Hi, I am here with Dr. David Gruder. He is the founder & president of Integrity Culture Systems, and the Director of the newly emerging Center for Integral Leadership at the California Institute for Human Science. An 11-award-winning psychologist specializing in Leader Effectiveness, Enterprise Success, and Culture Architecture. here is the full episode hope you enjoy. Listen in your favorite podcast app.

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Episode Highlights

Ari [00:04:15] How do you break through that kind of organizational is in, whether it's in corporations and governments in whatever or in families or in yourself, even the organizational how you've organized your own being.

David [00:06:04] And for the words and actions that the emotions I'm having about the stories I'm telling myself about the parts of reality that I'm paying attention to have on those to whom I'm in relationship or with whom I'm in relationship. That, to me, is the essence of spiritual responsibility. So that's the personal side of it. There's a societal side of it, too. Should I go on to that?

David [00:12:15] My belief system is the right belief system because after all, all of the other beliefs that my core assumptions are based on makes sense with my core assumptions. So my belief system must be right. Well, it does. It doesn't. Must be right. That's that's. That's erroneous thinking. That's arrogant thinking. And the reason that's important to the question that you are asking is because when I approach these kinds of of questions of paradigm of belief system from a place of humility. Then I get to see everyone else as my brothers and my sisters. I get to see people who have different life experiences for mine that have lessons and wisdom to teach me, just as I have certain life experiences that might have wisdom to offer others.

Ari [00:17:26] And that's whether it's, you know, in this day and age is the mask versus the know mask. Right. Or the hug versus no hug. Social distance versus. Come together. You know, if we're able to have these kinds of conversations, don't you think we would get a long way, much better in society?

David [00:22:10] The blindness that people end up having, they don't know it. I call it a spell. Most people, in my experience are under a cultural spell. They don't know how to see that they're under a spell and therefore they don't know that there's something to get free of. And it's incredibly damaging.

Ari [00:23:29] A community of melting pot people. So when you know, when we hear people say, if you don't like it, leave it. Or if you're you know, if you think differently than I do, you should leave the country or whatever those those statements are that people make.

Ari [00:27:26] That is so true. You know, my my grandfather came over to this country when he was 12 years old, I believe, by himself on a boat through Ellis Island, became a multi, multi millionaire, lost it all, gained it all, lost it all gained it all.

Ari [00:27:44] But he spoke eleven languages, eleven Austrian, Hungarian, you know, Yiddish, Hebrew, Spanish, French. I mean, he spoke German a lot of languages because, you know, as a salesman that was his job. But even even before he was 12. Growing up in Austria, Hungarian Empire, he was initially taught and this was in maybe the late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds. He was taught these languages as just your being born.

Ari [00:47:46] Absolutely. You know, I'd like you to maybe expand on that a little bit, these ideas, because this is really what what my book in this podcast is about is how do we go about with tools, with techniques, with training, with mindset. How do we go about taking this world that we created. Right. And saying, OK. The way I look at it is this is not optimal, we can create it better. So how do we create something that is more optimal for our own human growth? So let's expand on this for a little bit. And just I'm going to let you kind of go, because I know you've you've done a lot of thinking about it. We've talked about this before

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Full Transcription

Ari&Davidpart1.mp3

Ari [00:00:00] Has it occurred to you that the systems we live by are not designed to get results? We pay for procedures instead of outcomes, focusing on emergencies rather than preventing disease and living a healthy lifestyle. For over 25 years, I've taken care of Olympians, Paralympians, A-list actors and Fortune 1000 companies. If I did not get results, they did not get results. I realized that while powerful people who controlled the system want to keep the status quo. If I were to educate the masses, you would demand change. So I'm taking the gloves off and going after the systems as they are. Join me on my mission to create a new tomorrow as a chat with industry experts. Elite athletes thought leaders and government officials about how we activate our vision for a better world. We may agree and we may disagree, but I'm not backing down.

Ari [00:00:50] I'm Ari Gronich and this is. Create a new tomorrow podcast.

Ari [00:01:01] Welcome back to another episode of Create a New Tomorrow.

Ari [00:01:05] I am your host, Ari Granite's, and I am back with Dr. David Gruder. He is a 12 time award winning integrative psychologist. And more than that, he's an organizational psychologist. He has done some amazing things. I call him the guru of gurus, the mentor of mentors. And welcome back, David. I am so glad that we're able to do this again and provide so much more of your wisdom to the audience.

David [00:01:33] That's a pleasure to be back with you, Ari.

