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

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

Has to be welcome to the school of greatness my name is lewis howes former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur and each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness thanks for spending some time with me today now let the class begin.

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Welcome back everyone to school of greatness very excited about our guest we have ari wallach in the house my man good to see you sir how you doing i'm doing great very excited about this you are an applied futurist and you've got this new book called long becoming the great ancestors our future needs i'm excited about this because i believe that society is very short term thinking most people i've been to blame for this in my life as well is thinking how can i get what i want now how do i bring the future of this big idea this dream to me in this moment what's the shortcut what's the fast path what's the way to get there but a lot of us don't think about what are the consequences of taking the short path 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 it's if ari and lewis are walking on the plains of the serengeti twenty thousand years ago and all of a sudden an animal with very large teeth jumps out from behind a tree you and i should not sit there and have a long conversation about what to do what we need to do is we need to immediately react and that is what has helped us flourish as a species homo sapiens for hundreds of thousands of years so short 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 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 right now when i cook breakfast i turned on a switch there are people who will have to walk five miles off 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 ceo's and i meet these ceo's of fortune fifty 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 ceo's before who will call me up at the end of the day and they're like well i don't know if we can move forward with this larger 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 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 waves of being so i've worked in presidential politics i've worked on presidential campaigns since nineteen ninety six 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 twenty four 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 no the day after you win.

But i mean for the next four years or whatever yeah four years or.

Two years i was on unnamed senator was sitting next to me in the acela from dc to new york and this was about a day and a half after the election cause i was down in dc for it i was making my way back up to new york i'm not going to say this name but this person 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 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 chasing the serengeti again for a lot of people that's how they have to live but for those of us who don't have to struggle at that level we have to break out of this and so this book is about that mindset that we need to adopt to take us out of that.

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

What end the t list to what.

End yeah and it's like figuring out your values your vision and to what end what are you creating your life for what is it all about to what end so what does that mean to thinking about and should we start with to what end and then reverse engineer to now so this is great.

We'Re going right into it so for twenty years i've been helping the united nations the state department some folks at the white house big corporations the philanthropists think about where they want things to go in the future and what i found time and time again was we would 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 was only four five eight years out while.

They'Re in election or office 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 twenty 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 thirteen 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 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 thirty 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 kind of stepped back because i was looking at that trying to figure out why these ceo's 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 ten years that takes place in the future not like not necessarily far future like star wars 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 right which means basically ultimate aim and goal so you started us kind of at the end but i'm going to start there but then we'll see how we use the other ones to kind of create this mindset so when we go into decision making mode whether it's like what do i have for breakfast do i eat this or that because right now i can tell you eat your broccoli and eat your kale and you're 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 louis 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 sorry i'm sure if we.

Compared our track were you one hundred or were you a distance guy so.

I got four by one hundred relay okay and i'll get into this other one in a second pole vault i.

Did pole vault and one hundred as well i was decathlete so i did okay so the pole vault is challenging.

Pole vault is challenging but i use that in how i think about long paths so let's talk about the relay the most important part according to my coach ted tillian the handoff the handoff and 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 four by one hundred 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 trust and you go it's trust if i put.

It in my hand then i can run with it and then i pass it on to the next person so.

We are in a transition zone right now on the planet and we are literally 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 one hundred 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 i think at some point you're gonna say stick and here's the crazy thing you're not yelling stick when you're in your eighties or you're on the backside and you're kind of ending things and thinking okay how am i gonna pass the baton and accident 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 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 right they're doing all this amazing work but what ends up happening more often than not is we don't think about it as kind of a ladder to the next generation we think well this is my own lifespan and i'm going to be a more actualized more great more powerful ari by the end of my life full stop but if you're to what end becomes about the larger species and society flourishing for generations to come and you now put yourself in 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 what when they are born and they get raised they actually are starting off on a higher step it's like track right it's like the four by one hundred 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 but it puts it into a.

Larger context 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 well so.

