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The closer we feel to our future selves, the more vividly we can imagine them, the more overlap we perceive with them, the more emotional bonded we feel with them, the
the more likely we're going to be to have saved money and acquired assets, experience greater financial well-being, be likely to exercise and be more likely to take the ethical path. Others have found that people with these high degrees of overlap also do better in school and experience more meaning in their lives. So it's a whole host of outcomes that seem like they really matter, not just later, but also now.
Welcome to Curious Minds at Work. I'm your host, Gail Allen. We've all had the experience of working toward goals today that would benefit us in the future. Goals like exercising more, losing weight, or saving for retirement. Yet when faced with early morning alarms or tempting desserts, we may lose sight of our goals. But what if the answer to sticking with them was to form a relationship with a very special person, future you?
Hal Hirschfeld, author of the book, Your Future Self, How to Make Tomorrow Better Today, has spent his career studying what happens when we build a closer relationship with our future self. His work reveals how this relationship can have an outsized impact on our success, one that extends beyond weight loss, fitness, and a comfortable retirement.
One quick ask, if you like the podcast, please take a moment to leave a rating on iTunes or wherever you subscribe. Your feedback sends a strong signal to people looking for their next podcast. And now here's my interview with Hal Hirschfield. Hal Hirschfield, welcome to the podcast. It's great to have you on. Hey, thanks so much, Gail. I really appreciate you having me. What do you mean by a future self? And why is it so important for us to understand?
When we think of future selves, it's really important to consider what our goals are. You know, if I'm thinking about being healthy in five years to play with my kids and I'm really considering a future self of five years from now, but I also need to consider the many future selves along the way. It's the tomorrow self that needs to wake up and start working out.
Or I could think about my future self in 25 years, 30 years around retirement or whatever it may be. What's important here is that these are the versions of us that we will turn into and our decisions now will impact them later.
As you say that, and certainly as you write about it in the book, there's this tension because some of us might feel like we have this self at our core that doesn't change. What have researchers learned? Is there a core self?
On the surface, I think a lot of people probably say, well, you know, there is this version of me. This is who I am. But that may not be the best way to think of ourselves. And in fact, research has really documented the many ways that we often think of our future selves as if they are other people. So much so that in our mind's eye, our future self changes.
looks like another person on a neuroimaging level in the brain, the activity that arises when we think about our future selves looks more like the activity that arises when we think of just another person today. And what that means is that when we consider the self over time, a sort of more accurate description may be that we're really a collection of separate distinct selves.
When do we believe that other people in our lives stop being themselves? There's really interesting research that you cite that Nina Strominger has done. What does her research show about this?
Nina Strominger and Sean Nichols have done some fantastic work, which I think actually answers what could be considered a millennia-old problem, which is what makes us who we are over time? When do we think of someone as continuing to be themselves, and when do they change? The answer that they've arrived at is that what really matters is our core moral traits, or they call it the essential moral self.
Essentially, these are the traits that we can point to and say, that's sort of the essence of somebody. If you are sardonic or you are kind or you're generally compassionate or you're generally sort of reticent and reserved, those things, when they change, change.
might make us say, well, that person now has changed. They're now almost a different person entirely. But if we see some sort of thread there with the core moral traits, that's when we might say, you know, certain aspects of that person have been altered over time. But if they're still kind, if they're still sarcastic, if they're still compassionate, whatever it may be, that's when we say, okay, they are quote unquote the same.
You had mentioned how research shows that we view our future selves as if they're other people. And something else that you talk about, depending on how we feel about these other people, the kind of relationships that we have with them today, this is going to impact how much we're going to sacrifice, if at all. You've conducted research on this. What have you found? That's right. So the basic idea in a nutshell is that it may be okay to think of our future selves as if they're other people.
