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 So we are in a transition zone right now on the planet.
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So when we think about our ultimate goal, it has to be... Welcome to the School of Greatness.
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My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur.
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And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness.
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Thanks for spending some time with me today.
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Now let the class begin.
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 A recession is coming, inflation is going through the roof, and one of the biggest reasons why most people are scared is because they haven't figured out how to develop a strong personal brand.
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I don't care if you're looking to build a business, a side hustle, a solopreneur, or you're a career professional.
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A personal brand is a must, and a powerful one at that point is the key.
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It's going to help you transform any downturn in economy into an opportunity.
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 So, if you're looking to generate more leads and more sales for your business, or you're looking to really develop yourself in your career to have more opportunities, then make sure to go to lewishouse.com slash branding for a free training.
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I'm going to teach you the five key strategies that are going to help you really set yourself up as we go deeper into this recession.
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So, make sure to go to lewishouse.com slash branding right now, and I'll see you in this free training coming soon.
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 Welcome back everyone at the School of Greatness.
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Very excited about our guest.
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We have Ari Wallach in the house.
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My man, good to see you, sir.
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How are you doing?
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I'm doing great.
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Very excited about this.
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You are an applied futurist and you've got this new book called Long Path, Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs.
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I'm excited about this because I believe that society is very short-term thinking.
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Yep.
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 Most people, I've been to blame for this in my life as well, is thinking, how can I get what I want now?
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How do I bring the future of this big idea, this dream to me in this moment?
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What's the shortcut?
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What's the fast path?
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What's the way to get there?
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 But a lot of us don't think about what are the consequences of taking the short path, right?
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Why is thinking long term or long path an important thing on an individual level and a planet level over short term thinking?
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 First of all, thank you for having me.
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It's a great question.
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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.
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Because here's the thing.
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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
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 jumps out from behind a tree, you and I should not sit there and have a long conversation about what to do.
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What we need to do is we need to immediately react.
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And that is what has helped us flourish as a species, Homo sapiens, for hundreds of thousands of years.
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So short-termism
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 In and of itself is not inherently bad.
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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.
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That's when it's bad.
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So first of all, let's say... What type of people make short-term decisions most of the time?
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 There's a large percentage of the planet who is literally existing on a dollar a day.
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They are making... Survival mode.
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Survival mode.
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If we take Maslow's Pyramid, there are folks that are literally just trying to get by and you have to think short term.
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So first of all, it's a privilege to even start thinking in these larger, more expansive, temporally expansive ways.
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 So for a lot of folks, this is just their reality.
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Now, one of the reasons I wrote the book is so there are fewer of those folks, right?
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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.
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So those people who are literally struggling, you know,
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 Right now, when I cook breakfast, I turn on a switch.
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There are people who will have to walk five miles, often very dangerous five miles, just to collect wood.
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So let's recognize that.
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A lot of us make short-term decisions, though, who could be making longer-term decisions.
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 Because the overall kind of structures that we exist in in society are incentivizing that, right?
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So if I work with CEOs and I meet these CEOs of Fortune 50 companies, I'm like, all right, this is great.
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I want to talk about the big future.
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Let's go out six or eight months, right?
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Because they're incentivized on a quarterly return basis.
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The money they literally make at the end of each quarter is based on their stock price.
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And so what ends up happening, that incentivized structure
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 I've worked with CEOs before who will call me up at the end of the day, and they're like, well, I don't know if we can move forward with this larger futuring project.
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And I say, well, why?
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They're like, did you see our stock price today?
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I said, today?
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I said, today?
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What do you mean?
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Well, they said, look, the thing is, it was up at noon.
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 But then it dropped a little bit.
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I don't, I don't know if we can do this.
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And so they're making decisions like that.
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It's, it's not, and again, it's not totally selfish.
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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, these short term ways of being.
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So you can think about, so I've worked in presidential politics.
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I've worked on presidential campaigns since 1996.
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 and smaller, more local campaigns.
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And now the way we kind of fund and run our politics, especially in this country, in the US, you literally, you know, you'll win your election, 24 hours later, you're picking up the phone, calling people, trying to raise money for the next election.
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Yeah, I was literally on a- Four years later.
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No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
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The day after you win- But I mean for the next four years or whatever.
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Yeah, yeah, four years or two years.
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I was on, unnamed senator was sitting next to me in the Acela from DC to New York.
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 And this was about a day and a half after the election, because I was down in DC for it.
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I was making my way back up to New York.
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I'm not going to say this name, but this person was heading up.
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And I wasn't totally listening, but I could tell they were kind of making these rapid calls.
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And some of the calls were to people, even though this was a US senator, this US senator was introducing themselves.
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Like, this is Senator.
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Thank you for your support.
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As you know, we've opened up another pack for my next election.
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 They just won.
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They just won.
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I mean literally, they're probably wearing the same shoes they wore at their election night party.
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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.
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I opened the book with a story.
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 I'm in the kitchen and my phone starts buzzing, there's a notification.
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And I look at it, and my daughter had missed turning in a Spanish assignment, and she had missed it, and it had been eight seconds since she missed it.
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It was due, but it was just a weekly assignment.
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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?
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So these larger incentivized systems are driving us to do more short-termistic behaviors
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 beyond just Louis and Ari being chased in the Serengeti.
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Again, for a lot of people, that's how they have to live.
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But for those of us who don't have to struggle at that level, we have to break out of this.
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And so this book is about that mindset that we need to adopt to take us out of that.
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 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 telos.
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To what end, yeah.
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And it's like figuring out your values, your vision, and to what end, what are you creating your life for?
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Yeah.
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What is it all about?
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To what end?
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So what does that mean, to thinking about, and should we start with to what end, and then reverse engineer to now?
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 So this is great.
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We're going right into it.
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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.
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And what I found time and time again was when we'd get into these conversations, they'd say, well, I want to fix this issue or solve this problem.
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But usually, what they consider the future was only four, five, eight years out.
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 while they're in election or when they're in office.
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And so that was the future.
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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.
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We don't even know what that is.
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We were talking earlier about when we look at the media environment, right?
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So I have 13 year old twin daughters.
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 And I go to their bookshelf, and I see every kind of tween novel they're reading.
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And of course, because for what I do, I'm looking to see, well, what if these are of the future?
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And a lot of them are.
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And I won't name names, so I don't want to throw any authors under the bus.
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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.
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 It could be nuclear war, it could be whatever it is.
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The world has ended, it's being rebuilt, and then there's some tween drama over here.
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But that's just first, so I stepped back because I was looking at that, trying to figure out why these CEOs and entrepreneurs I was working with were finding it difficult to tell me about where they actually wanted to go.
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Then I started looking at the TV shows and the movies.
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 Any movie you've seen in the past 10 years that takes place in the future, not necessarily far future, like Star Wars, or we can argue that's in the far past, but we won't get into 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?
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And so what I realized was the folks that I was working with, my children I'm trying to raise,
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 It's becoming increasingly difficult for them to be able to answer the question you're asking, to what end?
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Because in everything that they're surrounded by, their education, their content, the to what end is always dystopia.
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It's disaster.
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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?
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And
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 Look, what I didn't wanna do is I didn't wanna provide answers.
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So someone was like, you know, this is an amazing book, but you don't tell me what's gonna happen.
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I wanna know what's, you're a futurist, where's your crystal ball?
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And I think we've got into a lot of trouble that way, because we're looking for other people to tell us what is gonna happen, right?
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As opposed to us stepping back and saying, what do we want to happen?
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To what end?
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So in developing long path as an applied mindset,
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 There's three components.
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There's futures thinking, there's transgenerational empathy, and there's telos, which means basically ultimate aim and goal.
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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
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 create this mindset, so when we go into decision-making mode, whether it's like, what do I have for breakfast?
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Do I eat this or that?
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Because right now I can tell you, eat your broccoli and eat your kale, and you're like, ugh, okay.
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Or we can put it into a much larger frame, and living and acting and speaking healthily actually becomes something you wanna do because it's part of your legacy.
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So the to what end is incredibly important to be able to answer that question.
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 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.
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It's always from the birth of Lewis to the death of Lewis.
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Like, how do you actualize and maximize that unit of time?
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 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.
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The problem with that is most of the issues that we face, even at an individual level, let alone a societal level,
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 Started well before Lewis and are gonna go on well after Lewis and so so I ran track I'm sorry, but I'm sure if we compared our hundred or were you a distance 4x100 relay?
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Okay, and then I'll get I'll get into this way other one in a second pole vault I did pull off and 100 as well.
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I was the Catholics.
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Okay, so the pole vault is challenging pole vault is challenging But I use that in how I think about long paths.
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So it's let's talk about the relay the most important part according to my coach Ted Tillian
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 Hand off the hand off.
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It's a transition zone it is and more importantly and you know, this is if God I would love to run track with you would have been the great end of my four by 100 But I'm in all state you're not actually looking at me You already start running and I yell stick and you put your hand out.
