The School of Greatness - How To Mentally Time Travel To Create Your Desired Future EP 1306

Episode Date: August 15, 2022

Ari Wallach is a futurist and the founder and Executive Director of Longpath Labs. He is the author of the book by HarperCollins, Longpath: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs. Wallach’s TED talk on the Longpath mindset has been viewed 2.6 million times and translated into 21 languages. He has written for outlets like the BBC and Wired, hosted Fast Company magazine’s “FactCo Futures with Ari Wallach,” and he has been featured in The New Times, CNBC, CNN, Vox, and more. He has served as an advisor to the US State Department, United Nations, and numerous organizations including the RacialEquity2030 Challenge, the Gettysburg Project, and Politico's Long Game Forum. More at www.longpath.orgIn this Episode, you will learn:What transgenerational empathy really is and why it's so important.How curiosity and creativity can help you to build a longpath mindset.The importance of healing your past in order to create a brighter future.How to visualize your future through mental time travel.For more, go to: lewishowes.com/1306The Future of Space Travel w/ Peter Diamandis: EP 1264The Surprising Secrets to Aging w/ David Sinclair: EP 1232Embrace the Future w/ Peter Diamandis: EP 881

So we are in a transition zone right now on the planet. So when we think about our ultimate goal, it has to be... Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

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My man, good to see you, sir. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Very excited about this. You are an applied futurist and you've got this new book called Long Path, Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs. I'm excited about this because I believe that society is very

short-term thinking. Most people, I've been to blame for this in my life as well, is thinking, how can I get what I want now? How do I bring the future of this big idea, this dream to me in this moment? What's the shortcut? What's the fast path? What's the way to get there? But a lot of us don't think about what are the consequences of taking the short path, right? Why is thinking long-term or long path an important thing on an individual level and a planet level over a short-term thinking? First of all, thank you for having me. It's a great question. So let's step back, because even though the subtitle

of the book is an antidote for short-termism, I don't want people to think, oh, well, short-termism is inherently bad. Because here's the thing, if Ari and Lewis are walking on the plains of the Serengeti 20,000 years ago, and all of a sudden an animal with very large teeth jumps out from behind a tree You and I should not sit there and have a long conversation about what to do

What we need to do is we need to immediately react and that is what has helped us Flourish as a species homo sapiens for hundreds of thousands of years so short-term ism In of itself is not inherently bad It's when we allow to become the overriding principle how we make decisions at an individual level, at a collective, at a planetary level. That's when it's bad. So first of all, let's say-

What type of people make short-term decisions most of the time? There's a large percentage of the planet who is literally existing on a dollar a day. They are making- Survival mode. Survival mode. Survival mode. If we take Maslow's pyramid,

there are folks that are literally torches trying to get by and you have to think short term. So first of all, it's a privilege to even start thinking in these larger, more expansive, temporally expansive ways. So for a lot of folks, this is just their reality. Now, one of the reasons I wrote the book is so there are fewer of those folks, right? So for those of us who are able to have conversations like this and listen to this

or watch this, we can actually start making larger systemic changes. So those people who are literally struggling, you know, right now, if I want, when I cook breakfast, I turned on a switch. There are people who will have to walk five miles, often very dangerous five miles just to collect wood. So let's recognize that. A lot of us make short-term decisions, though, who could be making longer-term decisions because the overall kind of structures that we exist in society are incentivizing that, right? So I work with CEOs, and I meet these CEOs of Fortune 50 companies. I'm like, all right, this is great. I want to talk about the big future.

Let's go out six or eight months. Right. Because they're incentivized on a quarterly return basis. The money they literally make at the end of each quarter is based on their stock price. And so what ends up happening is that incentivized structure. I've worked with CEOs before who will call me up at the end of the day, and they're like, well, I don't know if we can move forward with this larger futuring project. And I say, well, why? They're like, did you see our stock price today?

I said, today? I said, today? What do you mean? Well, they said, look, the thing is, it was up at noon, but then it dropped a little bit. I don't know if we can do this. And so they're making decisions like that. It's not, and again, it's not totally selfish. It's not just about his or her pay

that they're gonna get at the end of the quarter, but about the larger kind of system that we have built that is kind of driving these short-term ways of being. So I've worked in presidential politics. I've worked on presidential campaigns since 1996 and smaller, more local campaigns. And now the way we kind of fund and run our politics especially in this country in the us you literally you know you'll win your election 24 hours later you're picking up the phone calling people trying to raise money for

the next election really yeah i was literally on it four years later no no no no no no no the day after you win i mean for the next four years or whatever yeah yeah four years or two years i was i was on unnamed senator was sitting next to me in the acela from dc to new york and this was about a day and a half after the election because i was down in dc port i was making my way back over to new york i'm not going to say this name but this person was heading up and i was you know i wasn't totally listening but i could tell they were kind of making these rapid calls and some of the calls were people even, even though this is a US Senator, this US Senator was introducing themselves like, this is Senator, thank you for your support.

As you know, we've opened up another pack for my next election. They just won. They just won. I mean, literally they're probably wearing the same shoes they wore at their election night party. And so we have these systems that are set up and it And by the way, it's in business, it's in politics, it's in our lives. I opened the book with a story. I'm in the kitchen and my phone starts buzzing, there's a notification. And I look at it and my daughter had missed turning in a Spanish assignment

and she had missed it and it had been eight seconds since she missed it. It was due, but it's just a weekly assignment. So already I was getting kind of this notification and we can talk about what that does to my brain, but I'm getting notified that we need an immediate response because what happened? So these larger incentivized systems are driving us to do more short-termistic behaviors beyond just losing and already being chasing the Serengeti. Again, for a lot of people, that's how they have to live. But for those of us who don't have to

struggle at that level, we have to break out of this. And so this book is about that mindset that we need to adopt to take us out of that. I think on the other copy that I had, it talked about connecting to the, I can't remember, you call it the end game,

or what's the? To what end, the T-List. To what end, yeah. And it's like figuring out your values, your vision, and to what end, what are you creating your life for? What is it all about? To what end? So what does that mean to thinking about,

and should we start with to what end, and then reverse engineer to now? So this is great, we're going right into it. So for 20 years, I've been helping the United Nations, the State Department, some folks at the White House, big corporations, philanthropists, think about where they want things to go in the future. And what I found time and time again

was when we'd get into these conversations, they'd say, well, you know, I wanna fix this issue or solve this problem, But usually what they consider the future was only four, five, eight years out. While they're in election or whatever. So that was the future. And so what happened was I started saying, well, it became clear to me in these conversations over the past 20 years, that it was becoming more and more difficult for folks to think about the future they wanted for all sorts of reasons around kind of how we've atrophied our imagination. We don't even know what that is.

We were talking earlier about when we look at the media environment, right? So I have 13 year old twin daughters and I go to their bookshelf and I see every kind of tween novel they're reading. And of course, because for what I do, I'm looking to see, well, what are these are of the future, right? And a lot of them are i won't name names i don't want to throw any authors under the bus but any kind of tweenie novel that is let's say five years out to 30 years out one thing is always a kind of a pillar of the story which is something terrible has happened to civilization it could be nuclear war it could be whatever it is. The world has ended, it's being rebuilt,

and then there's some tween drama over here, right? I gotcha. And so, but that's just first, so I kinda stepped back, because I was looking at that, trying to figure out why these CEOs and entrepreneurs I was working with were finding it difficult to tell me about where they actually wanted to go. Then I started looking at the TV shows and the movies.

So think about any movie you've seen in the past 10 years that takes place in the future. Not necessarily far future like Star Wars, or we could argue that's in the far past, but we won't get into that for another episode. But any show that takes place in the future, it could be a meteor that hits the planet, whatever it is, there is no to what end

because everything always collapses, right? And so what I realized was the folks that I was working with, my children I'm trying to raise, it's becoming increasingly difficult for them to be able to answer the question you're asking, to what end? Because in everything that they're surrounded by, their education, their content, the to what end is always dystopia. It's disaster.

And so one of the things when I was writing this book, I was thinking, OK, how do I write a book that helps folks think differently about tomorrow? And it's look, what I didn't want to do is I didn't want to provide answers. So someone was like, you know, this is an amazing book, but you don't tell me what's going to happen. I want to know what you're a futurist. Where's your crystal ball? And I think we've got into a lot of trouble that way because we're looking for other people to tell us what is going to happen, right?