Yes and no so what's your end game more often than not it's like lewis what's your end game with everything that you're doing here more often than and i won't say i won't put you on the spot if someone 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 how does 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 trupp 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 jako 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 fifty years from now you're gonna kind of stop and think well okay like in fifty years it could be like it's gonna be hard for you to you may come with some top line details more often than not you're gonna think oh there'll be monorails and jetpack you know you'll go to kind of external things but then if i say luz tell me about los angeles fifty 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 twenty year time frame because you're a young man so i say go back twenty years right and all of a sudden you start giving me all these details of what your life 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 eyes and i'll just say okay and this is the pole vaulting part of saint 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 embarrassing part of the conversation so let's take sergei bubka one of the best jumper vaulters of all time nineteen nineteen yeah so sergey is sitting back and thinking like okay he sees what he was you know for him breaking records 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 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 it 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 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 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 todayism it's like today today douglas rushkoff calls it presentism but what todayism is it's not so much it's more insidious than short termism because what it does is it erases time so we end up almost being like in a hall of mirrors right you ever get that feeling 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.

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Because there's power to being present and in the moment and not just thinking outside constantly yeah 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 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 kind of very much in the moment that's different than presentism right presentism is like when everything's over and over but what being present in the way that we're talking about being mindful is separate and also very important because what it allows you to do is actually start thinking about this big question that you ask to what end where do i want to take this if you are kind of polluted your 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 one 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 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 cause 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 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 disander resentment it could be like what.

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

And by the way we're also seeing in this country right now when we think about when we think about race and we think about slavery there's so much that we don't talk about and we didn't do in the kind of the failed project reconstruction and we look back and 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 cause they were evil it's maybe because they didn't really know any better they didn't.

Have skills or tools or skills or.

Tools and i can't i guarantee you.

Right now and 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 or you should have done this so much of that is coming from the past and injected by our parents and society and the reason we focus on that in long path which is really about the future in many ways is until you've reconciled with that that inner voice and where that comes from there's no way you're going to build a better future because it's all it's been woven throughout whatever your imagination is for what your desired future could be is always going to have that within it it's so funny.

You'Re saying this because man i interview a lot of different types of individuals from different contexts of life and expertises and industries 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 i've been studying just on mindset and money and relationships and health it's like you got to learn how to heal the past if you want to be a healthier human being if you want to have not a traumatic relationship moving forward with a new relationship you've got to heal that relationship you've got to heal the relationship with your family whatever it is your relationship to money you've got to heal if you want to earn more step one is being aware of the past and healing those things that hold you back and.

One hundred percent what that does is it drives self compassion for yourself not.

Beating yourself up not beating yourself not blaming yourself and i'm an idiot yeah.

Why did i do this why that inner dialogue we think by the way.

That but you're a futurist you're not a therapist no but we you're talking about like healing and all these different.

Things now but 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 two 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 hadn't 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've 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 part of that holds you back in terms of trust and a whole bunch of other issues so part of it is kind of parsing what that is so for me as a futurist it was just that it was like what part of it not having because by the way we go to a restaurant i won't have my back to the door either it gets passed on the thing is you have to take the parts of that that work and the parts that don't because if you don't you're gonna pass that on it's gonna be another heirloom that i'm giving to my kids and even if you don't have kids by the way you're gonna pass on to people around you in the next generation so transgenerational empathy we heal the past we become more in the present by knowing what is holding what that baggage is and at that point this was to your comment earlier about being a therapist now at that point we can start futuring now we can actually say okay where do we want to go and before we can do that we have to acknowledge something else so one of the things that makes it so difficult to be alive in this moment is we're in what i call an intertidal so the intertidal zone right when we think about oceans is that piece of land that part of the day is above water part of the day is below water right and it's this really interesting place that's both kind of chaos and complexity but also massive opportunity right so you have 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 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 fifteen 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 title give or take about ten or twelve thousand 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 hunter gatherer because now we're just all in cubicles it was actually really rough back then like not every no comfort 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 right at night because we did something wrong if you and i did something wrong in that small band everybody be like louis you took too much of me or you shirked your responsibility during the hunt you're out of here but everyone saw it so what happens when we move into a kind of more urbanization in this last major 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 interesting when the whole group because remember up until that point i always had eyes on you and 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 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 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 ten years we're probably in it for another ten or fifteen years this is a very important time that actually sets the 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 intertitle 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 effect 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 depending on where you are on the planet or in some places happening right now we had systems we had ritualistic elder based systems that initiated it so if we look at what's happening right now with the rise of psychedelics and ayahuasca and people going away for eight day experiences this was the norm for tens of thousands of years when.

