to remind you, it's hilarious. Yeah, I mean, the book has a bunch of examples of that as well.

• 2:05:53Speaker 01

  And I was like, oh, I was like, yeah, like, why am I doing this? Like, what am I, what am I setting up? And so I have hope that this scales as people, you know, you have an amazing listenership. If, as people kind of, by the book or not, but then as you kind of think about that, these things reverberate. They start to kind of trim tab out. Our smaller interactions make those things happen. And they scale when we do it together, when we facilitate things with open chairs, when we share our vision, when we change our behaviors, and when we kind of cultivate our mind in a way to act healthier around individuals and how we react to things. That's how we overcome short-termism and how we build better futures for all.

• 2:06:32Rich Roll?

  There's something really empowering about that, right? Like, you have a sense of agency. Like, your actions will reverberate.

• 2:06:39Rich Roll?

  Into future generations regardless of the quality of those actions, right? So to take stock of those actions and understand that they are meaningful, even if you're feeling disempowered in your life, I think is a very cool notion, you know, or just kind of sensibility to have it.

• 2:06:56Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 2:06:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, it was good talking to you, man. I really enjoyed that. The book is Long Path. I really dug the book. I think everybody should check it out. And we did it, man. How do you feel?

• 2:07:06Speaker 01

  I feel great. Thanks for having me.

• 2:07:08Rich Roll?

  Anywhere else you want to direct people who want to learn more about what you're up to?

• 2:07:12Speaker 01

  Well, longpath.org. And then from there you can see all sorts of stuff. You can learn about the book, about Long Path Gather. You can sign up for things and obviously, you know, on Instagram, R E W. But really go to longpath.org, sign up for the newsletter. If you want to get involved, we're doing more things kind of in person now as we, as we start to get out of this thing. Whether it's Long Path Gather in person, we're doing in different cities or digitally. Love to have any, especially anyone who is already kind of a Rich Roll listener and viewer, already has kind of made the cut in my book in terms of someone who wants to do this and is already kind of, already kind of starting to do this work. We would just love to level it up with them.

• 2:07:49Rich Roll?

  Yeah, very cool. I'll link all that stuff up in the show notes, of course. And also, you know, your TED Talk, like all the stuff, like lots of stuff there for people to check out. And that's it, man. That was super fun.

• 2:08:00Speaker 01

  Thanks. Yeah.

• 2:08:00Rich Roll?

  Feel good?

• 2:08:01Speaker 01

  Feels great.

• 2:08:02Rich Roll?

  Awesome. Talk to you soon. Peace.

• 2:08:07Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com.

• 2:08:38Rich Roll?

  If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, the meal planner, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo, with additional audio engineering

• 2:09:21Rich Roll?

  by Cale Curtis. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis, with assistance by our creative director, Dan Drake. Portraits by Davy Greenberg and Grayson Wilder. Graphic and social media assets courtesy of Jessica Miranda, Daniel Solis, Dan Drake, and A.J. Akpodiate. Thank you, Georgia Whaley, for copywriting and website management. And of course, our theme music was created by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants.