In this episode, we sit down with futurist and social innovator Ari Wallach. As the founder of Longpath and author of Longpath: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs, Ari challenges us to think beyond short-termism and into a future shaped by collective responsibility and empathy. His work blends strategic foresight with moral imagination, offering a bold vision for how we might navigate today’s chaos with intention and hope. Join us for a conversation on intergenerational thinking and how embracing the long view can transform how we live and lead today.
In this episode, we sit down with futurist and social innovator Ari Wallach. As the founder of Longpath and author of Longpath: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs, Ari challenges us to think beyond short-termism and into a future shaped by collective responsibility and empathy. His work blends strategic foresight with moral imagination, offering a bold vision for how we might navigate today’s chaos with intention and hope. Join us for a conversation on intergenerational thinking and how embracing the long view can transform how we live and lead today.
Learn more about Ari’s work at Longpath - https://www.longpath.org/
Ari Wallach on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/ariw
Rabbi Ingber on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/rabbiingber
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This transcript was auto generated- its accuracy may vary.
Rabbi David Ingber (00:07)
Hi everyone, I'm Rabbi David Ingber and this is Detours and Destinations, podcast through the 92nd Street Y that explores deep thinkers in conversation about the expected and unexpected turns in their lives and the wisdom that they gleaned along the way. Today's guest is Ari Wallach, who is both a dear friend and also an inspiration. Ari is the author of Long Path, Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs by Harper Collins and the creator and host of the documentary series on PBS, A Brief History of the Future, which aired in 2024. is a longtime member of the community that I started on the Upper West Side and also a board member and a leader. But most importantly, as I said, a dear friend of mine and my family. So awesome to have you, Ari. Oh, man, I'm telling you, I'm looking forward to our conversation because there's so many things that we've talked about over the years that I want to explore more deeply with you and just.
Ari Wallach (00:55)
It's awesome to be here.
Rabbi David Ingber (01:06)
Having somebody who's a futurist, mean a futurist on our show is really awesome. just to start off our conversation today, detours, destinations, you know, when you think of those two terms, like what comes to mind? Do you think that life presents us with destinations? do people create destinations? What are detours? Like when you think about that abstractly and one of the things that you do so superbly is think about things both in the abstract and then applying it. So what does that mean to you, those two words, detour and a destination?
Ari Wallach (01:41)
When you first reached out and said I'm doing this podcast called Detour and Destinations, honestly the first thing I thought of was Ernest Becker ⁓ and his book The Denial of Death, which he won the Pulitzer for in the early 1970s. And to quickly summarize it, he basically postulates that humans, homo sapiens, are the only kind of sentient entity on planet Earth that we know of that at a very early age becomes aware of their own mortality, their own death.
and that everything that we create, be it anxiety or heroism, the entire kind of spectrum of emotions and culture and religions and you name it, is so that we can deal with this existential angst of our final destination. Knowing that it's out there and that one day we will cease to exist. So when you invited me, that was the first thing I thought of. go, well, you know, that's the destination.
Rabbi David Ingber (02:36)
just gonna say that's a unique free association around the destination, the final destination. I think I love that that's where you went and Ernst Becker, of course, and that whole school, Outer Rank and so on, just thinking that so much of what we consider to be necessary in culture or culture itself is kind of the way that we justifiably have to construct this denial that helps us to function, denial of that ultimate destiny. So your first thought was, okay. Well, that was my first thought. thought, okay, I'm curious about your next.
Ari Wallach (03:06)
Second thought was I think I want to tweak kind of how Becker thinks about it and that's actually my life's work as a futurist. We do something in the West extremely well which was we think about our lives from birth to death and everything in between as kind of the detours and the journey but the issue is we do that in isolation of a larger chain of being.
So what ends up happening is, we've talked about this, we think about kind of Esalen and the of the West Coast movement for maximal self-individuation, becoming my true self, my true Ari. It's always in this artificial book-ended framework of my birth to my death. And so that's how Becker thought about it too in many ways. But those of us, yourself included, who have dabbled in thinking about in different paradigms of thought, specifically what we call Eastern.
recognize, and I don't mean this necessarily in the karmic, you know, in a Hindu wheel, but who and what we are comes from who came before us and I think as if not more importantly, who is to come after us. And so the first thing I thought of when I heard the title was the destination death. The second thing I thought of was, well, actually that destination, if we purely kind of frame it in our own life, we're missing out on something because
I don't think that's the actual destination. think destination, if we treat it as a noun, as an endpoint to who we are, we fall into an artificial trap. If we see it as a process of becoming, not just in ourselves, but in relationship to others, could be our kids, but it could be those around us, we realize destination is a verb, it's an ongoing. And you know exactly where we go with this.
This is also how I see Judaism. This is how I see God. This is how I see transgenerational ethics. The idea that we need to exist in this, and I'm not taking away the title of your podcast, but because it's open to interpretation, the binary of seeing ourselves and who we are in this world as purely locked in to this biological birth moment of Ari when I was born in 1974, to Ari when he dies, God willing, decades from now.
God willing, There's a false premise and a false understanding because so much of who we are is, I think and feel, truly feel how we're setting up the next generation.
Rabbi David Ingber (05:41)
What I love about what you just said and I was kind of like having some little miniature mind-blowing moments just what you said You know when people think about the nature of reality and we is it particles that wave and and you and I have spoken about quantum stuff before not that I know much about it, but just we know enough to know seem like we know something but but the the sense that the observer and the observed are not to like destinations and detours kind of depending on where you're standing from the perspective of
you know, my own individual life, can think about kind of bookends that you're talking about, but that you're arguing that both within an individual life, what is a detour, what is the destination, obviously will depend on where you're looking from, you know, how long the continuum is. And then if you extend that even further, it can transform the way you think about your life in its entirety, because it's just one stop along a very long continuum, a long road, right, which, you know, our short lifespan.
We keep saying, invoking this, all of our listeners think that everything here is religious, but that there is a sense that we sell ourselves short, so to speak, when we don't have a longer view of our own short time here. And so that brings me to you as a futurist, I mentioned earlier that you wrote a book called Long Path, and one of the insights that you just offered is from your TED Talk, which has almost three million, at this point, views from 2016, where you talked about these three.
pieces of the long path and one of them was seeing our lives not only from our own individual birth until our own individual death, but to think about future generations and what we're leaving for them and what we're investing in towards them. So can we go back to talk about your individual life even though I know, if you could just take us back to the beginning of your individual life story as a stepping stone towards understanding what interested you and what motivated you and catalyzed you to think about.
something bigger than your own lifespan.
Ari Wallach (07:38)
So
I was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, 1974, which then opens up the question, what's a nice Jewish boy like you do it in Guadalajara in the early 70s. when people ask me about my story, who are you, the usual bio, you want to start with when you were born and where you were born, but because you have an idea about my philosophy and how I think about this, I have to go back. And I'll go back to both my parents. My father was born in 1922 in a small,
town called Boronowice, which then Poland, now Belarus. And the shorter version of the story is soon after the Nazis invaded and basically took over Poland very rapidly in the Blitzkrieg, all the Jews who were basically 90 % of the population of Boronowice were put into one-tenth the size of what they had normally been in into the ghetto. about a year and a half later, that's a teenager at this point.
Rabbi David Ingber (08:29)
You're just a teenager at this point.
Ari Wallach (08:32)
He ends up escaping the ghetto and in the escape, his father is killed alongside of him. He escaped for the brother. He ends up joining the Jewish underground, the partisans. He lives in the forests of Poland for two and a half years. And then after the war becomes a Nazi hunter with different governments, intelligence units in the region. And at that point, it became clear to him, at least he felt, he later told us that to him, Europe was a graveyard, a graveyard of Jews. And he wanted to get to America. Now remember,
He, up until this point, saw himself as a yeshiva guy. He was gonna go into the family business, is a little banking, a little butchering, all this kind of stuff. And now Europe is gone. It's decimated everyone except for his brother, who he lost contact with, but then joined up again and randomly in a forest. were both fell into a safe house an hour apart from one another, having not seen each other for a year. He decides his future is gonna be in the West, in America.
At that same time, he decides for various reasons that he wants to help establish the state of Israel. And so he is caught by the US smuggling a group of Czech orphans to boats in Italy to get them into then Palestine before it became the state of Israel. He's placed into a of a DP internment camp. Some cousins of his break him out. He goes from Italy into Portugal. He's not allowed into the US, because at that point there's now a quota.
and the most west he can get to is Cuba. He speaks no Spanish at this point. Eight other languages, but no Spanish. He's in Cuba for 10 years, all the way through the revolution, and at one point he's in a casino, right? This is the late 1950s in Cuba, and he's sitting down in a casino, and this little old guy next to him is whistling like a tune, and my dad starts whistling the tune with him. It's an old Yiddish tune. So that gentleman was Meyer Lansky.
Rabbi David Ingber (10:25)
This was- Meyer Lansky, for those who don't know Meyer Lansky.
Ari Wallach (10:29)
I don't know how do you say it was organized crime? Because I mean, how do you want to call them?
Rabbi David Ingber (10:35)
I don't know. don't know what the gangster Jewish gang
Ari Wallach (10:38)
I'm Jewish gangster. My dad didn't get involved with him, but the point is he's living a very Forrest Gump life at this point. Kind going from international thing to international. He tells me a story about when he was in Havana and he saw the Russian ships coming through starting to unload supplies in very large containers. It ended up being some of the, basically what was going to hold the rockets that eventually led to the blockade.
Rabbi David Ingber (11:02)
Who bathe pigs?
Ari Wallach (11:03)
Well, the blockade in the Bay of Piscos. He eventually had a falling out with Castro because it became very clear. You have to remember at this point, my father's one of the few people in Cuba who speaks fluent Russian and fluent Spanish now, but is not necessarily Russian. So Castro and the group loved my dad because he could kind of translate with Russians that were there. They had a falling out because my dad saw the writing on the wall and said, this isn't socialism or this is not for the people. This is this is a dictatorship. I've seen this before.
Rabbi David Ingber (11:05)
And then the whole.
Now how old is your dad at this point? 30s. They're 30s at this point.
Ari Wallach (11:34)
I must be late.
Yeah. Right. So Castro's folks come to my dad's place of work and he says, what's up? And they're like, we're taking you to your apartment. You're going to pack and you're on the four p.m. flight to Mexico City. We're giving you a round trip ticket because Mexico won't accept you if you only have a one way ticket. Never use a return. Never come back. So that was the favor that he was owed was getting that ticket to Mexico City. A lot of people were not given that polite favor.
goes to Mexico City, there's family who had left Europe before the war, and he ends up joining a larger group of folks who are doing kind of industrial pipes and valves, like the Corona plant or Jose Cuervo. Those were all my dad's pipes that he was importing from Europe and Asia. Meanwhile, my mom, who is 20 years junior, 1945, baby boomer, was an artist, Jewish, growing up in the Bay Area, and she was studying under Buckminster Fuller, kind of the, I would say one of the most...
fascinating engineers, architects, and really futurists. And in studying with him, he said, you know, Susan, I love your art, I love everything you're doing, but you're very Western in your mindset. You need to kind of expand how you think about the world. And at that point, there weren't nonstop flights to Europe like we send our kids to. The further she, her parents would let her go at that point. She's 20 years old, 21 years old, is to Mexico. So she goes to study Aztec and Mayan city planning and architecture and art.
and they're set up on a blind date and that's how I'm born in Guadalajara in 1974. I start, so I start.
Rabbi David Ingber (13:04)
Okay. No,
just wanna stop for a second. That's just remarkable story. And as a futurist, you're proving already the context matters, like where we come from is as essential in understanding where we're going as anything is. And so you're just taking us on this incredible journey. Your father is this very colorful, very...
Ari Wallach (13:27)
Very colorful.
Rabbi David Ingber (13:28)
Very colorful very interesting man, and you brought us up to this point You're born in Guadalajara, Mexico after this blind date that brings together your mom Susan
Ari Wallach (13:36)
American
artist who worked with Bill Graham and did the Monterey Jazz Festival and is kind of like a hippie but who doesn't do drugs and an artist and very, you know, hang out. Used to do breakfast with Janis Joplin. So there's that whole world. And then there's this like Nazi hunting resistance fighter who hung out with Meyer Lansky who was pushed out of Cuba by Castro. So it's a fascinating, very interesting story. The takeaway though is we all kind of have stories like that. It's not always those kind of intense peaks like I just laid out.
But the reason it's so important for us to kind of establish a baseline of the people who brought us to this point, and by this point I mean our birth, is that they come through with their own psychological, emotional, spiritual ups and downs, both the peaks and the traumas. And so it wasn't until my 20s, my father passes away when I'm 18 years old from cancer, until my 20s,
when I'm in therapy and at the San Francisco Zen Center and doing a lot of intense work, that I'm able to start kind of constructing my own spiritual, emotional, psychological DNA by looking at my ancestors and the impact that it had on them. And there's a trap here, because then we can blame our parents for everything. But the fact is, life happened to them, it happened to their grandparents, this goes back many, many generations. But the reason I raise this on our kind of
detours and the journey and the destinations is so much of what happens to us is just not in our control. What's in our control is how we react to it. And so that was the takeaway lesson both from my mother and from my father. My father experienced horrific things with his eyes, with his hands. He was still the guy you wanted to hang out with at a party because he told the crudest jokes, the funniest thing. He was always
Rabbi David Ingber (15:30)
Do you have vivid memories of your dad?