Ari [00:01:35] Awesome. Thank you so much. Tell us a little bit about how you got started in organizational psychology. Why did you choose that field specifically and what it is that you're looking to create in this new tomorrow, New World?

David [00:01:52] So how I got into the field. Kind of starts at at age 16. I was expected to become a professional musician. And we're certainly on track for that. I had started performing as a child in a lot of different capacities. And so I was not being asked, what university are you going to? I was being asked, what conservatory are you're going to? And by the time I was 16, in some way, that is still kind of magical and mysterious to me. I knew that even though music was and is my first love, psychology was my calling. And I also knew that I was. Called to have impact on elevating society, not just on individuals. And so in my doctoral program, I selected a doctoral program that was going to enable me to get a PHD. That was split between clinical psychology, which is the deep inner work and organizational development psychology, which is the interpersonal the work of of what happens in groups and systems. And so that was my best way to equip myself to elevate leaders and cultures throughout my career.

Ari [00:03:14] That is that it's awesome. You know, one of the things that I say a lot is we made this shit up and we can make it up better. Yeah. Think that people forget in many cases that the society as it is, is a figment of our imagination. We created it. We created the buildings. We created the design of the houses. We created the design of the societies. And when something is suboptimal, not up to performance standards, right. Then it's kind of incumbent upon us to recreate it in a different, better way. But we have organized around our creation and there's a psychological element to this is how we live and this is how we're always going to live and this is how we should live. And we want to go back to the way that it was right or the way that we think it should be.

Ari [00:04:15] How do you break through that kind of organizational is in, whether it's in corporations and governments in whatever or in families or in yourself, even the organizational how you've organized your own being.

Ari [00:04:31] What do you what would be some some tools, some ways that people could think about this a little bit differently so they'd be open to the possibilities now?

David [00:04:42] Great question. I agree with you completely. We have massive imaginations as human beings were incredible.

David [00:04:50] The natural compulsive storytellers. We make up stories left and right. And so, yes, everything we see around us is of our creation. We invented an imaginary thing, called it a corporation corporate structure. We invented an imaginary thing called money. I mean, you don't go down a whole long list of things that we invented and then those things started being or seeming real to us. So the tails wagging the dog in that sense.

David [00:05:26] And so where where this starts is with a personal ownership piece and. And a societal ownership piece. So the personal ownership piece for me has to do with self responsible responsibility. I and I alone I'm responsible for the parts of reality that I pay attention to for the stories I make up about what those parts of reality that I'm paying attention to mean for the emotions that the stories I tell myself about the parts of reality that I'm attending to activate in me.

David [00:06:04] And for the words and actions that the emotions I'm having about the stories I'm telling myself about the parts of reality that I'm paying attention to have on those to whom I'm in relationship or with whom I'm in relationship. That, to me, is the essence of spiritual responsibility. So that's the personal side of it. There's a societal side of it, too. Should I go on to that?

Ari [00:06:30] Yes, please.

David [00:06:32] So the societal responsibility part. Has to do with with the intersection of freedom and responsibility, which we seem to have forgotten collectively as a society, even though I know certain individuals who haven't forgotten that.

David [00:06:51] But as a society, we seem to have forgotten it. You know, there are there are lots of people who are taking the position essentially that the most important thing in society is freedom. And others are saying the most important thing in society is responsibility, social responsibility.

David [00:07:12] And both groups are equally and oppositely insane because of what they've forgotten, because freedom without responsibility is narcissism and responsibility without freedom is tyranny. And when we have forgotten that we invented society and that society or society's rules are not meant to be the boss of us, they are meant to be in service to our evolution as a species and our stewardship of a planet. When we forget those things, then we have everything upside down. Same thing goes with patriotism, by the way. You know, I view patriotism as nested dolls. You know, those Russian or Ukrainian dolls where there's a doll with an a doll with an a doll?

David [00:08:08] Well, this is something else that we've forgotten as a as a planet collectively. Again, individuals are exceptions to this, where we take a position that in my country comes first. And, you know, whatever impact that has on your country, well, that's your problem. Well, you know, patriotism, if it's integrated and if it's saying it's nested. So my first responsibility is to stewarding the planet. My second responsibility is to humanity inside of that. I have patriotism to my country, to my religious or spiritual groups, to my communities, to my business, etcetera, etcetera. And inside of that is my patriotism to my to my family and my and my primary love relationship and to myself. When we when we are in either or thinking that says I have to sacrifice one of those nested dolls for the other nesting dolls or or in order to attend to one nesting doll, I have to be willing to sacrifice the rest. I'm engaging in insane societal thinking.