You turn thirteen you're going to go.

Through this you have a puberty ritual you're going to 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 in the bar bat miksa ceremony where we where we thank our elders and we thank our ancestors but in general in society we have lost that right 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 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 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 that's true and it kept you alive kept you alive but it was literally a direct connection and those belly buttons go back tens of thousands of 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 ninety eight percent 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 at 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 just 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 had some 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.

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You do then if you're looking ten twenty thirty years out to your future self and i always think about like my highest future self is my end to what end is thinking ten years from now i'll be forty nine almost fifty i guess am i really proud of the actions i took today that are going to make my future self proud that like wow i'm so glad you showed up that way for me in the future and it's funny because i've been talking about this a lot on my show but i've got on my phone 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 at five ten twelve twenty one thirty thirty five all those things and bring the past to the now like you talked about of this 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 they don't have the same traumas that i had so.

I mean so it's amazing that you have that on your phone but we're very soon we're going to tweak that a little bit and i'll tell you how so hal hirschfeld 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 oxygen flow and where things are being activated in the brain and he'll put them in and like most of these studies are mostly done on college freshmen but he puts them in who else is gonna go to an fmri machine and 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 gonna slice my head open right now and this part of their brain will activate and then he'll say okay i want you to and he'll take someone famous he'll say i want you to think about matt damon you know this part of the brain will activate and then he'll say i want you to think about your future self twenty 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 thirty 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 ten years and yet you look at the photo every day for thirty seconds you ten years from now ten 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 termistic you're actually thinking much broader and so you go to longpath dot 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 ten 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 the.

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 so photo me at five there's one with me and my family and there's one with me aged twenty years from now 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 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 oh my gosh got the.

Chills 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 gonna go on lewis i'm gonna write a book and i'm gonna get on lewis howe like the number one guy on the planet i'm gonna do one hundred percent but you know this cause 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 like you'll get there and you'll be on the stage i've spoken in front of thousands of people and afterwards everyone's like that must have been amazing i'm like eh because i did it for like a futureing thing okay but when you start to put what you're doing in a much larger context about the so think about it there's been about depending on who you talk to there's been roughly between eighty to one hundred billion homo sapiens on planet earth since eighty to one hundred billion eighty to one hundred billion if you go depending on where you want to draw the line between astropilithic and all these other but about eighty to one hundred billion right so now here we are in twenty twenty two 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 four hundred page novel called homo sapiens there's been about one hundred 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 one hundred percent 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 go forward one thousand years from now when people are looking in the history books or books or whatever in the digital books or something brain machine interface and like who is this lewis howes character i mean there's big statues of you in central park.

There'S a 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 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 gonna wanna 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 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 so i eat meat right yeah me too i try to be healthy about it and it's organic and free range look two hundred years from now like roughly someone there's gonna be research or it could be one hundred years it could be fifty 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 eight hundred 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 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 are 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 ten of them lined up why that was his first desk if you look at the photo of him when it was just him.

With like the computer and the amazon.

Side and the amazon spray paint 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 scrappy thing but don't forget it's always that first day and that's what that so that's always interesting is to remember your past and not cause i walk into some conference rooms of these companies that have unicorns whatever and these tables cost like one hundred thousand yeah one hundred 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 was 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 lewis through generations or the trillions to come how are we 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 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 when something happens and we look back at it we're always like okay i see 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 ten 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 gonna you know growing up in my family the official future is i'm gonna go to college graduate school get married have three point two kids that's an 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 ten thousand 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 scary 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 two thousand years the main official future is heaven or hell right in kind of in a monotheistic phase and a number of them there's this 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 it 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 that we just go into drugs and addiction.