Ari Wallach (15:32)
Yeah, I have great memories of just that, us going to people's houses for things and him telling jokes that I wouldn't even tell my children, even when they're over the age of 18, just old Yiddish humor, like dirty funny jokes. I also have images of him being really upset and kind of storming out of the house because he had a fight with my mom or something like that. And in hindsight, I'm like, ⁓ he was of a generation. Like those folks who went through the Holocaust didn't go to therapy. didn't do the work.
Now you walk into a bookstore and there's shelves and shelves of, you know, lived trauma, all that, you know, the body keeps a score. None of that was available to those folks. So I have the memories of all of them.
Rabbi David Ingber (16:13)
What I'm hearing...
which is really fascinating but also moving, is that a futurist also is animated by the same principle, which is that we are transgenerationally impacted, period. And that we are transgenerationally impacted by the context in which we're born into, the unfinished, young-spoke frequently of finishing our parents, know, the unlived life of our parents that we often have to either consciously or unconsciously live. And then the notion that at some point,
to this again, you begin to teach and want us to be thinking about how we shape, So much we don't control, but so much of what we do control has to shape not just our own lives, but also lives going forward. So your dad is this, you know, he passed away when you very young. At that moment...
was that also something you thought impacted you when you were doing this work on yourself and on the past that his own father as you said had died when he was right when they were getting right in front of him yeah here you in a sense your father is gone and you are now right thinking about the rest of my life
Ari Wallach (17:23)
⁓
I'm roughly saying, it's interesting. Growing up the son of a Holocaust hero who fought the Nazis meant to me that I wanted to go to West Point. Look, to this day, people who know me are always, it's an odd thing. So if I'm anywhere, if I hear a military helicopter or a military jet, I can identify what model of F-15 it is. I can tell you what kind of submarine is coming through the Hudson.
Rabbi David Ingber (17:36)
I didn't know that about you.
Ari Wallach (17:51)
I was probably one of the few high schools in America that could identify on site almost the make and model of every Russian ICBM, whether it was in a silo or in a transporter. To me, what it meant growing up under this hero was through a, be blunt, almost like a reactive lens, it a military lens. Well, if he fought, I should be prepared to fight. That is, going back to Ernest Becker, that is the heroism that I know.
That is the one that I saw. He never said, oh, you should go to the military. It wasn't anything like that. So he gets sick while I'm still in high school and graduating. And it's at that point, a little earlier on, I actually didn't want to go to West Point because I didn't realize it on the other side of the country. So I'm a little bit of a mama's boy. So I wanted to stay close. I'm studying international relations and conflict at that point. In college, my father passes away. And through meeting with a Jungian therapist, that
For me, what made actually the most sense, the transformation, the transmutation of that, what we will call kind of that energetic field that goes from our parents onto us, would be to continue on his work and my mom's work, which was all about creativity and agency, by doing almost the exact opposite, which wasn't to be reactive. It wasn't to know every make and model of Russian ICBM out there and kind of prepare for that. It was to think.
critically, honestly, and authentically about what would it mean to get to the point where we don't have to know those ICBM numbers? What would be the opposite of that? That's when I became a peace and conflict studies major and started thinking about conflict resolution and conflict transformation. And that's also when I got more more interested in the future because I realized, as you just said, we are impacted by the past, which, ipso facto means we are impacting the future. And I realized that that
so much of what the futuring profession was at that point. Futuring has, look, it goes back thousands of years, the Oracle of Delphi, but modern futuring, at least in America, came out of the US Air Force. came out of the military, mutually assured destruction. was Herman Kahn, a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn, in the late 1940s, developed the modern field of futuring. He came up with these different scenarios, specifically, what would have to happen for America to survive a nuclear holocaust? This is what futuring was, was how could America still survive?
And I was surrounded by lot of those folks. learned from those folks in the 90s when I was at UC Berkeley. Global Business Network, which was the premier kind of future professional think tank, was just down the street. So would go to their salons and their lectures. And I realized at that point, we can do one of two things. We can plan for the worst, or we can plan for the world that we want. It's a very different thing, right? One is how do we build fences and walls and ICBMs? The other is how do we plant those carob seeds?
And that's how my featuring developed in that period.
Rabbi David Ingber (20:41)
Well, the Capses is a reference for those who don't know. It's a reference to a story in the Talmud. I want to get back to something. When did your family move to the States? It's before your father passes away. yeah.
Ari Wallach (20:53)
So we're in Guadalajara. I'm only three and a half years old. But importantly, so we went to a Jewish day school, my older sisters and myself, and the school bus had guards on it, know, cars with folks with guns in front and behind it. And then on ⁓ Yom Kippur, the doors of our synagogue were machine gunned. We left two weeks later. Didn't sell the house, didn't sell anything in the house. My dad sold the business, didn't tell anyone.
Rabbi David Ingber (20:56)
Yeah, we're anywhere to the west coast and
Ari Wallach (21:23)
It was like in the middle of it, my dad said, I've seen this before. I've seen this before. I'm not, we're going to America. And that was it. And by then, he was able to move up here, because it's an American wife, and that was it.
Rabbi David Ingber (21:33)
I love that you're backfilling a lot of things that are relevant to your biography. I love it. But do you ever sense just as I'm listening to you that when you said you made a distinction between your father's path and your path, right, and after doing this Jungian work, you realize that what your dad was doing that was kind of hunting Nazis or making sure the world would be a safer place in that way and that you thought initially you might need to do, you decided you're gonna go a different direction. Is it fair to say that that insight was also
partially because you grew up not having to think that way. mean, have you thought that through? mean, your father reacts to what's going on in Mexico in the way that, know, he's seen this script before. been in Cuba, seen this script before in that way. He's been in Europe. He knows the dangers, right? And so he has his own reactive way, as you said. You kind of, like many of us, grew up with those stories, but not having that in our...
our own experience, right? Is that partially a privilege that we have that we can think peacefully as opposed to reactively? what do you think about that? Nezor's yes, okay.