Ari [00:09:20] You know, that's really interesting. I think a lot of people believe that they have to focus the exact opposite of what you just said. Right. Self family, city, county. I mean, it goes out and then eventually maybe we'll get to the world at large. Right. Or humanity at large and and so forth. I never quite understood the idea of patriotism. And I'll tell you why. Patriotism to me has always been the same thing as being a white supremacist or a well, saying to somebody, I'm proud to be white, I'm proud to be black. I'm proud to be blue. I'm proud to be green. It's something that you have no control over where you were born. Right. So you're born and you know, Latvia versus being born in the U.S.. So all of a sudden, you must be a lower form of human because you were born there, but you had no no choice in that. Just like you must be if you're black, you must be a lower form of a human being because of your color, even though you had no particular choice in that. And it really relates nothing to character. So how do we evolve beyond the label of. Well, any of the labels. But beyond the label of patriotism, beyond the label of I'm proud because. Of what I am versus what I do.

David [00:11:05] Right. Oh, my gosh, there are so many layers to this question.

David [00:11:10] You know, the let me start with what you said about in this narrative of a person saying, I can't help where I was born or the color of my skin. Even that is open to question. You know, there are metaphysical belief systems that that say that we do choose our life circumstances. So the humility piece with this is to remember that all belief systems, every belief system this planet has ever seen is based on its own set of core assumptions, such as I chose where you know, how the circumstances under which I was born. I didn't choose those core assumptions that are neither verifiable nor unverifiable that can either be proved nor disproved. And when we forget that, we move straight into arrogance.

David [00:12:15] My belief system is the right belief system because after all, all of the other beliefs that my core assumptions are based on makes sense with my core assumptions. So my belief system must be right. Well, it does. It doesn't. Must be right. That's that's. That's erroneous thinking. That's arrogant thinking. And the reason that's important to the question that you are asking is because when I approach these kinds of of questions of paradigm of belief system from a place of humility. Then I get to see everyone else as my brothers and my sisters. I get to see people who have different life experiences for mine that have lessons and wisdom to teach me, just as I have certain life experiences that might have wisdom to offer others. And it's not a competition over who has more wisdom for whom it is this delicious opportunity. Life is this delicious opportunity to compare notes and learn from each other and discover more about the bigger picture from the smaller slices that we each see individually when we have that kind of attitude. We are able to sit in the both and of relishing our own identity, you know, relishing the unearned privileges and the unearned targeting that we get to experience as a result of the life that we have been born into. And we get to relish the diversity of humanity. So instead of it being one or the other, that I'm I'm either only identified through the color of my skin or I refuse to recognize that my skin has has a particular tint to it. How about both hand?

Ari [00:14:20] That's a really interesting point of view. I think that what that does for people when they adopt that kind of a point of view is it allows for an openness and a willingness to understand another's point of view. And I'll give you an example of of an experience that I had about 10 years or so ago. I had a roommate who was a Palestinian Muslim woman. And I am a Latino Jew who I you know, I call myself a mutt because I have pieces, I think everything inside of me. So I've never actually identified as a label, but I've definitely got a lot of that Jewish culture and Latino culture in me. And so she and I would have these amazing conversations about the Palestinian and Jewish and Israeli conflict, the Muslim and Jewish conflict. And, you know, what was fascinating is her cousin was an attorney who worked for Hamas, PLO. And the government of Palestine. And did negotiations with Israel. So we actually had an an opportunity in that in those conversations to create some real change, because what I didn't know is she would call him up after we had a conversation and say, OK, you might want to talk to them about this. You might want to write. You might want to have these kinds of conversations with when doing the negotiating.

Ari [00:16:09] And she was like a sister to me. We didn't have that feeling of being separate is even with our separate thoughts and our separate opinions. We didn't agree on everything for sure. But she was like a sister. We considered ourselves each others, family.

Ari [00:16:27] And that allowed for so much healing within both of us from what we preconceived as in what's the word that they use in divorce?

David [00:16:43] Irreconcilable differences.

Ari [00:16:45] Both differences. Yes. So what we would consider to be a reference. A reconciled, salable differences became very reconcilable. Very common for us to get to a level of understanding where we were the same, where we were different. And how the how that happened.

Ari [00:17:08] And I find that what you're saying is that kind of a conversation. When doing peace talks would be so beneficial.

Ari [00:17:20] Yeah, to to have that kind of a conversation with the people who disagree with us.

