For People Who FEEL BEHIND In Life, Watch This To Manifest Your DREAM FUTURE | Ari Wallach

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

You gotta have a dream.

The school of greatness.

Really?

Yeah. Please welcome Lewis Howers.

Why is thinking long term or long path an important thing on an individual level and a planet level over short term thinking?

First of all, thank you for having me. It's a great question. So let's step back because even though the subtitle of the book is an antidote for short termism, I don't want people to think, oh well, short termism is inherently bad. Because here's the thing. If Ari and Lewis are walking on the plains of the Serengeti 20,000 years ago and all of a sudden an animal with very large teeth jumps out from behind a tree, you and I should not sit there and have a long conversation about what to do. We. 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, at a collective, at a planetary level, that's when it's bad. So first of all, let's say what.

Type of people make short term decisions.

Most of the time, there's a large percentage of the planet who is literally existing on a dollar a day. They are making survival mode. If we take Maslow's pyramid, there are folks that are literally just trying to get by and you have to think short term. So first of all, it's a privilege to even start thinking in these larger, more expansive, temporally expansive ways. So for a lot of folks, this is just their reality. Now, one of the reasons I wrote the book is so there are fewer of those folks, right? So for those of us who are able to have conversations like this and listen to this or watch this, we can actually start making larger systemic changes. So those people who are literally struggling, you know, right now, if I want, when I cook breakfast, I turned on a switch, there are people who will have to walk five miles, often very dangerous five miles just to collect wood. So let's recognize that a lot of us make short term decisions though, who could be making longer term decisions, because the overall kind of structures that we exist in, in society are incentivizing that, right? So if I work with CEOs and I meet these CEOs of Fortune 50 companies and they're like, all right, this is great. I want to talk about the big future. Let's go out six or eight months, right? Because they're incentivized on a quarterly return basis, the money they literally make at the end of each quarter is based on their stock price. And so what ends up happening? That incentivized structure. I worked with CEOs before who will call me up at the end of a day and they're like, well, I don't know if we can move forward with this larger futureing project. And I say, well, why? They're like, did you see our stock price today? I said, today? Today. I said, today? What do you mean? Well, they said, well, look, the thing is it was up at noon, but then it dropped a little bit. I don't know if we can do this.

Oh my gosh.

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 and calling people trying to raise money for the next election.

Really?

Yeah, I was literally on a.

Four years later.

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

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

Yeah, yeah, four years or two years. I was on unnamed senator was sitting next to me in The Acela from D.C. to New York. And this was about a day and a half after the election. Cause I was down in D.C. for it. I was making my way back up to New York. I'm not going to say his name, but this person was heading up. 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. Thank you for your support. As you know, we've opened up another pack for my next election.

They just won.

They just won. I mean, literally, they're probably wearing the same shoes they wore at their election night party. And so we have these systems that are set up. And by the way, it's in business, it's in politics, it's in our lives. I open the book with a story. I'm in the kitchen and my phone starts buzzing. There's a notification and I look at it and my daughter had missed turning in a Spanish assignment and she had missed it and it had been eight seconds since she missed was due. But it's just a weekly assignment. So already I was getting kind of this notification and we can talk about what that does to my brain, but I'm getting notified that we need an immediate response because what happened? So these larger incentivized systems are driving us to more short termistic behaviors beyond just Lewis and Ari being chased into Serengeti. Again, for a lot of people that's how they have to live. But for those of us who don't have to struggle at that level, we have to break out of this. And so this book is about that mindset that we need to adopt to take us out of that.

I think on the other copy that I had it talked about connecting to the, I can't remember, you call it the end game or what's the to what end?

The T list.

To what end? Yeah. And it's like figuring out your values, your vision and to what end? What are you creating your life for? What is it all about?

To what end?

So what does that mean to thinking about and should we start with to what end and then reverse engineer to now?

So this is great, we're going right into it. So for 20 years I've been helping the United nations, the State Department, some folks at the White House, big corporations, philanthropists, think about where they want things to go in the future. And what I found time and time again was when we get into these conversations, they'd say, well, I want to fix this issue or solve this problem. But usually what they consider the Future was only 4, 5, 8 years out.

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

So that was the future. And so what happened was I started saying, well it became clear to me in these conversations over the past 20 years that it was becoming more and more difficult for folks to think about the future they wanted for all sorts of reasons around kind of how we've atrophied our imagination. We don't even know what that is. We were talking earlier about when we look at the media environment, right? So I have 13 year old twin daughters and I go to their bookshelf and I see every kind of tween novel they're reading and of Course, because for what I do, I'm looking to see, well, what if these are of the future, right? And a lot of them are, and I won't name names, so 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, 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 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 could argue that's in the far past, but we won't 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, 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 look, what I didn't want to do is I didn't want to provide answers. So someone was like, you know, this is an amazing book, but you don't tell me what's going to happen. I want to know what'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 going to happen, right? As opposed to us stepping back and saying, what do we want to happen? To what end? So in developing Long Path as an applied mindset, there's three components. There's futures thinking, there's transgenerational empathy, and there's Telos, which means basically ultimate aim and goal. So you started us kind of at the end, but I'm going to start there. But then we'll see how we use the other ones to kind of create this mindset. So when we go into decision making mode, whether it's like, what do I have for breakfast? Do I eat this or that? Because right now I can tell you eat your broccoli and eat your kale. You know, like, okay. Or we can put it into a much larger frame and living and acting and speaking healthily actually becomes something you want to do because it's part of your legacy. So the. To what end? Is incredibly important to be able to answer that question. Now, one of the reasons it's very difficult, especially in the west, in the Western canon, which is, you know, most of us who kind of are probably potentially listening, is that when we think about what does it mean to have like the good life or to be a fully formed human or even going back to the Stoics, the one thing they all have in common is what I call, like a lifespan bias. It's always from the birth of Lewis to the death of Lewis. Like, how do you actualize and maximize that unit of time? It makes sense. And I'll keep speaking about you in the third person, but it makes sense because Lewis is the one 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, let alone a societal level, started well before Lewis and are going to go on well after Lewis. And so I ran track.