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You don't you don't look back You can't look you just have to feel right and you guys trust
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 If I put it in my hand, then I can run with it.
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And then I pass it on to the next person.
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So we are in a transition zone right now on the planet.
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And we are literally having, we have an opportunity to either say, well, I'm just gonna, even though I'm in a relay race, I think I'm in a 100.
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 By myself, so I'm going to run this thing out, but you're not like I get no matter what issue you're working on.
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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.
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 to the next generation, and we're not doing that.
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But once you start to kind of bring that into your thinking, at some point, you're going to say stick.
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And here's the crazy thing.
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You're not yelling stick when you're in your 80s or you're on the backside and you're kind of ending things.
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You're thinking, OK, how am I going to pass the baton to next?
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 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.
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You are consistently creating a legacy.
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You're consistently saying stick and passing on, even if you don't realize it.
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 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.
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It doesn't mean you can't, doesn't mean I don't want to be the best Ari possible.
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You don't want to be the best Louis possible.
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But your ultimate aim and goal should be one that transcends just your own life.
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And now think about what does that look like at scale?
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 I mean, whether people call it long path or not, but kind of a transgenerational way of thinking and connecting.
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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?
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They're doing all this amazing work.
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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.
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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.
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 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.
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I want to be the best version of myself, but it's not just for myself.
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It's so that the next generation, and this doesn't necessarily mean you have to have your own genetic kids.
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It can be all the next generation that you influence.
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 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.
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It's like track, right?
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It's like the 4x100.
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If your second or third runs with a sick fast time, you set the next generation.
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So the mindset
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 Long path requires us to have a to what end that is bigger than ourselves so that we can Work on issues that it doesn't mean you can't work on stuff for yourself But a person to a larger context is so is to what end also what people say is what's your end goal?
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You know, what's your end goal for this project?
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Yeah this career for this thing you're doing.
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Well, so yes and no So what's your end game more often than not is like Lewis?
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What's your what's your end game with everything that you're doing here?
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I
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 More often than not, and I won't put you on the spot, if someone would say, all right, what's your end game with long path?
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They're asking me to answer that for myself.
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More often than not, that's what we mean, right?
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But once you start kind of thinking and adopting long path into how you process those types of questions, you think, okay,
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 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.
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So they set the next generation and the next generation.
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Is that your to what end?
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That's my to what end.
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So how's the exercise go?
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 So there's a dozen of them in the book.
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So there's multiple different kind of cognitive exercises asking you to kind of imagine different futures, imagine your ancestors, imagine future generations.
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And all of the exercises in the book are basically back-ended by peer-reviewed research, right, about how you get people to think differently about themselves and future generations.
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And so there's this guy at NYU, Jakob Troep, he does amazing research on what's called basically mental time travel.
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 So mental time travel of mental time travel.
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Well, so here's the thing because you're an athlete So you think crosses a professor as well who talks about one of these things in his book called chatter?
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Yes mental time travel I think it's powerful.
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So mental time travel what what what Yako has found and a bunch of other people is that if I was to say Lewis tell me what life will be like in Los Angeles 50 years from now
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 You're going to stop and think, well, OK, in 50 years it could be like this.
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It's going to be hard for you to find.
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You may come with some top line details.
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More often than not, you're going to think, oh, there'll be monorails and jet packs.
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You'll go to external things.
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But then if I say, Luz, tell me about Los Angeles 50 years ago.
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Now I'm asking you to go back in a historical way.
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And I'll make it even easier.
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I'll say, go back.
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I'll say, let's use a 20-year time frame.
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 because you're a young man.
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So I say go back 20 years, right?
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And all of a sudden you start to have all these details of what your life was like, the food that you ate.
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You can become much more imaginative because your hippocampus, which is holding your memory now, is kind of creating memories and bringing things back.
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But here's the great thing, and you know this as an athlete, if you close your eyes, and I'll just say, okay,
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 And this is the pole vaulting part.
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I'd say, Lewis, I want you to visualize yourself going over the bar.
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And I won't say at what height, because then you'll ask me my height, and it'll become a very embarrassing part of the conversation.
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So let's take Sergei Bubko, one of the best jumper vaulters of all time.
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19 or 18?
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19, 19 and a half.
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Yeah, so Sergei's sitting back and thinking, like, OK, he sees it.
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For him, breaking records was like in quarter inches, right?
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So when he's visualizing,
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 Him going 19 feet, right?
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And he's closing his eyes.
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His hippocampus can't tell the difference.
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And we've done this.
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We've seen the research.
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The visualization of him going over and the memory of him clearing a similar height, the brain won't tell the difference.
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So when it gets to the point, the muscle memory is actually going to activate and he's going to clear it.
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He's already seen himself doing it.
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It's the same thing with mental time travel on bigger issues and bigger systems, not just pole vaulting.
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 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.
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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.
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You can tell me about the food, entertainment, how people are living.
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 It's kind of the same thing.
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That's what mental time travel, that's what the exercises in the book will do.
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We'll ask people things to kind of imagine or to think back to their far-off descendants or their far-off descendants and their ancestors, but we do it in a way where all the exercises in the book are meant to kind of take you out of your lifespan bias, take you out of like a temporal bias, right?
0
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I mean,
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 The real insidious part about short-termism is that it puts us in what I call todayism.
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It's like today, today.
0
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Douglas Rushkoff calls it presentism.
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But what todayism is, it's more insidious than short-termism because what it does is it erases time.
0
SPEAKER_00
 So we end up almost being like in a hall of mirrors, right?
0
SPEAKER_00
You ever get that feeling like it's a groundhog day every day, over and over again.
0
SPEAKER_00
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.
0
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 Because there's power to being present and in the moment, and not just thinking outside constantly.
0
SPEAKER_01
It's like you need both.
0
SPEAKER_01
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.
0
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and you can also be, so my 20s were mostly spent on and off in kind of different sodas and practices in San Francisco.
0
SPEAKER_00
 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.
0
SPEAKER_00
That's different than presentism, right?
0
SPEAKER_00
Presentism is like when everything's over.
0
SPEAKER_00
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?
0
SPEAKER_00
Where do I want to take this?
0
SPEAKER_00
If you are kind of,
0
SPEAKER_00
 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?
0
SPEAKER_00
And so that's the the second part of kind of the the second pillar I should say of long path is this idea of transgenerational empathy
0
SPEAKER_00
 So you know empathy, right?
0
SPEAKER_01
This is the second part, right?
0
SPEAKER_00
The second pillar is transgenerational empathy.
0
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So more than that, it's like, well, you need to have compassion for yourself.
0
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And from that kind of flowing of pro-socialness, you can do other things.
0
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I don't take 100%.
0
SPEAKER_00
But when it comes to thinking about how we want the future to look, first and foremost, we have to recognize that what
0
SPEAKER_00
 What holds us back about, so if I say, Lewis, tell me about your future, and what's gonna hold you, or maybe not you, because you're more actualized than most, but what's gonna hold most people back is you're gonna bring all this stuff into the exercise based on your parents, based on your aunts, all sorts of, it can be systemic, but it can be positive and negative, right?
0
SPEAKER_00
It can be intergenerational trauma,
0
SPEAKER_00
 And it can be collective or it can be acute, but you're going to bring that in.
0
SPEAKER_00
And more often than not, and I've and I've seen this for the past couple of years.
0
SPEAKER_00
 we look back at our ancestors with a lot of disdain, right?
0
SPEAKER_00
I mean, there's a lot, especially, we're going through a kind of reckoning.
0
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Resentment, right?
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Disdain and resentment.
0
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It could be like what your parents did.
0
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One of my parents did this, my grandparents did this, and everyone's messed up, and they did these bad things.
0
SPEAKER_00
And by the way, we're also seeing that in this country right now, 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 of reconstruction, and we look back
0
SPEAKER_00
 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.
0
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It's not about, people did terrible things.
0
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What it is, is it's about recognizing kind of context.
0
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So evil is always gonna be evil.
0
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But a lot of things that like our parents did to us wasn't because they were evil, it's because they didn't really know any better.
0
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They didn't have skills or tools.
0
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Skills or tools, and I can guarantee you right now.
0
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And it was the norm.
0
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 It was the norm, and it doesn't make it okay, but it was the norm.
0
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And the reason you want to have kind of empathy for that is not to say, but it's okay that you did it.
0
SPEAKER_00
It's to recognize those things came into you at an individual level, or those things came into us at a collective level, which is happening in America right now.
0
SPEAKER_00
 We need to process, work through it in a way that allows us to kind of be clear enough so that we can then move into a place where we say, okay, all these inner things, you know, there's only this inner dialogue that we have.
0
SPEAKER_00
Like it's always like, oh, Lewis, you should have done that.
0
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Art, you should have done this.
0
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 So much of that is coming from the past and injected by our parents and society.
0
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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.
0
SPEAKER_00
 Because it's all, it's been woven throughout whatever your imagination is for what your desired future could be.
0
SPEAKER_00
It's always going to have that within it.
0
SPEAKER_01
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.