As opposed to us stepping back and saying, what do we want to happen? To what end? So in developing Long Path as an applied mindset, there's three components. There's futures thinking, there's transgener there's futures thinking there's transgenerational empathy and there's telos right which means basically ultimate aim and goal so you started us kind of at the end but i'm going to start there but then we'll see how we use the other ones to kind of create this mindset so when we go into decision making mode whether it's like what do i have for breakfast do i eat this or? Because right now I can tell you,

eat your broccoli and eat your kale, and you're like, ugh, okay. Or we can put it into a much larger frame and living and acting and speaking healthily actually becomes something you want to do because it's part of your legacy. So the to what end is incredibly important to be able to answer that question.

Now, one of the reasons it's very difficult, especially in the West, in the Western canon, which is, you know, most of us who kind of are probably potentially listening, is that when we think about what does it mean to have like the good life or to be a fully formed human or even going back to the Stoics, the one thing they all have in common is what i call like a lifespan bias it's always from the birth of lewis to the death of lewis like how do you actualize and maximize that unit of time it makes sense and i'll keep speaking about you in the third person but it makes sense because lewis is the one writing the reading the book or consuming the content so it makes sense that all these things are just geared towards you.

The problem with that is most of the issues that we face, even at an individual level, let alone a societal level, started well before Lewis and are going to go on well after Lewis. So I ran track. Me too. I'm sure if we compared our time. Were you a 100 or were you a distance guy?

So I was a 4x100 relay. Okay. And then I'll get into this other one in a second, pole vault. I did pole vault and 100 as well. I was a decathlete, so I did. Okay, so. The pole vault is challenging. The pole vault is challenging, but I use that in how I think about long paths.

So let's talk about the relay. The most important part, according to my coach, Ted Tillian, was. The handoff. The handoff. The handoff. It's a transition zone. It is. And more importantly, and you know this, if God, I would love to run track with you,

you would have been the great end of my 4x100. I would have been all state. You're not actually looking at me. You already start running and I yell stick and you put your hand out. You don't look back. You can't look. You just have to feel it and you go, it's trust. If I put it in my hand, then I can run with it.

And then I pass it on to the next person person so we are in a transition zone right now on the planet and we are literally having we have an opportunity to either say well i'm just gonna even though i'm in a relay race i think i'm in a 100 by myself so i'm just gonna run this thing out but you're not like i get no matter what issue you are working on that is bigger than yourself, won't necessarily be solved in your own lifetime. You have to kind of work at it, and you have to be at a point where you can yell stick

to the next generation, and we're not doing that. But once you start to kind of bring that into your thinking, and then at some point you're gonna say stick, and here's the crazy thing, you're not yelling stick when you're in your 80s or you're on the backside and you're kind of ending things. You're thinking, okay, how am I going to pass the baton of next year? You are saying stick in every single action you take every day from how you greet the security guard downstairs to how do you talk to your colleagues to how you talk to yourself, your own internal dialogue. Yes.

You are consistently creating a legacy. You're consistently saying stick and passing on, even if you don't realize it. So when we think about our to what end, our ultimate goal, it has to be if we want to kind of have a mindset that breaks us out of our lifespan bias, it has to be something bigger than ourselves. It doesn't mean you can't, it doesn't mean I don't wanna to be the best Ari possible. You don't want to be the best Lewis

possible. But your ultimate aim and goal should be one that transcends just your own life. And now think about what does that look like at scale? I mean, whether people call it long path or not, but kind of a transgenerational way of thinking and connecting. Now you start to have something really interesting because I think about the work that you've done on yourself and those who are kind of listening and watching, right? They're doing all this amazing work. But what ends up happening more often than not is we don't think about it as kind of a ladder to the next generation. We think, well, this is my own lifespan and I'm going to be a more actualized, more great, more powerful Ari by the end of

my life. Full stop. But if you're to what end becomes about the larger species and society flourishing for generations to come and you now put yourself in a, okay, here's my life. I want to be the best version of myself, but it's not just for myself. It's so that the next generation, and this doesn't necessarily mean you have to have your own genetic kids. It can be all the next generation that you influence. If you're your best possible self

and you are that way to others, when they are born and they get raised, they actually are starting off on a higher step. It's like track, right? It's like the four by 100. If your second or third runs with a sick fast time you set up the next generation so the the the mindset of long path requires us to have a to what end that is bigger than ourselves so that we can work on issues that it doesn't mean you can't work on stuff for yourself but it puts it

into a larger context so is to what end also what end, also, what people say is, what's your end goal? What's your end goal for this project, for this career, for this thing you're doing? Well, so yes and no. So what's your end game? More often than not, it's like, Lewis, what's your end game with everything that you're doing here? More often than... And I won't say, I won't put you on the spot.

If someone says, all right, what's your end game with Longpath? They're asking me to answer that for myself. More often than not, that's what we mean, right? But once you start kind of thinking and adopting long path into how you process those types of questions, you think, okay, my end game, the way you would probably answer it after being with the book for a while and doing the exercises in it is going to be to be the best possible human I can be at this point in time and set the next generation up. So they set the next generation and the next generation.

Is that your to what end? That's my to what end. So I think- So how's the exercise go? So there's a dozen of them in the book. So there's multiple different kind of cognitive exercises ask you to kind of imagine different futures, imagine your ancestors imagine

future generations and all all of the exercises in the book are basically back ended by peer reviewed research right about how you get people to think differently about themselves and future generations and so so there's this guy at nyu yakov trope he does he does amazing research on what's called uh basically mental time travel on what's called basically mental time travel. I love this stuff. So mental time travel. I love mental time travel. So here's the thing, because you're an athlete.

Ethan Cross is a professor as well who talks about one of these things in his book called Chatter. Yes. Mental time travel, I think it's powerful. So mental time travel, what Yaakov has found and a bunch of other people is that if I was to say, Lewis, tell me what life will be like in Los Angeles 50 years from now. You're gonna kind of stop and think, well, okay, like in 50 years it could be like this.

It's gonna be hard for you to, you may come with some top line details. More often than not, you're gonna think, oh, there'll be monorails and jetpacks, you know, you'll go to kind of external things. But then if I say, Louis, tell me about Los Angeles 50 years ago. Now I'm asking you to go back in a historical way. And I'll make it even easier. I'll say, go back. I'll say, let's say

you use a 20 year timeframe because you're a young man. So I say, go back 20 years, right? And all of a sudden you start giving me all these details of what your life was like, what the food that you, you can become much more imaginative because your hypo campus, which is holding your memory now is kind of creating memories and bringing things back. But here's the great thing and you know this as an athlete, if you close your eyes and I was just and I was just saying okay and this is this is the pole vaulting part, say Lewis I want you to visualize yourself going over the bar and I won't say at what height because then you'll ask my height it'll be a very it'll become a very embarrassing part of the conversation so let's take let's take sergey

bubko one of the best jumpers of all time 19 or 18 19 19 yeah so sergey's sitting back and thinking like okay he sees anybody was you know for him breaking records was like in quarter inches right so his when he's visualizing him going 19 feet right and he's closing his eyes his idea campus can't tell the difference between we've done this we've seen the research the visualization of him going over and the memory of him clearing of similar height the brain won't tell the difference so when it gets to the point the muscle memory is actually going to activate and he's gonna clear he's gonna he's already seen himself doing it it's the same thing with mental time travel on bigger

issues and bigger systems not just pole vault. So I've asked you to close your eyes and you're thinking back 20 years to Los Angeles and you're coming up with all these details about kind of what it looks like. Now I say, now let's go 20 years into the future. And all of a sudden you have a much more developed idea and construct of what it could look like. You can tell me about the food, entertainment, how people are living. It's kind of the same thing. That's what mental time travel, that's what the exercises in the book will do. We'll ask people things to kind of imagine or to think back to their far-off descendants and their ancestors, but we do it in a way where all the exercises in the book are meant to kind of take you out of your lifespan bias, take you out of like a temporal

bias, right? I mean, the real insidious part about short-termism is that it puts us in what I call like todayism. It's like today, today. Douglas Rushkoff calls it presentism. But what todayism is, it's not so much, it's more insidious than short-termism because what it does is it erases time. So we end up almost being like in a hall of mirrors, right? You ever get that feeling like it's a groundhog day every day over and over again. And so what Long Path is meant to do is kind of break you out of that

so you're no longer just in the moment, but you're thinking in a much, much larger way. Because there's power to being present and in the moment and not just thinking outside constantly. It's like you need both. You need to be here and now and be present and be focused. And you also need space and time to be thinking about the future. Yeah.