Ari Wallach (22:37)
So the answer is yes. Look,
I grew up in the golden age, right? It was like the 90s, was Clinton, it boom time, was end of, was Francis Fukuyama, it the end of history, the cold, the wall fell, the whole thing. It was great, Israel was doing great. was pre, any intifada, anything, as far as I knew. Look, growing up a conservative Jew on the West Coast, I only see this in hindsight, but we would have these Jewish National Fund maps in our classroom and...
I didn't know about, let's say, Gaza or the West Bank, Judea, Samaria, because those were actually full on the map. So for me, we didn't have to, it was just a state of Israel. There's no carve-outs like they are now. And not that they weren't there, but that's just not how they printed the map. And so as far as I was concerned, everything was hunky-dory. And so I had the flexibility and the agency to think slightly differently. If I was 18 or 20 years old right now, it'd be a very different story.
Rabbi David Ingber (23:34)
Wow, that's really, I'm so tempted to go there. Okay, go there. Detour. Yeah, let's take a detour, exactly.
Ari Wallach (23:42)
Look, I have teenage daughters. live just north of New York City, not that long after October 7th. You know, one of them asked, like, should I tuck my Star of David into my sweatshirt? Going into New York City, the second largest Jewish population in the world outside of Tel Aviv. I won't go more into that, but like that was just not a world that I knew at all. Like I also.
I've been very involved in politics on the left. Look, I worked in Washington, D.C. on the Clinton campaign in 1996, which makes me very old. I've only known flourishing and thriving for the Jewish people in America. Like, we were always the underdog. I faced my little anti-Semitism here at middle school. I some kids throw pennies at me. I had no idea why. I had no idea why.
Rabbi David Ingber (24:28)
I'm tempted to say why, I, yeah.
Ari Wallach (24:30)
And now, ⁓ going back to ⁓ my self-inflicted wound here question of like, if I was 18, would I think things? No, like I was deeply traumatized not just by October 7th, but by the world's reaction to it. Doesn't matter where you stand with, it was, I realized, we're not, like that.
It's not as safe and great as we thought. And if I was 18 years old right now, I don't know if I'd be like, I'm just going to work on ensuring peace and to Kuno Lam for the world writ large. In the world. And look, in my home, to be clear, the Kuno Lam that we practice for fixing the world was we're in America, the Jewish people, we have to do our part in pushing for the unfinished journey of the American dream.
Rabbi David Ingber (25:11)
I mean fixing the down like pairing the world ⁓
Ari Wallach (25:28)
is just that of the experiment that is America and Jews here just like everyone else should work to push that forward and make the at least the nation more safe and more just for everyone especially because we're in a position where where everything is safe and after October 7th I was like we're actually not as safe as I thought we were maybe we have to do some more work I'm not saying I would want to become more isolationist or anything like that but it definitely
Rabbi David Ingber (25:51)
There's
a wake-up call for sure. There's a wake-up call. I want to come back to it because I don't want to leave our conversation today without having come back to the application of some of your futurists or futureizing or futureing, as you say the verb in it, and applying it there. But you touched on your own back to the kind of theme of detours and destinations. Your own life is at multiple destinations, detours. You learned so many different disciplines and you were so impacted and so influenced by so many different things. You know, when you think of your father, let's say, passing away,
when you were quite young and that as a kind of detour of sorts and how you worked with it and you said you worked with it. did therapy trying to understand what your takeaway is and what you're gonna do with your life. Then you moved into many different fields. mean, you said you were in politics and you're a seeker.
Ari Wallach (26:41)
I'm a seeker. You are. And I love knowledge. you know, I talking to a good friend earlier today. She's like, you know, you really should have just become a doctor. Of all the that. Yeah, look, I remember going to HUC at one point and being like, what is this rabbinical thing? I remember doing rounds with a friend of ours who's a doctor saying like, what is this doctor thing? I went to Harvard to meet with Celia Benhabib, who ran the government program to get a PhD there to talk to her about it.
Rabbi David Ingber (26:48)
of all ⁓
So do you think that there's like a psychograph of a seeker that inclines them to sing detours with a greater curiosity and frame it kind of like, this is interesting. Like exploration is from detours. Like, ⁓ you were heading in a particular direction and then this was interesting to you and that was interesting to you. Did you feel anxious to arrive somewhere? Like, I'm supposed to be here by this moment in my life.
Ari Wallach (27:31)
So in
1995, my mom brought me to some event in the San Francisco Bay area. It was, I know, a fundraiser, some political thing. And I got into the line of the buffet. And the guy that I got behind ended up being Senator Tom Harkin, great senator from Iowa. And he turns around and he goes, oh, you know, I'm a student at UC Berkeley at that point. He's like, what are you into? I'm like, I'm peace and conflict. He goes, oh, I started USIP, the United States Institute of Peace, which you may know from the news was just shut down, their big, beautiful building on the mall.
This was before they had the building. And I go, oh, I know USIP. I wanted to get an internship there this summer, but there was no internship program. And he's like, what do you mean there's no internship program? I'm one of the co-sponsors of the bill that it. I don't know. They just couldn't get it together. The internship person quit. He goes, hold on. And he calls this guy Paul over. And he goes, Paul. And he tells him the story. Paul gives me his business card. And Paul says, call me on Tuesday, four days later. When I call Paul four days later, Paul goes, you have an internship at USIP?
You're expected in Washington, D.C. in five weeks. Go find an apartment, go there. I had no plans on being in Washington at that point. So here I am working in the Religion, Ethics, and Human Rights Department. At the same time, there's only three days a week, two days a week, don't know what I'm gonna do, I reach out to the sister of one of my sister's former boyfriends who was the chief of staff to Chairman Donnie Fowler. I hey, I have two days in Washington. Do you need an intern?
She goes, you know what, we always need interns. And they kind of shoved me in some back corner office. Three days later in the back corner office, some mail comes to that office that's sent to the wrong person. And the guy that I'm doing some envelope stuffing for goes, go take that down the hallway that goes to those people down there. So I'm like, I'll take it. I'm just like a lowly intern. And I go in and I go, this is for you. And the woman says something kind of like snarky to me. And I said something kind of snarky back to her. And she goes, who's your boss?
I'm like, oh my God, I've been here for like three or four days. I'm gonna get fucked. And she walks out, I'm like, this is like, I'm thinking to myself, I haven't even made it to lunch yet. I'm like, what am I gonna do with these other two? She walks back in, she goes, all right, it's done. You work for me now. So her name was Ann Rowan. She was the head of East Coast financing and fundraising for Clinton. So I spent the next four months with her, and that takes me to the White House. That's where I first meet President Clinton. I'm in rooms with President Clinton the size of this room.
Rabbi David Ingber (29:32)
Yeah.