Drugs addiction bad habits and we become very very very short termistic it's all about in here 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 ten thousand years so that we become a full flourishing species how do you.

Get people who are not thinking that way to start thinking about something bigger than themselves if they're in constant anxiety stress mode or they're dealing with trauma from their family or they're broke or whatever it might be how do you get people to start the process of thinking beyond you look for a number.

Of people who are going through kind of acute emergencies or traumas like we'll make this this is a second or third layer that they have to address right but for 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 a 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 seventy years honi said to him do you really believe you'll live another seventy 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 but 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 talking about the panama canal that took fifty 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 just being.

Kind to people on the street being kind to people walking the door which.

Is yeah and going back to your earliest question which is well what do we do about the folks that can't think like this so part of it is being kind right but that's not that's where we start right are these smaller things but what we want to do is build a kind of way of collectively going about and being in the world that allows us to start addressing these questions these very big ones people who who are unhoused poverty all these wicked problems that we don't know how to solve because we don't know how to solve them through the official future that we're in but when you start to have kind of a base layer of compassion and empathy as a chef you only have a certain number of goods 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 a really famous futurist who wrote all operating manual for spaceship earth which is just the greatest title ever for a book he was asked in world war two 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 and it got to the point where the hydraulics that were necessary to turn a twenty 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 attempt attach a four 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 a something really really small that would go against the flow that would actually create the action so he built 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 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 patterns like yes we have to electrify everything we have to get off.

Of fossil fuel like renewable energy everything.

Yeah we know all that and for ninety nine percent of the planet we all we all know it but we're actually not in the business right we can't do it 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 ten thousand dollars 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 two thousand 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 let's face.

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When was the.

First time you wrote a letter to your future self eighth grade eighth grade.

And here's a 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 aria by the way a priori that has to happen before you can connect to future generations so your future self.

First and then if you have to.

Start you have to start in your own house and kind of think like okay what do i need you know a friend of mine is a it's kind of gross but he's a periodontist and so we've been having these we were roommates in college what is that just so i'm aware 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.

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 twenty 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 forties or fifties 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 asked other doctors what you do for seventies or eighties they're like start stretching in your twenties.

I asked a doctor perlmutter who's written many new york times bestselling books i don't know if you know he is the 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 dallas 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 yeah and future generations not suffering it right that's why the book is called becoming the great ancestors our future needs our future descendants need us to become great ancestors we needed gilbert at harvard talks about this 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 beginning but think about yourself ten years ago the music that you like to ten 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 two hundred years from now genetic if we were to be able to go back and kind of put you two hundred years ago or even twenty thousand 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 the world so much of that has changed so much of that is on us and so what i'm asking as people kind of read and consume the book is what we are called upon to do to be great ancestors right now is to upgrade the operating system for who we are as a civilization so that is the question is how do we do that i think these three pillars futures thinking recognizing that there's an official future but that the official future isn't going to 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 possible futures examine destination exactly.

So in the book we talk about specifically not just desired future but examined desired future because we went in reverse order we kind of know where this goes the examined desired future isn't just the future for you as you kind of would have thought about it without doing the work once you start doing the work around transgenerational empathy and thinking about that kind of 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 i was using to build out my desired future kind of were some baggage from the past 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 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 one.

Hundred percent so there's a story in the book about this 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 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 twenty 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 get 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 what that inner voice or what media tells us and so before you can future yourself or your organization or the world especially in relation with others you have to heal from what came before i'm so happy.

You'Re saying this because i feel like you 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 but 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 reactional action to prove to fit in to belong to be accepted by your parents or whatever it might be and i think this is so valuable you're sharing this because i think analytical intellectual people in general 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 like short term pain or something like to pain and future pain it's like this is like the ultimate self help.

Book i mean you know what i mean i think we've already printed too many copies to actually put that on there but for the paperback 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 is in this type of field because people are just more about like let's just make more and build more and i'm all for growth i think the world is expanding the universe is expanding there's got to be some growth somewhere from an individual level in society level but it's what is it the growth for yeah to what end to what ends and i think that's important and i had a kind of a wake up call when i was about thirty i'm thirty nine 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 in 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 it's to reach one hundred 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 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 i'm gonna go back to ari and.

