How To Mentally Time Travel To Create Your Desired Future EP 1306

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 Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  So we are in a transition zone right now on the planet. So when we think about our ultimate goal, it has to be.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  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.

• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:30Speaker 01

  Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness. Very excited about our guest. We have Ari Walek in the house. My man, good to see you, sir. How you doing?

• 1:36Lewis Howes?

  I'm doing great.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:51Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 1:52Speaker 01

  Most people, I've been to blame for this and my life as well, is thinking, how can I get what I want now?

• 1:58Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  How do I bring the future of this big idea, this dream to me in this moment?

• 2:02Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 2:02Speaker 01

  What's the shortcut? What's the fast path? What's the way to get there?

• 2:07Lewis Howes?

  But a lot of us don't think about what are the consequences of taking the short path.

• 2:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 2:11Lewis Howes?

  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?

• 2:22Speaker 00

  First of all, thank you for having me.

• 2:23Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 2:23Speaker 00

  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. You know, 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 termism in and of itself is not inherently bad. It's when we allow it to become the overriding principle, how we make decisions at an individual level,

• 3:09Speaker 00

  at a collective, at a planetary level. That's when it's bad. So first of all, let's say.

• 3:13Lewis Howes?

  What type of people make short term decisions most of the time?

• 3:18Speaker 00

  There's a large percentage of the planet who is literally existing on a dollar a day.

• 3:22Lewis Howes?

  Survival mode.

• 3:23Speaker 00

  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.

• 4:03Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 4:03Speaker 00

  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, in society are incentivizing that. Right? So I work with CEOs and I meet these CEOs of Fortune 50 companies. And they're like, Ari, 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, that incentivized structure. I've worked with CEOs before who will call me up at the end of the day.

• 4:46Speaker 00

  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, it was up at noon. But then it dropped a little bit. I don't, I don't know if we can do this.

• 5:01Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  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 going to 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.

• 5:37Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 5:38Speaker 00

  Yeah. I was literally on a-

• 5:39Lewis Howes?

  Four years later?

• 5:41Speaker 00

  No, no, no, no, no, no. The day after you win.

• 5:43Lewis Howes?

  But I mean, four of the next four years or whatever.

• 5:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Four years or two years. I was, I was on unnamed senator was sitting next to me in the acella from DC to New York. And this was about a day and a half after the election. Cause I was down in DC for it. I was making my way back up to New York. I'm not going to say his name, but this person was, was heading up. And I wasn't totally listening, but I could tell they were kind of making these rapid calls. And some of the calls were to people, 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 PAC for my next election.

• 6:17Lewis Howes?

  They just won.

• 6:18Speaker 00

  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 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, it'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 was just a weekly assignment. So already I was getting kind of this notification. And we can talk about what that does to my, to my brain. But I'm getting notified that we need an immediate response, because what, what happened? So these larger incentivized systems are driving us to do more short-termistic behaviors

• 7:01Speaker 00

  beyond just losing R and B and chasing the Serengeti. Again, for a lot of people, that's how they have to live.

• 7:07Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  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.

• 7:19Lewis Howes?

  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?

• 7:26Speaker 00

  To what end, the T-Lose.

• 7:26Lewis Howes?

  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?

• 7:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:33Lewis Howes?

  What is it all about?

• 7:34Speaker 00

  To, to what end?

• 7:35Lewis Howes?

  So what, what does that mean to thinking about? And is it, should we start with to what end? And then reverse engineer to now?

• 7:42Speaker 00

  So this is great, we're going, we're going right into it. So, 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 want to fix this issue or solve this problem." But usually, what they consider the future is only four, five, eight years out.

• 8:10Lewis Howes?

  While they're in election, or when they're in office.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, and 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, 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, and I won't name names, I don't want to throw any authors under the bus, but any kind of tweeny 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,

• 8:58Speaker 00

  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 like tween drama over here, right? And so, but that's just first, so I started, I kind of stepped back, because I was looking at that, trying to figure out why these CEOs and entrepreneurs I'm working with were finding it difficult to tell me about where they actually wanted to go. Then I started looking at the kind of 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 like, not necessarily far future like Star Wars, or we can argue that's in the far past, but we'll get it for another episode. But any show that takes place in the future, it could be a meteor that hits the planet, whatever it is,

• 9:40Speaker 00

  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, okay, how do I write a book that helps folks think differently about tomorrow? And it's, look, what I didn't want to do, 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 gonna happen.

• 10:22Speaker 00

  I want to know what's, 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 gonna 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 transgenerational empathy.

• 10:48Speaker 00

  And there's telos, right? Which means basically ultimate aim and goal. So you started us kind of at the end, but I'm gonna 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 that? Because right now, I can tell you, eat your broccoli, eat your kale. You're like, oh, okay. Or we can put it into a much larger frame and living and acting and speaking healthily actually becomes something you wanted 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,

• 11:30Speaker 00

  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, reading the book or consuming the content. So it makes sense that all these things are kind of just geared towards you. The problem with that is most of the issues that we face, even at an individual level,

• 12:12Speaker 00

  let alone a societal level, started well before Lewis and are gonna go on well after Lewis. And so I ran track.

• 12:20Lewis Howes?

  Me too.

• 12:21Speaker 00

  I ran, I'm sure if we compared our time.

• 12:24Lewis Howes?

  Were you a hundred or were you a distance guy?

• 12:25Speaker 00

  So I was like 4x100 relay.

• 12:26Lewis Howes?

  Okay.

• 12:27Speaker 00

  And then I'll get into this other one, the second, pole vault.

• 12:30Lewis Howes?