And you can all look, you can also be. So my 20s were mostly spent on and off in kind of different Soto Zen practices in San Francisco. And so all of my time was focused on being present with who and what I was and very much in the moment. That's different than presentism, right? Presentism is like when everything's over and over. But what being present in the way that we're talking about, being mindful, is separate and also very important because what it allows you to do is actually start thinking

about this big question that you asked, to what end? Where do I want to take this? If you are kind of polluted, mental environment is polluted by what's going on around you, and even more so by what you brought into the room, it's very difficult to imagine to what end, right? And so that's the second part of kind of,

the second pillar, I should say, of Long Path is this idea of transgenerational empathy. So you know empathy, right? This is the second part, right? This is the second pillar is transgenerational empathy. So more than that, it's like, well, you need to have compassion for yourself. And from that kind of flowing of pro-socialness, you can do other things. I don't say 100%. But when it comes to thinking about how we want the future to look first and foremost we have to recognize that what what holds us back about you know so if i say lewis tell me about your future and what's going to hold you or maybe not you because you're more actualized than most but what's going to hold most people back is you're going to bring all this stuff into the exercise

based on your parents, based on your aunts, all sorts of, it can be systemic, but it can be positive and negative, right? It can be intergenerational trauma, and it can be collective or it can be acute, but you're gonna bring that in. And more often than not, and I've seen this for the past couple of years,

we look back at our ancestors with a lot of disdain. Right? I mean, there's a lot, especially we're going through a kind of- Resentment, right? Right, disdain and resentment. It could be like what your parents did. Why did my parents do this? And my grandparents did this,

and everyone's messed up, and they did these bad things. And by the way, we're also seeing in this country right now, when we think about, when we think about race, and we think about slavery, there's so much that we don't talk about, and we didn't do in the kind of the failed project reconstruction and we look back and transnational empathy is not

meant to look back on those who came before us be it our parents or generations thousands of years and totally left them off the hook it's not about people did terrible things um what it is is it's about recognizing kind of context so evil is always gonna be evil but a lot of things that like our parents did to us wasn't because they were evil it's gonna be because they didn't really know any better they have skills or tools skills or tools and I guarantee I can guarantee you right now it was the norm it was the norm and it doesn't make it okay but it was the. And the reason you want to have kind of empathy for that

is not to say, but it's okay that you did it. It's to recognize those things came into you, either at an individual level, or those things came into us at a collective level, which is happening in America right now. We need to process, work through it, in a way that allows us to kind of be clear enough so that we can then move into a place where we say, okay, all these inner things, you know, there's always this

inner dialogue that we have. Like it's always like, oh, Lewis, you should have done that. Art, you should have done this. So much of that is coming from the past and injected by our parents and society. And the reason we focus on that in Long Path, which is really about the future in many ways, is until you've reconciled with that, that inner voice and where that comes from, there's no way you're going to build a better future.

Because it's all, it's been woven throughout whatever your imagination is for what your desired future could be, is always going to have that within it. It's so funny you're saying this because, man, I interview a lot of different types of individuals from different contexts of life and expertises and industries. What I'm going to hear you say right there is step one is heal the past. Yep, 100%. Heal the memories of the past. This is everything that I've been studying just on mindset and money and relationships and health.

It's like you got to learn how to heal the past if you want to be a healthier human being, if you want to have not a traumatic relationship moving forward with a new relationship. You've got to heal that relationship. You've got to heal the relationship with your family. Whatever it is, your relationship to money, you've got to heal if you want to earn more. Step one is being aware of the past

and healing those things that hold you back. And with a hundred percent, and what that does is it drives self-compassion for yourself. Now, not beating yourself up and blaming yourself. And I'm an idiot. Yeah, why did I do this? Why?

That inner dialogue, we think by the way that- But you're a futurist, you're not a therapist. No, but we- You're talking about like healing and all these different things now. But this is the issue. I mean, nothing about other futurists who've been doing this work for decades,

whose shoulders I stand on. But what became very apparent to me is we were always kind of saying like, here's the past, forget about this, let's move forward. Let's move forward to monorails and jetpacks and AI all I'm not saying we shouldn't talk about that but what I'm saying is as an individual or as a entrepreneur or as a politician or a parent or a parent if you want to think about the futures that you want you have to heal what got you

to this point Wow powerful, that's powerful. Powerful to hear from someone like you. Because I want you won't be able to tell me I've been I've been I've been in the situation room. I've been at the top floor of the U. And I've been in all these rooms with all these cats, right? Doing amazing work. They're doing amazing.

Leaders of the world in different industries. Across the board. More often than not, what I see holding them back when I say, well, to what end? Where do you want to take this? Where do you want to go? I know because I know their past. World domination, right? It's like that's the whole thing. I know because I know about these folks and it's my job to know these things.

I'm like, oh, they're coming into this entire exercise with all this stuff. Baggage, yeah. All of us are coming into it, right? stuff. By the way, all of us are coming into it, right? We all carry heirlooms with us that are emotional heirlooms that have been passed on to us by those who came before. Some heirlooms you should keep. There are many things that my mother and father brought from their past that were amazing and made me be able to do them. Good habits, good skills, good values. Creativity, openness, humor, what have you. There's other things that if I don't process are going to hold me back in doing the work that I want to do. And he offered me, look, my father as a teenager had his father killed in front of him in Poland at the very early stages of World War II.

He went on, he escaped the ghetto, he joined the Jewish underground and was a Nazi hunter after the war. He joined the Jewish underground and was a Nazi hunter after the war. Then after that, it was professional soccer, then Cuba, a fight with Castro, to Mexico, where he met my mom, who's an artist and trained by Buckminster Fuller, another kind of engineer, architect, futurist. So it's all these amazing things,

and then out pops me and my two sisters. Now, it's on me to figure out what of that is going to propel me forward, and what of that is gonna kinda hold me back. So I'll give you a very, very personal example. So, my father who passed away when I was much younger, because he hadn't when he was much older, whenever we would go eat in a restaurant,

he never had his back to the door. Right? So funny, I said this this morning at breakfast. I said that exact same thing. I never have my back where people can walk behind me. I've always wanted to observe what attack or potential threat there is. So the question is, I won't put you on the couch right now, but the question is, where does that come from? How does that help you analyze situations and see patterns?

So part of that helps you build this. Part of that holds you back in terms of trust and a whole bunch of other issues. So part of it is kind of parsing what that is. So for me, as a futurist, it was just that. It was like, what part of not having, because by the way, we go to a restaurant, I wouldn't have my back to the door either.

It gets passed on. The thing is, you have to take the parts of that that work and the parts that don't. Because if you don't, you're gonna pass that on. It's gonna be another heirloom that I'm gonna give to my kids. And even if you don't have kids, by the way, you're gonna pass on to people around you

in the next generation. So transgenerational empathy, we heal the past, we become more in the present by knowing what is holding, what that baggage is. And at that point, this was to your comment earlier about being a therapist, now at that point we can start futuring. Now we can actually say, okay, where do we want to go? And before we can do that, we have to acknowledge something else.

So one of the things that makes it so difficult to be alive in this moment is we're in what I call an intertidal. So the intertidal zone, right, when we think about oceans, is that piece of land that part of the day is above water, part of the day is below water, right? And it's this really interesting place that's both kind of chaos and complexity, but also massive opportunity, right?

So you have mussels that have evolved to actually hold water when the water goes down, and you have starfish that find pools. And it's an amazing place. So we are in that right now on the planet, especially kind of in what we call the global north. Why? So intertidal happened when the narratives,

the stories, the institutions, the things that we use to kind of guide us start to fall away, right? So one of the ways we the institutions, the things that we use to kind of guide us start to fall away, right? So one of the ways we measure this, because we want to be somewhat quantitative, is people's trust. Trust in institutions, trust in each other, trust in leadership. If you look at the past 15 years, it's just been falling down, right? We've had intertitles before. Probably the last massive intertitle was the shift from Hunter, this is back to you and I on the Serengeti, because we'll keep going back to us back then.