Lewis yes and the saber toothed tigers.

There'S many bio who would argue with the saber toothed tiger being okay whatever it's a metaphor or fifteen thousand 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 one hundred percent 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 four hundred 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 see it as so i don't say it as an environmentalist in the kind of the climate environmentalist i say this as someone who cares about the mental environment we are broken we are disconnected the emotional environment we are it's very difficult for us to connect one on one with humans because it's very difficult for us to connect one on one with ourselves yes why is it difficult for us to connect one on one with ourselves because we have been told that we are separate and apart 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 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 make billions you can win the highest offices in the land if.

You want to drive that it'll never fulfill the wound so 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 ten thousand 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 had listening is to add the next layer not because it's responsibility or out of guilt but because i think it'll make the work you do that much more powerful everything from a hop in your step to when you're really thinking like is this worth it should i be doing this 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 ten thousand years if you can answer that in the affirmative oh my god nothing can stop you what would.

Be the prompt then for the future self letter let's just say that's if people only do one action and they do this for future self letter what would be the prompt to write to.

Themselves so it's how the book ends so i'm not going to give it too much away but it's here's how i became a great ancestor oh interesting look you can be a good ancestor you can be we're all going to be ancestors we're all going to die right by the way that's ernest becker won the nineteen seventy two 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 gonna die at one point and everything we do is to avoid that death and this goes back to aria luz 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 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 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 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 one hundred percent and they're supposed to be.

One of the happier memento mori at one point look a lot of people you know i know there's this yolo people wake up in the morning and they say well how am i gonna live today as if though 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 how was i like if today was my last day the way i interacted with my wife with my children with louis can i stand by that as a model of what does it mean to be a great ancestor and pass that on right like heaven forbid louis i walk out of here i get hit by a bus can i look back and say well my interactions with lewis with this audience was that the stick moment where i said trust me 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 you know as an athlete there was always for pole vaulting it was always measured in inches right for the four by one hundred 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 that's.

True 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 transformational for you long path becoming the great ancestors our future needs an antidote to short terminism terminism termism termism yeah short termism so make sure you guys check this out get a couple copies they can get it at.

Your website longpath dot org book or basically anywhere on the planet books are.

Sold on or offline get long path really inspiring this is a question i ask everyone at the end i mentioned it before it's called the three truths so imagine you live as long as you want and every day you've been proud of being a great ancestor for the future right for your future generations but it is the last day many.

Years away many years away 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 to what end is all meaningful and purposeful and fulfilling but 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.

The three truths the first one is act as if though you are a great ancestor because you are the second is never be afraid to love fully and really fully really in everything that means and you know i was thinking i was getting dressed coming on to lewis howes right and 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 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 you know i think about lance armstrong's book it's not about the bike the third truth is it's not about you yeah the.

Only challenge is most people think the world revolves around them and so that's why a lot of people suffer because they're always focused about me me me as opposed to like you said we or how can i be of service how can i use myself to be.

Of service to others yeah we are vessels for future generations and i don't mean that in an overly spiritual or theological way but our job is to do the best we can to set those up and we happen to be in a transition zone right now so let's take it seriously.

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 should i change the norm so i really acknowledge you for speaking in this way to an audience that i think probably doesn't typically think about healing and having empathy for their ancestors and not saying like it's okay to do that now but having empathy for the past having empathy for yourself as a kid growing up and then starting to think into the future in a spiritual standpoint so we can just make better decisions every single day so i really acknowledge you for the way you communicate where you bridge it you bridge the gap from what i think people really need to hear so i'm excited for people to get this book thank you my final question what is your definition of greatness i'm going.

To have to go back you know my my definition of greatness is living in accordance with being a great ancestor.

There you go all right my man.

Appreciate it thank you powerful man thank.

You so much for listening i hope you enjoyed today's episode and 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.

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