  I did pole vault and 100 as well. I was decathlete, so I didn't.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  Okay, so.

• 12:34Lewis Howes?

  The pole vault is challenging.

• 12:35Speaker 00

  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 Tillyan.

• 12:43Lewis Howes?

  The handoff.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  The handoff. It's the transition zone.

• 12:47Lewis Howes?

  It is.

• 12:48Speaker 00

  And more importantly, and you know this, it's if, God, I would love to run track with you, you would have been the great end of my 4x100, would have been Allstate. You're not actually looking at me. You already start running and I yell stick and you put your hand out.

• 12:59Lewis Howes?

  You don't, you don't look back.

• 13:00Speaker 00

  You can't look. You just have to feel it and you go, it's trust.

• 13:02Lewis Howes?

  If you put it in my hand, then I can run with it. And then I pass it on to the next person.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  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're 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, so thinking at some point, you're gonna say, "Stick." And here's, 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 gonna pass the baton de exs?"

• 13:51Speaker 00

  You're 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.

• 14:03Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 14:03Speaker 00

  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 be the best Ari possible. You don't wanna 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 a long path or not, but kind of a transgenerational way of thinking and connecting. Now you start to have something really interesting.

• 14:46Speaker 00

  Because I think about the work that you've done on yourself, and, and those who are kind of listening and watching, right? They're, 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 gonna 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, the next generation that you influence.

• 15:28Speaker 00

  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, 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 the next generation. So 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.

• 16:02Lewis Howes?

  Is so, is to what end also what people say is what's your end goal? You know, what's your end goal for this project, for this career, for this thing you're doing?

• 16:10Speaker 00

  Well, so yes and no. So what's your end game? More often than not, it's like, Louis, what's your, what's your end game with everything that you're doing here? More often than, and I, I won't say, I won't put you on the spot. If someone say, all right, what's your end game with, with long path? 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 of. So they set the next generation and the next generation.

• 16:52Lewis Howes?

  Is that your to what end?

• 16:53Speaker 00

  That's my to what end. My, so I.

• 16:55Lewis Howes?

  So how's the exercise go?

• 16:56Speaker 00

  So I, there's, 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 of the exercises in the book are basically backended 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, Yaakov Troop, he does amazing research on what's called, basically, mental time travel.

• 17:25Lewis Howes?

  I love this stuff.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  So, mental time travel.

• 17:27Lewis Howes?

  I love mental time travel.

• 17:28Speaker 00

  Well, so here's the thing, because you're an athlete, so...

• 17:30Lewis Howes?

  Ethan Cross is a professor as well, who talks about one of these things in his book called Chatter.

• 17:35Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 17:36Lewis Howes?

  Mental time travel, I think it's powerful.

• 17:38Speaker 00

  So, mental time travel, what Yaakov has found, and a bunch of other people, is that if I was to say, "Louis, tell me what life will be like in Los Angeles 50 years from now," you're going to kind of stop and think, "Well, okay, like, in 50 years, it's going to be hard for you to... You may come with some top line details. More often than not, you're going to 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."

• 18:04Lewis Howes?

  Hmm.

• 18:05Speaker 00

  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, let's 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 getting all these details of what your life was like, what the food that you... You can become much more imaginative, because your hippocampus, which is holding your memory now, is kind of creating memories and bringing things back.

• 18:28Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 18:29Speaker 00

  But here's the great thing, and you know this as an athlete, if you close your eyes, and I was to say, "Okay," and this is the pole vaulting part, "Say, Louis, I want you to visualize yourself going over the bar." And I won't say at what height, because then you'll ask me my height, and it'll be a very... It'll become a very embarrassing part of the conversation. So, let's take Sergey Bukha, one of the best jumper vaulters in the world.

• 18:50Lewis Howes?

  Was it 19 or 18?

• 18:51Speaker 00

  19, 19 and a half.

• 18:52Lewis Howes?

  19 or something, yeah.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, so Sergey's sitting back and thinking, like, okay, he sees, you know, for him, breaking records was like in quarter inches, right? So, his, when he's visualizing... Him going nineteen feet, right? And he's closing his eyes. His hippocampus can't tell the difference. And we've done this, we've seen the research. The visualization of him going over and the memory of him clearing a 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 going to clear. He's already seen himself doing it. So same thing with mental time travel on bigger issues and bigger systems, not just pole vaulting. So I'd ask you to close your eyes and you're thinking back twenty years to Los Angeles. And you come up with all these details about kind of what it looks like. Now I say, now, let's go twenty years into the future.

• 19:36Speaker 00

  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 or 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.

• 20:21Speaker 00

  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.

• 20:39Lewis Howes?

  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.

• 20:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you can all look, you can also be, so my twenties 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. 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 ask, 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.

• 21:35Speaker 00

  It's very difficult to imagine to what end, right? And so that's the, the second part of kind of, the, the second pillar, I should say, of long path. Is this idea of transgenerational empathy. So you know empathy, right?

• 21:50Lewis Howes?

  This is the second part, right?

• 21:51Speaker 00

  This is the second pillar is transgenerational empathy. So more often than not, it's like, well, you, you need to have compassion for yourself. And, and from that kind of flowing of prosocialness, you can do other things. I don't take a hundred percent. 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, Louis, tell me about your future. And what's gonna hold you, or maybe not you, because you're more actualized than most. But what's gonna hold most people back is you're gonna 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.

• 22:34Speaker 00

  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, and I've seen this for the past couple of years. We look back at our ancestors with, with a lot of disdain, right? I mean, there's a lot, especially, we're going through a kind of-

• 22:48Lewis Howes?