Me too.

I'm sure if we Compare, were you.

100 or were you a distance guy?

So I got 4 by 100 relay. Okay. And then I'll get into this other one in a second. Pole vault.

I did pole vault and 100 as well. I was decathlete, so I did okay. So the pole vault is challenging.

Pole vaults are challenging. But I use that in how I think about long paths. So let's talk about the relay. The most important part, according to my coach, Ted Tillian, the handoff. The handoff. It's the transition zone.

It is.

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

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

You just have to feel it. Trust. And you got it's trust.

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

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 going to. Even though I'm in a relay race, I think I'm in a 100 by myself, so I'm just going to run this thing out. But you're not. 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, at some point you're gonna say, stick. And here's the crazy thing. You're not yelling stick when you're in your 80s or you're on the backside and you're kind of ending things. You're thinking, okay, how am I gonna pass the baton accident? You are saying stick. In every single action you take every day, from how you greet the security guard downstairs to how do you talk to your colleagues to how you talk to yourself, your own internal dialogue. 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. Doesn't mean I don't want to be the best Ari possible. You don't want to be the best Louis possible, but your ultimate aim and goal should be one that transcends just your own life. And now think about it. What does that look like at scale? I mean, whether people call it long path or not, but kind of a transgenerational way of thinking and connecting. Now you start to have something really interesting, because I think about the work that you've done on yourself and those who are kind of listening and watching, they're doing all this amazing work. But what ends up happening more often than not is we don't think about it as kind of a ladder to the next generation. We think, well, this is my own lifespan, and I'm going to be a more actualized, more great, more Powerful Ari by the end of my life, full stop. But if you're. To what end? Becomes about the larger species and society flourishing for generations to come. And you now put yourself in the okay, here's my life. I want to be the best version of myself. But it's not just for myself. It's so that the next generation, and this doesn't necessarily mean you have to have your own genetic kids. It can be all the next generation that you influence. If you're your best possible self and you are that way to others when they are born and they get raised, they actually are starting off on a higher step. It's like track, right? It's like the 4 by 100. If your second or third runs with a sick fast time, you set up the next generation. So 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 doesn't mean you can't work on stuff for yourself, but it puts it into a larger context.

So to what end? Also what people say is what's your end goal? What's your end goal for this project, for this career, for this thing?

You're doing well. So yes and no. So what's your end game? More often than not is like, Louis, what's your end game with everything that you're doing here? More often than. And I won't say, I won't put you on the spot if someone say, all right, what's your end game 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 up. So they set the next generation and the next generation.

Is that your. To what end?

That's my. To what end? My. So I.

How's the exercise go?

So there's a dozen of them in the book. So there's multiple different kind of cognitive exercises ask you to kind of imagine different futures, imagine your ancestors, imagine future generations. And all of the exercises in the book are basically back ended by peer reviewed research about how you get people to think differently about themselves and future generations. And so there's this guy at nyu, Yaakov Troup. He does amazing Research on what's called basically mental time travel.

I love this stuff.

So mental time travel.

I love mental time travel.

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

An athlete, so Ethan Cross is a professor as well, who talks about one of these things in his book called Chatter. Yes, mental time travel, I think it's powerful.

So mental time travel. What Jacob 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 could be like, 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, luz, tell me about Los Angeles 50 years ago. Now, I'm asking you to go back in a historical way and I'll make it even easier. I'll say go back. I'll say, let's say, let's use a 20 year time frame because you're a young man. So I say go back 20 years, right? And all of a sudden you start giving me all these details of what your life was like, 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. But here's the great thing, and you know this, as an athlete, if you close your. And I was just, and I was just saying, 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 my height. It'll be a very embarrassing part of the conversation. So let's take Sergey Bubka, one of the best jumper vaulters of all time. 19. 19, yeah. So Sergey is sitting back and thinking like, okay, he sees what he was. You know, for him, breaking records is like in quarter inches, right? So he is. When he's visualizing him going 19ft, right, and he's closing his eyes, his hippocampus can't tell the difference between. 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. The 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 20 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 20 years into the future and all of a sudden you have a much more developed idea and construct of what it could look like. You can tell 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 descendant 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 today, ism. It's like today, today. Douglas Rushkoff calls it presentism. But what todayism is, it's not so much. It's more insidious than short termism because what it does is it erases time. So we end up almost being like in a hall of mirrors. Right. You ever get that feeling, you're like it's a Groundhog Day every day, over and over again. And so what long path is meant to do is kind of break you out of that. So you're no longer just in the moment, but you're thinking in a much, much larger way.

Because there's power to being present and in the moment and not just thinking outside constantly. It's like you need both. You need to be here and now and be present and be focused. And you also need space and time to be thinking about the future.

Yeah. And you can all look, you can also be. So my 20s were mostly spent on and off in kind of different Soto Zen practices in San Francisco. And so all of my time was focused on being present with who and what I was and kind of very much in the moment. That's different than presentism. Right. Presentism is like when everything's owner, they'd be a bit. 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, it's very difficult to imagine to what end. Right. And so that's the second part of kind of the second pillar, I should say, of long path is this idea of transgenerational empathy. So, you know, empathy, right?

This is the second part, right.

This is the second pillar is transgenerational empathy. So more often than not, it's like, well, you need to have compassion for yourself. And from that kind of flowing of pro socialness, you can do other things. I don't take 100%. But when it comes to thinking about how we want the future to look, first and foremost we have to recognize that what holds us back about. 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 could be systemic, but it can be positive and negative, right? It can be intergenerational trauma and it can be collective, or it can be acute, but you're gonna bring that in. And more often than not, and I've seen this for the past couple of years, we look back at our ancestors with a lot of disdain, right? I mean, there's a lot especially we're going through a kind of regular resentment, right? Disanderezent. It could be like what your parents did.