This is not good. ⁓
Ari Wallach (29:57)
four or five people helping them get ready to meet. The point is you just have to be open, right? Look, I had the luxury of knowing that I came from a family that would always have a couch or a bed for me, so no matter how hard I fell, I could always go home. But that was it, those were all the details. And that took me on to a 20 plus year that leads to meetings in the White House for the next 20 years as part of my political work.
delivering mail to the wrong room.
Rabbi David Ingber (30:29)
So who knows what a destination is, who knows what a detour is. you kind of, in that way of just following a thread, you were led to various places and then moved from place to place. curiosity. That could also, again, that could be part of your family's heritage. Your father sounded like a very open-ended person. Could be from your mom, who also was willing to leave something behind in order to go find something else. Kind of the Abrahamic myth of, lech lecha, go to a place that I will show you.
Ari Wallach (30:41)
Thread the thread!
Rabbi David Ingber (30:59)
you kind of animating your life. And it's funny that you framed your father as a kind of Forrest Gump like character just listening to this.
Ari Wallach (31:07)
But
that becomes a certain sense of modeling. And so I'm in Washington as an intern, and I have these lunch breaks, and I'd go hang out in the National Art Gallery. And there's a set of paintings by Thomas Cole called The Voyage of Life, which I get pulled to very early on. He did a couple of different sets, 1840, 1842. And if you haven't seen these, they're in the gallery, and they're on four kind of different walls facing each other. And The Voyage of Life, it's basically childhood, being born, youth.
what they call manhood and death. It's these four paintings following an individual through the four chapters of life. I spent more time looking at those than you would have. I mean, I've been to that little room area where those paintings are dozens of time from the age of 19 to I just took my kids there. And part of what those paintings did and still do is they give me a sense of kind of chapters and to recognize that you don't have to be everything all at once.
And if you look at, I'm not going to ruin the surprise here, the last painting, because in the entire painting series is an individual being born coming out of a cave and then going through youth where everything is amazing and open. And then when you're an adult, it's the rocky water. And then the final painting as an old man, the river is going into the ocean and there are angels descending and he's kind of looking up saying like, I'm ready. Those paintings have played a bigger role in my understanding.
of the journey of life than probably anything else have. Because what it did is it allowed me to see that everything happens in its time in different chapter settings, and when it's time, you'll move on to the next one. And so those have become kind of a touchstone for me. almost every time I'm in Washington, I go visit them.
Rabbi David Ingber (32:46)
So those touchdowns though also speak to another influence, which is you and I both have been intensely influenced by our exposure to meditation, to mindfulness, to thinkers like Krishnamurti and others who are in that, I guess the pantheon of Eastern, they're called, ⁓ depending on how you frame them. And one of the tensions that I'm experiencing listening to you, maybe listeners too, like here you are as a futurist and your journey is very much
on the one hand to remind people that the destination is not just the end of their own life, but a much longer trajectory. And it also extends in both directions by your ancestors and your descendants. And yet, I don't know, some listening to you might feel as I feel like the focus on the present, like the sense of like, I'm going with this because I don't know where this might lead me along the trajectory of my life. And so like when you think about the tension between presentism, not as
ignoring the future, but presentism as being present, like just being here, not constantly ruminating about the future. And usually when people think about the future, by the way, they don't think about it positively. I think often people think of the future as a source of major anxiety and also something that they feel beholden to and they don't think often in the way that you have often spoken about it as futures or destinations. Multiples. Multiples, and that you are.
co-creating, but how do you balance that? Like, you know, presentism and being here in the world. How might somebody think about that with you?
Ari Wallach (34:20)
Look, there's a time and a place for everything. I, especially now, especially with my children, I see them getting older and getting ready to leave the house sooner than I'd like. The greatest gift you can give yourself, yourself, and those you are with is to be 100 % totally present. That's so cliche. What's a simple example of that? When you sit down with someone, take your phone off the table.
Because when it's not on the table, you're half distracted, but even if it's face down, you're not totally present. Okay, so why is that important for a futurist to say? Because the fact of the matter is, there's also time to future. Like I'll go into rooms like this with whiteboards and we'll paint out these scenarios of the future of refugee flows. That's the time to be present with the energies in the room, but to really cast your mind's eye multi-years, multi-decades out. But you, I can't do that all the time. That's literally...
I'll give myself an hour to a day to do that. The rest of the time, I try to be as hyper present as I can, not just for myself, but for those around me, because that actually is another way of featuring. So there's intellectual cognitive featuring on the whiteboard, future of water supplies in the Sahel, Sub-Saharan Africa. I just did that earlier this morning. The other version of featuring is actually being so present with the individuals around you that they feel nested and accepted.
and within this envelope of love and caring that you have for them right now. Now that's important in the present, but or and people who feel safe are more likely to make better decisions for themselves in the future. So we often think of futureing or futurists as working at these big large scales. Yes, I've worked with the UN and companies and all this stuff, but some of the most important futureing you can do is just making eye contact with the barista who just gave you a coffee and actually being a human because
how you impact his or her in that moment will then reverberate. So the reverberations are both at the micro and the macro scale. So that's how you deal with that tension is by having different times to do featuring, but even when you're being hyper present, you're actually still featuring.
Rabbi David Ingber (36:30)
Yes, so tell us about Featuring because Long Path and then ultimately the PBS special that you hosted. So here you are, you're very, very involved in the political landscape, famously amongst our friends and others. You were involved in the Great Schlepp. It was your idea, the Great Schlepp, was to go down to Florida and engage, you know, nice, along with Mick Moore.
Ari Wallach (36:51)
I
was gonna say with with Mick Moore, Sarah Silverman did a great video for us back in 2008. Obama was having a Jewish problem in Florida.
Rabbi David Ingber (36:58)
They need
to plow it in to win. So you're moving in various circles. Your focus is on the political present, but also the future too. And your future as a futurist is already in the present with you then. And eventually you become a futurist, which involves many things that you've been saying here in shorthand, like working towards solving big problems and some smaller problems, but mostly big problems for various companies, various organizations, all kinds of folks.
Ari Wallach (37:24)
White House, a bunch of folks.
Rabbi David Ingber (37:26)
And so you eventually codify all this into long path, is what I spoke about earlier about the Ted talk. Why don't you tell us a little bit about long path and the three pieces of futurist advice that you give there.
Ari Wallach (37:40)
So we have go back. So I was doing work with the UN Refugee Agency in Geneva, and we were in this meeting, not necessarily with UN folks, but a bunch of folks, and this is 2015. I said, look, all the work that we're doing and showing says that we're going to have from 500 million to a billion climate refugees in the 2030s or 2040s. What do we do about it now? And some of the folks in the room, not everyone, some of the folks in the room who are a little bit older is like, yeah, we know that's coming, but we'll be long retired by then.