  Resentment, right?

• 22:49Speaker 00

  But disdain or resentment, it can be like what your parents did-

• 22:51Lewis Howes?

  My parents did this, my grandparents did this, and everyone's messed up, and they did these bad things.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  And by the way, we're also seeing in this, 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, and the kind of the failed project of reconstruction. And we look back and transgenerational 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. 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 because maybe they didn't really know any better.

• 23:33Lewis Howes?

  They didn't have skills or tools.

• 23:35Speaker 00

  Skills or tools, and I guarantee, I can guarantee you right now-

• 23:38Lewis Howes?

  And it was the norm.

• 23:39Speaker 00

  It was the norm, and it doesn't make it okay, but it was the norm. And the reason you wanna 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, Louis, 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,

• 24:24Speaker 00

  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.

• 24:40Lewis Howes?

  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. And what I'm hearing you say right there is step one is heal the past.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 24:54Lewis Howes?

  Heal the memories of the past.

• 24:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:56Lewis Howes?

  And this is everything, you know, that I've been studying just on mindset and money and relationships and health. It's like, you gotta 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.

• 25:17Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 25:17Lewis Howes?

  Step one is being aware of the past and healing those things that hold you back.

• 25:25Speaker 00

  And with, a hundred percent, what that does is it drives self-compassion for yourself.

• 25:30Lewis Howes?

  Not beating yourself up and blaming yourself and I'm an idiot.

• 25:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, why did I do this? Why?

• 25:35Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:36Speaker 00

  That, that inner dialogue, we think, by the way, that that-

• 25:40Lewis Howes?

  But you're a futurist, you're not a therapist.

• 25:42Speaker 00

  No, but we-

• 25:43Lewis Howes?

  You know, you're talking about like healing and all these different things now.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  But so, 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 monrails and jet packs and AI and 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-

• 26:16Lewis Howes?

  Or a parent.

• 26:17Speaker 00

  Or a parent. If you want to think about the futures that you want, you have to heal what got you to this point.

• 26:24Lewis Howes?

  Wow, that's powerful. Powerful to hear from someone like you.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  Because you won't be able to, trust me, I've been in the Situation Room. I've been at the top floor of the UN. I've been in all these rooms with all these cats, right? Doing amazing work. They're doing amazing work.

• 26:37Lewis Howes?

  The leaders of the world in different industries.

• 26:39Speaker 00

  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.

• 26:48Lewis Howes?

  World domination, right? That's the whole thing.

• 26:50Speaker 00

  I know, because I know about these folks and it's my job to do these things. I'm like, oh, they're coming into this entire exercise with all this stuff.

• 27:00Lewis Howes?

  Baggage, yeah.

• 27:01Speaker 00

  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 what I'm doing.

• 27:20Lewis Howes?

  Good habits, good skills, good values.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  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. It 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'd been, 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, you know, my two sisters. Now, it's on me to figure out what of that is going to propel me forward

• 28:05Speaker 00

  and what of that is going to kind of hold me back. So I'll give you, 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'd go eat in a restaurant, he never had his back to the door.

• 28:19Lewis Howes?

  So funny, I said this this morning at breakfast. I said that exact same, same thing. I never have my back where like people can walk behind me. I always wanted to observe what attack or potential threat there is.

• 28:31Speaker 00

  So the question is, where, so we won't, 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 situation and see pattern? So part of that helps you build this.

• 28:42Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  Part of that holds you back in terms of trust and a whole bunch of issues. So part of it is kind of parsing what that is. So for me, as a futurist, it was thinking, 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.

• 28:58Lewis Howes?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 28:59Speaker 00

  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 is, you know, 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.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  So the intertidal zone, right, when we think about oceans, is that, 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? You have muscles that have evolved to actually hold water when the water goes down. And you have starfish that find pools. And it's just, it's, it's, it's an amazing place. So we are in that right now on the planet, especially kind of in what we call the kind of the global north. Why? So intertidals happen when the narratives, the stories, the institutions, the things that we use to kind of guide us start to fall away, right?

• 30:26Speaker 00

  So one of the ways we, 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 for 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 10,000 or 12,000 years ago. We go from hunter-gather to actually thinking about staying in one place. Civilization, right? And that's a massive intertitle. Because before that, the way you and I ordered the world was by stars and mythic structures. Now, we're staying in one place. Why?

• 31:09Speaker 00

  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 hunter-gatherer because now we're just all in cubicles. It was actually really rough back then.

• 31:21Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:22Speaker 00

  Not everywhere.

• 31:23Lewis Howes?

  No comfort.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  There's no penicillin, there was no wifi. 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.

• 31:35Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 31:35Speaker 00

  Right, at night, because we did something wrong. If you and I did something wrong in that small band, everyone would be like, Louis, you took too much of me. Or you shorted 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 Louis are doing behind walls.

• 32:08Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 32:09Speaker 00

  The whole group. Because remember, up until that point, I always had eyes on you. And I saw what you were doing. Always. And there was no room. And I would, you know, 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 and 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 intertitle. These things that we take for granted, I mean, that's innovation, right? From polytheism to monotheism, that's some deep intertitle creativity, right? And look, intertitles always come about because you have kind of constrained food resources,

• 32:52Speaker 00

  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 put it back together again. Things are system, they're interrelated, right? And so, that's across the board for

• 33:33Speaker 00

  everything. So, we see our ways of how Ari and Lewis go about the world starting to break down, the things that we believed in are now 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 an intertidal? How do you successfully get through this moment as an individual and as part of a larger collective?

• 34:17Lewis Howes?