Ari [00:17:26] And that's whether it's, you know, in this day and age is the mask versus the know mask. Right. Or the hug versus no hug. Social distance versus. Come together. You know, if we're able to have these kinds of conversations, don't you think we would get a long way, much better in society?

David [00:17:47] Not only would we get along much better, but the quality of our problem solving would skyrocket. Because. When people are in their own silos, you know, when they're when they're in what is in some circles, the circles that study propaganda, they call them information bubbles. They they're only getting a reflection of their own beliefs. Coming back at them from social media and other Internet sources because of how the the algorithms are actually set up on the Internet, where the algorithms are deciding for us what we're going to get exposed to, what products we're going to get exposed to, what perspectives we're gonna get exposed to and when we're in information bubbles. That's a prescription for divisiveness because in an information bubble, because all I'm seeing is my own reflection. Now, it's easy to imagine that I must be right. Whereas when we're given these these sacred opportunities to really know and interact with people who have very different life experiences and backgrounds than we do, then there's a level of richness that expands our vision of ourselves, of our world, and of what solutions could look like.

Ari [00:19:20] Yeah, that that's that's really cool, I was watching a video recently, and it was a gentleman who what they, you know, they say infiltrated the KKK. He was a black gentleman, but he didn't infiltrate. He just started having conversations with one of the grand. Pubis don't know what they call them, grandmasters of the KKK, and yet and over the years, they became very close friends.

Ari [00:19:50] Began to trust each other because they got to know each other. Yes, then I believe that it's somewhere around 60, 70 different members of the KKK ended up denouncing that. Belief system. They still like the camaraderie that came from being part of the group. Right. But they denounced what the group was focused on. I guess you could say, and it's an interesting form of psychology.

Ari [00:20:23] You get to learn about somebody or about a different culture, and all of a sudden it opens your eyes and heart rate. They say that the cure to racism is traveling.

Ari [00:20:35] What do you think of that statement?

David [00:20:37] Yes, the cure to centrism. Any kind of ethnocentrism is to be exposed to other cultures. The conversations that I have with my fellow Americans who have not traveled extensively outside of the United States are profoundly different from the conversations that I have with my fellow Americans who have traveled extensively and by travel. I don't mean that they've that somebody has gone to another country and then they've stayed in American hotels and eaten American foods and gotten tours around whatever that location is by American tour guides. That's not traveling. That's pretending to travel. I'm talking about the real deal. And when we're exposed to other cultures, if we have any kind of teach ability in us at all, we can't help but be impacted. We can't help but have our world view expanded when people are very, very ethnocentric. Whatever the the centrism is about American centric, let's say, because they've never traveled outside of the United States. They may not have even traveled to all the different sections of our country because our country is a bunch of mini called countries. Culturally, you know, the culture in the Deep South is not the same as the culture in New York or as the culture in California, etcetera, etcetera.

David [00:22:10] The blindness that people end up having, they don't know it. I call it a spell. Most people, in my experience are under a cultural spell. They don't know how to see that they're under a spell and therefore they don't know that there's something to get free of. And it's incredibly damaging.

Ari [00:22:32] Yeah, that's interesting. I used to I I'm very good with accents. Right. And I used to be able to tell if somebody was from Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Manhattan, which New York accent. It was that they had just because somebody was from Texas or if they're from Tennessee. Right. From. From their accent. And what you just said is so true. We are such a diverse culture of many different countries met.

Ari [00:23:04] You know, this this whole thing about us being a melting pot. And so here's my question to you. If we a melting pot of all of these different cultures. How do we convince or shift the perspective of American to.

Ari [00:23:29] A community of melting pot people. So when you know, when we hear people say, if you don't like it, leave it. Or if you're you know, if you think differently than I do, you should leave the country or whatever those those statements are that people make.

Ari [00:23:47] How do we shift that so that people understand that this melting pot and the differences in culture is what makes us great, not what weakens us?

David [00:23:58] A great question again. I, I think that what will help a lot is understanding the pendulum swing in the immigrant mindset that we've undergone over the last 80 years or so, 70 years, somewhere in that in that timeframe, that there was a time when the immigrant mindset that the dominant immigrant mindset was you come to the United States and you leave your old country, your old culture behind and you assimilate into being an American. And what that looked like back then. And I grew up in a family like this. Was that you? You gave up the language of the country that you came to came from and you gave up its its cultural traditions. And and you you tried to blend into some notion of what being an American was. And now we are at the other end of that pendulum swing where we have people that have no desire. Some people, not not all people, but some people have no desire to assimilate into American society. They want the experience of being in this country while staying fully identified with whatever the culture or country or languages that they came from. And I think both of those perspectives have massive blindspots. We have to have a common bond, a common sense of purpose and mission. And that common bond is in the context of the United States would be the the original version of the American dream, the version the American dream that birthed this country, not the delusional version of the American dream that it was replaced with in the 1950s.