I'm like, yeah, but there's things we can do right now 15 years ahead of time instead of being reactive. And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I realized, I was like, well, how many other issues could be solved today in 2015 if people in the year 2000 had started working on them? And why don't they? And that's what really got me thinking about short-termism. Where does it come from? Yes, we're all short-termistic. At a biological level, if you and I are on the Serengeti 10,000 years ago and an animal starts chasing us, we're gonna run.
If we come across a tree laden with fruit, we're going to eat all the fruit because we don't know when the next meal is going to come. And we want to run away from that tiger. The problem is when that becomes embedded within all of our social systems, economic systems and cultural systems. And it became very clear to me at that time that it was everywhere. Obviously, the big driver is, let's say, quarterly earnings, which is bananas that you run some of the most powerful companies and organizations the planet has ever known based on quarterly earnings so folks can make sure
They understand, don't get me wrong, there need to be metrics for success. But what I realized at that point was we were making decisions on too small of a timeframe. And so I took all the work that I had done on the Eastern front of my persona, my mentality, the way.
Rabbi David Ingber (39:25)
Wait,
world?
Ari Wallach (39:28)
with the deeper
kind of strategy work, kind of classic consulting work. And I said, look, how do we find a way to both overcome short-termism and embed long-termism, both at a macro level within organizations, within culture, and as importantly within ourself, that's kind of more from the Eastern side, and which one comes first or do they co-arise together? That's what I was thinking about. That became Long Path, and a good friend of mine, Alec Ross, said,
Listen, you have all these ideas, codify it, give a talk. You gotta go out there. Same thing I would say to you. That became Long Path, and the idea behind Long Path, this mindset, it's three pillars. We talked about a couple of them. One of them is obvious when you think about it. We have to stop thinking about the future. And we have to start thinking about the futures. And that doesn't mean we all live in this quantum multiverse where there's gonna be multiple futures. Yeah, we're on one linear time path. But what ends up happening is,
we end up building what we call kind of an official narrative of tomorrow. So I'm often asked to be on these panels, the future of transportation, the future of food, the future of Judaism. As if there's only one singular path and people just want me to divine or crystal ball what it's going to be, what that does is it robs us of agency, of the ability to not just be victims of the future, but to actually be architects of it, quoting Buckminster Fuller. And so that was the first pillar was just futures thinking. Think about it in a much more open,
If you think about the cone, instead of one straight line, it's more of a cone of possibilities. The second is transgenerational empathy. This is a key component because we know transgenerational thinking, we've thought about it. We've already talked about it. It's about thinking about the past and thinking about the future. Empathy is slightly different because it means you now have an emotional connection, both to those who came before you and those that will come after you. Here's a little bit of the Trojan horse on empathy and why we choose it. We know from psychology and neuroscience,
we are much more likely to stick with something if we are emotionally invested within it as opposed to just intellectually or cognitively. So that's why we talk about transgenerational empathy. And a clear example, you can do this on the longpath.org website is you can write a letter to your future self and you can also write a letter to future generations. But it's important to talk about when you do that is to think about how you, you it's not just about the world that I want my grandchildren to grow up in.
That's one thing, and I'll do certain things to effectuate change so they live in a better world. What'll lead me to actually taking more consistent action is if I feel and think about how I want them to feel. I want them to feel safe. I want them to feel loved. I want them to feel compassion for others. Then I'm more likely to take action. So that will put the neuroscience side. The third is what we've also talked about is telos, ultimate aim, purpose, and goal. Now, I think of telos much like I think about God.
as verb, as having a destination. This, by the way, I just took from the Torah. This is just the idea of Israel. This is just the idea. And when I say Israel, I mean the wrestling, the land of milk and honey. What pulled us out of...
Rabbi David Ingber (42:34)
So is Tilos of the three, is that identifiable with some version of a destination? Like an ultimate end, as you call it in the TED Talk? Like the ultimate end?
Ari Wallach (42:44)
Yes, the North
Star is kind of the GPS, but without that vision of a land of milk and honey of what we want, it is very difficult for us to get there. Now advertising does this extremely well. When you see TV ads for a vacation destination or for a man and a woman at a convertible having the time of their life, they're showing you a vision of what could be. Notice everyone's always smiling in advertising. No one's ever crying in an advertisement. And what they're doing is they're tapping into what we talked about.
They're tapping in, you will feel this way if you consume this. So we're saying in T.L.O.S. we have to give a vision of what it is that we want for us to start moving in that direction. Yes, there will be many, many detours along the way. But if you have an idea of what that land of milk and honey is, you are much more likely to stay the course.
Rabbi David Ingber (43:36)
So are we now, just like pivoting from the future to now, are we in a detour period right now? Like from a perspective of a futurist, so much of what you've worked on for the last couple of decades in your life on the macro scale, not the micro scale, not like giving people sense of how to integrate those three pillars of your long path, like into your family's life or into your small or large Jewish community or other community's life. And without being overtly or necessarily political about this moment,
although you could be, it's up to you. But clearly, many of the things that have to do with the future, or the ways that we conceived of bequeathing to our children and their children and next generation a different world are somewhat, the last 100 days or so, in last couple of months, under attack, being treated very differently, certain assumptions about.
ecological future and the of the environment, the future of our children. Like on the one hand, you know, perhaps there, some would argue that there are now problems that are being dealt with now that have been avoided until now, right? But as a futurist, how would you apply these principles right now and say, here's what we need to do at this moment? And then also to backtrack to the, to that question that you asked about being an 18 or 19 year old, also, if you might use your lens on futurism to bring us into that thorny place too.
Ari Wallach (45:02)
So I would say right now we're in what I call an intertidal. So the intertidal space for those who aren't, you know, who don't study marine biology or oceanography, is that place along the shoreline that sometimes is below water, sometimes is above water. But it's the tides, right? But there's something that most people don't realize about the tides. The tide doesn't come in and the tide doesn't come out the way we often think about it. The Earth rotates within this big bulge of water that because of the sun and the moon,
The water on the surface of the planet is actually oblong and the earth, the landmass, rotates within it. So it's not so much that the water's coming in or out, it's that we're in a turning process within it. So we are in a part of a turn right now. The last major intertitle was from the Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, when we had a complete paradigm shift in how we saw the world. And then the old institutions, obviously in the West, was the church, T, capital C.
which gave rise to a whole host of institutions built around enlightenment type, rational, know, Bacon and Hegel. And the way we think about the world is through a rational, de-godified mindset, which for what it's worth, took us very, very far. We were talking earlier in the fourth grade, I broke my femur, right? Something you know.