  How do we do it?

• 34:17Speaker 00

  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-

• 34:30Lewis Howes?

  Relationship to yourself, relationship to others, relationship to the world, to the next generation, relationship to the past, the future, everything.

• 34:37Speaker 00

  That's it. So, you can't-

• 34:39Lewis Howes?

  First to the past.

• 34:40Speaker 00

  First to the past, and that recognition, right? Like, remember, we, up until a couple of 100 years ago, a couple of thousand years ago, where you are on the planet, or in someplace happening right now, we had systems, we had ritualistic elder-based systems that initiated. So, if we look at what's happening right now with the rise of psychedelics and ayahuasca and people going away for 8-day experiences, this was the norm for tens of thousands of years.

• 35:04Lewis Howes?

  Right. When you turn 13, you're gonna go through something.

• 35:06Speaker 00

  You had a purity ritual, you're gonna go through something. You know, my daughters just had their bot mixed, twin daughters, and I kept thinking the whole time, "Oh, we've been doing this for thousands of years." And now, look, in the modern world, it's like, do the invitations go out? Will the caterers 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, bar mitzvah ceremony, where we thank our elders and we thank our ancestors. But in general, in society, we have lost that.

• 35:36Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 35:36Speaker 00

  We've lost that ability to kind of connect and be in a relate and be, what we call in Buddhism, right relation.

• 35:42Lewis Howes?

  Right relation?

• 35:43Speaker 00

  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...

• 35:52Lewis Howes?

  Your tribe.

• 35:53Speaker 00

  Your tribe.

• 35:53Lewis Howes?

  Tribe, yeah.

• 35:54Speaker 00

  But you think, it's interesting, I was thinking about this the other day, and you just gave the word. You're like, you're 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, right? It's all about, if we look at all of our movies with the heroes, it's always, the hero always does it alone. But any, you know, 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 did this on my own." They're always like, "Oh, it was my band of brothers," those are the people that would... 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

• 36:38Speaker 00

  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, and one of the things, I don't want to 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.

• 37:03Lewis Howes?

  It's true, and it kept you alive.

• 37:05Speaker 00

  Kept you alive. But it was literally a direct connection. And those belly buttons go back tens of thousands of, if not 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 they call it 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, a husband, a person. But if we want to move forward in a positive flourishing way through this intertidal, we have to flip it. It has to go from me to we.

• 37:50Speaker 00

  We have to do that. And so 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, at 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 about that, that becomes how you start to have empathy for those who will be coming and actually start feeling.

• 38:35Speaker 00

  Because if I was to say to you, Louis, like, you know, tell me, let's talk about, you know, four generations from now, describing to me. You can 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, Neil 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,

• 39:20Speaker 00

  which is one of the most difficult things that you have to do.

• 39:22Lewis Howes?

  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 like my highest future self is my end, to what end is, thinking... You know, 10 years from now, I'll be 39, uh, 49, almost 50, I guess. Am I really proud of the actions I took today?

• 39:41Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 39:41Lewis Howes?

  That are going to make my future self proud to like, wow, I'm so glad you showed up that way for me.

• 39:46Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 39:46Lewis Howes?

  In the future.

• 39:47Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 39:47Lewis Howes?

  Right? And it's funny because I have a, I've been talking about this a lot on my show, but I've got a, on my phone, photo of my childhood self, right? And over the last year and a half, I've been doing a healing process to reconnect.

• 39:59Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 40:00Lewis Howes?

  And have empathy for my childhood self at the many different psychological stages of feeling confusion and stress and overwhelm and

• 40:07Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 40:07Lewis Howes?

  Abuse and all these different things that, you know, kids go through. And having compassion, empathy, and allowing to heal the old, the, the child within me, the psychological

• 40:18Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 40:18Lewis Howes?

  Wounded child within me.

• 40:20Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 40:20Lewis Howes?

  At five, 10, 12, 21, 30, 35, you know, 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?

• 40:41Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 40:42Lewis Howes?

  And I think that process has really helped me constantly be grateful, be present, but also be future thinking at the same time. And hopefully thinking gener- generationally, like, how am I going to pass this down to my children as well? So they don't have the same traumas that I had.

• 40:58Speaker 00

  So, I mean, so it's, it's amazing that you have that on your phone. And but we're, we're very soon, we're going to tweak that a little bit and I'll tell you how. So how harshly UCLA did this, has done a bunch of research on this, where he'll take people and he'll put them into an FMRI machine, right? 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 like college freshmen, but he puts them in. Who else is going to go to an FMRI machine? And he slides them in and, you know, he'll say, okay, I want you to think about yourself right now. In the present moment, you know, this is an oversimplification because you're not going to slice my head open right now, and like this part of their brain will activate. And they'll say, okay, I want you to, and he'll take someone famous, he'll say like,

• 41:40Speaker 00

  I want you to think about Matt Damon, 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.

• 41:53Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 41:54Speaker 00

  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 other group, two things. One, he has them write letters to their future self.

• 42:07Lewis Howes?

  I love this exercise.

• 42:09Speaker 00

  Right?

• 42:09Lewis Howes?

  I love this. I've done this many times.

• 42:11Speaker 00

  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 in this, for some of this research, 10 years. And you look at the photo every day for 30 seconds.

• 42:23Lewis Howes?

  Of you 10 years.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  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.

• 42:46Lewis Howes?

  For that future self.

• 42:47Speaker 00

  For that future self. You're thinking about, so now you're no longer todayist, you're no longer short-termist. You're actually thinking much broader. And so, so you go to longpath.org, and there's a little section that says, "Future Me", and there's, and there's a couple of things you can do. One, you can take a photo of your, you know, a photo of yourself and age it 10 years.