0
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 And what I'm gonna hear you say right there is step one is heal the past.
0
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Heal the memories of the past.
0
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And this is everything that I've been studying just on mindset and money and relationships and health.
0
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It's like you gotta learn how to heal the past if you want to be a healthier human being.
0
SPEAKER_01
 Not a traumatic relationship moving forward with it with a new relationship.
0
SPEAKER_01
You've got to heal that relationship You got to heal the relationship with your family, whatever it is your relationship to money.
0
SPEAKER_01
You've got to heal if you want to earn more Yep, step one is being aware of the past and healing those things that hold you back and with a hundred percent what that does is it drives self-compassion for yourself and
0
SPEAKER_01
 Not beating yourself up, and blaming yourself, and I'm an idiot.
0
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, why did I do this?
0
SPEAKER_00
That inner dialogue, we think by the way... But you're a futurist, you're not a therapist.
0
SPEAKER_00
No, but we... You're talking about healing and all these different things now.
0
SPEAKER_00
 But this is the issue.
0
SPEAKER_00
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.
0
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Let's move forward to monorails and jetpacks and AI.
0
SPEAKER_00
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,
0
SPEAKER_01
 Or a parent.
0
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Or a parent.
0
SPEAKER_00
If you wanna think about the futures that you want, you have to heal what got you to this point.
0
SPEAKER_01
Wow, that's powerful.
0
SPEAKER_01
Powerful to hear from someone like you.
0
SPEAKER_00
Because you won't be able to, trust me, I've been in the situation room, I've been at the top floor of the UN, I've been in all these rooms with all these cats, right?
0
SPEAKER_00
Doing amazing work.
0
SPEAKER_00
They're doing amazing work.
0
SPEAKER_01
The leaders of the world in different industries.
0
SPEAKER_00
 Across the board more often than not what I see holding them back when I say well to what end?
0
SPEAKER_00
Where do you want to take this?
0
SPEAKER_00
Where do you want to go?
0
SPEAKER_00
I know cuz I know domination, right?
0
SPEAKER_00
That's the whole thing.
0
SPEAKER_00
I know I know Because I know about these folks and that's my job to exist.
0
SPEAKER_00
I'm like, oh they're coming into this entire exercise with all this stuff.
0
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I
0
SPEAKER_00
 All of us are coming into it, right?
0
SPEAKER_00
We all carry heirlooms with us that are emotional heirlooms that have been passed on to us by those who came before.
0
SPEAKER_00
Some heirlooms you should keep.
0
SPEAKER_00
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.
0
SPEAKER_01
Good habits, good skills, good values.
0
SPEAKER_00
Creativity, openness, humor, what have you.
0
SPEAKER_00
There's other things that if I don't process are gonna hold me back in doing the work that I wanna do.
0
SPEAKER_00
 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.
0
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He went on, he escaped the ghetto, he joined the Jewish underground and was a Nazi hunter after the war.
0
SPEAKER_00
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.
0
SPEAKER_00
 So it's all these amazing things and then out pops me and you know, my two sisters now It's on me to figure out what of that is going to propel me forward and what of that is gonna kind of hold me back So I'll give you I'll give you a very very personal example So my father who passed away when I was much younger because he hadn't when he was much older Whenever we'd go eat in a restaurant.
0
SPEAKER_00
He never had his back to the door Right funny.
0
SPEAKER_01
I said I said this this morning
1
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 This morning at breakfast, I said that exact same thing.
1
SPEAKER_02
I never have my back where people can walk behind me.
1
SPEAKER_02
I've always wanted to observe what attack or potential threat there is.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's so funny.
1
SPEAKER_00
I won't put you on the couch right now, but the question is, where does that come from?
1
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How does that help you analyze situations and see patterns?
1
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Part of that helps you build this.
1
SPEAKER_00
 Part of that holds you back in terms of trust and a whole bunch of other issues.
1
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So part of it is kind of parsing what that is.
1
SPEAKER_00
So for me, as a futurist, it was just that.
1
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It was like, what part of not having, because by the way, we go to a restaurant, I wouldn't have my back to the door either.
1
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It gets passed on.
1
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The thing is, you have to take the parts of that that work and the parts that don't.
1
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Because if you don't, you're gonna pass that on.
1
SPEAKER_00
 It's going to be another heirloom that I'm going to give to my kids.
1
SPEAKER_00
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.
1
SPEAKER_00
So transgenerational empathy, we heal the past, we become more in the present by knowing what is holding, what that baggage is.
1
SPEAKER_00
And at that point, this is, you know, to your comment earlier about being a therapist,
1
SPEAKER_00
 Now at that point, we can start futuring.
1
SPEAKER_00
Now we can actually say, OK, where do we want to go?
1
SPEAKER_00
And before we can do that, we have to acknowledge something else.
1
SPEAKER_00
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.
1
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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.
1
SPEAKER_00
And it's this really interesting place that's both kind of chaos,
1
SPEAKER_00
 and complexity, but also massive opportunity, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
So you have mussels that have evolved to actually hold water when the water goes down, and you have starfish that find pools.
1
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It's an amazing place.
1
SPEAKER_00
So we are in that right now on the planet, especially in what we call the global north.
1
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Why?
1
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So intertitles happen when the narratives, the stories, the institutions, the things that we use to kind of guide us
1
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 start to fall away.
1
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One of the ways we measure this, because we want to be somewhat quantitative, is people's trust.
1
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Trust in institutions, trust in each other, trust in leadership.
1
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If you look at the past 15 years, it's just been
1
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 falling down, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
We've had intertitles before.
1
SPEAKER_00
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.
1
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We would have been a great team.
1
SPEAKER_00
Give or take about 10,000 or 12,000 years ago, we go from hunter-gatherer to actually thinking about staying in one place, civilization, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
 And that's a massive interchannel, because before that, the way you and I ordered the world was by stars and mythic structures.
1
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Now, we're staying in one place.
1
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Why?
1
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Because we're cultivating grain, we're cultivating livestock, and it's actually, as much as everyone says, oh,
1
SPEAKER_00
 It would've been great to be a hunter-gatherer, because now we're just all in cubicles.
1
SPEAKER_00
It was actually really rough back then.
1
SPEAKER_00
Not every, I don't know.
1
SPEAKER_00
There was no penicillin, there was no wifi, there was like, short-termism, always on, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
And the thing that you and I were the most scared of, obviously, was dying and being pushed out of the cave.
1
SPEAKER_00
Right, at night, because we did something wrong.
1
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If you and I did something wrong in that small band, everybody would be like, Lewis, you took too much of me, or you shirked your responsibility during the hunt.
1
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 you're out of here.
1
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But everyone saw it.
1
SPEAKER_00
So what happens when we move into a kind of more urbanization in this last major intertitle is, remember the intertitle is all this creativity?
1
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So one of the things that gets created in that is our good friend God.
1
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Why?
1
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We need a kind of omnipotent God.
1
SPEAKER_00
 thing that can see what Ari and Louis are doing behind walls.
1
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Because remember, up until that point, I always had eyes on you.
1
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I saw what you were doing.
1
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And there was no room.
1
SPEAKER_00
It was a very different world.
1
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But if you messed up, you knew about it very quickly.
1
SPEAKER_00
Now, all of a sudden, as we're urbanizing and Clay Bricks and the Levant in the Middle East,
1
SPEAKER_00
 We need these new ways of order.
1
SPEAKER_00
We need new narratives.
1
SPEAKER_00
So there's this idea of, instead of many gods, we have one God, and that God can see everything, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
So I'm using God as an example of what can happen in the intertidal.
1
SPEAKER_00
These things that we take for granted, I mean, that's innovation, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
From polytheism to monotheism, that's some deep intertidal creativity, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
And look, intertidals always come about because you have kind of constrained
1
SPEAKER_00
 food resources, more urbanization, people kind of coming together, usually kind of major disease spread, like check, check, check, check.
1
SPEAKER_00
That's all happening right now.
1
SPEAKER_00
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.
1
SPEAKER_00
And in fact, we can recreate it.
1
SPEAKER_00
And for a long time, it actually worked.
1
SPEAKER_00
 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.
1
SPEAKER_00
If we break the forest into its individual components, that's not actually, you can't put it back together again.
1
SPEAKER_00
Things are system, they're interrelated, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
 That's across the board for everything.
1
SPEAKER_00
So we see our ways of how Ari and Lewis go about the world starting to break down.
1
SPEAKER_00
The things that we believed in are now being pressure tested and failing across the board.
1
SPEAKER_00
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.
1
SPEAKER_00
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.
1
SPEAKER_00
And obviously this can be about climate change, but it's about a whole host of issues.
1
SPEAKER_00
 I wrote the book and created this mindset because it's bespoke to the moment.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's how do you navigate an intertitle?
1
SPEAKER_00
How do you successfully get through this moment as an individual and as part of a larger collective?
1
SPEAKER_02
How do we do it?
1
SPEAKER_00
How do we do it?