David [00:25:56] And the diversity piece of that is that I inside of this common bond that I share with you. I relish my uniqueness as an individual, as a culture. My ability to speak multiple languages, God forbid, like most Europeans, are multilingual. Most Americans are not multilingual. And in Europe, there is no there's no fear when I mean, when I'm working in Switzerland, there is no fear that I encounter among the Swiss, for example, that they're losing their culture because they're having conversations in French, in German, in Italian and in the one of the native versions of Swiss language, which is called her Monch. There's no feeling of, oh, I'm I'm suddenly not Swiss because I'm speaking all of these languages. There's there's a both. And about that, there's pride in being Swiss. And what the Swiss culture collectively stands for. And at the same time, there's a joy in expressing a flavor of that being that version of being Swiss. We're missing that in this country. We're missing the boat and we're in a war between blind acculturation or refusal, a refusal to a culture rate. It's got to be both.

Ari [00:27:26] That is so true. You know, my my grandfather came over to this country when he was 12 years old, I believe, by himself on a boat through Ellis Island, became a multi, multi millionaire, lost it all, gained it all, lost it all gained it all.

Ari [00:27:44] But he spoke eleven languages, eleven Austrian, Hungarian, you know, Yiddish, Hebrew, Spanish, French. I mean, he spoke German a lot of languages because, you know, as a salesman that was his job. But even even before he was 12. Growing up in Austria, Hungarian Empire, he was initially taught and this was in maybe the late eighteen hundreds, early nineteen hundreds. He was taught these languages as just your being born.

Ari [00:28:20] You're growing up and you're learning. My parents, on the other hand, my dad who speaks German and Spanish and English and Yiddish. Right. But he they only spoke Spanish if they didn't want us to know what they were saying. And so I was I took a lot of years of Spanish, but I never learned how to speak it fluently or fluidly, I should say, you know, same with Hebrew. I took Hebrew school, but when I went to Israel, I couldn't speak Hebrew for anything based on how they speak it on the streets, right? Absolutely. No, I felt. And every time I've traveled, I have felt so culturally inept because of my lack of being able to speak another language. So what you just said is so true. And and I really appreciate you saying that, because when you speak somebody else's language, you get to know their culture much better. Right. Especially if you could dream. In their language.

David [00:29:30] So you and I came from very similar families. Both sides of my family came from what was then the Australian Gary, an empire. One side of my family came from the Austrian side. The other side of the family came from the Hungarian side. And my parents as well, both of whom were born in the United States. It's their parents who came over from from Europe. My parents, when they didn't want my brother and me to understand what they were talking about. That's when they talk to Yiddish. And when I first started traveling extensively internationally in the 1970s, what I discovered to my great delight were that was that the two fastest ways to access the heart of a country that I was in were to speak its language and eat its food and hang out with people who were from that country rather than go looking for other Americans to hang out with. And I got huge enrichment from the willingness to be a clumsy imbecile in another language, because what I found very rapidly was that most people in the countries that I visited were very appreciative and forgiving of my inability to speak their language simply because I was authentically attempting to speak their language. And it opened up all kinds of doors.

Ari [00:30:59] That is that's a that's a really good point. You know, when I was in Greece during the 2004 Paralympics. We learned a lot of Greek because I was going to be there for a month and I had to learn it. I had to learn what what they were saying on the on the trail, you know, the trains and and so on. And some of the words that are not appropriate to say. Right. So they had us with these. But. Packs as part of our uniform. But you called them a fanny pack. Well, you know, you were you were saying something untoward because Fanny means something different in European here than it does. That's right. Our culture. And so learning those things so that you don't offend, but you also learn.

Ari [00:31:51] Oh, that's a odd name for that particular body part. Know, it's an interesting thing. And I would go to this this restaurant after a ten, twelve hour day. And this one gentleman was from Boston, but from while he was from Greece, we had lived in Boston. It came back to Greece. So he spoke a few languages and he and I would sit and chat for an hour, two hours, three hours a night and just get to know each other. And it was interesting because when I was there, they had the Algerians coming in to the country and doing all of the cheap labor for building the stadiums and so on for the Olympics was such an interesting thing for me because. We have in this country what we call the Mexicans, right? It's not Mexican people. It's the Mexicans that will do your cheap labor. And I was thinking, you know, every country has got to have is going to have immigrants that they call taking their jobs and doing this this kind of thing. And I think about it and I go, well, why wouldn't why weren't the Greeks doing the job? Because it was a lot easier, would have been a lot easier to hire the people who were from there. Right. So what is it about us as people in general that think that outsourcing and doing these kinds of things is such a wrong thing vs. allowing people who want to work in something that they're good at and like doing and then we get to do the things that we like doing. Right.