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

By the way, we're also seeing in this country right now, when we think about, when we think about race and we think about slavery, there's so much that we don't talk about and we didn't do in the kind of the failed project reconstruction. And we look back and 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 going to be evil. But a lot of things that like our parents did to us, it wasn't because they were evil. It's maybe because they didn't really know any better.

They didn't have skills or tools.

Skills or tools. And I can guarantee you right now.

It was the norm.

It was the norm. And that doesn't make it okay, but it was the norm. And the reason you want to have kind of empathy for that is not to say, but it's okay that you did it. It's to recognize those things came into you either at an individual level or those things came into us at a collective level, which is happening in America right now. We need to process, work through it in a way that allows us to kind of be clear enough so that we can then move into a place where we say, okay, all these inner things. There's always this inner dialogue that we have. Like, it's always like, oh, Louis, you should have done that. Ari, you should have done this. So much of that is coming from the past and injected by our parents and society. And the reason we focus on that in long path, which is really about the future in many ways, is until you've reconciled with that, that inner voice and where that comes, there's no way you're going to build a better future. Because it's all. It's been woven throughout. Whatever your imagination is for what your desired future could be is always going to have that within it.

It's so funny you're saying this because, man, I interview a lot of different types of individuals from different contexts of life and expertises and industries. And what I'm going to hear you say right there is step one is heal the past, heal the memories of the past. And this is everything that. But I've been studying just on mindset and money and relationships and health. It's like, you got to learn how to heal the past if you want to be a healthier human being. If you want to have not a traumatic relationship moving forward with a new relationship, you've got to heal that relationship. You got to heal the relationship with your family, whatever it is, your relationship to money, You've got to heal if you want to earn more. Step one is being aware of the past and healing those things that hold you back.

And 100% what that does is it drives self compassion for yourself, not beating.

Yourself up, blaming yourself. And I'm an idiot.

Yeah. Why did I do this? Why that inner dialogue. We think, by the way, that.

But you're a futurist, you're not a therapist. No, but we, you know, you're talking about like healing and all these different things now.

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 monorails and jetpacks and AI. I'm not saying we shouldn't talk about that. But what I'm saying is, as an individual or as a entrepreneur or as a politician or a parent. Or a parent, if you want to think about the futures that you want, you have to heal. What got you to this point?

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

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.

The leaders of the world in different.

Industries across the board. More often than not, what I see holding them back when I say, well, to what end? Where do you want to take this? Where do you want to go? I know because I know.

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

I know. I know because I know about these folks, and it's my job to know these things. I'm like, oh, they're coming into this entire exercise with all this stuff. 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. 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 heal from it. Look, my father, as a teenager, had his father killed in front of him in Poland at the very early stages of World War II. He went on. He escaped the ghetto. He joined the Jewish underground and was a Nazi hunter after the war. Then after that, it was professional soccer. Then Cuba, a fight with Castro, to Mexico, where he met my mom, who's an artist and trained by Buckminster Fuller, another kind of engineer, architect, futurist. So it's all these amazing things, and then out pops me and my two sisters. Now it's on me to figure out what of that is going to propel me forward and what of that is going to kind of hold me back. So I'll give you a very, very Personal example. So my father, who passed away when I was much younger, because he had me when he was much older, whenever we'd go eat in a restaurant, he never had his back to the door. Right.

So funny, I said this this morning at breakfast. I said that exact thing. 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.

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? Well, how does that help you analyze situation and see patterns? So part of that helps you build this.

Yes.

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

Exactly right.

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 going to pass that on. It's going to be another heirloom that I'm going to give to my kids. And even if you don't have kids, by the way, you're going to pass on to people around you in the next generation. So transgenerational empathy, we heal the past, we become more in the present by knowing what is, holding what that baggage is. And at that point, this was to your comment earlier about being a therapist. Now at that point, we can start futuring. Now we can actually say, okay, where do we want to go? And before we can do that, we have to acknowledge something else. So one of the things that makes it so difficult to be alive in this moment is we're in what I call an intertidal. So the intertidal zone, when we think about oceans, is that piece of land that part of the day is above water, part of the day is below water. Right. And it's this really interesting place that's both kind of chaos and complexity, but also massive opportunity. Right. So you have muscles that have evolved to actually hold water when the water goes down, and you have starfish that find pools. It's an amazing place. So we are in that right now on the planet, especially kind of in what we call kind of the global North. Why? So inner titles happen when the narratives, the stories, the institutions, the things that we use to kind of guide us start to fall away. Right. So one of the ways we 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 or 12,000 years ago. We go from hunter gatherer to actually thinking about staying in one place. Civilization, right. And that's a massive intertidal. 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? Because we're cultivating grain, we're cultivating livestock. And it's actually as much as everyone says, oh, you know, it would have been great to be a hunter gatherer because now we're just all in cubicles. It was actually really rough back then.

No comfort.

There's no pedicillin. 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. Yeah, 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 meat or you shirked your responsibility during the hunt. You're out of here. But everyone saw it. So what happens when we move into a kind of more. More urbanization in this last major intertidal is. Remember the intertidal, there's all this creativity. So one of the things that gets created in that is our good friend God. Why we need a kind of omnipotent thing that can see what Ari and Lewis are doing behind walls when the whole group. Because remember, up until that point, I always had eyes on you, man. I saw what you were doing. If you were 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 intertidal. These things that we take for granted, I mean, that's innovation, right? From polytheism to monotheism, that's some deep intertidal creativity, right? And look, intertidals always come about because you have kind of constrained food resources, more urbanization, people kind of coming together, usually kind of major disease spread, like, check, check, check, check. That's all happening right now. On top of that, the kind of larger narrative we've been living by is this enlightenment, mechanistic way of thinking, which is if we break everything down to its littlest of components, we can understand it and in fact, we can recreate it. And for a long time, that actually worked. But you and I both know that if we step out and go to a forest right now, and I say, well, this is the bark and this is the place, if we break the forest into its individual components, that's not actually. You can't pull, you can't put it back together again. Things are system, they're interrelated, right? And so that's across the board for everything. So we see our ways of how Ari and 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 and intertidal, how do you successfully get through this moment as an individual and as part of a larger collective?