1
SPEAKER_00
So what I say in Long Path is, there's a couple of things.
1
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We can't, I think first and foremost, and we've touched on this already, is Long Path is inherently a relational mindset.
1
SPEAKER_00
 And I mean this with no offense to anyone.
1
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Relationship to yourself, relationship to others, relationship to the world, to the next generation, relationship to the past, the future, everything.
1
SPEAKER_00
That's it.
1
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First to the past.
1
SPEAKER_00
First to the past, and that recognition.
1
SPEAKER_00
Remember, up until a couple of hundred years ago, a couple of thousand years ago, where you are on the planet, or in some places happening right now,
1
SPEAKER_00
 we had systems, we had ritualistic elder-based systems that initiated it.
1
SPEAKER_00
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.
1
SPEAKER_00
When you turn 13, you're gonna go through something.
1
SPEAKER_00
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.
1
SPEAKER_00
 And now, look, in the modern world, it's like, do the invitations go out?
1
SPEAKER_00
Will the caterers show up?
1
SPEAKER_00
But if you step back, this larger ritualistic way of kind of transitioning, and look, there's a big part in the bar bat mix of ceremony where we thank our elders and we thank our ancestors.
1
SPEAKER_00
But in general, in society, we have lost that, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
We've lost that ability to kind of connect and be, what we call in Buddhism, right relation.
1
SPEAKER_00
 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 But but you think it's interesting I was thinking about this the other day and you just gave the word you like your temporal tribe, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
It's like forwards and backwards.
1
SPEAKER_00
You're part of something more than just yourself right and it's hard because
1
SPEAKER_00
 In Western society, so much tells us one thing, which is it's all about you.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's all about the individual, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
It's all about, if we look at all of our movies with the heroes, it's always, the hero always does it alone.
1
SPEAKER_00
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.
1
SPEAKER_00
 They're always like, oh, it was my band of brothers.
1
SPEAKER_00
So long path is inherently relational because you can practice it to a point.
1
SPEAKER_00
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?
1
SPEAKER_00
And in these kind of cognitive ways, you stand in front of a mirror.
1
SPEAKER_00
Look, you stand in front of a mirror.
1
SPEAKER_00
So 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,
1
SPEAKER_00
 I have you focus on your belly button.
1
SPEAKER_00
And everyone's like, why your belly button?
1
SPEAKER_00
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.
1
SPEAKER_02
It's true, and it kept you alive.
1
SPEAKER_00
Kept you alive, but it was literally a direct connection.
1
SPEAKER_00
And those belly buttons go back tens of thousands, if not millions of years, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
All the way through, it's a through line.
1
SPEAKER_00
And by the way, it's gonna go all the way through.
1
SPEAKER_00
 So it's inherently relational, because you have to understand that when you go to a bookstore, if anyone still goes to bookstores, and you go to the self-help section, right, or what they call prescriptive non-fiction, or they call it different things, 98% of the books are about just you and the work that you have to do on yourself.
1
SPEAKER_00
And there's no fault to that.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I get that, and I've read most of them, and it's helped me be a better dad, husband, or person.
1
SPEAKER_00
But if we wanna move,
1
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 Forward in a positive flourishing way through this intertitle.
1
SPEAKER_00
We have to we have to flip it It has to go from me to we we have to do that And so the kind of the back third of the book is okay.
1
SPEAKER_00
You've done all this work on yourself now.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's time to think about Co-creating futures.
1
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So people always ask me what's the future and I always say the same thing.
1
SPEAKER_00
What do you want it to be?
1
SPEAKER_00
 And how do we do it together?
1
SPEAKER_00
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.
1
SPEAKER_00
They didn't future alone.
1
SPEAKER_00
What I'm asking in this book is for folks to be able to do that collectively as an individual.
1
SPEAKER_00
 kind of layer at a familial, you know, their family organization and society writ large.
1
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And so that's where, and then from that point, as you start to kind of think about that, that becomes how you start to have empathy for those who will be coming and actually start feeling.
1
SPEAKER_00
Because if I was to say to you, Lewis, like, you know, tell me, let's talk about
1
SPEAKER_00
 you know, four generations from now, like describing to me.
1
SPEAKER_00
You talk about it from your prefrontal cortex, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
And we've seen this.
1
SPEAKER_00
We do the fMRI studies.
1
SPEAKER_00
You can visualize and tell me about them.
1
SPEAKER_00
But if I start asking, well, how do they feel in this world?
1
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All of a sudden, it's like a record, a needle scratching on a record.
1
SPEAKER_00
 Because we're not trained to do that inherently.
1
SPEAKER_00
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.
1
SPEAKER_00
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.
1
SPEAKER_02
 And so what do you do then if you're looking 10, 20, 30 years out to your future self?
1
SPEAKER_02
And I always think about my highest future self.
1
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To what end is thinking 10 years from now, I'll be 49, almost 50 I guess, am I really proud of the actions I took today?
1
SPEAKER_02
 that are gonna make my future self proud.
1
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They're like, wow, I'm so glad you showed up that way for me in the future, right?
1
SPEAKER_02
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 a photo of my childhood self, right?
1
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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.
1
SPEAKER_02
 and having compassion, empathy, and allowing the heal, the old, the child within me, the psychological wounded child within me at five, 10, 12, 21, 30, 35, you know, all those things, and bring the past to the now, like you talked about of the society,
1
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 And then think, okay, is the action I take this morning by moving my body, by working out, by eating healthy today, by thinking a certain way going to benefit my highest self 10 years from now?
1
SPEAKER_02
And I think that process has really helped me constantly be present but also be future thinking at the same time and hopefully thinking generationally, like how am I gonna pass this down to my children as well so they don't have the same traumas that I had?
1
SPEAKER_00
 So it's amazing that you have that on your phone, but very soon we're gonna tweak that a little bit, and I'll tell you how.
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So Hal Hershfield at UCLA has done a bunch of research on this, where he'll take people and he'll put them into an fMRI machine, which looks at the oxygen flow and where things are being activated in the brain.
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And he'll put them in, and most of these studies are mostly done on college freshmen, but he puts them in.
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Who else is gonna go to an fMRI machine?
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And he slides them in.
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 He'll say, okay, I want you to think about yourself right now, in the present moment.
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This is an oversimplification, because you're not going to slice my head open right now.
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And this part of their brain will activate.
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And then he'll say, okay, I want you to, and he'll take someone famous.
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He'll say, I want you to think about Matt Damon.
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This part of the brain will activate.
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SPEAKER_00
And then he'll say, I want you to think about your future self 20 years from now.
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And you know which part lights up?
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The same part that did for Matt Damon.
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SPEAKER_00
So it's someone that they kind of vaguely know, but it's not them.
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SPEAKER_00
 So you pull them out, you divide the group, and you do two things.
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With one group, the control group, nothing, they don't do anything, they come back in 30 days or whatever.
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SPEAKER_00
The other group, two things.
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One, he has them write letters to their future self.
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I love this exercise.
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SPEAKER_02
I love this, I've done this many times.
1
SPEAKER_00
So you write a letter to your future self, and the other thing they do, and they've also done this in VR, but for simplification, they'll take a photo and they'll age it, let's say for some of this research, 10 years.
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And you look at the photo every day for 30 seconds.
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Of you 10 years from now.
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SPEAKER_00
 and they put them back into the fMRI machine, and what do you think happens?
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SPEAKER_00
The control group is still, oh, this is present Ari, this is future Ari over here.
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SPEAKER_00
The group that actually had the intervention done on them, you know exactly what happened.
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Present Ari and future Ari start to overlap, right, and they become kind of one, and you start making decisions in that way.
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 For that future self.
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For that future self.
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So now you're no longer todayist, you're no longer short-termist, you're actually thinking much broader.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
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 You can take a photo of yourself and age it 10 years.
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And the other thing is you can write a letter to your future self.
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These are all kind of neurocognitive interventions that help you start going there.
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SPEAKER_00
So I obviously, I did this.
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SPEAKER_00
And so on my desk at home, you know what there is, right?
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SPEAKER_00
There's a photo of me when I was six years old.
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SPEAKER_00
 Right, which is kind of like, oh, actually, it's a photo of me when I'm five years old.
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SPEAKER_00
I'll get to why I did that in a second.
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It's a photo of me at five.
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There's one with me and my family, and there's one with me aged 20 years from now.
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And so when I'm thinking about the decisions that I have to make, how do I do it?
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SPEAKER_00
I'm trying to look across that.
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But there's other things.
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SPEAKER_00
We also have, and again, you're talking to, so this may be,
1
SPEAKER_00
 That's easy, but I'll go a little bit further.
1
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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.
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And then I have one frame that's empty.
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And I keep it there.
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And that's for my grandkids or future generations.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so I see that every day as I walk into the kitchen, I look at that.
1
SPEAKER_00
 Because what I'm thinking is the things that I'm doing, why, you know, what's my why?
1
SPEAKER_00
Like, why, you know, like, why do I get up in the morning?