But what matters is the type of relationship that we have with them in the same way that what matters when it comes to our relationships with our partners and our kids and our parents, it's not that those folks are other people in our lives. It's that they're people who we have varying degrees of closeness to. The closer we feel to our future selves, the more vividly we can imagine them, the more overlap we perceive with them, the more emotional bonded we feel with them, the
the more likely we're going to be to have saved money and acquired assets, experience greater financial well-being, be likely to exercise and be more likely to take the ethical path. Others have found that people with these high degrees of overlap also do better in school and experience more meaning in their lives. So it's a whole host of outcomes that seem like they really matter, not just later, but also now.
I remember when findings were coming out in kind of the general press about your research where people were seeing that, you know, if I could see myself 20, 30, 40 years down the road, I might make different choices. And I wonder if you could tell us a little bit more about that because it's pretty revelatory what you did in terms of your methods and what you found, especially around things like saving money that you've referenced.
Early on, we sort of realized if part of the problem here is that when people don't do things for their future selves, the experience that they're having is that they can't really identify with that future self. They can't sort of feel emotionally bonded and a sense of sort of overlap with that future self. And so what we were thinking was, well, how could we improve that? How could we make it more likely that they will experience that sense of overlap?
And I have to say, it was kind of a difficult question to grapple with. But one of the insights that I and others had had was, well, okay, you know what?
Let's take it seriously, this idea that our future self is another person. And then you start saying, well, how do I get people to take better care of other people? And one of the answers that comes up is you make them more emotional. This is what charities do all the time. They make charity recipients vivid and emotional. And that makes it easier for us to take action. And I remember I had said to some friends, I wish we could just show people a hologram of their future self. Yeah.
You know, it's like we've started to see this, you know, over the years, every couple of years, there's some big news story about a musical artist who's, you know, either not there physically or actually dead. And they show up as a hologram on stage, right? I said, wouldn't that be cool? Well, I was lucky because at the time, the communications department was down the hall from the psych department, which is where
where I was housed in grad school. And there was this researcher, Jeremy Balanson, who did all this great work on virtual reality. And one of my friends said, you know, what if you ask him? I bet he'll have an idea. And we started talking and realized maybe we could use virtual reality to
put people into a setting where they could, quote unquote, see their future selves. So this is the early days of age progression. Basically what it does is it mimics the experience of aging. We make people's faces a little bit saggier and wrinklier. And this is going to get depressing really quickly, Gail. So maybe I should, I can skip over this. I think everyone knows what I'm talking about, right?
So what we did was put people into these virtual reality settings. We showed them these age-progressed images, and they got to sort of interact with their future selves. They got to have a conversation with their future selves compared to a group of people who just saw almost an image of themselves now. And in that early work, what we found was that the people who are exposed to these future self images and conversations were more likely to want to save for the future.
Now, I'll caution. That was a relatively small sample. It's kind of hypothetical because, well, so what if they say they want to? Will they actually do it? Over the years, we've been following up on this. And I have a paper coming out in June where we worked with a bank, reached out to about 50,000 of their customers, and half of them got the option to see their future selves and half did not. And the ones who saw their future selves were 16% more likely to make a contribution to
to their personal pension or retirement account, if you will. These are relatively small numbers. It's really hard to move the needle when it comes to saving. It's hard to move the needle when it comes to getting people to do anything over an email campaign or a push message. But I find this to be really optimistic almost that
These exercises that get people to vividly see and emotionally connect to their future selves may end up helping when it comes to long-term or future-oriented behavior. Does that research continue with that particular bank? So it's not continued with them. There's other banks that have been doing this sort of thing. So I just saw something this week in the news about
where a bank in Europe actually did something so clever. They got AI involved here and they asked people to describe briefly their ideal retirement. So for instance, one woman said, I see myself running through a field of poppies with my dogs. I mean, you can probably fill in the blanks here. They press a button, a couple seconds go by and up comes this beautiful photo. Yeah.
of this woman aged running through a field of poppies with her dogs. And it's just incredible. Now, you know, this particular bank claims that
After introducing this, they had a 300% increase in sign up for their retirement products year over year, Q1 2022 to Q1 2023. I, of course, the researcher in me wants to ask, well, hold on, what else is changing? Is there a control group, et cetera? So I don't put too much stock in that without knowing all of the details. But it certainly seems like a very promising way to use the cutting edge technology to
to help people visualize the future. As we've been talking about, we tend to live in the here and now. It's where most of our attention lies. But it's clear it would be of tremendous benefit to us to spend more of our time thinking about our future self, to take action on our future self's behalf. Why do we find it so hard to do this if it would benefit us in so many ways? What is our default setting as humans that makes this difficult? Part of the difficulty here, as you said, is that...