We would have been a great team. Give or take about 10 or 12,000 years ago, we go from hunter-gatherer to actually thinking about staying in one place, civilization, right? And that's a massive intertitle because before that that the way you and I ordered the world was by stars and mythic structures now we're staying in one place why because we're cultivating grain we're cultivating livestock and it's actually as much as everyone says oh you know it would have been great to be a hunter-gatherer because now we're just all in cubicles it was actually really rough back then like no yeah not every comfort there's no penicillin there

was no wi-fi there was like short-termism always on right and the thing that you and i were the most scared of obviously was dying and being pushed out of the cave yeah right at night because we did something wrong if you and i did something wrong in that small band everybody like lewis you took too much of me or you. Or you shirked your responsibility during the hunt. You're out of here. But everyone saw it. So what happens when we move into a kind of more urbanization in this last major intertitle is, remember the intertitle, there's all this creativity? So one of the things that gets created in that is our good friend God. Why? We need a kind of omnipotent thing that can see what Ari and Lewis are doing behind walls. Interesting. Because remember, up until that point, I always had eyes on you. I saw what

you were doing. Always. And there was no room. It was a very different world. But if you messed up, you knew about it very quickly. Now, all of a sudden, as we're urbanizing in, you know, clay bricks in the Levant in the Middle East, we need these new ways of order. We need new narratives. So there's this idea of instead of many gods, we have one God and that God can see everything, right? So I'm using God as an example of what can happen in the intertidal. These things that we take for granted, I mean, that's innovation, right? From polytheism to monotheism, that's some deep intertidal creativity, right? And look, intertidal has always come about because you have kind of constrained food resources, more urbanization, people kind of coming together, usually kind of

major disease spread, like check, check, check, check. That's all happening right now. On top of that, the kind of larger narrative we've been living by is this enlightenment mechanistic way of thinking, which is if we break everything down to its littlest of components, we can understand it. And in fact, we can recreate it. And for a long time, that actually worked. But you and I both know that if we step out and go to a forest right now and I say, well, this is the bark and this is the plant. If we break the forest into its individual components, that's not actually, you can't pull, you can't put it back together again, things are system, they're interrelated.

Right. And so that's across the board for everything. So we see our ways of how Ari and Louis go about the world, starting to break down the things that we believed in are now, um, being pressure tested and failing across the board. So this intertidal that we're in, I'd say probably for the past 10 years, we're probably in it for another 10 or 15 years. This is a very important time

that actually sets the trim tab, which I'll get to in a second, of where this whole homo sapien thing goes. And obviously this can be about climate change, but it's about a whole host of issues. So I wrote the book and created this mindset because it's bespoke to the moment. It's how do you navigate and intertidal?

How do you successfully get through this moment as an individual and as part of a larger collective? How do we do it? How do we do it? So what I say in Long Path is, there's a couple of things. We can't, I think first and foremost, and we've touched on this already,

is long path is inherently a relational mindset. So, and I mean this with no offense to anyone. Relationship to yourself, relationship to others, relationship to the world, to the next generation,

relationship to the past, the future, everything. That's it. So you can't. First to the past. First to the past. And that recognition, right? Like remember,

we, up until a couple of hundred years ago, a couple of thousand years ago, where you are on the planet, or in some places happening right now, we had systems, we had ritualistic elder-based systems that initiated it. So if we look at what's happening right now with the rise of psychedelics and ayahuasca

and people going away for eight-day experiences, this was the norm for tens of thousands of years. When you turn 13 you're gonna get a purity ritual you're gonna go through something we don't you know my daughters just had their bot mixed twin daughters and i kept thinking the whole time we've been doing this for thousands of years and now look in the modern world it's like the invitations go out will the caterer show up but if you step back this larger ritualistic way of kind of transitioning. And look, there's a big part in the Bar Bat Miksa ceremony where we thank our elders and we thank our ancestors.

But in general, in society, we have lost that. We've lost that ability to kind of connect and be in, what we call in Buddhism, right relation. Right relation? Right relation, be in a way where you're interacting and in relationship with yourself, those around you, those that came before you and those that will come in a way that-

Your tribe. Your tribe. Your own tribe, yeah. But you think it's interesting, I was thinking about this the other day and you just gave the word, you're like your temporal tribe, right? It's like forwards and backwards.

You're part of something more than just yourself, right? And it's hard because in Western society, so much tells us one thing, which is it's all about you. It's all about the individual. It's all about, if we look at all of our movies with the heroes, the hero always does it alone. But any, when I would talk to my dad about things, or talk to any real hero, be it a fireman, policeman,

military, no one ever, I would talk to my dad about things, or talk to any real hero, be it a fireman, policeman, military, no one ever said, I did this on my own. They're always like, oh, it was my band of brothers, it was the people that, so long path is inherently relational because you can practice it to a point. So there's a whole bunch of exercises in the book that are about kind of connecting you

with the past, present, and future, right? And in these kind of cognitive ways, you stand in front of a mirror. Look, you stand in front of a mirror, so one of the things, I don't wanna give anything away in the past, present, and future, right? And in these kind of cognitive ways, you stand in front of a mirror. Look, you stand in front of a mirror, so one of the things, I don't wanna give anything away in the book, but one of the things, when you stand in front of a mirror,

I have you focus on your belly button. And everyone's like, why your belly button? Well, because your belly button is one of the few things that actually was truly connected, unless, I mean, this is, I think, for everyone on the planet, connected you to the previous generation. It's true, and it kept you alive.

Kept you alive, but it was literally a direct connection. And those belly buttons go back tens of thousands of millions of years, right? All the way through, it's a through line. And by the way, it's gonna go all the way through. So it's inherently relational because you have to understand that when you go to a bookstore, if anyone still goes to bookstores,

and you go to the self-help section, right, or what they call prescriptive nonfiction, or they call it different things, 98% of the books are about just you and the work that you have to do on yourself. And there's no fault to that, and I get that, and I've read most of them, and it's helped me be a better dad,

and husband, and person. But if we wanna move forward in a positive, flourishing way through this intertidal, we want to move forward in a positive flourishing way through this intertidal we have to we have to flip it it has to go from me to we we have to do that and so the kind of the back third of the book is okay you've done all this work on yourself now it's time to think about co-creating futures so people always ask me what's the future and I always say the same thing what do you want it to be? And how do we do it together?

Because I can have a future for myself, but anyone who's ever built a business or an organization or anything knows they didn't do it alone. They didn't future alone. What I'm asking in this book is for folks to be able to do that collectively, an individual kind of layer, at a familial, you know, their family organization and society writ large. And so that's where, and then from that point, as you start to kind of think at a familial, you know, their family, organization, and society writ large.

Yeah. And so that's where, and then from that point, as you start to kind of think about it, that becomes how you start to have empathy for those who will be coming and actually start feeling. Because if I was to say to you, Lewis, like, you know, tell me, let's talk about, you know, four generations from now, like, describing to me.

You talk about it from your prefrontal cortex, right? And we've seen this, we do the fMRI studies. You can visualize and tell me about them. But if I start asking, well, how do they feel in this world? All of a sudden it's like a record, a needle scratching on a record. Because we're not trained to do that inherently. But if you've done, as you've made your way

through the book and you've had empathy for those who have come before, empathy for yourself, now when I ask you to have empathy for future generations, that muscle is actually there. And where it gets kind of really interesting is before you even do that, you have to connect to your future self, which is one of the most difficult things that you have to do. And so what do you do then if you're looking 10, 20, 30 years out to your future self? And I always think about my highest future self

is to what end is thinking 10 years from now, I'll be 49, almost 50, I guess. Am I really proud of the actions I took today that are gonna make my future self proud? They're like, wow, I'm so glad you showed up that way for me in the future. And it's funny because I've been talking about this a lot on my show, but I've got on my phone a photo of my childhood self. And over the last year and a half, I've been doing a healing process to reconnect and have

empathy for my childhood self at the many different psychological stages of feeling confusion and stress and overwhelm and abuse and all these different things that kids go through. And having compassion, empathy, and allowing the heal, the old, the child within me, the psychological wounded child within me at five, 10, 12, 21, 30, 35, all those things. And bring the past to the now, like you talked about, of the society,

and then think, okay, is the action I take this morning by moving my body, by working out, by eating healthy today, by thinking a certain way going to benefit my highest self 10 years from now? Yep. And I think that process has really helped me constantly be present but also be future thinking at the same time and hopefully thinking generationally, like how am I gonna pass this down to my children as well

so they don't have the same traumas that I had. So it's amazing that you have that on your phone, and very soon we're gonna tweak that a bit, and I'll tell you how. So Hal Harshley at UCLA has done a bunch of research on this, where he'll take people and he'll put them into an fMRI machine, which looks at kind of the oxygen flow and where things are being activated in the brain. And he'll put them in, and like most of these studies are mostly done on college freshmen, but he puts them in.