• 43:06Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  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, so I obviously, I did this. And so on my desk at home, you know what there is, right?

• 43:19Lewis Howes?

  There's a photo of your future self.

• 43:20Speaker 00

  Well, there's a photo of me when I was six years old.

• 43:22Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 43:23Speaker 00

  Right? Which is kind of like, oh, actually, it's a photo of me when I'm five years old. I'll get to why I did that in a second. There's 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.

• 43:31Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 43:32Speaker 00

  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, look, there's other things. We also, 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, our kids, and then we have a current family one. And then I have one frame that's empty.

• 43:53Lewis Howes?

  Oh.

• 43:54Speaker 00

  And I keep it there. And that's for my grandkids or future generations.

• 43:58Lewis Howes?

  Oh my gosh, you got the chills.

• 43:59Speaker 00

  And so I see that every day as I walk into the kitchen.

• 44:01Lewis Howes?

  Oh my gosh.

• 44:02Speaker 00

  Because what I'm thinking is the things that I'm doing, why, you know, what's my why? Like, why, you know, like, why do I get up in the morning? There's obviously, no, look, ego's a great thing. It's a great tool. So some of it is like, I'm, I'm gonna go on Lewis Howes. I'm gonna write a book and I'm gonna get on Lewis Howes, like the number one guy on the planet. I'm gonna do it 100%. But you know this because you've had success in multiple different areas. That's actually not enough to eat. You can still do that.

• 44:24Lewis Howes?

  Self fulfillment.

• 44:25Speaker 00

  You still feel, you'll get there and you'll be on the stage and the, I've been on, I've spoken in front of thousands of people and afterwards, I was like, that was, that must've been amazing. I'm like, eh.

• 44:33Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 44:34Speaker 00

  Like, because I did it for like a futuring thing. Eh, okay. But when you start to put what you're doing in a much larger context about the, so think about, there's been about, tell them who you talk to, there's been a rut between 80 to 100 billion Homo sapiens on planet Earth since.

• 44:51Lewis Howes?

  80 to 100 billion?

• 44:52Speaker 00

  80 to 100 billion.

• 44:53Lewis Howes?

  It's crazy.

• 44:54Speaker 00

  If you go, tell them where you want to draw the line between astropiloticus 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 gonna, we're gonna successfully navigate this intertribal 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, 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.

• 45:27Lewis Howes?

  That's crazy.

• 45:28Speaker 00

  And so what ends up happening is what is it that, what is the legacy? What are the heirlooms that we want to give them and that we want to give? 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 1,000 years from now. And people are looking in the history books, or not books, or whatever, in the

• 45:51Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, digital books.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  Brain machine interface, and like, who is this Lewis Howes character? Like, what is, I mean, there's big statues of you in Central Park.

• 45:58Lewis Howes?

  What is that, yeah?

• 45:59Speaker 00

  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, and 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?

• 46:19Lewis Howes?

  To set them up for success.

• 46:20Speaker 00

  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 of our today.

• 46:30Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 46:30Speaker 00

  So, I, I eat meat, right?

• 46:33Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, me too.

• 46:33Speaker 00

  Like, I try to be healthy about it, and it's organic and free range. Look, 200 years from now, like, roughly, some, 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, blah. And our, our descendants are gonna look back and be like, "What was Ari and Lewis there? That was horrific, horrific." And by the way, take, go forward 800 years, and whatever they were doing, folks will look at it and be like, "That was horrific."

• 47:03Lewis Howes?

  They're barbaric.

• 47:04Speaker 00

  Barbaric.

• 47:04Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 47:05Speaker 00

  Again, it doesn't mean we shouldn't stop doing evil, those things, but, so let's, so there's a little bit of hubris, it's a, put it in the 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? Or, or, you know, so one of the things that, 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?

• 47:33Lewis Howes?

  No, I'm telling.

• 47:34Speaker 00

  So in meetings, he would, well, there's two things he did that are very, that are amazing. And I wanted 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. 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.

• 48:03Lewis Howes?

  With like the computer and the Amazon sign.

• 48:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, and the Amazon spray paint. It's a wood, it's literally, it's a door.

• 48:08Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 48:09Speaker 00

  And so, part of it is, don't forget where you came from. Like, we may be this whole thing. But don't forget, it's always, it's always that first day, and that's what that, so that's always interesting is to remember your past. And not, because 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.

• 48:31Lewis Howes?

  You could hire someone for that.

• 48:33Speaker 00

  You can do a lot with that. And here, though, 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.

• 48:43Lewis Howes?

  What would they want?

• 48:45Speaker 00

  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?

• 49:00Lewis Howes?

  That's interesting.

• 49:01Speaker 00

  And so, when you don't know what to do, you're not sure like what direction to go into. You could 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 Louis, future generations, or the trillion 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.

• 49:40Speaker 00

  So the side benefit of transgenerational empathy, besides laying out this thing for future generations, it makes you a better human today.

• 49:48Lewis Howes?

  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.

• 50:00Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 50:00Lewis Howes?

  Because, you know, when something happens and we look back at it, we're always like, okay, I see where that, why that is that way, and I'm, you know, I see the lesson there. And 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 myself 10 years from now.

• 50:18Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 50:18Lewis Howes?

  He's my hero.

• 50:19Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 50:19Lewis Howes?

  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, I'll never meet him. And yeah, it's interesting.