We live in the present. That feels like a almost too abstract of a statement, but that's the time period that we spend all of our time in. What that means is that we end up getting anchored on right now. The emotions that we experience feel stronger in the present. The present is undoubtedly more certain than the future. We don't ever fully know what we'll become.
My collaborator, Liz Dunn, she has this line that I think is so useful here. She says that the present is a magnifying glass for our emotions. And I think that really helps explain the concept well. It's just that everything we're experiencing right now feels stronger. And so if I'm tempted to spend more, overeat or whatever it is,
It's a lot easier to just give in rather than, say, think about this abstract, uncertain future where the consequences are going to befall me. Hal, you talk about how we can fail to see the ways that our present selves add up to and become our future selves. What does that mean? One way that I like to think about it is that...
We as people are incredibly good at making exceptions. And what I mean by that is that we make exceptions of the present.
So, you know, I'll give you my example from literally last night. I've noticed that I've been snacking a lot more at night. Like we have this little candy Tupperware, which basically is like leftover. You're making us all feel really good right now, Al. So keep going. Keep going. It's like all leftover candy from my kids. It's like Halloween candy, Easter candy, all this stuff. It's like the stuff they've discarded, but it's in there.
And it's so easy to see it's on the top shelf of the pantry. And it's like, we've had dinner and I'm, you know, we're hanging out or whatever. And I just have that craving. And I've been saying, I don't need to do this. I'm not that hungry. I know it's not great for me. If I eat too much chocolate at night, I don't sleep as well. Blah, blah, blah. I don't need to spell this out. I think you know what I mean, right? It's really easy.
To know that I don't want to do that and at the same time feel that, well, tonight is different, you know, or last night was different. I had a really long day yesterday and it was cloudy and kind of cold in LA, which felt, you know, off for May. I deserve a treat. And it's really easy to tell that story. You can come up with almost anything. It's Wednesday. I'm halfway through the week. It's Thursday. I'm almost at the weekend.
And the funny thing about that is any one of those stories we tell ourselves, and we're incredibly good at those stories, what we're doing there is making an exception out of that day. We're almost cleaving that day from all the other days. The reality is you can't really do that because they all add up. So if I were to binge on all the chocolate in our pantry one night and not do it again, well, would that really have a material impact on my health and my livelihood over time? I don't know.
I don't know. It's hard to say. But if I do that again and again and again, that's when it really adds up. That's when those separate selves add up to a bigger one. Here's the thing though, and you're right about this. Even when we think about the future, we don't tend to think deeply enough about it in general. You explain it's often because we fail to recognize the ways the future could be different from the present. And it's what you call and what people call projection bias. What is this? What does it look like?
One of the things I like about this is that another story that we tell ourselves is that we are, in fact, thinking ahead. We are thinking about the future. And how do we do that? Well, I tell myself, you know, I'll make a plan. But in making that plan, I oftentimes use my present feelings and project them ahead in time. Now, the irony here is that I'm doing a disservice to my future self.
Because I'm not considering the ways in which his feelings and thoughts and behaviors may actually change over time.
One of the classic examples of this, of course, is you go to the grocery store, right? And you're hungry and you buy food as if you're going to be that hungry the rest of the week. I think everybody can identify that. Or the reverse is also true. I go to the grocery store after having had dinner and I think I don't need that much stuff. And then I'm left that week wondering, where are my snacks? Could have really had them. So it kind of goes both directions. Now, those are...