Ari [00:33:38] So how can we balance these two pieces so that they make more sense for people?

David [00:33:49] Well, I think it's important to understand with those particular dimensions that that there are certain people who who look on certain kinds of jobs as being beneath them. There are other people who might not look on a particular job as being beneath them, but the job pays a lower amount per hour than the amount of money that they want to be making per hour. And so they won't take the job because they think it pays too little. And so when we've got and we've seen this throughout cultures around the world, I mean, the Japanese, for example, had the same kind of attitude toward Koreans for a long time, just as a for instance, you name the culture there.

David [00:34:40] There has been this kind of where the where the real people of our country. And then we have these people that really aren't us, but we've got to bring them in because they'll do what we need doing because they're willing to and they're willing to get paid less than we're willing to get paid. And we've got more important things to do that that kind of of that mean it's a form of elitism. Obviously, it's also partly propelled, though, by in the United States, by the old immigrant mentality. You know, my parents like like you're talking about when when my grandparents came to the States, they came penniless. They they gave up everything in their prior lives. And so my my parents both grew up in tenements. They grew up in the slums because their parents could barely make ends meet because they were taking jobs that were the the dregs of society kinds of jobs in order to make enough money to not be deported. You know, enough money to because they became they all became American citizens, but they didn't have the education to or the entrepreneurial spirit if they didn't have the education to really succeed in high level ways. So they put all of their energy into making sure that their children got the kind of education in the United States that they didn't have.

David [00:36:13] So their children create better lives for themselves than their parents could. And my parents in term had in turn had that same idea that they wanted my brother and me to have a better life than they had. So we were enter generationally, we were on an upward spiral in the belief in the American dream.

Ari [00:36:37] You know, that's a good point. I think every generation is designed as a step ladder. Right. And if we continually move up generation to generation to generation up that ladder, we can create something that's incredible. We just have to be willing to shift ladders when that ladder stops. Right. So one ladders, 10 feet. We've got to be on a 20 foot ladder to get past so we can switch. And right now, we're we're on this trajectory of people who want to go backwards down the ladder again. Right. And people who want to go forwards. We have this big confusion. I think it's a confusion, although a lot of people are very sure of themselves when it comes to progression versus regression. And, you know, progressive and liberal has gotten a bad name, conservative has gotten a bad name and those kinds of things. So if we're ever going to change and create a new tomorrow. What are the elements that we have to look at? In order to to start moving forward on and keep going up the ladder vs. regressing down?

David [00:37:57] Well, I think first of all.

David [00:38:00] We have in our society a massive pandemic of learned helplessness, the belief. Nothing I do makes a difference. The negative things I do don't really impact other people. The positive things I do don't really impact other people. So all you know, all I'm left with is let me let me live for today as much as I can. And, you know, I probably won't be alive in 10 years, so who cares? And so there's an unrealistic, you know, self-serving kind of undercurrent in parts of our society. There's a learned helplessness, undercurrent in parts of our society. There is a mentality in other parts of our society that says, well, we we've achieved things that other people haven't achieved. So we're entitled to look down our noses at those people who haven't achieved what we think they should have achieved at the at that point in their lives or in the in their generations of being American. The first stage, I think, is about spotting the spell. It's about waking up to the ways in which our minds. There's a battle for our brains. It's going on and waking up to the ways that our minds are being hijacked or that attempts to hijack our minds are occurring on a daily basis across the political and ideological spectrums. I think we need to align with our fundamental design. You know, there there there are certain qualities that unite all of us as a species, as humanity.

David [00:39:46] We all have the drive to be who we truly are. It's our drive for authenticity. We all have the drive to bond with others. It's our drive for connection. And we all have the drive to influence the world around us. And that's our drive for impact. When we forget that our basic nature is about living at the intersection of authenticity, connection and impact. We are susceptible to being manipulated and propagandized by stuff out there that's going to that's trying to tell us that other things are more important than those things. So we have to align with our design or realign with our design. We have to strengthen our underpinnings. We have to strengthen our teach ability, are our personal well-being, our health are self care, our discernment, our ability to to recognize those kinds of subtle thought processes, critical thinking, if you will, rather than this ridiculous, you know, either or polarized thinking. We have to learn how to recognize the promptings from our deepest selves. We have to learn how to recognize wisdom that comes from whatever source we individually happen to feel connected with that we are a part of. And that's larger than us. We we need to learn how to harvest profound blessings and gifts from undesired and even unacceptable life experiences.