Rabbi David Ingber (46:20)
Yeah, because I broke my hip just for those. I broke my hip about five weeks ago. And so you're in fourth grade and you're
Ari Wallach (46:25)
And fourth grade, I my femur
on the monkey bars. I spent two months in the hospital and then two months in a body cast at home. And one of the things I do is I read a lot. And remember those old Choose Your Own Adventure books? So there was a new series that had come out called Time Machine. So it's kind of like the Choose Your Own Adventure, but it's always like the age of dinosaurs or the Civil War where you made different decisions, but you went forward and backwards in time. That's probably, you know, to answer the unanswered question, that's when I first started thinking about
Rabbi David Ingber (46:37)
sure.
Ari Wallach (46:53)
Futures was probably in these book series. But what ends up happening, I realize at that time, is that so much of how we define ourselves is through this Logos rationalized way. The point is, when I broke my femur, I'm glad we had science. I'm glad we had the scientific method. It saved me, me to walk without any significant long-term damage. That being said, those very institutions are now, A, under attack.
under the past hundred days. And by institutions I mean courts, civil society, all of that. But they were also starting to show their age in a certain way where they weren't meeting the needs of everyone. Now, I am not far from saying, it's good what's happening. Not at all, because we need Enlightenment-era institutions to move us forward as a species. At the same time, there are folks who realize they were being underserved and now are attacking them.
because they feel it takes away, I can't speak for a whole population who's attacking the institutional layer that allows civilization to flourish, so I won't, but it makes sense to me that in an intertidal moment where there's rapid, mostly technological change, we're about AI, automation, we can talk about the Trump voter being birthed in 1996 at the age of NAFTA when we stripped out all the jobs out of the middle of America, all of these things are happening.
And so now we're seeing regressive forces. So we are in this liminal space, this intertidal where the old ways are no longer working, the new ways are yet to be born. And to take the quote all the way through from Gramsci, now is the time of monsters and that's exactly what we're seeing right now. So as a futurist, I see the most important thing we can do, and I won't get into resistance or defiance because that's not my jam, the most important thing that I can offer, other futurists can offer,
is a way of thinking about not what we don't want the future to look like. I'm asked to be on panels all the time. Can you talk about the rise of authoritarianism and fascism? Other people can do that much better than I can. What I want to talk about, and what's so important for us to be doing right now, is to actually imagine what we do want the world to look like, not what we don't want it to look like. Yes, I don't want it to look like 1933. I don't want another Kristallnacht, sure. What I do want is people to think about, well, what do want actually America to look like in 2030, 2040, 2050?
Rabbi David Ingber (49:15)
So let me ask you, is there a shadow to being a futurist? Meaning, as we're talking about problems, like on the one hand, there's something about futurism which is a corrective, Short-termism as you call it, or myopic focus on the present moment, or on the present generation, or my own short lifespan between the bookends. Is there a shadow to it in that, like other systems, it also...
impede urgency because there's a sense that you have like the very same thing that can make I can imagine for myself like the history is long the archivist Ria's, you know as dr. King said so Massively the archivist Ria's long, but it bends right in the clients towards justice. So given the historical overview I remember reading last week on Holocaust Remembrance Day in Noma Shoah about the resistance of some of those who lived during the Holocaust and in one particular story the rhetorical question of the character was
Do you think the Nazis, did they know how they were just one part of this much bigger story that was playing out in this meta-historical reality? They were a bit player in a much bigger play. And so when you're thinking, I guess if you're thinking generationally, and tell me if I'm wrong here, if you're thinking generationally in big generational pieces, as long as you're humble enough to know that it's not assured, right, the futures depend upon your agency, it gives you an obligation to sense, to do something.
but ⁓ it also lifts you up from the catastrophizing that might come from only seeing the temporal in just this moment. So it lifts you in a sense. Is there a shadow though? Can someone be overly?
Ari Wallach (50:55)
Yes, I was with someone earlier today and they're like, give me some hope. I'm like, this is the best time to be alive in the 300,000, thousand year arch of being a homo sapien. She's like, but what about what's happening right now? Did you read the news? like, I don't go. Right. I see the grand art. I have three children, two women, a boy. There's no better time to be a woman on planet Earth in all of recorded history than right now. It's still terrible. Rights are being taken away. There's misogyny. There's all sorts of bad things. Yeah.
Rabbi David Ingber (51:00)
year.
So that's where the hope comes, right?
Ari Wallach (51:24)
Now I can say that, and that sounds great, but like I don't want, you know, like my girl's walking down the street getting whistled at on the subway.
Rabbi David Ingber (51:33)
Right, or we can imagine even worse things.
Ari Wallach (51:36)
So the shadow side of doing what I do, and you could probably talk to my wife about this more, is that it's easier. My safe space is going meta, going high, I think in hundred-year chunks. It's not good for everyone. And look, if this was, you know, Rabbi David Ingber's On the Couch show, one might say, well, this is how Ari deals with the innate embodied trauma that his family actually went through, is by actually elevating outside of the
Rabbi David Ingber (51:49)
Right.
Ari Wallach (52:05)
the micro and living in the macro. And by the way, probably true, and by the way, I'm okay with it for right now. It probably bothers those the closest to me. But this is, look, everyone's got work they have to do, both on themselves and in the world. My detour is the macro. You know, look, I hope in 10, 15 years, maybe I'll stop doing this larger macro-futuring and spend more time doing more of the inner journey work that will make me just.
not think about the far hundred years, the next 400 years of Homo sapiens, and just think about the next minute, but I'm not there yet.
Rabbi David Ingber (52:38)
So what gives you hope is that big picture. Is there anything that breaks your heart? If you could open us as listeners to something that even someone who's as optimistic as you can be and seeing the big macro picture, like missed opportunities or missed moments here that are like, ⁓ that didn't need to be a detour.
Ari Wallach (52:59)
Yeah, I mean look, in my own personal journey, both of my parents have passed away too early. My father when I was 18, my mom just a few years ago. You gotta spend more time with the people that you love. You talk to any hospice nurse who gets to spend, or a hospice practitioner, no one on their deathbed or as they're going through hospice ever says, God, I wish I took that other vacay, I wish I bought that car, that jewellery.
It's always like, wish I spent more time with the people that I love and care about and help nurture them and help bring out the best in them. And so when I think about the things that keep me up at night, it's like, am I spending enough time with my kids? Not just time, but I present enough? Because unfortunately, and I won't include you in this, I can be very heady and intellectual and not as in myself on the feelings side.