1
SPEAKER_00
There's obviously, you know, look, ego is a great thing.
1
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It's a great tool.
1
SPEAKER_00
So some of it is like, I'm, I'm going to go on Lewis Howe.
1
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I'm going to write a book and I'm going to get on Lewis Howe, like the number one guy on the planet.
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I'm going to do 100%.
1
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 And you know this, because you've had success in multiple different areas.
1
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That's actually not enough to, you can do that, it's self-fulfilling.
1
SPEAKER_00
You'll get there, you'll be on the stage.
1
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I've spoken in front of thousands of people, and afterwards, they were like, that must have been amazing.
1
SPEAKER_00
I'm like, eh.
1
SPEAKER_00
Because I did it for a futuring thing, eh, okay.
1
SPEAKER_00
But when you start to put what you're doing in a much larger context about the, so think about it.
1
SPEAKER_00
There's been about, depending on who you talk to,
1
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 There's been a rut between 80 to 100 billion Homo sapiens on planet Earth.
1
SPEAKER_00
 since- 80 to 100 billion.
1
SPEAKER_00
80 to 100 billion.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's crazy.
1
SPEAKER_00
If you go, tell them where you want to draw the line between Astropoliticus and all these, but about 80 to 100 billion, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
So now here we are in 2022, and we look forward and we start to think, well, A, we're gonna successfully navigate this intertidal moment, but we're literally on page one of a 400 page novel called Homo Sapiens.
1
SPEAKER_00
So it's been about 100 billion to this point,
1
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 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.
1
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And so what ends up happening is, what is the legacy?
1
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What are the heirlooms that we want to give them?
1
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Part of it is a healthy planet, 100%.
1
SPEAKER_00
First and foremost, nothing happens outside of spaceship Earth, right?
1
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Eventually we start to leave it.
1
SPEAKER_00
But if we think, you know, if, we talked about this earlier, let's go forward 1,000 years from now.
1
SPEAKER_00
 And people are looking at the history books or books or whatever in the, you know, brain machine interface.
1
SPEAKER_00
I'm like, who is this Lewis Howe character?
1
SPEAKER_00
I mean, there's big statues of you in Central Park.
1
SPEAKER_00
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?
1
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
1
SPEAKER_00
They gave us, they figured out climate change.
1
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They figured out the right things to do and ways of working and being,
1
SPEAKER_00
 What they're going to want to know is what were the things that you and I did at an emotional psychological level?
1
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To set them up for success.
1
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To set them up for success.
1
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Or to hurt them.
1
SPEAKER_00
Or to hurt them in flourishing, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
And by the way, and part of transgenerational empathy for the past is also recognizing there's only so much we can do with what the norms are today.
1
SPEAKER_00
So I eat meat, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
I try to be healthy about it and it's organic and free-range.
1
SPEAKER_00
 Look, 200 years from now, roughly, there's gonna be research, or it could be 100 years, it could be 50 years, there'll be research where it's like, animals were totally conscious.
1
SPEAKER_00
They totally felt the pain, they totally knew what was going on, blah, blah, blah, blah.
1
SPEAKER_00
And our descendants are gonna look back and be like, what was Ari and Lewis, that was horrific, horrific.
1
SPEAKER_00
 And by the way, go forward 800 years, and whatever they were doing, folks will look at it and be like, that was horrific.
1
SPEAKER_02
Barbaric.
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Barbaric.
1
SPEAKER_00
Again, it doesn't mean we shouldn't stop doing evil, those things.
1
SPEAKER_00
So there's a little bit of hubris.
1
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Put it into context.
1
SPEAKER_00
But if we go out to the trillion or so Homo sapiens,
1
SPEAKER_00
 when we look at the three different photo frames that we have, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
Or, you know, so one of the things that actually, I pilfered from Amazon, which is, you know, you can pilfer where you can.
1
SPEAKER_00
So at Amazon, Bezos was famous for leaving an empty chair.
1
SPEAKER_00
You know this?
1
SPEAKER_01
You know this story?
1
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So in meetings, he would, well, there's two things he did that are amazing.
1
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And I went to go visit and do a talk and do some work there.
1
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And I noticed two things.
1
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One, all the conference, big conference, you know, gorgeous Seattle headquarters.
1
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 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.
1
SPEAKER_00
It'd be like 10 of them lined up.
1
SPEAKER_00
Why?
1
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That was his first desk.
1
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If you look at the photo of him when it was just him.
1
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With like the computer and the Amazon sign.
1
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And the Amazon spray paint.
1
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It's a wood, it's literally, it's a door.
1
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Interesting.
1
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 And so part of it is don't forget where you came from.
1
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We may be this whole thing, but don't forget it's always that first day.
1
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So that's always interesting is to remember your past.
1
SPEAKER_00
Because I walk into some conference rooms of these companies that have
1
SPEAKER_00
 Unicorns whatever and like these tables cost like a hundred thousand.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah hundred grand for a table You can hire someone for that.
1
SPEAKER_00
You can do a lot with that and here though.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's it's still the door So that's one but the other thing that he would do is he would leave one chair Empty and that chair was meant to represent the customer What would they want?
1
SPEAKER_00
What would they want?
1
SPEAKER_00
So whenever there's a kind of decision to be made it'd be like what would they want?
1
SPEAKER_00
Mm-hmm
1
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 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.
1
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But that chair is meant to represent future generations.
1
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What do they want?
1
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What do they need?
1
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And so when you don't know what to do, you're not sure like what direction to go into, you can look at that chair and if you're in, look, you may be in a setting where you're not able to leave an empty chair.
1
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You can mentally have that empty chair.
1
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And that empty chair is,
1
SPEAKER_00
 for future Lewis, for generations, or the trillions to come?
1
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How are we making decisions for them?
1
SPEAKER_00
And look, here's the thing, this is not feel good, oh my god, like kumbaya.
1
SPEAKER_00
This helps you in the present because what it does is it helps you be more creative and more curious
1
SPEAKER_00
 and recognize that you have to be in right relationship to the world and those around you.
1
SPEAKER_00
So whether you're a politician, an entrepreneur, an athlete, this just ups your game in the moment.
1
SPEAKER_00
So the side benefit of transgenerational empathy besides laying out this thing for future generations, it makes you a better human today.
1
SPEAKER_02
 Yeah, you called it future self-thinking.
1
SPEAKER_02
There's another term mental time travel I I started talking about this a few years ago calling it future hindsight Yeah, because you know when something happens and we look back at it.
1
SPEAKER_02
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 the Matthew McConaughey talked about this in his acceptance speech for the Oscar where he's like
1
SPEAKER_02
 Someone asked me who my hero is and I think about myself 10 years from now.
1
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He's my hero.
1
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And I'm always chasing that person.
1
SPEAKER_02
I'm trying to make that person proud.
1
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I'm trying to make the actions to get closer to that.
1
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And then when I get there, I realize my hero's still another 10 years out.
1
SPEAKER_02
And I have to start making decisions and actions towards improving myself to be closer to that hero.
1
SPEAKER_02
But I'll never meet him.
1
SPEAKER_02
 Yeah, it's interesting.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so it's the same thing, but now expanded out over several generations.
1
SPEAKER_00
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 both kind of creativity, but also kind of chaos.
1
SPEAKER_00
 We have to step back.
1
SPEAKER_00
There's this term that's in the book, this idea of the official future.
1
SPEAKER_00
The official future.
1
SPEAKER_00
I put that in quotes, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
So the official future can be an individual.
1
SPEAKER_00
Growing up in my family, the official future is I'm going to go to college, graduate school, get married, have 3.2 kids.
1
SPEAKER_00
 That's an official feature.
1
SPEAKER_00
The official feature 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.
1
SPEAKER_00
 You know, we're all going to drive electric cars.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's a certain official future.
1
SPEAKER_00
So, and we talked about this much earlier, that the official future, that story was for generations, always came usually from the priests, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
It was those that were closest to God over the past 10,000 years.
1
SPEAKER_00
The wisest.
1
SPEAKER_00
 But why this?
1
SPEAKER_00
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.
1
SPEAKER_00
Because anything that you did that fell outside of this official future was not condoned.
1
SPEAKER_00
In fact, it was scary, you're pushed out of the cave, and so you didn't do it, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
 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?
1
SPEAKER_00
In a monotheistic face, and a number of them, the afterlife, remember, was invented as a control mechanism to get you to do certain things, to build morality.
1
SPEAKER_02
To do good things here, yes.
1
SPEAKER_00
Well, to do good things here now and to avoid, and by the way, who defined those good things was a huge controlling mechanism.
1
SPEAKER_00
And I say this in the book, I'm not talking about the,
1
SPEAKER_00
 the theology of religion, I'm talking about the control mechanism and what it became as an institution.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so even that's falling apart.
1
SPEAKER_00
The fastest growing group in America right now are what we call nuns, N-O-N-E-S.
1
SPEAKER_00
They're spiritual but not religious.
1
SPEAKER_00
None of the above.