David [00:41:23] We need all of those underpinnings in order to function in thrive, all rather than survival as individuals. We need to learn how to have right relationship with our power rather than to either run from power because the role models we see around power or our modeling really screwed up dysfunctional versions of power. So we want nothing to do with power or to pursue dysfunctional power. And we need to be really good at facilitating repair and evolution in whatever spheres of influence we're called to have positive impact. If we're all doing that, if we're all busy being too busy doing those kinds of things, then our differences become cherished and our common bond becomes sacred. And when we got that way of functioning as a society, the way we're going to function is vastly different from how we're functioning today.

Ari [00:42:27] Yeah, you know, there is a number of things that you said there that that I really enjoyed hearing. And one of the things that, you know, my my mentor. I call him Buckminster Fuller would say is that we have to get over the auspicious. And this is a paraphrase. So don't quote me on it, but it's paraphrased. It over the auspicious notion that we have to work to be a value. And.

Ari [00:43:01] I go back when I hear that phrase in my head, I go back to people like Thomas Jefferson, Leonardo da Vinci, Plato, you know, like I go back to the people that we consider great people of history. And I think, were they valuable in their lifetime or were they valuable in their death? Were they valuable as human beings because they created what they created or because they existed to begin with? And when I think of this notion,.

Ari [00:43:37] I think of all the technology that we have created and all the technology that we can create. And we've seemed to placed so much emphasis of value on how much a person person works versus what a person contributes. And the results that we get, we do this in medicine all the time. A doctor gets paid for procedures, not for results, not for what they create, but for what they treat. And so to me, I want to go backwards a little bit to a time in which we don't have the technology. Now, this is this is just a utopian theory at the moment, right?

Ari [00:44:27] I believe that we have borrowed with all the technology that we have and we consume. We've borrowed our imaginations from other people. And thereby have left our own imagination by the wayside. And that's going to become more and more evident in the next couple generations. Right. So how do we stop borrowing other people's. Imagination's and I call that, you know, game boxes. You know, any kind of game boxes and Internets and TV's and so on. When we had more time on our hands, we did more with the time that we had. I don't believe that people are lazy. I believe that people have been conditioned to cut their imaginations and thereby not create and be authentic in who they could be. So how do we get back to being our authentic selves when we have to eat? We have to live and we have to pay to be valuable.

David [00:45:36] Let me answer at a macro level and on a micro level. At the macro level. We are culturally still in a phase with technology where we are intoxicated with it. So it's a new toy, a new set of toys, and we're drunk. We're drunk on the new toy.

David [00:45:57] And so, of course, the toy becomes the boss of us and we relinquish our thought process to this new toy developed mentally in a society. Those phases are eventually outgrown. Where we we ultimately develop right relationship with new innovations rather than be intoxicated by them at the at the micro level. I think it's crucial for each one of us to discover and move into alignment with whatever are our deepest sense of life. Purpose happens to be because when we're living in alignment with our purpose. Our creativity comes back online and things like technology. Become what they are meant to be in the first place, which is tools to propel our creativity and our imagination rather than substitutes for being creative and imaginative. And I love that you brought up Bucky Fuller. One of my favorite of many quotes of his is the best way to predict the future is to invent it. And we've got the tail wagging the dog here. We're looking at trying to figure out how to predict the future so that we can be ready for it. Rather than asking ourselves what is the future we want to create together, the future we want to live in? What is the world we want to live in? And the world we want to leave to our children and our grandchildren. We need to stop predicting it and start inventing it. And, of course, like you said, in order to do that, we have to realign our creativity.

Ari [00:47:46] Absolutely. You know, I'd like you to maybe expand on that a little bit, these ideas, because this is really what what my book in this podcast is about is how do we go about with tools, with techniques, with training, with mindset. How do we go about taking this world that we created. Right. And saying, OK. The way I look at it is this is not optimal, we can create it better. So how do we create something that is more optimal for our own human growth? So let's expand on this for a little bit. And just I'm going to let you kind of go, because I know you've you've done a lot of thinking about it. We've talked about this before.

David [00:48:37] Yeah, well, on a brass tacks level, we can.