How do we do it?

How do we do it? So what I say in Long Path is there's a couple of things we can't. I think first and foremost, and we've touched on this already, is Long Path is inherently a relational mindset. So, and I mean this with no.

Offense, relationship to yourself, relationship to others, relationship to the world, to the next generation, relationship to the past, the future, everything, that's it. So you can't first to the past.

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

When you turn 13, you're gonna get a puberty ritual.

You're gonna go through something. My daughters just had their Bat Mitzvah, twin daughters. And I kept thinking the whole time, we've been doing this for thousands of years and now look, in the modern world it's like, 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 Bat Mitzvah ceremony where we thank our elders and we thank our ancestors. But in general, in society, we have lost that. We have lost that ability to kind of connect and be in, relate and be what we call in Buddhism, right relation, Right, right relation, right relation. Be in a way where you're interacting and in relationship with yourself, those around you, those that came before you, and those that will come to, in a way, your tribe. Your tribe.

Yeah.

But you think it's interesting, I was thinking about this the other day and you just gave the word like your temporal tribe, right? It's like forwards and backwards. You're part of something more than just yourself, right? And it's hard because in western society, so much tells us one thing, which is it's all about you. It's all about the individual, 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. It was 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 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, it's true, and kept you alive. Kept you alive. But it was literally a direct connection. And those belly battens go back tens of thousands, if not millions of years. Right. All the way through. It's a through line. And by the way, it's going to 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 into the self help section. Right. Or what they call prescriptive nonfiction, or they call it different things. 98% of the books are about just you and the work that you have to do on yourself. And there's no fault to that. And I get that, and I've read most of them, and it's helped me be a better dad and husband or 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. We have to do that. And so the kind of the back third of the book is, okay, you've done all this work on yourself, now it's time to think about co creating futures. So people always ask me, what's the future? And I say the same thing. What do you want it to be? And how do we do it together? Because I can have a future for myself. But anyone who's ever built a business or an organization or anything knows they didn't do it alone. They didn't future alone. What I'm asking in this book is for folks to be able to do that collectively, an individual kind of layer at a familial, you know, their family organization and society writ large.

Yeah.

And so that, 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. Because if I was to say to you, Louis, like, you know, tell me, let's talk about, you know, four generations from now, like, describe them to me. You talk about it from your prefrontal cortex, right? And we've seen this, we do the FMRI studies, you could 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 needle scratching on a record. Because we're not trained to do that inherently. But if you've done as you've made your way through the book. And you've had empathy for those who have come before, empathy for yourself. Now when I ask you to have empathy for future generations, that muscle is actually there. And where it gets kind of really interesting is before you even do that, you have to connect to your future self, which is one of the most difficult things that you have to do.

And so what do you do then, if you're looking 10, 20, 30 years out to your future self? And I always think about like, my highest future self is my end. My to what end is thinking, you know, 10 years from now I'll be 39, 49, almost 50, I guess. Am I really proud of the actions I took today that are going to make my future self proud? They're like, wow, I'm so glad you showed up that way for me in the future, right? And it's funny because I have a. I've been talking about this a lot on my show, but I've got 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 and have empathy for my childhood self at the many different psychological stages of feeling confusion and stress and overwhelm and abuse and all these different things that kids go through and having compassion, empathy, and allowing to heal the old, the child within me, the psychological wounded child within me, me at 5, 10, 12, 21, 30, 35, all those things and bring the past to the now, like you talked about, of the society. And then think, okay, is the action I take this morning by moving my body, by working out, by eating healthy today, by thinking a certain way going to benefit my highest self ten years from now? 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 generationally, like, how am I going to pass this down to my children as well so that I don't have the same traumas that I had?

So, I mean, so it's amazing that you have that on your phone and. But we're very soon we're going to tweak that a little bit and I'll tell you how. So Hal Hershey at 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 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 puts them in who else is going to go to an FMRI machine. He slides them in and he'll say, okay, I want you to think about yourself right now in the present moment. This is an oversimplification because you're not going to slice my head open right now. And this part of their brain will activate, and then he'll say, okay, I want you to. And he'll take someone famous, he'll say, like, 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.

Interesting.

But it's not them. So you pull them out, you divide the group and you do two things with one group, the control group, nothing. They don't do anything. They come back in 30 days or whatever. The other group, two things. One, he has them write letters to their future self.

I love this exercise, right? I love this. I've done this many times.

So you write a letter to your future self. And the other thing they do, and they've also done this in VR, but for simplification, they'll take a photo and they'll age it, let's say in this, for some of this research, 10 years. And yet you look at the photo every day for 30 seconds. You. 10 years, 10 years from now, and they put them back into the FMRI machine. And what do you think happens? The control group is still, oh, this is present Ari. This is future Ari over here. The group that actually had the intervention done on them, you know exactly what happened. Present Ari and future Ari start to overlap, right? And they become kind of one. And you start making decisions in that.

Way for that future self.

For that future self you're thinking about. So now you're no longer today is you're no longer short termist. You're actually thinking much broader. And so you go to longpath.org and there's a little section that says future me. And there's a couple of things you can do. One, you can take a photo of yourself and age it 10 years. That's cool. And the other thing is you can write a letter to your future self. These are all kind of neurocognitive interventions that help you start going there. So I obviously, I did this. And so on my desk at home, you know what there is, right?