1
SPEAKER_00
Because that's again another kind of narrative that's collapsing.
1
SPEAKER_00
So we have this official future.
1
SPEAKER_00
 About where the world is supposed to be going and we're seeing that kind of collapse in this intertidal moment but here's the thing not having any sense of future is It's too much of a cognitive load people start to freak out and what do they do?
1
SPEAKER_00
more often than not and we've seen this throughout history is They will go and look for a strong man or someone with a narrative that says this is the future Follow me.
1
SPEAKER_00
We saw that in this country.
1
SPEAKER_00
We've seen in other countries.
1
SPEAKER_00
It's not I'm not saying this as a
1
SPEAKER_00
 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.
1
SPEAKER_02
Just to have some direction to go.
1
SPEAKER_00
We need direction.
1
SPEAKER_02
What happens if we don't find that?
1
SPEAKER_02
Do we just go into drugs and addiction?
1
SPEAKER_00
Drugs, addiction, bad habits, and we become very, very, very short-termistic.
1
SPEAKER_00
 It's all here now, the pleasure right now.
1
SPEAKER_00
Instant gratification.
1
SPEAKER_00
Instant gratification because there's nothing bigger.
1
SPEAKER_00
I'm not part of something bigger anymore.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so in the book, I call it the project.
1
SPEAKER_00
And people are like, why do you call it the project?
1
SPEAKER_00
I was like, I didn't know what else to call it.
1
SPEAKER_00
But the project is something bigger than ourselves over the next 10,000 years so that we become a flourishing species.
1
SPEAKER_02
How do you get people who are not thinking that way to start thinking about
1
SPEAKER_02
 something bigger than themselves?
1
SPEAKER_02
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?
1
SPEAKER_00
And look, for a number of people who are going through kind of acute emergencies or traumas, like, we'll make this, this is a second or third layer that they have to address, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
But for those of us who have that kind of emotional, psychological space to do that,
1
SPEAKER_00
 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.
1
SPEAKER_00
What came before you?
1
SPEAKER_00
Because again, in this kind of todayist, lifespan-biased way of being, we're totally disconnected temporally from those who came before us and those who will come after us.
1
SPEAKER_00
So first and foremost, one of the first exercises is literally
1
SPEAKER_00
 having people stop and make that recognition of those that came before them.
1
SPEAKER_00
There's an opening story, I can read it, you can read it, it's literally in the first couple of pages.
1
SPEAKER_02
I'll let you read it, go ahead.
1
SPEAKER_02
Right here, this one?
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I'll do it verbatim.
1
SPEAKER_00
 this beautiful image of a tree, and this is from the Talmud, one of the kind of ancient Jewish texts.
1
SPEAKER_00
It says, one day a man named Honi was walking along and saw a man planting a carob tree.
1
SPEAKER_00
Honi asked him, how many years will it take until it will bear fruit?
1
SPEAKER_00
And the man said to him, not for 70 years.
1
SPEAKER_00
And Honi said to him, do you really believe you'll live another 70 years?
1
SPEAKER_00
 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.
1
SPEAKER_00
That's the book, that's the mindset.
1
SPEAKER_00
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?
1
SPEAKER_00
Some of them can be amazing businesses that will help more people flourish and will employ them.
1
SPEAKER_00
Some of them may be more kind of individual.
1
SPEAKER_00
My argument in this book, my thesis is,
1
SPEAKER_00
 that you can do actually very small things as carob tree planting, right?
1
SPEAKER_00
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.
1
SPEAKER_00
We think of that when we think of long term.
1
SPEAKER_00
No, no, no, no.
1
SPEAKER_00
 I'll get to those.
1
SPEAKER_00
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.
1
SPEAKER_00
And so.
1
SPEAKER_02
Just being kind to people on the street.
2
SPEAKER_02
 Going back to your earliest question, which is, well, what do we do about the folks that can't think like this?
2
SPEAKER_02
So part of it is being kind, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
But that's where we start, are these smaller things.
2
SPEAKER_02
But what we want to do is build a kind of
2
SPEAKER_02
 way of collectively going about and being in the world that allows us to start addressing these questions, these very big ones, people who are unhoused, poverty, all these 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.
2
SPEAKER_02
But when you start to have kind of a base layer of compassion and empathy, you know, as a chef, you only have a certain number of ingredients, all of a sudden that totally opens up again.
2
SPEAKER_02
It opens up so you can kind of start thinking very differently about this.
2
SPEAKER_02
So I mentioned this thing, this trim tab.
2
SPEAKER_02
 Buckminster Fuller, who was this really famous futurist who wrote Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, which is just the greatest title ever for a book, he was asked in World War II by the US Navy to help him solve a problem.
2
SPEAKER_02
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.
2
SPEAKER_02
And it got to the point where the hydraulics that were necessary to turn a 20-foot rudder didn't make sense.
2
SPEAKER_02
They didn't have the mechanical engineering know-how.
2
SPEAKER_02
 So he came up with this idea, which was to attach a four-inch piece of metal to the end of these rudders by making them smaller.
2
SPEAKER_02
And that became a trim tab.
2
SPEAKER_02
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.
2
SPEAKER_02
So you no longer needed the actual hydraulics.
2
SPEAKER_02
 You needed something really, really small that would go against the flow, that would actually create the action.
2
SPEAKER_02
So he believed in this so much that on his tombstone it said, call me trim tab.
2
SPEAKER_02
Because he believed that everything we do in our life is a trim tab moment.
2
SPEAKER_02
We can act and think like that.
2
SPEAKER_02
And so yes, I address in the book, there's all these ways, there's these massive trim patterns.
2
SPEAKER_02
Like yes, we have to electrify everything.
2
SPEAKER_02
We have to get off of fossil fuels.
2
SPEAKER_00
 Renewable energy, everything, yeah, yeah, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_02
We know all that, and for 99% of the planet, we all know it, but we're actually not in the business.
2
SPEAKER_02
So we can maybe, if we can afford, we can do some of it, and we can send market signals, but we're not in it.
2
SPEAKER_02
So the question is, what can we do?
2
SPEAKER_02
And what I offer is that we can act like trim tabs in the work that we do.
2
SPEAKER_02
It is about empathy and compassion and kindness.
2
SPEAKER_02
And a lot of people will critique that and say, well, that's not enough.
2
SPEAKER_02
That's not how you get us to 10,000 years.
2
SPEAKER_02
That's not real change, yeah.
2
SPEAKER_02
That's not real change.
2
SPEAKER_00
 It's like the work at home first.
2
SPEAKER_02
You do, you take care of your own house, do the work.
2
SPEAKER_02
Look, I don't say, you know, yes, you should protest.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yes, you should vote.
2
SPEAKER_02
Yes, you do all those big things and those do make things happen.
2
SPEAKER_02
But look, and this is my own, definitely my own point of view.
2
SPEAKER_02
What good is it if,
2
SPEAKER_02
 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.
2
SPEAKER_02
And we're all like not kind people.
2
SPEAKER_02
Like that doesn't seem like where we want to take the species.
2
SPEAKER_02
So what I'm saying is we can actually do both.
2
SPEAKER_02
But to your earlier point, we have to recognize that and activate on that.
2
SPEAKER_02
We have to
2
SPEAKER_02
 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?
2
SPEAKER_02
That's the empathy with the past.
2
SPEAKER_02
But from that curiosity, a whole panoply of solutions start to open themselves up for those very big, wicked structural problems that we're trying to deal with right now.
2
SPEAKER_00
 When was the first time you wrote a letter to your future self?
2
SPEAKER_02
Eighth grade.
2
SPEAKER_00
Eighth grade.
2
SPEAKER_02
And here's the crazy thing about writing a letter to your future self, because we've known that we put people in the fMRI machines, it's not the act of receiving it, it's the act of writing it.
2
SPEAKER_02
That's the change factor, not to give anything away, but it's not about when you get the letter, it's actually connecting with future Louis or future Ari.
2
SPEAKER_02
By the way, a priori, that has to happen before you can connect to future generations.
2
SPEAKER_02
 You have to start in your own house and kind of think like, okay, what do I need?
2
SPEAKER_02
A friend of mine is a, it's kind of gross, but he's a periodontist.
2
SPEAKER_02
And so we've been having these, we were roommates in college.
2
SPEAKER_02
What is that, just so I'm aware?
2
SPEAKER_02
Gums, work for the gums and teeth, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
 And I said, well, you know, what's the most, now knowing, now that you do this.
2
SPEAKER_00
You see a lot of nasty stuff.
2
SPEAKER_02
So yeah, you see a lot of nasty stuff.
2
SPEAKER_02
So what's the most important thing you would tell your 20 year old self?
2
SPEAKER_02
Floss.
2
SPEAKER_02
Floss.
2
SPEAKER_02
That's it.
2
SPEAKER_02
And I said, what about, and so I asked a dentist friend of mine, what's the number one thing you would, floss.
2
SPEAKER_02
 And I go, why?
2
SPEAKER_02
He goes, well, everyone starts doing it too late in their 40s or 50s.