Who else is going to go to an fMRI machine? And he slides them in, and he puts them in. Who else is gonna go to an fMRI machine? He slides them in and he'll say, okay, I want you to think about yourself right now in the present moment. And this is an oversimplification because you're not gonna slice my head open right now. And this part of their brain will activate. And then he'll say, okay, I want you to,

and he'll take someone famous, he'll say, I want you to think about Matt Damon. This part of the brain will activate. And then he'll say, I want you to think about your future you know this part of the brain will activate and then he'll say I want you to think about your future self 20 years from now and you know which part lights up the same part that did for Matt Damon so it's someone that they kind of vaguely know interesting but it's not them so you pull them out you divide the group and you do two things with one group the control group nothing they don't do anything they come

back in 30 days or whatever the The other group, two things. One, he has them write letters to their future self. I love this exercise. Right? I love this. I've done this many times. So you write a letter to your future self. And the other thing they do,

and they've also done this in VR, but for simplification, they'll take a photo and they'll age it. Let's say for some of this research, 10 years. And you look at the photo every day for 30 seconds. Of you 10 years away. Of you 10 years from now. And they put them back into the fMRI machine.

And what do you think happens? The control group is still, oh, this is present Ari, this is future Ari over here. The group that actually had the intervention done on them, you know exactly what happened. Present Ari and future Ari start to overlap, right? And they become kind of one.

And you start making decisions in that way. For that future self. For that future self. You're thinking about, so now you're no longer today-ist, you're no longer short-termist. You're actually thinking much broader. And so you go to longpath.org and there's a little section that says future me.

And there's a couple of things you can do. One, you can take a photo of yourself and age at 10 years. You can, you know. That's cool. And the other thing is you can write a letter to your future self. These are all kind of neurocognitive interventions that help you start going there.

So I obviously, I did this. And so on my desk at home, you know what there is, right? There's a photo of your future self. Well, there's a photo of me when I was six years old. Interesting. Right, which is kind of like, well, actually it's a photo of me when I'm five years old. I'll get to why I did that in a second. So a photo of me at five, there's one photo of me when I was six years old. Interesting. Right? Which is kind of like, well, actually, it's a photo of me when I'm five years old. I'll get to why I did that in a second.

So a photo of me at five. There's one with me and my family. And there's one with me aged 20 years from now. Wow. And so when I'm thinking about the decisions that I have to make, how do I do it? I'm trying to look across that. But there's other things. We also have, and again, you're talking to, so this may be, that's easy.

But I'll go a little bit further. What we do as a family, on our bookshelf, we actually, you know, there's photos of my wife and I when we were young, we have, you know, and our kids, and then we have the current family one. And then I have one frame that's empty. And I keep it there. And that's for my grandkids or future generations.

And so I see that every day as I walk into the kitchen, I look at that. Because what I'm thinking is the things that I'm doing, why, what's my why, why do I get up in the morning? There's obviously, look, egos are great things, they're great tools, so somebody's like, I'm gonna go on Lewis Howell, I'm gonna write a book and I'm gonna get on Lewis Howell,

like the number one guy on the planet, I'm gonna do it 100%. But, and you know this, because you've had success in multiple different areas, that's actually not enough to, you can do that. It's self-fulfillment. You still feel it, you'll get there, you'll be on the stage.

I've spoken in front of thousands of people and afterwards everyone's like, that must have been amazing. I'm like, eh. Because I did it for a future thing, eh, okay. But when you start to put what you're doing in a much larger context about the, so think about it, there's been about,

depending on who you talked to, there's been right between 80 to 100 billion homo sapiens on planet Earth. Since- 80 to 100 billion? 80 to 100 billion. That's crazy. If you go, tell them where you wanna draw the line

between the astrophysicists and all these, but about 80 to 100 billion, right? So now here we are in 2022, and we look forward and we start to think, well, A, we're going to successfully navigate this intertidal moment, but we're literally on page one of a 400-page novel called Homo Sapiens. There's been about 100 billion to this point. If we can make it through this next moment, which I believe we can, we're looking at hundreds of billions, maybe even trillions of Homo sapiens throughout the galaxy.

That's crazy. And so what ends up happening is, what is the legacy, what are the heirlooms that we want to give them, that we want to give them? Part of it is a healthy planet, 100%. First and foremost, nothing happens outside of spaceship Earth, right? Eventually we start to leave it.

But if we think, you know, if, we talked about this earlier, let's say, let's go forward a thousand years from now. And people are looking in the history books or in the books or whatever in the, you know, brain machine interface. I'm like, who is this Lewis Howe character? Like, what is Ira?

I mean, there's big statues of you in Central Park. What is that video? What is that? Yeah. And how they're, and it's not about necessarily judgment, but how they're gonna look back on us is gonna say, well, what is it that they did? Okay, they gave us, they figured out climate change. They figured out the right things to do in ways of working and being.

What they're gonna wanna know is, what were the things that you and I did at an emotional, psychological level? To set them up for success. To set them up for success. Or to hurt them in flourishing, right? Like I, and by the way, and part of transgenerational empathy for the past

is also recognizing there's only so much we can do with what the norms are today. So I eat meat, right? Like I try to be healthy about it and it's organic and free range. Look, 200 years from now, like roughly, there's gonna be research or it could be 100 years, it could be 50 years, there'll be research where it's like animals were totally conscious they

totally felt the pain they totally knew what was going on blah blah and our our descendants are gonna look back and be like what was Aryan Lewis there that was horrific horrific and by the way take go for 800 years and whatever they were doing folks will look at and be like that, that was horrific. They were barbaric. Barbaric. Again, it doesn't mean we shouldn't stop doing evil, those things. So there's a little bit of hubris. Put it into context.

But if we go out to the trillion or so homo sapiens, when we look at the three different photo frames that we have, right? So one of the things that actually I pilfered from Amazon, which is, you know, you can pilfer where you can. So at Amazon, Bezos was famous for leaving an empty chair.

You know this? Do you know this story? So in meetings, he would, well, there's two things he did that are amazing. And I went to go visit and do a talk and do some work there. And I noticed two things.

One, all the conference, big conference, you know, gorgeous Seattle headquarters. One, all the conference, big conference, you know, gorgeous Seattle headquarters. In many of the rooms, the conference tables are actually made out of big box, like doors, like Home Depot doors, like those hollow core doors. It'd be like 10 of them lined up. Why? That was his first desk. If you look at the photo of him when it was just him. With like the computer and the amazon side and the amazon it's a it's a it's a wood it's literally it's a door interesting and so part of it is don't forget where you came from like we may be this whole crappy thing but don't forget it's always it's always that first day and and that's what that so that's always interesting

to remember your past and not because i walk i walk into some conference rooms of these companies that have unicorns whatever and like these tables cost like a hundred thousand yeah a hundred grand for a table you could hire someone for that you know you can do a lot with that and here though it's it's still the door so that's one but the other thing that he would do is he would leave one chair empty and that chair was meant to represent the customer. What would they want? What would they want? So whenever there's a kind of decision to be made, it'd be like, what would they want? And so what I've been doing with some of the folks

that I work with at the UN and a bunch of others, we're leaving that chair open, but that chair is meant to represent future generations. What do they want? What do they need? That's interesting. And so when you don't know what to do, you're not sure like what direction to go into, you

can look at that chair and if you're in, look, you may be in a setting where you're not able to leave an empty chair. You can mentally have that empty chair and that empty chair is for future Lewis, for generations or the trillions to come. How are you making decisions for them? And look, here's the thing. This is not feel good, oh my God, like kumbaya. This helps you in the present because what it does is

it helps you be more creative and more curious and recognize that you have to be in right relationship to the world and those around you. So whether you're a politician, an entrepreneur, or an athlete, this just ups your game in the moment. So the side benefit of transgenerational empathy, besides laying out this thing for future generations, it makes you a better human today.

Yes. Yeah, you called it future self-thinking. There's another term, mental time travel. I started talking about this a few years ago, calling it future hindsight. Yeah. Because, you know, when something happens and we look back at it, we're always like, I see why that is that way. And I'm, you know, I see the lesson there. And then Matthew McConaughey talked about this in his acceptance speech for the Oscar, where he's like, someone asked me who my hero is. And I think about my, myself 10 years from now, he's my hero. And I'm always chasing that person. I'm trying to make that person proud. I'm trying to make the

actions to get closer to that. And then when I get there, I realize my hero's still another 10 years out. And I have to start making decisions and actions towards improving myself to be closer to that hero. But I'll never meet him. I think that's interesting. And so it's the same thing, but now expanded out over several generations.