There's a photo of your future self.

Well, there's a photo of me when I was six years old. Interesting, right? Which is kind of like. 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. Wow. And so when I'm thinking about the decisions that I have to make, how do I do it? I'm trying to look across that. But there's other 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 the cool current family one. And then I have one frame that's empty and I keep it there. And that's for my grandkids or future generations. And so I see that every day as I walk into the kitchen. I look at that. Because what I'm thinking is the things that I'm doing. Why, you know, what's my why? Like, why, you know, like, why do I get up in the morning? There's obviously, 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. I'm gonna write a book and I'm gonna get on Lewis Howe, like the number one guy in the. I'm gonna do 100%. But you know this because you've had success in multiple different areas. That's actually not enough to. You can do that.

Self fulfillment.

Self fulfillment. You still feel it. You'll get there and you'll be on the stage. And I've been on. I've spoken in front of thousands of people. And afterwards I was like, that was that. That must have been amazing. I'm like, eh, yeah. Because I did it for like a futureing thing. Okay. But when you start to put what you're doing in a much larger context about the. So think of. There's been about. Depending on who you talk to, there's been roughly between 80 to 100 billion homo sapiens on planet Earth.

Since 80 to 100 billion.

80 to 100 billion. If you go. It depends on where you want to draw the line between astropilithic and all these other. But about 80 to 100 billion. Right. So now here we are in 2022. And we look forward and we start to think, well, a, we're going to successfully navigate this intertidal moment, but we're literally on page one of a 400 page novel called Homo Sapiens. There's been about 100 billion to this point. If we can make it through this next moment, which I believe we can, we're looking at hundreds of billions, maybe even trillions of Homo sapiens throughout the galaxy.

That's crazy.

And so what ends up happening is what is it that, what is the legacy? What are the heirlooms that we want to give them? 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 a thousand years from now and people are looking in the history books or books or whatever, in the digital books or brain machine interface and like, who is this Lewis Howes character? I mean there's big statues of you in Central park video.

What is that? Yeah.

And how they're. And it's not about necessarily judgment, but how they're going to look back on us and is going to 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 being. What they're going to want to know is what were the things that you and I did at an emotional, psychological.

Level to set them up for success?

Set them up for success or to hurt them and 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. Yeah. So I, I eat meat, right? Like I try to be healthy about it and it's organic and free range. Look, 200 years from now, like roughly, someone there's going to 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 going to look back and be like, what was Ari and Lewis there? That was horrific. Horrific. And by the way, go four, 800 years and whatever they were doing, folks will look at it and be like, that was horrific.

They were barbaric, barbaric.

Again, it doesn't mean we shouldn't stop doing evil, those things. So there's a little bit of hubris to put it into context. But if we go out to the trillion or so Homo sapiens, when we look at the three different photo frames that we have, Right. So one of the things that actually I pilfered from Amazon, which is, you know, if you can pilfer where you can. So at Amazon, Bezos was famous for leaving an empty chair. You know this, you know this story. So in meetings he would. Well, there's two things he did that were very. That are amazing. And I went to go visit and do a talk and do some work there. And I noticed two things. One, all the conference, big conference, you know, gorgeous Seattle headquarters. In many of the rooms, the conference tables are actually made out of big box, like doors, like Home Depot doors, like those hollow core doors. It'd be like 10 of them lined up. Why? That was his first desk. If you look at the photo of him when it was just him with.

Like a computer in the Amazon side.

Amazon, it's a wood. It's literally, it's a door.

Interesting.

And so part of it is, don't forget where you came from. Like, we may be this whole 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 these tables cost like 100,000. Yeah, 100 grand for a table.

You can hire someone for that.

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.

What would they want?

What would they want? So whenever there's a kind of decision to be made, it'd be like, what would they want? And so what I've been doing with some of the folks that I work with at the UN and a bunch of companies, we're leaving that chair open. But that chair is meant to represent future generations. What do they want? What do they need?

That's interesting.

And so when you don't know what to do, you're not sure, like, what direction to go into. You 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, for generations or the trillions to come. How are you making decisions for them. And look, here's the thing. This is not feel good. Oh, my God. Like Kumbaya, this helps you in the present because what it does is it helps you be more creative and more curious and recognize that you have to be in right relationship to the world and those around you. So whether you're a politician, an entrepreneur, or an athlete, this just ups your game in the moment. So the side benefit of transgenerational empathy, besides laying out this thing for future generations, it makes you a better human today.

Yes. Yeah. You called it future self thinking. There's another term, mental time travel. I started talking about this a few years ago, calling it future hindsight, 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 ten years from now. He's my hero, and I'm always chasing that person. I'm trying to make that person proud. I'm trying to make the actions to get closer to that. And then when I get there, I realize my hero's still another 10 years out, and I have to start making decisions and actions towards improving myself to be closer to that hero. But I'll never meet him. I think that's interesting.

And so it's the same thing, but now expanded out over several generations. So one of the issues that I talked about was the difficulty that we have in imagining different tomorrows and why in this intertidal. It's kind of both kind of creativity, but also kind of chaos. And so we have to step back. There's this term that's in the book, this idea of the official future. The official future. I put that in quotes, right? So the official future could be an individual like, I'm going to grow up in my family. The official future is I'm going to go to college, graduate school, get married, have 3.2 kids. That's the official future. The official future in our world today is one where 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 all going to 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.

The wisest.

The wisest. Well, partly because the official future was meant to actually, as a kind of emancipatory, as it feels, it was actually meant to hem us in and actually become a control mechanism. Because anything that you did that fell outside of this official future was not condoned. In fact, it was scary. You're pushed out of the cave and so you didn't do it. Right. And so this idea of an official future. And 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 phase. And a number of them, there's this after the afterlife, remember, was invented as a control mechanism to get you to do certain things, to build morality.