2
SPEAKER_02
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.
2
SPEAKER_02
You know, you ask other doctors, what do you do for your 70s, 80s?
2
SPEAKER_02
They're like, start stretching in your 20s.
2
SPEAKER_00
I asked Dr. Perlmutter, who's written many New York Times bestselling books.
2
SPEAKER_00
I don't know if you know who he is.
2
SPEAKER_00
The last one I think was called Drop Acid.
2
SPEAKER_00
And at the end of every interview, I ask people their three truths.
2
SPEAKER_00
And one of them for him was floss when you're young.
2
SPEAKER_00
 It's like, 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.
2
SPEAKER_00
But that's interesting that, yeah, floss is one of those things.
2
SPEAKER_00
It's again, writing a letter to the future, what are your future self gonna be proud that you did to keep you happy, healthy, whole, fulfilled feeling, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
It's like not suffering in your future.
2
SPEAKER_02
 Yeah, and future generations not suffering it, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
That's why the book is called Becoming the Great Ancestors Our Future Needs.
2
SPEAKER_02
Our future descendants need us to become great ancestors.
2
SPEAKER_02
Gilbert at Harvard talks about this as kind of end of history illusion.
2
SPEAKER_02
 where we think we're on the tail end of history.
2
SPEAKER_02
But think about yourself 10 years ago.
2
SPEAKER_02
The music that you liked 10 years ago, it's evolved and you've evolved as a human.
2
SPEAKER_02
As a species, we're evolving also.
2
SPEAKER_02
If we think about 200 years from now, genetic, if we were to be able to go back and kind of
2
SPEAKER_02
 put you 200 years ago, or even 20,000 years ago, genetically you'd still be the same homo sapien, but so much of what we call the wetware, right, not the hardware, the hardware is like the big biology, but the wetware, the culture, norms, the way we operate in the world, so much of that has changed, so much of that is on us, and so what I'm asking as
2
SPEAKER_02
 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.
2
SPEAKER_02
So that is, the question is, how do we do that?
2
SPEAKER_02
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.
2
SPEAKER_02
So what do I ask people to do?
2
SPEAKER_02
I ask them to think about what is the desired future that they want?
2
SPEAKER_02
What is the desired future for Lewis?
2
SPEAKER_00
 Possible futures, examined desired futures, and official futures.
2
SPEAKER_02
So in the book we talk about specifically not just desired future, but examined desired future.
2
SPEAKER_02
Because we went in reverse order, we kind of know where this goes.
2
SPEAKER_02
The examined desired future isn't just the future for you as you kind of would have thought about it without doing the work.
2
SPEAKER_02
 Once we start doing the work around transnational empathy and thinking about that kind of baggage and what's holding you back, that actually starts to change because now you're going from a desired future, I want to be the best X in the world or whatever.
2
SPEAKER_02
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
I was creating from a wound as opposed to from a healed, healthy place.
2
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
2
SPEAKER_00
 becoming a doctor because I was influenced in a negative way to become a doctor.
2
SPEAKER_00
I didn't want to use that example because it's so cliche.
2
SPEAKER_00
I built a million dollar business to have more success and power as opposed to to make an impact through my product or service.
2
SPEAKER_02
Is that how you were raised though? 100%.
2
SPEAKER_02
 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 abode in the afternoon.
2
SPEAKER_03
Go ahead.
2
SPEAKER_02
This guy's in his abode, he's kind of looking, and the guy's like, what are you doing?
2
SPEAKER_02
Why aren't you out fishing?
2
SPEAKER_02
He's like, well, I've caught everything I need for the day.
2
SPEAKER_02
He goes, well,
2
SPEAKER_02
 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.
2
SPEAKER_02
You'd have 20 boats, and then you'd have all this money.
2
SPEAKER_02
And the guy says to the wealthy man, well, then what I would do?
2
SPEAKER_02
He's like, well, then you could relax in the afternoon.
2
SPEAKER_02
He goes, that's what I'm doing right now.
2
SPEAKER_00
You could retire and then do this.
2
SPEAKER_02
You got a boat and fish.
2
SPEAKER_02
I'm doing it right now.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_02
 So that's the examine part of like so much of what we think we should do is what society tells us or what our parents or the inner voice or what media tells us and so before you can future Yourself or your organization or the world especially in relation with others you have to heal from what came before I'm so happy you're saying this because I feel like you you come from a I would call it.
2
SPEAKER_00
I don't know like an intellectual world right an analytical intellectual
2
SPEAKER_00
 high level thinking, leadership world where people think about productivity, efficiency, maximizing, growth, expansion, world domination.
2
SPEAKER_00
And for you to say the first step is to really think about, or one of the first steps is to think about past empathy and healing.
2
SPEAKER_00
 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.
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I think this is so valuable, you're sharing this, because I think
2
SPEAKER_00
 analytical, intellectual people in general, I want them to think more this way, from the heart.
2
SPEAKER_00
This should be like an antidote to short-term pain or something, like to pain and future pain.
2
SPEAKER_00
This is like the ultimate self-help book.
2
SPEAKER_01
 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.
2
SPEAKER_00
But I think it's so powerful that people have that, that hear that from someone like you specifically who is in this type of field because
2
SPEAKER_00
 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.
2
SPEAKER_00
There's got to be some growth somewhere from an individual level in Society level, but it's what is it the growth for?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah to what end to what ends?
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and I think that's important and I I had a kind of a wake-up call when I was about 30 I'm 39 now and
2
SPEAKER_00
 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?
2
SPEAKER_00
And I realized, why am I still suffering inside?
2
SPEAKER_00
Like, why is it still not happy and fulfilled?
2
SPEAKER_00
Like, this is cool for a moment, but then I'm still angry at the world, angry at myself, resentful, like, reactive, triggered.
2
SPEAKER_00
 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.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I need to, and it's helped me accomplish, but it doesn't make me feel fulfilled.
2
SPEAKER_00
And when I started to say, what is my real mission?
2
SPEAKER_00
What do I want to do?
2
SPEAKER_00
I want to impact lives in a positive way.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I got clear on,
2
SPEAKER_00
 Okay, what's the mechanism for our business is to reach 100 million lives weekly to help them improve the quality of their life.
2
SPEAKER_00
And when it's like just at the core, it's like I just wanna bring joy to people.
2
SPEAKER_00
I wanna be joy and bring joy and provide solutions for peace and for growth.
2
SPEAKER_00
That's really what it is.
2
SPEAKER_00
In the different areas of life to support them from when they're in pain and into peace.
2
SPEAKER_00
It's a much more renewable energy that I have.
2
SPEAKER_02
It's more than renewable, it's regenerative.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
2
SPEAKER_02
 And this is what really we're talking about, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
Is kind of the healing and the work that needs to be done is regenerative.
2
SPEAKER_02
We're not just taking what's there and kind of renew it.
2
SPEAKER_02
Regenerative is actually making it whole again.
2
SPEAKER_02
Because if we think about, I'm gonna go back to Ari and Lewis.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes, and the saber-toothed tigers.
2
SPEAKER_02
There's many biologists who would argue with the saber-toothed tiger being, okay, whatever, so it's a metaphor.
2
SPEAKER_02
15,000 years ago, and we were very much
2
SPEAKER_02
 one with nature, and that doesn't mean we were hugging trees.
2
SPEAKER_02
What that means is there was no distinction between Ari Lewis and the natural world.
2
SPEAKER_02
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.
2
SPEAKER_02
Now, remember I said we're kind of at this intertidal, the past 400 years of this enlightenment, industrial revolution, mechanistic, break everything down as core components?
2
SPEAKER_02
 Go outside.
2
SPEAKER_02
Smell the air.
2
SPEAKER_02
It's not that clean.
2
SPEAKER_02
Look at what we're doing.
2
SPEAKER_02
And I don't say this as an environmentalist in the climate environment.
2
SPEAKER_02
I say this as someone who cares about the mental environment.
2
SPEAKER_02
We are broken.
2
SPEAKER_02
We are disconnected.
2
SPEAKER_02
The emotional environment.
2
SPEAKER_02
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.
2
SPEAKER_02
 Why is it difficult for us to connect one-on-one with ourselves?
2
SPEAKER_02
Because we have been told that we are separate and apart.
2
SPEAKER_02
Because that was the kind of, that's what Bacon and all the big Western intellectuals, Heidegger, Nietzsche, all of them all said the same thing.
2
SPEAKER_02
We are separate from nature.
2
SPEAKER_02
We can dominate.
2
SPEAKER_02
 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.
2
SPEAKER_02
You think about kind of the polarization and how we interact with other human beings and where that's coming from.
2
SPEAKER_02
That's not oxytocin, that's aggression, that's cortisol, that's adrenaline.
2
SPEAKER_02
That is Ari and Louis in constant fight or flight mode.
2
SPEAKER_02
 from the world, and here's the terrible part about it is you can make a ton of money off of that.
2
SPEAKER_02
You can make a ton, in fact, you can make billions.