• 50:37Speaker 00

  And so it's the same thing, but now expanded out over several generations. So one of the issues that I talked about was like the difficulty that we have in imagining different tomorrows. And why in this intertidal, it's this kind of, both kind of creativity, but also kind of chaos. And so we have to step back. There's a, there's this term that's in the book, this idea of the official future.

• 50:59Lewis Howes?

  Official.

• 51:00Speaker 00

  The official future, I put that in quotes, right? So the official future can be an individual, like I'm gonna, you know, growing up in my family, the official future is I'm gonna go to college, graduate school, get married, have 3.2 kids, I'm a... 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 gonna drive electric cars. It's a certain official future. So, and we talked about this much earlier, that the official future, that story, was for generations, always came usually from the priests, right? It was those that were closest to God over the past 10,000 years.

• 51:42Lewis Howes?

  The wisest.

• 51:42Speaker 00

  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 the, this idea of an official future, 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? In a monotheistic faith, in a number of them, the afterlife, remember, was invented as a control mechanism to get you to do certain things, to build morality.

• 52:21Lewis Howes?

  To do good things here, yes.

• 52:22Speaker 00

  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, right? The fastest growing group in America right now are what we call nuns, N-O-N-E-S. 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?

• 53:05Speaker 00

  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. It's not... 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.

• 53:30Lewis Howes?

  Just to have some direction to go.

• 53:32Speaker 00

  We need direction, we can't...

• 53:34Lewis Howes?

  What happens if we don't find that? Do we just go into drugs and addiction?

• 53:38Speaker 00

  Drugs, addiction, bad habits, and we become very, very, very short-termistic.

• 53:42Lewis Howes?

  It's all about in here, now.

• 53:44Speaker 00

  It's all here now, the pleasure right now.

• 53:45Lewis Howes?

  Instant gratification.

• 53:46Speaker 00

  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.

• 54:02Lewis Howes?

  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?

• 54:19Speaker 00

  And 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 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.

• 55:04Speaker 00

  There's an opening story, I can read it, you can read it. It's like literally in the first couple of pages.

• 55:10Lewis Howes?

  I'll let you read it, go ahead. Right here, this one?

• 55:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I can do, I'll do it verbatim. So, this beautiful image of a tree, and 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. Honi asked him, 'How many years will it take until it will bear fruit?'" And the man said to him, "Not for 70 years." And Honi 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, 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?

• 55:56Speaker 00

  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 carob tree planting, right? 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 want to 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...

• 56:40Lewis Howes?

  This is being kind to people on the street.

• 56:42Speaker 00

  Being kind to people.

• 56:42Lewis Howes?

  Opening the door, which is...

• 56:43Speaker 00

  And going back to your earliest question, which is, "Well, what do we do about the, you know, the folks that can't think like this?" So, part of it is being kind, right? But 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, you know, as a chef, you only have a certain number of ingredients. 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 thing, this trim tab.

• 57:25Speaker 00

  So Buckminster Fuller, who was a 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 US 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. It 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.

• 58:05Speaker 00

  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 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, you know, I address in the book, there's all these ways, there's this massive Trim Tab. Like, yes, we have to electrify everything. We have to get off of fossil fuel.

• 58:44Lewis Howes?

  Renewable energy, everything.

• 58:46Speaker 00

  We know all that, and for 99% of the planet, we all know it, but we're actually not in the business.

• 58:51Lewis Howes?

  Right, we can't do it.

• 58:52Speaker 00

  We can maybe, if we can afford, we can do some of it, and 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.

• 59:11Lewis Howes?

  That's not real change.

• 59:12Speaker 00

  That's not real change.

• 59:15Lewis Howes?

  But it kind of is.

• 59:16Speaker 00

  But it kind of is.

• 59:17Lewis Howes?

  It's like the work at home first.

• 59:18Speaker 00

  You do, you take care of your own house, do the work. Look, I don't say, you know, yes, you should protest, yes, you should vote, yes, you should 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 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,

• 1:00:00Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:00:09Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:00:18Lewis Howes?

  When was the first time you wrote a letter to your future self?

• 1:00:21Speaker 00

  Eighth grade.

• 1:00:22Lewis Howes?

  Eighth grade.

• 1:00:23Speaker 00

  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 F M R 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 Louis or future Ari. By the way, a priori, that has to happen before you can connect to future generations.

• 1:00:47Lewis Howes?

  It's your future self first, and then if you do.

• 1:00:50Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:01:01Lewis Howes?

  What is that, just on the way?

• 1:01:03Speaker 00

  Gums, worked for the gums and teeth, right? And I said, well, you know, what's the most, now knowing, now that you do this.

• 1:01:09Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, you see a lot of nasty stuff.

• 1:01:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, you see a lot of nasty stuff, so what's the most important thing you would tell your 20-year-old self?

• 1:01:16Lewis Howes?

  Floss.

• 1:01:17Speaker 00

  Floss.

• 1:01:17Lewis Howes?

  That's it.

• 1:01:18Speaker 00

  And I said, what about, and so I asked a dentist friend of mine, what's the number one thing you'd 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 your 70s or 80s? They're like, start stretching in your 20s.

• 1:01:37Lewis Howes?

  I asked a Dr. Perlmutter, who's written many New York Times bestselling books, I don't know if you know who he is? 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.

• 1:01:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:50Lewis Howes?

  It's like.

• 1:01:51Speaker 00

  That'd probably be mine.

• 1:01:52Lewis Howes?

  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, so. But that's interesting that, yeah, floss is one of those things. It's again, writing a letter to your future, what are your future self going to be proud that you did? To keep you happy, healthy, whole, fulfilled feeling, right? It's like not suffering in your future.