To do good things here. Yes.

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 a kind of, as an institution. And so even that's falling apart. Right. The fastest growing group in America right now, or what we call nones. 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, it's too much of a cognitive load. People start to freak out. And what do they do more often than not, and we've seen this throughout history, is they will go and look for a strong man or someone with a narrative that says this is the future. Follow me. We saw that in this country, we've seen in other countries. I'm not saying this as a. Through a political lens, I'm saying this through a kind of anthropological lens that in the absence of an official future, we will go to anyone who is offering us one, good or bad.

It doesn't happen just to have some direction to go.

We need direction. We can't.

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

Drugs, addictions, bad habits. And we become very, very, very short termistic.

It's all about inherent, it's all here.

And now, the pleasure right now.

Instant gratification.

Instant gratification because there's nothing bigger I'm not part of something bigger anymore. And so in the book, I call it the project. And people are like, why do you call it the project? I was like, I didn't know what else to call it. But the project is something bigger than ourselves over the next 10,000 years, years, so that we become a flourishing species.

How do you get people who are not thinking that way to start thinking about something bigger than themselves? If they're in constant anxiety, stress mode, or they're dealing with trauma from their family or they're broke or whatever it might be, how do you get people to start the process of thinking beyond you?

Look for a number of people who are going through kind of acute emergencies or trauma. It's 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 today is lifespan biased way of being. We're totally disconnected temporally from those who came before us and those who will come after us. So first and foremost, one of the first exercises is literally having people stop and make that recognition of those that came before them. There's an opening story. I can read it. You can read it. It's like literally in the first couple of pages.

I'll let you read it. Go ahead. Right here.

This one? Yeah, I can do. I'll do it verbatim. So this beautiful image of a tree. And this is from. 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. 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? 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. 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.

Which is being kind to people on the street. Being kind to people, which is.

Yeah, 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 those. So part of it is being kind, right? But that's not. That's where we start, right? Are these smaller things. But what we want to do is build a kind of way of collectively going about and being in the world that allows us to start addressing these questions, these very big ones. People who are unhoused, people who are poverty, all these like 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 have only a certain number of years, 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 that this trim tab. So Buckminster Fuller, who was really famous futurist who wrote, you know, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, which is just the greatest title ever for a book. He was asked in World War II by the U.S. navy to help him solve a problem. And the problem was the ships were getting bigger and bigger, but it was getting more difficult to actually steer them because the rudder had to get bigger to actually turn the ship. And I 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 4 inch piece of metal to the end of these rudders, but making them smaller and that became a trim tab. And so what he found was all you had to do was just turn that small piece a little bit into the oncoming water and it would whip the rudder around so you no longer needed the actual hydraulics. You needed something really, really small that would go against the flow, that would actually create the action. So he believed in the US so much that on his tombstone it said, call me Trim tab. Because he believed that everything we do in our life is trim, 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 these massive trim paths. Like, yes, we have to electrify everything, we have to get off of fossil.

Fuel, renewable energy, everything.

We know all that and for 99% of the planet we all know it, but we're actually not in the business. Like we can't do it. We can maybe if we can afford, we can do some of it, we can send market signals, but we're not in it. So the question is, what can we do? And what I offer is that we can act like trim tabs in the work that we do. It is about empathy and compassion and kindness. And a lot of people will critique that and say, well, that's not enough. That's not how you get us to $10,000.

That's not real change.

That's not real change.

But it kind of is though.

But it kind of is.

It's like the work at home.

First you do, you take care of your own house, do the work. Look, I don't say, you know, yes, you should protest, yes, you should vote, yes, you do all those big things and those do make things happen. But look, and this is my own, definitely my own point of view. What good is it in if, you know, 2,000 years from now we live on a planet that is perfectly green and eco and we made it through, but we're all like a holes to each other and we're all like, not kind people. Like that doesn't seem like where we want to take the species. So what I'm saying is we can actually do both. But to your earlier point, we have to recognize that and activate on that. We have to actually decide and make the decision that we want to be pro social, that we want to have empathy and awe and thinking in these ways. Because in the moment it makes us more curious because the curiosity is like, well, how did I get to this point? That's the empathy of the past. But from that curiosity, whole panoply of kind of solutions start to open themselves up for those very big, wicked structural problems that we're trying to deal with right now.

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

8Th grade.

8Th grade.

And here's the crazy thing about writing a letter to your future self, because we've known that, we've put people in the FMRI machines. It's not the act of receiving it, it's the act of writing it. That's the change factor. Not to give anything away. But it's not about when you get the letter. It's actually connecting with future Lewis or future Ari, by the way. A priority that has to happen before you can connect to future generations.

So your future self first, and then.

You have to start yourself. You have to start in your own house and kind of think like, okay, what do I need? A friend of mine is a. It's kind of gross, but he's a periodontist. And so we've been having these. We were roommates in college.

What is that?

Just don't know where gums work for the gums and teeth, right. And I said, well, you know, what's the most now knowing now that you do this?

I see a lot of nasty stuff.

So, yeah, you see a lot of nasty stuff. So what's the most important thing you would tell your 20 year old self?

Floss. Floss, that's it.

And I said, what about. And so I asked a dentist friend of mine, what's the number one thing you would do? Floss. And I go, why? Because, well, everyone starts doing it too late, in their 40s or 50s, and you have to actually say, 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, 80s. They're like, start stretching in your 20s.

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 asked people their three truths and one of them for him was floss. When you're young, yeah, it's like, that.

Would probably be mine.