So one of the issues that I talked about was the difficulty that we have in imagining different tomorrows and why in this intertitle it's both kind of creativity but also kind of chaos. And so we have to step back. There's this term that's in the book, this idea of the official future. Official. The official future.

I put that in quotes, right? So the official future could be an individual. Like I'm going to, you know, growing up in my family, the official future, I put that in quotes, right? So the official future could be an individual. Like I'm going to, you know, growing up in my family, the official future is I'm going to go to college, graduate school, get married, have 3.2 kids. That's an official future. The official future in our world today is one where, you know, technology will solve every problem and it'll look a certain way and there's these narratives and the world will get better. And, you know, we're all going to drive electric cars. It look a certain way and there's these narratives and the world will get better and we're all gonna drive electric cars.

It's a certain official future. And we talked about this much earlier that the official future, that story, was for generations always came usually from the priests. It was those that were closest to God over the past 10,000 years. The wisest. The wisest, well, partly because the official future was meant to actually, as a kind of emancipatory

as it feels, it was actually meant to hem us in and actually become a control mechanism. Because anything that you did that fell outside of this official future was not condoned. In fact, it was scary. You're pushed out of the cave, and so you didn't do it, right? And so this idea of an official future, and and by the way and we see this over the course of the past 2,000 years the main official future is heaven or hell right and kind of in in a monotheistic face and a number of them there's this after the afterlife remember was invented as a control mechanism to get you to do

certain things it build morality to do good things here yes well do good things here now and to avoid and by by the way who defined do good things here. Well, to do good things here now and to avoid, and by the way, who defined those good things was a huge controlling mechanism. And I say this in the book, I'm not talking about the theology of religion, I'm talking about the control mechanism and what it became as an institution.

And so even that's falling apart. The fastest growing group in America right now are what we call nuns,-o-n-e-s they're they're spiritual but not religious none of the above right because that's again another kind of narrative that's collapsing so we have this official future about where the world is supposed to be going and we're seeing that kind of collapse in this intertidal moment but here's the thing not having any sense of future is it's too much of a cognitive load people start to freak out and what do they do?

More often than not, and we've seen this throughout history, is they will go and look for a strong man or someone with a narrative that says, this is the future, follow me. We saw that in this country, we've seen it in other countries. I'm not saying this through a political lens, I'm saying this through a kind of anthropological lens, that in the absence of an official future, we will go to anyone who is offering us one,

good or bad. It doesn't happen. Just to have some direction to go. We need direction. We can't. What happens if we don't find that? Do we just go into drugs and addiction? Drugs, addiction, bad habits, and we become very, very, very short-termistic. It's all about here and now. It's all here and now, the pleasure right now. Instant gratification. Instant gratification because there's nothing bigger. I'm not part of something bigger anymore. And so in the book, I call it the project.

And people are like, why do you call it the project? I was like, I didn't know what else to call it. But the project is something bigger than ourselves over the next 10,000 years so that we become a flourishing species. How do you get people who are not thinking that way to start thinking about something bigger than themselves? If they're in constant anxiety, stress mode,

or they're dealing with trauma from their family, or they're broke, or whatever it might be, how do you get people to start the process of thinking beyond you? Look, for a number of people who are going through kind of acute emergencies or traumas, like we'll make this, this is a second or third layer that they have to address, right? But for a number of people who are going through kind of acute emergencies or traumas, like, we'll make this, this is a second or third layer that they have to address, right?

But for those of us who have that kind of emotional, psychological space to do that, what we're asking them to do is recognize, and I think it's the second exercise in the book, is how you got to this point. What came before you? Because again, in this kind of todayist, lifespan biased way of being, we're totally disconnected temporally from those who came before us and those who will come after us.

So first and foremost, one of the first exercises is literally having people stop and make that recognition of those that came before them. There's an opening story. I can read it. You can read it. It's like literally in the first couple of pages. I'll let you read it. Go ahead. Right here, this one. Yeah, I'll do it verbatim. So this beautiful image of a tree, this is from the Talmud, one of the kind of ancient Jewish texts. It says, one day a man named Honi was walking along and saw a man planting a carob tree.

Hone asked him, how many years will it take until it will bear fruit? And the man said to him, not for 70 years. And Hone said to him, do you really believe you'll live another 70 years? And the man answered, I found this world provided with carob trees. And as my ancestors planted them for me me so I too plant them for my descendants right that's the book that's the mindset and so the question becomes when you're looking at the photo of your younger and your older what are the carob trees that you're planting some of them can be amazing businesses that will help more people flourish and will employ them

some of them may be more kind of individual. My argument in this book, my thesis is that you can do actually very small things as care tree planting. So talk about this in the opening of the books, people are kind of expecting when they start reading the book, they're like, oh, so you're gonna talk about the Panama Canal that took 50 years, the Transcontinental Railroad and the Marshall Plan,

all these big kind of external infrastructure projects, we think of that when we think of long term. I said, no, no, no, I'll get to those, but what I really wanna talk about are these small, what we call kind of trim tab things that you can do right now today that are like carob trees being planted. And so,

I just, Just being kind to people on the street, which is opening the door, which is, yeah. And going back to your earliest question, which is, well, what do we do about the folks that can't think like this? So part of it is being kind, right? But that's not, that's where we start, right,

are these smaller things. But what we want to do is build a kind of way of collectively going about and being in the world that allows us to start addressing these questions, these very big ones, people who are unhoused, poverty, all these wicked problems that we don't know how to solve because we don't know how to solve them through the official future that we're in. But when you start to have kind of a base layer of compassion and empathy,

as a chef, you only have a certain number of groups, all of a sudden that totally opens up again. It opens up so you can kind of start thinking very differently about this. So I mentioned this trim tab. So Buckminster Fuller, who was this really famous futurist who wrote Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, which is just the greatest title ever for a book, he was asked in World War II by the U.S. Navy to help him solve a problem. And the problem was the ships were getting bigger and bigger,

but it was getting more difficult to actually steer them because the rudder had to get bigger to actually turn the ship. They got to the point where the hydraulics that were necessary to turn a 20-foot rudder didn't make sense. They didn't have the kind of mechanical engineering know-how. So he came up with this idea which was to attach a four inch piece of metal to the end of these rudders by making them smaller and that became a trim tab. And so what he found was all you had to do was just turn that small piece a little bit into the oncoming water and it would whip the rudder around so you no longer

needed the actual hydraulics. You needed a, something really, really small that would go against the flow that would actually create the action. So he believed in this so much that on his tombstone, it said, call me trim tab. Because he believed that everything we do in our life is a trim tab moment. We can act and think like that. And so, yes, I address in the book, there's all these ways, there's these massive trim paths.

Yes, we have to electrify everything. We have to get off of fossil fuels. Renewable energy, everything. We know all that. And for 99% of the planet, we all know it, but we're actually not in the business. We can't do it. We can maybe afford, we can do some of it. We can send market signals, but we're not in it. So the question is, what can we do? And what I offer is that we can act like trim tabs in the work that we do. It is about empathy and compassion and kindness. And a lot of people will critique that and say, well, that's not enough.

That's not how you get us to 10,000 years from now. That's not real change. That's not real change. But it kind of is, though. But it kind of is. It's like the work at home first. You do, you take care of your own house, do the work, look, I don't say,

yes, you should protest, yes, you should vote, yes, yes you do all those big things and those do make things happen but look and this is my own definitely my own point of view what good is it in if you know 2 000 years from now we live on a planet that is perfectly green and eco and we made it through but we're all like a-holes to each other and we're all like not kind people. Like that doesn't seem like where we want to take the species. So what I'm saying is we can actually do both. But to your earlier point, we have to recognize that and activate on that. We have to actually decide and make the decision that we want to be pro-social,

that we want to have empathy and awe and thinking in these ways. Because in the moment, it makes us more curious because the curiosity is like, well, how did I get to this point? That's empathy with the past. But from that curiosity, a whole panoply of kind of solutions start to open themselves up for those very big, wicked structural problems that we're trying to deal with right now. When was the first time you wrote a letter to your future self?