• 1:02:16Speaker 00

  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 need, 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...

• 1:02:34Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 1:02:35Speaker 00

  But it's not...

• 1:02:36Lewis Howes?

  Which is beginning.

• 1:02:36Speaker 00

  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, the 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

• 1:03:19Speaker 00

  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? Thinking, recognizing that there's an official future.

• 1:03:30Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:03:30Speaker 00

  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 a desired future for Lewis?

• 1:03:39Lewis Howes?

  Possible futures, examined.

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:03:42Lewis Howes?

  Official future.

• 1:03:43Speaker 00

  So in the book, we talk about specifically not just desired future, but examined desired future. Because we went in reverse order.

• 1:03:49Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:03:50Speaker 00

  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 we start doing the work around transnational empathy and thinking about that kind of the 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 was, that I was using to build out my desired future kind of were some baggage from the past.

• 1:04:22Lewis Howes?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:04:23Speaker 00

  Right, like, maybe...

• 1:04:23Lewis Howes?

  I was creating from a wound as opposed to from a healed, healthy place.

• 1:04:27Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:04:28Lewis Howes?

  I was... Becoming a doctor because I was, you know, influenced in a negative way to become a doctor.

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  I didn't want to use that example because it's so cliche, but I was raised.

• 1:04:37Lewis Howes?

  I built a million dollar business to, you know, have more success and power as opposed to to make an impact through my product.

• 1:04:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, or even, you know, there's a story, there's a story.

• 1:04:46Lewis Howes?

  Is that how you were raised though?

• 1:04:47Speaker 00

  A hundred percent. 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 boat in the afternoon.

• 1:04:55Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, that's good.

• 1:04:56Speaker 00

  You know, the story, he goes.

• 1:04:57Lewis Howes?

  Go ahead.

• 1:04:58Speaker 00

  This guy's in his boat and he's kind of looking at the guy, he's 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 and 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. He's like, well, then you could relax in the afternoon. He goes, that's what I'm doing right now.

• 1:05:19Lewis Howes?

  You could retire and then.

• 1:05:20Speaker 00

  And do this.

• 1:05:21Lewis Howes?

  You got a boat and fish.

• 1:05:22Speaker 00

  I'm doing it right now.

• 1:05:23Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:24Speaker 00

  So that's the examined part of like so much of what we think we should do is what society tells us or what our parents or what 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.

• 1:05:43Lewis Howes?

  I'm so happy you're saying this because I feel like you, you come from a, I would call it, I don't know, like an intellectual world, right? 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, 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 have, you'll be thinking differently of why you're creating the thing you're thinking.

• 1:06:24Speaker 00

  A hundred percent.

• 1:06:25Lewis Howes?

  It'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.

• 1:06:42Lewis Howes?

  Analytical, intellectual people in general, I want them to think more this way.

• 1:06:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:06:47Lewis Howes?

  From the heart.

• 1:06:48Speaker 00

  That's one of the, look, this is, I came.

• 1:06:51Lewis Howes?

  This should be like, this should be like, 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.

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  I mean.

• 1:07:02Lewis Howes?

  You know what I mean?

• 1:07:03Speaker 00

  Says Lewis Howes. 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.

• 1:07:12Lewis Howes?

  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 gotta be some growth somewhere from an individual level, in society level, but it's what is it the growth for?

• 1:07:35Speaker 00

  Yeah, to what end?

• 1:07:36Lewis Howes?

  To what end?

• 1:07:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:37Lewis Howes?

  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 and more, all that stuff, right? And I realized, why am I still suffering inside?

• 1:07:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:07:53Lewis Howes?

  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.

• 1:07:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:08:00Lewis Howes?

  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 how 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 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.

• 1:08:43Lewis Howes?

  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.

• 1:08:51Speaker 00

  It was, it's more than renewable, it's regenerative.

• 1:08:53Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:08:54Speaker 00

  And this is where I think, this is what really we're talking about, right? It's 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 renew. Regenerative is actually making it whole again.

• 1:09:06Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:09:06Speaker 00

  Because we think about, I'm gonna go back to Ari and Lewis.

• 1:09:09Lewis Howes?

  Yes, and the saber-toothed tigers.

• 1:09:11Speaker 00

  There's many biologists who would argue with the saber-toothed tiger being, okay, whatever. So, it's a metaphor.

• 1:09:19Speaker 00

  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 100% vibing, 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 this intertidal, this, 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, and so, I don't say it as a, as an environmentalist in the kind

• 1:10:03Speaker 00

  of the climate environment, I say this as someone who cares about the mental environment. We are broken, we are disconnected. The emotional environment, we are, is 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.

• 1:10:18Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:10:19Speaker 00

  Why is it difficult 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, the Heidegger, Nietzsche, all of them all said the same thing. We are separate from nature, we can dominate, we, 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. Are you thinking about the kind of polarization and how we interact with other human beings? And where that's coming from? That's not oxytocin, that's not dopamine, that's aggression, that's cortisol, that's adrenaline.

• 1:10:57Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:10:58Speaker 00

  That is Ari and Lewis in constant fight-or-flight mode from the world. And here's the, the terrible part about it is you can make a ton of money off of that.

• 1:11:07Lewis Howes?

  Oh yeah, tons.

• 1:11:08Speaker 00

  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, if you drive that.

• 1:11:16Lewis Howes?

  It'll never fulfill the wound, for why you're creating that for.

• 1:11:20Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 1:11:21Lewis Howes?

  You'll never be able to fill the wound up.

• 1:11:22Speaker 00

  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 you know, 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?