You have a lot of pain, you know, it's like, what's the thing that's going to relieve the later pain that's hard to get back, you know, whatever that thing is. So. But that's interesting that, yeah, floss is one of those things. It's again, writing a letter to the future. What are your future self going to be proud that you did to keep you happy, healthy, whole, fulfilled, feeling. Right. It's like not suffering in your future.

And future generations not suffering it. Right. That's why the book is called Becoming the Great Ancestors. Our future needs. Our future descendants need us to become great ancestors. We needed. Gilbert at Harvard talks about this as kind of end of history illusion, where we think we're on the tail end of history, right? And like nothing there's a But think about yourself 10 years ago, the music that you like 10 years ago, you probably would never be. It's evolved and you've evolved as a human. As a species, we're 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 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 for who we are as a civilization. So the question is, how do we do that? I think these three pillars, futures thinking, recognizing that there's an official future, but that the official future isn't going to get us there. So what do I ask people to do? I ask them to think about what is the desired future that they want. What is the desired future for Lewis?

Possible futures examined.

Exactly. So in the book, we talk about specifically not just desired future, but examine desired future. Because we went in reverse order. We kind of know where this goes. The examined desired future isn't just the future for you, as you kind of would have thought about it, without doing the work. Once you start doing the work around transgenerational empathy and thinking about that kind of 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 realized certain of these things that was. That I was using to build out my desired future kind of were some baggage from the past. Right.

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

Exactly.

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

I didn't want to use that example because it's so cliche.

But I was raised, I built a million dollar business to have more success, success and power as opposed to make an impact through my product or even to.

There's a story. There's a story.

Is that how you were raised though?

100%. So there's a story in the book about this kind of wealthy man who comes across a fisherman who's kind of in his boat.

It's in the afternoon, he goes, go ahead.

This guy's in his boat and he's kind of looking at the guy'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, if you were out all day, you would make more money and then eventually you could hire more people. Then you'd have more, 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.

You could retire and then do this. You got a boat and fish.

I'm doing it right now.

Yeah.

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 that inner voice or what media tells us. And so before you can future yourself or your organization or, or the world, especially in relation with others, you have to heal from what came before.

I'm so happy you're saying this because I feel like you come from a, I would call it, I don't know, like an intellectual world, right? An analytical, intellectual, high level thinking, leadership world where people think about productivity, efficiency, maximizing growth, expansion, world domination. And for you to say the first step is to really think about, one of the first steps is to think about past empathy and healing so that you can create from a space of a healed place, a whole place, not a half hurt place. And you can create more meaningful. You'll be thinking differently of why you're creating the thing you're thinking. It'll be an intentional action of your life as opposed to a reaction action to prove to fit in, to belong, to be accepted by your parents or whatever it might be. And I think this is so valuable you're sharing this because I think analytical, intellectual people in general, I want them to think more this way, from the heart.

That's one of the. Look, this is I can't.

This should be like, this should be like an antidote to, to like short term pain or something like to pain and future pain. It's like this is like the ultimate self help book.

I mean, you know what I mean? Says Lewis Howard. I think we've already printed too many copies to actually put that on there. But for the paperback, I think we now have a new blurb for the front.

But I think it's so powerful that people have that hear that from someone like you specifically who's in this type of field. Because people are just more about, like, let's just make more and build more. And I'm all for growth. I think the world is expanding, the universe is expanding. There's got to be some growth somewhere from an individual level, in society level. But it's. What is it the growth for?

Yeah, to what end?

To what end? And I think that's important. And I had a kind of a wake up call when I was about 30, I'm 39 now, where it was all about success, you know, earn more, be celebrated more, build a bigger following, to be acknowledged more, all that stuff. Right. And I realized, why am I still suffering inside?

Yeah.

Like why is it still not happy and fulfilled? Like, this is cool for a moment, but then I'm still angry at the world, angry at myself. Resentful, like reactive. Triggered. And it wasn't until I started to heal literally nine years ago. And it's been a journey of different healing journeys. But it wasn't until I started to heal, I was like, oh wow, I've been doing this all wrong and I need to. And it's helped me accomplish, but it doesn't make me feel fulfilled. And when I started to say what is my real mission? What do I want to do? I want to impact lives in a positive way. And I got clear on, okay, what's the mechanism for? Our business is to reach 100 million lives weekly to help them improve the quality of their life. And when it's like just at the core, it's like, I just want to bring joy to people. I want to be joy and bring joy and provide solutions for peace and for growth. That's really what it is in the different areas of life to support them from where they're in pain and into peace. It's a much more renewable energy that I have.

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

Yes.

And this is where things, this is what we're really we're talking about. Right. Is kind of the healing and the work that needs to be done is regenerative. It's not just, we're not just taking what's there and kind of renewal. Regenerative is actually making it whole again.

Yes.

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

Yes. And the saber toothed tigers.

There's many biologists who would argue with the saber toothed tiger being. Okay, whatever. So It's a metaphor. 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 at this intertidal, the past 400 years of this enlightenment, industrial revolution, mechanistic. Break everything down, its core components. Go outside, smell the air. It's not that clean. Look at what we're doing. And I don't say this, so I don't say it as a, as an environmentalist, in the kind of the climate environment. I say this as someone who cares about the mental environment. We are broken, we are emotionally connected. 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.

Yes.

Why is it difficult for us to connect one on one with ourselves? Because we have been told that we are separate and apart. Because that was the kind of, that's what Bacon and all the big Western intellectual, Heidegger, Nietzsche and all of them all said the same thing. We are separate from nature, we can dominate. But what ends up happening is in that kind of fractured reality that we're living with nature, which gives us where we are with climate. It also gives us where we are as a species with one another. You think about kind of the polarization and how we interact with other human beings and where that's coming from. That's not oxytocin, it's not that dopamine. That's aggression, that's cortisol, that's adrenaline.

Yes.

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.

Oh yeah, tons.

You can make a ton. In fact, you can, you can make billions. You can win the highest offices in the land if you want, but you.