Eighth grade. Eighth grade. And here's the crazy thing about writing a letter to your future self because we've known that we've put people in the fMRI machines. It's not the act of receiving it. It's the act of writing it.

That's the change factor. Not to give anything away, but it's not about when you get the letter. It's actually connecting with future Lewis or future Ari. By the way,

a priori, that has to happen before you can connect to future generations. Both either- It's for your future self first, and then your future generations. You have to start in your own house and kind of think like, okay, what do I need?

You know, a friend of mine is a, it's kind of gross, but he's a periodontist. And so we've been having these, we were roommates in college. What is that, just so I'm aware? Periodontist. Gums, work for the gums and teeth, right? And I said, well, you know, what's the most,

now knowing, now that you do this. Yeah, you see a lot of nasty stuff. Yeah, you see a lot of nasty stuff. So what's the most important thing you would tell your 20 year old self? Floss. Floss. That's it. And I said, what about,

and so I asked a dentist friend of mine, what's the number one thing you would do? Floss. And I go, why? He goes, well, everyone starts doing it too late in their 40s or 50s. And you have to actually, and this is not a commercial for flossing,

but it's a great example of these little things about taking care, you know, you ask other doctors, what do you do for, in your 70s or 80s, they're like, start stretching in your 20s. I asked Dr. Perlmutter, who's written many New York Times bestselling books, I don't know if you know who he is. The last one I think was called Drop Acid.

And at the end of every interview, I ask people their three truths. And one of them for him was floss when you're young. Yeah. It's like, that'd probably be mine. You have a lot of pain. You know,

it's like, what's the thing that's going to relieve the later pain that's hard to get back? You know, whatever that thing is. but that's interesting that, yeah, floss is one of those things.

It's again, writing a letter to the future. What are your future self going to be proud that you did to keep you happy, healthy, fulfilled feeling, right? It's like not suffering in your future. Yeah, and future generations not suffering it, right? That's why the book is called Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs. Our future descendants need us to become great ancestors we needed

gilbert at harvard talks about this it's kind of end of history illusion where we think we're on the tail end of history right and like nothing there's like but it's just beginning but think about yourself 10 years ago the music that you liked 10 years ago you probably would never be it's evolved and you've evolved as a human and the species were evolving also right and we will like if we think about 200 years from now genetic if we were to be able to go back and kind of put you 200 years ago or even 20 000 years ago genetically you'd still be the same homo sapien but so much of what we call the wetware right not the hardware the hardware is like the big biology but the wetware the culture norms the way we operate in the world, so much of that has changed.

So much of that is on us. And so what I'm asking as people kind of read and consume the book is what we are called upon to do to be great ancestors right now is to upgrade the operating system for who we are as a civilization. So that is the question is, how do we do that? I think these three pillars, futures thinking, right? Recognizing that there's an official future, but that the official future isn't going to get us there. So what do I ask people to do? I ask them to think about what is the desired future that they want? What is the desired future for Lewis? Possible futures examined. Exactly. So in the book, we talk about specifically not examined desired futures, official future, yeah. So in the book we talk about specifically

not just desired future, but examined desired future. Because we went in reverse order, we kind of know where this goes. The examined desired future isn't just the future for you as you kind of would have thought about it without doing the work. Once you start doing the work around transgenerational empathy,

and thinking about that kind of baggage and what's holding you back, that actually starts to change, because now you're going from a desired future, I want to be the best X in the world or whatever, now the examined part is, I want to do this in the future because I realize certain of these things that I was using to build out my desired future

kind of were some baggage from the past. Right, like maybe- I was creating from a wound as opposed to from a healed, healthy place. Exactly. I was becoming a doctor because I was, you know, influenced in a negative way to become a doctor. I didn't want to use that example because it's so cliche. I know.

But I was raised... I built a million dollar business to, you know, have more success and power as opposed to make an impact through my product or service. Yeah. Or even to have know there's a story there's a story that's how you were raised though yeah so there's a story in the book about this uh this kind of wealthy man who comes across a fisherman who's kind of in his abode in the afternoon he goes go ahead this guy's in his abode he's kind of looking at the guys like what are you doing why aren't you out fishing he's like well i've caught everything i need for the day he goes well you

know if you were out all day, you would make more money. And then eventually you could hire more people. Then you'd have more boats. You have 20 boats. And then you'd have all this money. And the guy says to the wealthy man, well, then what I would do is like, well, then you could relax in the afternoon. He goes, that's what I'm doing right now. You could retire and then do this.

You've got a boat and fish. I'm doing it right now. Yeah. and then you got a boat and fish. I'm doing it right now. Yeah. So that's the examine part. It's like so much of what we think we should do is what society tells us

or what our parents or the inner voice or what media tells us. And so before you can future yourself or your organization or the world, especially in relation with others, you have to heal from what came before. I'm so happy you're saying this because I feel like you come from a, I would call it, I don't know, like an intellectual world, right?

An analytical, intellectual, high-level thinking, leadership world where people think about productivity, efficiency, maximizing, growth, expansion, world domination. And for you to say the first step is to really think about, or one of the first steps is to think about past empathy and healing, so that you can create from a space of a healed place, a whole place, not a half hurt place, and you can create more meaningful,

you'll be thinking differently of why you're creating the thing you're thinking. You'll be an intentional action of your life as opposed to a reactional action to prove, to fit in, to belong, to be accepted by your parents or whatever it might be. And I think this is so valuable you're sharing this because I think analytical, intellectual people in general general i want them to think more this

way yeah from the heart that's one of the look this is i can't this should be like this should be like uh an antidote to like short-term pain or something like to pain and future pain it's like this is like the ultimate self-help book i mean you know what i mean i think we've already printed too many copies to actually put that on there but for the paperback This is like the ultimate self-help book. I mean. You know what I mean? Says Lewis Howell. You know what I mean? I think we've already printed too many copies to actually put that on there, but for the paperback, I think we now have, we now have a new blurb for the front.

But I think it's so powerful that people have that, that hear that from someone like you, specifically, who is in this type of field, because people are just more about like, let's just make more and build more and i'm all for growth i think the world is expanding the universe is expanding there's got to be some growth somewhere from an individual level in society level but it's what is it the growth for yeah to what end to what ends yeah and i think that's important and i i had a kind of a wake-up

call when i was about 30 i'm 39 now where it was all about success, you know, earn more, be celebrated more, build a bigger following to be acknowledged more, all that stuff, right? And I realized, why am I still suffering inside? Yeah. Like, why is it still not happy and fulfilled? Like, this is cool for a moment, but then I'm still angry at the world, angry at myself, resentful, like reactive, triggered. And it wasn't until I started to heal,

literally nine years ago, and it's been a journey of different healing journeys, but it wasn't until I started to heal, I was like, oh wow, I've been doing this all wrong. And I need to, and it's helped me accomplish, but it doesn't make me feel fulfilled. And when I started to say, what is my real mission? What do I want to do?

I want to impact lives in a positive way. And I started to say, what is my real mission? What do I want to do? I want to impact lives in a positive way. And I got clear on, okay, what's the mechanism for our business? It's to reach 100 million lives weekly to help them improve the quality of their life. And when it's like just at the core, it's like I just want to bring joy to people. I want to be joy and bring joy and provide solutions for peace and for growth. That's really what it is. In the different areas of life to support them from when they're in peace and for growth. That's really what it is. In the different areas of life, to support them from when they're in pain and into peace.

It's a much more renewable energy that I have. It's more than renewable, it's regenerative. Yes. And this is where things, this is what really we're talking about, right? Is kind of the healing and the work that needs to be done is regenerative. It's not just, we're not just taking what's there

and kind of, no, regenerative is actually making it whole again. Yes. Because if we think about, I'm going to go back to Ari and Lewis. Yes. And the saber tooth tigers. You know, there's many biologists who would argue with the saber tooth tiger being, okay, whatever.

So it's a metaphor. Um, so we're 15,000 years ago and we were very much one with nature and that doesn't mean we were hugging trees what that means is there was no distinction between Ari Lewis and the natural world we were a hundred percent vibe and everything that we did was so that we could flourish we could grow but not at the expense of the larger system. Now, remember I said we're kind of at this inner title, the past 400 years of this enlightenment,

industrial revolution mechanistic, break everything down as core components. Go outside, smell the air. It's not that clean. Look at what we're doing. And I don't say this, so I don't say it as an environmentalist in the kind of the climate environment. I say this as someone who cares about the mental environment.