• 1:11:59Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 1:12:00Speaker 00

  That's it. I mean, your work is already doing this, and now, all I'm asking you or anyone who's listening is, is to add the next layer, not because it's responsibility or out of guilt, because I think it'll make the work you do that much more powerful. You know, give, 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?

• 1:12:20Lewis Howes?

  It's a meaningful work.

• 1:12:21Speaker 00

  It's a meaningful work. Meaningful work in your own lifespan, sure. And by the way, sometimes that's just enough.

• 1:12:26Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 1:12:27Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:12:37Lewis Howes?

  And what would be the prompt then for the future self, uh, letter? Let's just say that's, if, if people only do one action and they do this future self letter, what would be the prompt to write to themselves?

• 1:12:49Speaker 00

  So, it's how the book ends, so I'm not gonna give it too much away, but it's, here's how I became a great ancestor.

• 1:12:56Lewis Howes?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:12:57Speaker 00

  Look, you can be a good ancestor, you can be, we're all gonna be ancestors, we're all gonna 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 to know that we're gonna die at one point. And everything we do is to avoid that death.

• 1:13:21Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:13:22Speaker 00

  And this goes back to Ari and Lewis being kicked out of the cave. And so, one of the problems with answering that question of, am I being a great, am I being a great ancestor?

• 1:13:32Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:13:38Lewis Howes?

  It's crazy, right?

• 1:13:39Speaker 00

  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...

• 1:13:52Lewis Howes?

  Well, the country of Bhutan, I think, focuses five times a day on their death.

• 1:13:56Speaker 00

  100%.

• 1:13:57Lewis Howes?

  They're supposed to be one of the happier...

• 1:13:58Speaker 00

  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 gonna 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?" Which doesn't mean I passed a piece of legislation or I fed the world...

• 1:14:26Lewis Howes?

  Sold a company.

• 1:14:27Speaker 00

  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? 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 Louis, with his audience, was that the stick moment where I said, 'Trust'?" And like, but the trust isn't just in my actions, it's who I am and how I am. That's what the Bhutan is.

• 1:15:02Lewis Howes?

  Your way of being.

• 1:15:03Speaker 00

  Your 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 and I did my best. That's the yardstick. You know, as an athlete, there's always, for pole vaulting, it was always measured in inches, right? For the 4x100, it was down to our milliseconds. 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...

• 1:15:36Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:15:55Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. Man, this is inspiring stuff. I didn't know you're gonna be speaking therapy talk over here, but I love it.

• 1:16:01Speaker 00

  That's, you know, that's the way we go here.

• 1:16:04Lewis Howes?

  Um, we got a couple of final questions for you.

• 1:16:05Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 1:16:06Lewis Howes?

  Uh, but I want people to get this book. I think it's gonna be really transformational for you. Long Path: Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs, an antidote to short terminism. Terminism?

• 1:16:16Speaker 00

  Terminism.

• 1:16:17Lewis Howes?

  Terminism?

• 1:16:17Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:18Lewis Howes?

  Short termism. Um, so make sure you guys check this out. Get a couple of copies. They can get it at your website.

• 1:16:24Speaker 00

  Longpath.org forward slash book or basically anywhere on the planet, books are sold on or offline.

• 1:16:30Lewis Howes?

  Get Long Path. Really inspiring. Uh, this is a question I ask everyone at the end. I mentioned it before. It's called the three truths.

• 1:16:36Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:16:36Lewis Howes?

  So imagine you live as long as you want and you, and every day you've been proud of the, the, the, being a great ancestor for the future, right? For your future generations. But it is the last day many years away.

• 1:16:50Speaker 00

  Many, many, many years.

• 1:16:52Lewis Howes?

  You live as long as you want, but eventually you gotta turn the lights off.

• 1:16:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:16:56Lewis Howes?

  And you, uh, you also accomplish everything you want to create. You know, your end game, your to what end is all meaningful and purposeful and fulfilling. But for whatever reason, we don't have access to this book or anything you've ever shared.

• 1:17:07Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:17:09Lewis Howes?

  Hypothetical, it's all gone.

• 1:17:11Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:17:11Lewis Howes?

  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?

• 1:17:23Speaker 00

  Well, you already took floss.

• 1:17:24Lewis Howes?

  Yes, so three more.

• 1:17:26Speaker 00

  The, the three truths, the first one is act as if though you are a great ancestor. Because you are.

• 1:17:36Speaker 00

  The second is never, never be afraid to love fully.

• 1:17:43Speaker 00

  And really fully, really in everything that means. And you know, I was thinking, I was getting dressed coming on to Louis' house, right? And I'm so, I just put on whatever, I was, you know, all black, not that hard. But, 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, 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.

• 1:18:24Lewis Howes?

  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, a we. Or how can I be of service, how can I use myself to be of service to others?

• 1:18:38Speaker 00

  We are vessels for, for future generations. And I don't mean that in 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.

• 1:18:52Lewis Howes?

  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, you know, educational talk, but speaking from a place that I think every human being needs to understand, which is first, learn how to heal.

• 1:19:37Lewis Howes?

  Anything that's been holding you back and understanding, 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?

• 1:19:51Lewis Howes?

  And is it the best thing I should be doing for this part of my life? Or should I reconsider? Is it, you know, 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.

• 1:20:31Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:20:32Lewis Howes?

  Uh, my final question, what is your definition of greatness?

• 1:20:36Speaker 00

  I'm gonna have to go back, you know, my, my definition of greatness is living in accordance with being a great ancestor.

• 1:20:42Lewis Howes?

  There you go. All right. My man. Appreciate it.

• 1:20:45Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:20:45Lewis Howes?

  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 want to 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.