Can drive that it'll never fulfill the wound, why you're creating that for?

Yes.

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

Yeah. And folks who have done the healing are not figuring out how to divide us from one another or divide us from nature. They're looking at how to bring us together. Because if Ari and Lewis want to look, step back, and, 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? That's it. I mean, your work is already doing this. And now all I'm asking you or anyone who's listening to this is to add the next layer. Not because it's responsibility or out of guilt, but because I think it'll make the work you do that much more powerful. Everything from like a kind of a hop in your step to when you're really thinking, like, is this worth it? Should I be doing this?

It's a meaningful work.

Is it? Meaningful work? Meaningful work in your own lifespan, sure. And by the way, sometimes that's just enough. But for those who kind of dare to go a little bit further, is this meaningful work for the next 10,000 years? If you can answer that in the affirmative, oh, my God, nothing can stop you.

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

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

Oh, interesting.

Look, you can be a good ancestor. You can be. We're all 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, know that we're going to die at one point, and everything we do is to avoid that death. And this goes back to Arya Lu's being kicked out of the cave. And so one of the problems was answering that question of, am I being a great. Am I being a great ancestor? One of the biggest problems with that is, you have to solve for the fact that you're writing about a time after you've been alive.

That's crazy, right?

And so we can. 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, there's. You go to South Korea, there's meditations where you lie in a coffin. Like, you think about.

Well, the country of Bhutan, I think, focuses five times a day on their death, 100%. And that's supposed to be one of the.

The happier memento mori at one point. Look, a lot of people, you know, there's like this yolo. People wake up in the, in the, in the morning and they say, well, how am I going to live today? As if, though is my. It was my only day, my last day. And they go out, 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? It doesn't mean I passed a piece of legislation or I did, you know, I fed the world, sold a company, sold a company, or solved something. How was I like, if today was my last day, the way I interacted with my wife, with my children, with Lewis, Can I stand by that as a model of what does it mean to be a great ancestor and pass that on, right? Like, heaven forbid, Louis, I walk out of here, I get hit by a bus. Can I look back and say, well, my interactions with Lewis, this audience, was that the stick moment where I said trust. But the trust isn't just in my actions. It's who I am and how I am. That's where the baton is way of being 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 the best. I did my best. That's the yardstick. That's my, you know, as an athlete, there's always. For pole vaulting, it was always measured in inches, right? For the 4 by 100, it was our down to our millisecond. For those of us, for me, who no longer have those external metrics, it's not an internal metric. And the internal metric is. Was my day, was my life acting in accordance with what it means to be a great ancestor for me or not. And not that I'm a binary thinker in any way, shape or form, but that's kind of how you have to wrestle with these questions about life and meaning and purpose is are you doing that? And that's what Long Path allows you to do, is because it sets you up into something much bigger than yourself.

Yeah, man. This is inspiring stuff. I didn't know you're going to be speaking therapy talk over here, but I love it. I love it.

That's the way we go here.

I got a couple final questions for you, but I want people to get this book. I think it's going to be really tricky, transformational for you. Long Path, Becoming the Great Ancestors. Our future needs an antidote to short terminism. Terminism.

Termism.

Termism.

Yeah.

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

Or longpath.org book or basically anywhere on the planet books are sold on or offline.

Get Long Path. Really inspiring. This is a question I asked everyone at the end. I mentioned it before. Before. It's called the Three Truths. So imagine you live as long as you want, and every day you've been proud of being a great ancestor for the future, right? For your future generations. But it is the last day, many years away.

Many, many, many years.

You live as long as you want, but eventually you got to turn the lights off. And you also accomplish everything you want to create 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 hypothetical. It's all gone. But you have a piece of paper and a pen. You get to write down three truths, three things you know to be true, or three lessons you would share with the world. And this is all we have to remember you by. What would be those three truths?

Well, you already took floss. Yes.

Three more.

I think the three truths. The first one is act as if though you are a great ancestor, because you are. The second is never be afraid to love fully and really fully, really in everything that means. And I was interested, thinking I was getting dressed, coming on to Lewis Howes. Right? And I'm so I just put on whatever. I was all black. Not that hard. But the boots that I put on, the shoes were the first pair of shoes that my dad bought when he came from Cuba to Mexico. And the bracelet I'm wearing is a friendship bracelet that my daughter gave me. And in the middle between my dad and my bracelet is me. Right.

Wow.

And so that third truth is, I think about Lance Armstrong's. Book, it's not about the bike. The third truth is, it's not about you.

Yeah, the only challenge is most people think the world revolves around them. And so that's why a lot of people suffer. They're always focused about me, me, me, as opposed to, like you said, we, or how can I be of service? How can I use myself to be of service to others?

We are vessels for future generations, and I don't mean that in an overly spiritual or theological way, but our job is to. 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.

Ari, I really acknowledge you for the way you communicate about the future. I think a lot of people are concerned about AI and computers and technology and whatever things are going to be happening externally, but they're not thinking about the internal, emotional, psychological, mental, spiritual future and how what we do in this moment will pass on to our future generations and to the world generations. So I really acknowledge you for living in this space of analytical, intellectual, educational talk, but speaking from a place that I think every human being needs to understand, which is first, learn how to heal anything that's been holding you back. And understanding, why am I taking these actions? Why am I working so hard on this thing or pursuing this career, launching this company? What's the reason? Generate long term thinking, and is it the best thing I should be doing for this part of my life, or should I reconsider? 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.

Thank you.

My final question. What is your definition of greatness?

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

There you go. All right, my man. Appreciate it.

Thank you.

Powerful man. CRISPR is an opportunity to go into your genome and make the edit and cure you, right? This is like, this is word processing.

For the letters of your body.

So that's probably not. We're not going to probably use Crispr for longevity, but it's going to help us live our longest, healthiest life.