Sometimes actually with the people closest to you, that is actually what they need. But again, for various reasons, which I think anyone listening to this will understand, I kind of exist more up here. And so what's difficult is you need, for someone like me, is to also kind of bring it down. And I'd the opposite is true too. I know I have an empath, my daughter's an empath. I would love for her to spend more time up here and not so in it. And so life is that balance. so the detours aren't always.
What you read, the key thing, key takeaway, I'll sum up for anyone listening, fast forward to this section. Your detours and destinations are not what's on your LinkedIn profile. There's a sole resume, a sole code, and who you are emotionally that you took from the past that will help imprint on people into the future that's much more important than anything else that we will ever see in those bullet points. And the key thing is to always be reminding yourself
Rabbi David Ingber (54:30)
Right.
Ari Wallach (54:50)
of those higher levels of importance as opposed to what we now as a society say is the most important thing.
Rabbi David Ingber (54:55)
I love what you said because where you went when I asked you what breaks your heart is you went to the personal. I asked for the personal, I obviously you could go to a lot of different dimensions and you spoke beautifully about quantity and quality of time with people that we love and you went to death which is kind of where we started and what's interesting is that
On the one hand, when we started with the denial of death in Ernst Becker's work and in, let's say, in life, more broadly, can lead to great things. It's that very denial that allowed us to create culture and civilization as we know it in his theory. And you're warning against this, like, the short-sightedness of seeing your own demise as the end of the life arc. You have responsibility towards the future. But then you came back just perfectly to bookend this as...
It's not entirely true. Like one can see one's demise, and this was also Becker's insight, one can honestly face one's own, the short-term life that you have and have it catalyze you to live in ways that make really intense impacts on other people. And I think there's no greater crucible for that than parenting. Like literally the minute you had a future, you were responsible for your children and for being the primary, you know, planting of seeds.
for them and their future and your actions that I know for myself as a father, like my life completely changed. Of course, if you're a listener and you don't have children, of course this is the case across the board in other contexts. for me, it was very powerful. The minute I had my first kid, everything changed for me and I'm sure for Immediately. Immediately. And so my actions or my mistakes or my shortcomings, my vulnerabilities, my unlived life, my ancestors' unlived life all became that much more important for me to actually
live into because I realized that my choices here were not just impacting me or my parents or my siblings, but now they're impacting the future. And there's a being and there will be beings who will be impacted by the seeds that I plant. And that was really beautiful just to hear that how vital it is for you personally to make those, you you can be a futurist at the White House, but in the end of the day.
Ari Wallach (57:07)
It's
not about the situation, it's about the family room. Look, I ran the numbers, I have three kids. If they have 2.1 kids, they're, ⁓ 200 years from now, there will be 10,000 people through our lineage. And how I am with my kids right now will imprint something psychologically, spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, that will impact those 10,000. And you start running the numbers writ large, and however many listeners you...
Rabbi David Ingber (57:10)
Exactly.
Ari Wallach (57:36)
you have and I'm sure it's a plethora of listeners. we ran. If we ran the numbers we're talking millions and millions of future human beings are impacted by our very actions and that comes great responsibility. Look it's what you buy it's how you invest all those material things but it's also moral progress and what you pass on.
Rabbi David Ingber (57:40)
⁓ Maybe not yet, soon, soon.
So you've spoken already here today, but you've spoken with me and others in the past about the importance of imagination. Leave us with some kind of a tool here for us. How should we be fostering our own imaginations in creating a better future? What should we be doing?
Ari Wallach (58:17)
So I said this a little bit before, but I'll go back into it. Very, very simple exercise, which is to write a letter to your future self. You can do this at longpath.org. You can do this at Dear Tomorrow. You can do this at futureme.com. And you can set the time parameters. So if you go to longpath.org, when you write a letter to your future self, the default is five years from now, you'll get the email back. And all the research has shown that connecting to your future self in that way alone
changes so much about how you are in the world because unfortunately we are so disconnected from our future self. There's this great experiment that happened at UCLA. The short version is when they ask people to think about their future self, it was a completely different part of their brain. It was the same part that they associate with a celebrity or someone that wasn't them. And when they did the simple exercise of writing a letter to their future self over a couple of days, when they put them back in the fMRI machine, which is an MRI machine that looks at where oxygen flow is,
They found that people who had written letters to their future self or looked at photos of themselves aged every morning for 10 seconds in the mirror, which you can do with a Snapchat filter or anything, where they associate the blood flow for their current self and their future self were now overlapping. Very simple. So that's some key exercise. It's just to connect to your future self. Before you think about connecting to future generations or these big macro things, just think about...
You know, and I do this probably more than I should, but you gotta eat your own dog food. I often think, where do I wanna be in 2030? And I'll write a letter to myself in 2030 that I know will get emailed back to me in 2030. And I do that probably once every two weeks. Short little things. LonePath.org will, there's a little future me tag, you can write a letter to your future self.
Rabbi David Ingber (59:59)
Wow. So longpath.com.
Wow, that's a powerful exercise. A very powerful, actually, as you know, at the Roman community, we also do a similar thing once a year. We have a letter writing to our future selves. What a powerful exercise to be into. powerful. Well, thank you, brother, for this great conversation. There are things that I learned about you today that even knowing you for close to 20 years, I didn't know. And...
Ari Wallach (1:00:29)
I
was saving them for the day that you would have this podcast. I'd myself a future letter 20 years ago when I read it. I go, this guy's amazing, but I'm not gonna tell him everything. Because one day there'll be a thing called podcasts. And oh my gosh, he's gonna have me on there and I'm gonna tell him things he's never heard before.
Rabbi David Ingber (1:00:32)
Rob.
Well, you know, I've had this experience already with a couple of people thus far in the first season where there are people that I that I've known for so long and I feel like I want to have even more conversations and and this felt like it just touched the surface but it was quite a service of quite a first round I just want to thank you for your honor The mind ideas the ideas that were here that was so I think ⁓ powerful and impactful. So thank you already
Ari Wallach (1:01:02)
for having me and thank for doing this.
Thanks for having me.
Rabbi David Ingber (1:01:19)
We'll thank all of you also for listening. I want to thank our team, our producer, F. Rod Bigger, our editor, Maya Geyer, our music by Shimon Smith, and thank you to the 92nd Street Y and to Eden Sidney Foster. I'm your host, Rabbi David Ingber, and this is Detours and Destinations. We'll see you next Tuesday for the dropping of the next episode. Until then, all your detours be destinations.