David [00:48:43] Simply start making a habit of doing what is already being done in a more narrow way in high functioning companies, in a high functioning company. Among other things, one of the one of their one of the traditions or rituals in a high functioning company is that teams get together regularly, not just once in a while. They get together regularly and they ask the question, what's working well and why does that matter? What positive impact does those things that are working well have?

David [00:49:18] And then they ask a second question. What would what could what could be even better? What would be even better? If so, what if we did this and that and this other thing differently? Why would that matter? What positive impacts would would the up leveling of best practices have and. Healthy company is constantly looking at it at their best practices and saying, well, those might have been the best practices 10 years ago. And thank goodness we develop them today in the middle of the Covid crisis. Not so much. What would what are what what in vet best practices would we invent? Now, that same kind of boots on the ground attitude. Is a equally relevant to crafting an elevated society. We need to look at what's working well and why that matters so that we will do those things more. And we need to look at the even better ifs and how it different changes and improvements are going to elevate our functioning as a society. So, you know, we're looking at, let's just say capitalism, for example. Most people don't know that there are two versions of capitalism and one version of something else that that's called capitalism but isn't. And most people just, you know, lump all of those things together. And so there are a lot of people in society that are viciously, fiercely anticapitalism.

David [00:50:56] Well, when I ask those people to tell me their version of capitalism, what they inevitably describe is what I and others who study this call sociopathic capitalism, the sociopathic version of capitalism, where I manipulate you into buying what you don't need at a price you can't afford. And I'll manipulate you so well that I'll convince you that doing that makes you happy. That's sociopathic capitalism. Or I'll make profits at the expense of killing off the environment. That's sociopathic capitalism. When I ask people who are anticapitalist what they, how they define capitalism, they invariably define sociopathic capitalism. They have no idea that there's such a thing as healthy capitalism or collaborative capitalism, the way that you and I know about where we're creating win wins. And then there's a third group that defines capitalism in a way that has nothing to do with capitalism. They're defining a completely different economic system that I call debtism, which is borrowing against an uncertain future in order to prop up the illusion of a lifestyle in the present. There's nothing about capitalism that has anything to do with that. That's a completely different economic system. It has nothing to do with capitalism. So if we don't sit down and really look at what our structures really are, what is our economy based on? Well, we have an economy just to finish up this little strand.

David [00:52:30] We have an economy that's based on an assumption that perpetual growth is good.

David [00:52:41] And most people just buy it. They buy it as an economic assumption. That's an example of a belief system that has an assumption that's neither verifiable nor and verifiable. It's neither Chern or false. That perpetual growth is good. What we have to have the courage to look at is what are the costs of perpetual growth? What are the prices of perpetual growth? And is there a way to continue to grow simply because evolution is part of our makeup? But to not make growth the boss of us. What about the notion of enough Nisse? What about the notion of sustainability and looking at growth in that in those as frames of reference?

David [00:53:25] So unless until we find the courage to say we have to evaluate, reevaluate what patriotism is, what the American dream is, and if we're in the United States or what the dream of our country is or elsewhere, what economics looks like, what happiness looks like. What growth looks like, what alignment with being stewards of a planet looks like until we have the courage to sit down and ask these kinds of questions without getting into polarized, divisive arm wrestling matches over ideological addiction. We will continue to devolve into the the opposite of utopian future. Well, it's it's a dystopian future that we are actually co creating right now. And yet, at the same time, everyone says, well, we don't want a dystopian future, but no, no, we're not going to look at our basic assumptions. That's nuts thinking. That's insane. That is cultural opposite of mental health as a culture.

Ari [00:54:30] You know, I like I like that you you put it that way because in a lot of a lot of people I've talked to have issues sometimes just saying it like it is, you know. And the truth is, is that if you're not saying something as it is matter of factly, then you're doing a disservice to the situation at hand, you know? And so to say something like that's insane thinking is going to cause people to say, I'm thinking that way and I'm not insane. Right. Therefore, you must be insane for saying exactly there to be insane.

Ari [00:55:16] Thank you so much for listening to part one of this interview. Stay tuned for the next episode when we resume this conversation right from where we left off.

Ari [00:55:26] Thank you for listening to this podcast. I appreciate all you do to create a new tomorrow for yourself and those around you.

Ari [00:55:33] If you'd like to take this information further and are interested in joining a community of like minded people who are all passionate about activating their vision for a better world, go to the Web site, create a new tomorrow Acom and find out how you can be part of making a bigger difference. I have a gift for you. Just for checking it out.

Ari [00:55:51] And look forward to seeing you take the leap. And joining our private paid mastermind community. Until then, see you on the next episode.