We are broken. We are disconnected. The emotional environment, yeah. The emotional environment. It's very difficult for us to connect one-on-one with humans because it's very difficult for us to connect one-on-one with ourselves. Yes. Why is it difficult for us to connect one-on-one with ourselves? Because we have been told that we are separate and apart.

for us to connect one-on-one with ourselves? Because we have been told that we are separate and apart. Because that was the kind of, that's what Bacon and all the big Western intellectuals, Heidegger, Nietzsche, all of them all said the same thing. We are separate from nature. We can dominate. But what ends up happening is in that kind of fractured reality that we're living with nature,

which gives us where we are with climate, it also gives us where we are as a species with one another. You think about the polarization and how we interact with other human beings and where that's coming from. That's not oxytocin. It's not dopamine. That's aggression. That's cortisol. That's adrenaline. That is Ari and Lewis in constant fight or flight mode from the world. And here's the terrible part about it is you can make a ton of money off of that oh yeah tons you can make a ton in fact you can you can make billions you can win the highest offices in the land if you want but it'll never drive that it'll never fulfill

the wound from why you're creating that for yes you'll never be able to fill the wound up yeah Yes. You'll never be able to fill the wound up. Yeah. And folks who have done the healing are not figuring out how to divide us from one another or divide us from nature. They're looking at how to bring us together. Because if Ari and Lewis want to look, step back,

and wherever we go after this, if anywhere, 10,000 years from now, was the work that we were doing, was your work of bringing kind of joy and solutions, was it bringing us into more proper alignment and aligned action with one another in the universe? Or is it dividing us falsely because that's the narrative that we were told we should perpetuate? That's it. I mean, your work is already doing this. And now all I'm asking you or anyone who's listening is to add the next layer, not because it's responsibility or out of guilt, but because I think it'll make the work you do that much more powerful. Everything from like a kind of a hop in your step to when you're really thinking like, is this worth it?

Should I be doing this? It's a meaningful work. It's a meaningful work. Meaningful work in your own lifespan, sure. And by the way, sometimes that's just enough. But for those who kind of dare to go a little bit further, is this meaningful work for the next 10,000 years? If you can answer that in the affirmative, oh my God, nothing can stop you. What would be the prompt then for the future self letter? Let's just say that if people only do one action and they do this future self letter,

what would be the prompt to write to themselves? So it's how the book ends. So I'm not going to give it too much away, but it's, here's how I became a great ancestor. Oh, interesting. Look, you can be a good ancestor. You can be, we're all going to be ancestors. We're all going to die. Right. By the way, that's Ernest Becker won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for a book called the denial of death and what he believed was so much of what we do is because we are the only Homo sapiens are the only species at a very early point in our lives and know that we're gonna die at one point and everything we do is to avoid that death and this goes back to Ari Luz being kicked out of the. And so one of the problems with answering that question of,

am I being a great ancestor? One of the biggest problems with that is you have to solve for the fact that you're writing about a time after you've been alive. It's crazy, right? And so we can exist in two worlds. We can either be what they call death anxious or death aware. So there's an exercise in the book about that.

Look, you go to South Korea, there's meditations where you lie in a coffin. Like you think about. Well, the country of Bhutan, I think, focuses five times a day on their death. 100%. They're supposed to be one of the happier countries. Yeah, memento mori at one point. Look, a lot of people, you know, there's this YOLO. People wake up in the morning and they say, well, how am I going to live today as if it was my only day, my last day? And they go out and they do these amazing things and they cliff dive or whatever.

So I do that, but I do it the opposite. When I go to bed at night, I go, if that was my last day, was that a great ancestor day? So it doesn't mean I passed a piece of legislation or I fed the world. Sold a company. Sold a company or solved something. How was I? Like if today was my last day, the way I interacted with my wife,

with my children, with Louis, can I stand by that as a model of what does it mean to be a great ancestor and pass that on, right? Like heaven forbid, Louis, I walk out of here and I get hit by a bus. Can I look back and say, well, my interactions with Lewis, with this audience, was that the stick moment

where I said trust, but the trust isn't just in my actions, it's who I am and how I am. That's what the baton is. The way of being. The way of being, with a capital B. So if I can walk out of here and say yes to that, then I've known I did what I could. You did your best. I did my best.

That's the yardstick. That's, you know, as an athlete, there's always, for pole vaulting, it was always measured in inches, right? For the four by 100, it was down to our millisecond. For those of us, for me, who no longer have those external metrics, it's not an internal metric. And the internal metric is, was my day, was my life acting in accordance with what it means to be a great ancestor for me or not? And not that I'm a binary thinker in any way, shape, or form, but that's kind of how you have to wrestle with these questions about life and meaning and purpose is are you doing

that? And that's what Long Path allows you to do is because it sets you up into something much bigger than yourself. Yeah. Man, this is inspiring stuff. I didn't know you were going to be speaking therapy talk over here, but I love it. I love it. That's the way we go here.

We've got a couple of final questions for you. Yep. But I love it. I love it. That's the way we go here. We've got a couple final questions for you. Yep. But I want people to get this book. I think it's going to be really transformational for you. Long Path, Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs, An Antidote to Short Terminism. Terminism? Termism.

Termism. Yeah. Short Termism. So make sure you guys check this out. Get a couple copies. They can get it at your website. Longpath.org forward slash book or basically anywhere on the planet

books are sold on or offline. Get Long Path. Really inspiring. This is a question I ask everyone at the end. I mentioned it before. It's called the three truths. So imagine you live as long as you want. And every day you've been proud

of being a great ancestor for the future right for your future generations but it is the last day many years away many many many years you live as long as you want but it actually got to turn the lights off yeah and you you also accomplish everything you want to create you know your endgame your to what end is all meaningful and purposeful fulfilling but for whatever reason we don't have access to this book or anything you've ever shared. Hypothetically, it's all gone.

Yeah. But you have a piece of paper and a pen, you get to write down three truths, three things you know to be true, or three lessons you would share with the world. And this is all we have to remember you by. What would be those three truths? Well, you already took floss.

Yes, so three more. The three truths. The first one is act as if though you are a great ancestor because you are. The second is never be afraid to love fully. And really fully.

Really in everything that means. And, you know, I was thinking, I was getting dressed coming onto Lewis Howes, right? And so I just put on whatever I was, you know, all black, not that hard. But the boots that I put on, the shoes were the first pair of shoes that my dad bought when he came from Cuba to Mexico. And the bracelet I'm wearing is a friendship bracelet that my daughter gave me. And in the middle, between my dad and my bracelet, is me. Right?

And so that third truth is, you know, I think about Lance Armstrong's book, It's Not About the Bike. The third truth is, it's not about you. Yeah, the only challenge is most people think the world revolves around them. And so that's why a lot of people suffer. Because they're always focused about me, me, me, as opposed to, like you said, we. Or how can I be of service?

How can I use myself to be of service to others? We're vessels for future generations. And I don't mean that in an overly spiritual or theological way. But our job is to do the best we can to set those up. And we happen to be in a transition zone right now. So let's take it seriously. All right. I really acknowledge you for the way you communicate about the future. And I think a lot of people are concerned about AI and computers and technology and whatever things are going to be happening externally, but they're not thinking about the internal, emotional, psychological, mental, spiritual future

and how what we do in this moment will pass on to our future generations and to the world generations. So I really acknowledge you for living in this space of analytical, intellectual, educational talk, but speaking from a place that I think every human being needs to understand, which is first, learn how to heal. Anything that's been holding you back and understand, why am I taking these actions? Why am I working so hard on this thing or pursuing this career or launching this company? What's the reason generate long-term thinking? And is it the best thing I should be doing for this part of my life? Or should I reconsider? Should I change the norm? So I really acknowledge you for speaking in this way to an audience that I think probably doesn't typically think about healing and having empathy for their ancestors. And not saying like it's okay to do that now, but having empathy for the past,

having empathy for yourself as a kid growing up, and then starting to think into the future in a spiritual standpoint so we can just make better decisions every single day. So I really acknowledge you for the way you communicate, where you bridge it, you bridge the gap from what I think people really need to hear. So I'm excited for people to get this book. Thank you. My final question, what is your definition of greatness? I'm going to have to go back. My definition of greatness is living in accordance with being a great ancestor. There you go. All right, my man. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Powerful, man. Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend

and subscribe over on Apple Podcasts as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I wanna remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter.

And now it's time to go out there and do something great.