2
SPEAKER_02
You can win the highest offices in the land if you want if you drive that.
2
SPEAKER_00
It'll never fulfill the wound for why you're creating that for.
2
SPEAKER_00
You'll never be able to fill the wound up.
2
SPEAKER_02
 And folks who have done the healing are not figuring out how to divide us from one another or divide us from nature.
2
SPEAKER_02
They're looking at how to bring us together because if Ari and Louis want to look, step back,
2
SPEAKER_02
 and wherever we go after this, if anywhere, 10,000 years from now, was the work that we were doing, was your work of bringing kind of joy and solutions, was it bringing us into more proper alignment and aligned action with one another in the universe, or is it dividing us falsely because that's the narrative that we were told we should perpetuate?
2
SPEAKER_02
 That's it.
2
SPEAKER_02
I mean, your work is already doing this.
2
SPEAKER_02
And now all I'm asking you or anyone who's listening is to add the next layer, not because it's responsibility or out of guilt, but because I think it'll make the work you do that much more powerful.
2
SPEAKER_02
You know, give everything from like a kind of a hop in your step to when you're really thinking like, is this worth it?
2
SPEAKER_02
Should I be doing this?
2
SPEAKER_00
It's a meaningful work.
2
SPEAKER_02
 Is it meaningful work?
2
SPEAKER_02
Meaningful work in your own lifespan?
2
SPEAKER_02
Sure.
2
SPEAKER_02
And by the way, sometimes that's just enough.
2
SPEAKER_02
But for those who kind of dare to go a little bit further, is this meaningful work for the next 10,000 years?
2
SPEAKER_02
 If you can answer that in the affirmative, oh my God, nothing can stop you.
2
SPEAKER_00
And what would be the prompt then for the future self letter?
2
SPEAKER_00
Let's just say that's, if people only do one action and they do this future self letter, what would be the prompt to write to themselves?
2
SPEAKER_02
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
Oh, interesting.
2
SPEAKER_02
Look, you can be a good ancestor, you can be, we're all gonna be ancestors, we're all gonna die.
2
SPEAKER_02
 Right?
2
SPEAKER_02
By the way, that's Ernest Becker, won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for a book called The Denial of Death.
2
SPEAKER_02
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 that know that we're gonna die at one point.
2
SPEAKER_02
And everything we do is to avoid that death.
2
SPEAKER_02
And this goes back to Aria Lewis being kicked out of the cave.
2
SPEAKER_02
And so one of the problems with answering that question of am I being a great ancestor,
2
SPEAKER_02
 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.
2
SPEAKER_02
It's crazy, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
And so we can exist in two worlds.
2
SPEAKER_02
We can either be what they call death-anxious or death-aware.
2
SPEAKER_02
So there's an exercise in the book about that.
2
SPEAKER_02
Look, you go to South Korea, there's meditations where you lie in a coffin, like you think about... I know.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, the country of Bhutan, I think, focuses five times a day on their death.
2
SPEAKER_00
 It's supposed to be one of the happier.
2
SPEAKER_02
Look, a lot of people, there's this YOLO, people wake up in the morning and they say, well, how am I gonna live today as if it was my only day, my last day?
2
SPEAKER_02
And they go out and they do these amazing things and they cliff dive or whatever.
2
SPEAKER_02
So I do that, but I do it the opposite.
2
SPEAKER_02
When I go to bed at night, I go, if that was my last day, was that a great ancestor day?
2
SPEAKER_02
 It doesn't mean I passed a piece of legislation or I fed the world, sold a company or solved something.
2
SPEAKER_02
How was I?
2
SPEAKER_02
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?
2
SPEAKER_02
Heaven forbid, Lewis, I walk out of here and I get hit by a bus.
2
SPEAKER_02
 Can I look back and say, well, my interactions with Lewis and with this audience, was that the stick moment where I said, trust?
2
SPEAKER_02
But the trust isn't just in my actions, it's who I am and how I am.
2
SPEAKER_02
That's where the baton is.
2
SPEAKER_00
Your way of being.
2
SPEAKER_02
Your way of being, with a capital B.
2
SPEAKER_02
 So if I can walk out of here and say yes to that, then I've known I did what I could and I did my best.
2
SPEAKER_02
That's a yardstick.
2
SPEAKER_02
You know, as an athlete, for pole vaulting, it was always measured in inches, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
For the 4x100, it was down to our millisecond.
2
SPEAKER_02
For those of us, for me, who no longer have those external metrics,
2
SPEAKER_02
 It's not an internal metric.
2
SPEAKER_02
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?
2
SPEAKER_02
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?
2
SPEAKER_02
And that's what long path allows you to do is because it sets you up into something much bigger than yourself.
2
SPEAKER_00
 Man, this is inspiring stuff.
2
SPEAKER_00
I didn't know you were gonna be speaking therapy talk over here, but I love it.
2
SPEAKER_02
I love it, I love it.
2
SPEAKER_02
That's the way we go here.
2
SPEAKER_00
We got a couple final questions for you.
2
SPEAKER_00
But I want people to get this book.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think it's gonna be really transformational for you.
2
SPEAKER_00
Long Path, Becoming the Great Ancestors, Our Future Needs, An Antidote to Short Termism.
2
SPEAKER_00
Termism?
2
SPEAKER_00
Termism.
2
SPEAKER_00
Termism, short termism.
2
SPEAKER_00
So make sure you guys check this out.
2
SPEAKER_00
Get a couple copies.
2
SPEAKER_00
They can get it at your website.
2
SPEAKER_02
 longpath.org forward slash book, or basically anywhere on the planet books are sold that are offline.
2
SPEAKER_00
Get Long Path, really inspiring.
2
SPEAKER_00
This is a question I ask everyone at the end, I mentioned it before, it's called the three truths.
2
SPEAKER_00
So imagine you live as long as you want, and every day you've been
2
SPEAKER_00
 Proud of being a great ancestor for the future, right?
2
SPEAKER_00
For your future generations.
2
SPEAKER_00
But it is the last day many years away.
2
SPEAKER_00
You live as long as you want, but eventually you gotta turn the lights off.
2
SPEAKER_00
And you also accomplish everything you wanna create.
2
SPEAKER_00
Your end game, your to what end is all meaningful and purposeful and fulfilling.
2
SPEAKER_00
But for whatever reason, we don't have access to this book or anything you've ever shared.
2
SPEAKER_00
 Hypothetical, it's all gone.
2
SPEAKER_00
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
What would be those three truths?
2
SPEAKER_02
Well, you already took floss.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes, so three more.
2
SPEAKER_02
The three truths, the first one is act as if though you are a great ancestor, because you are.
2
SPEAKER_02
 The second is never be afraid to love fully.
2
SPEAKER_02
 And really fully, really in everything that means.
2
SPEAKER_02
And I was interested, I was thinking, I was getting dressed coming on into Lewis's house, right?
2
SPEAKER_02
And I'm so, I just put on whatever, I was all black, not that hard.
2
SPEAKER_02
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.
2
SPEAKER_02
And the bracelet I'm wearing is a friendship bracelet that my daughter gave me.
2
SPEAKER_02
And in the middle between my dad and my bracelet is me.
2
SPEAKER_02
 Right, and so that third truth is, you know, I think about Lance Armstrong's book, It's Not About the Bike.
2
SPEAKER_02
The third truth is it's not about you.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, the only challenge is most people think the world revolves around them.
2
SPEAKER_00
 And so that's why a lot of people suffer, because they're always focused about me, me, me, as opposed to, like you said, a we, or how can I be of service, how can I use myself to be of service to others?
2
SPEAKER_02
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.
2
SPEAKER_00
 I really acknowledge you for the way you communicate about the future.
2
SPEAKER_00
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
2
SPEAKER_00
 Future and how what we do in this moment will pass on to our future generations and to the world generations So I really acknowledge you for living in this space of analytical intellectual You know educational talk
2
SPEAKER_00
 But speaking from a place that I think every human being needs to understand, which is first, learn how to heal.
2
SPEAKER_00
Anything that's been holding you back and understand why am I taking these actions?
2
SPEAKER_00
Why am I working so hard on this thing or pursuing this career or launching this company?
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What's the reason generate long-term thinking?
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 And is it the best thing I should be doing for this part of my life?
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Or should I reconsider?
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SPEAKER_00
Should I change the norm?
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SPEAKER_00
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.
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And not saying it's okay to do that now, but having empathy for the past.
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SPEAKER_00
 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.
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SPEAKER_00
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.
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SPEAKER_00
So I'm excited for people to get this book.
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My final question, what is your definition of greatness?
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My definition of greatness is living in accordance with being a great ancestor.
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SPEAKER_00
 There you go.
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SPEAKER_00
All right, my man.
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Appreciate it.
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SPEAKER_02
Thank you.
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SPEAKER_00
Powerful, man.
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SPEAKER_00
 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.
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SPEAKER_00
And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter.
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And now it's time to go out there and do something great.