I think those are almost funny examples, and I think they're relatable. But there's more pernicious examples of this too. We sometimes make plans that are too rigid, failing to appreciate how our interests may change over time. We lock ourselves into things, into plans, as I said, and then have a hard time getting out of them.
One of the spaces where I think this is fascinating, I discuss in the book is when it comes to end of life plans, which is not a topic that everybody wants to talk about. And yet it's also a topic that everyone should talk about because having a better plan is
for the end of life results in a better death that results in better grieving for our loved ones. And part of the key here is that we want to have flexibility. We want to make sure that we're not planning too rigidly with only our present self's interests in mind. How much do we tend to think that our personalities and preferences are going to change over time? There's something you talk about. It's like the end of history illusion.
It's one of my favorite illusions. It's fascinating work by Jordi Quadbach, Tim Wilson, Dan Gilbert. The gist here is that we are really good at looking back in time and seeing how we have changed from the past to the present. But then this sort of weird wrinkle happens and we somehow think that we won't change as much from the present to the future. I know that's a little strange, right? It's not that we think we're suddenly going to be the exact same. We know that things will change.
But we have this tendency to think that we are somehow now who we are and that history has stopped. Our progress is going to slow over time. There's an irony here. And the irony is that by thinking that our preferences and our tastes and our personalities will kind of remain similar between now and the future, we end up making life harder for our future selves. We, again, lock ourselves into plans.
We don't appreciate that signing up for something right now. Well, we may not feel the same way about that later on. And if this feels strange at all, you know, all you have to do is think back and say, did I change from, you know, 15 to 25? Did I change from 25 to 35, 35 to 45 and so on? The chances are you'll probably do some of that from 45 to 55 and so on and so on. When I talked to Dan Gilbert about this, one of the original researchers on this work,
He said to me, you know, I had this sense that when I was in my 20s, I'd probably change a bit when I got into my 30s. But from there on, I would, I'm sure there'd be little changes, but I would kind of, you know, not coast per se, but, you know, be roughly the same. And he said, he was 64 when I talked to him. And he said, looking back,
I have changed more from 54 to 64 than I did from 44 to 54 in a way that he could never have imagined at the age of 54. And that's really stuck with me. I think it's such an important thing to keep in mind because it means that we're all fundamentally changing as we progress through life.
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One of the solutions that you offer is to make the future closer. And this is a solution to the problem of the fact that, you know, because we don't often get close to this future self, we might not do good things on its behalf today. So something you say is, you know, how do we get the future to come closer to us? What do you mean by that?
It can be interpreted a variety of different ways, right? We could literally feel that some point in time in the future is not as far off into the future. So in other words, subjectively speaking, the period between now and 20 years from now, let's make that period of time feel shorter. Let's not make it feel like such a long expanse. That's a little abstract though.
Another way to think about this question is, how can I make the future self feel emotionally closer to who I am now? I go back to the concept of our future selves as other people. If I feel estranged from a close friend or worse, you know, a partner or my kids, my goal is not to maintain that sense of distance. My goal is
is to bring them closer, to feel connected to them again. And that's in large part what I mean when I say let's make that future self feel closer to who we are now. So we've talked about work you've done in terms of a solution to this that involves visualizing your future self. You also write in your book that people have also found success in writing letters to and also from their future selves. Can you talk to us a little bit about this and why this works so well?
Early on, we had people write letters just to their future selves. And there was an effect, though small, on people's behaviors afterwards. More recent research has found that when you write a letter to your future self and then a reply letter from, that may actually be better at drawing in a sense of closeness and continuity with the future self. And I think there's a really easy to understand reason why, which is
When you write the letter back from your future self, it really forces you to step into the shoes of that future self and see the world through their eyes. It's kind of like an empathy enhancing exercise. If I just talk to my future self, that may be helpful, but it's kind of a one-sided conversation. And so I think the smarter thing to do is to try to make it more of an exchange or a conversation with your future self.
Can you give us a clear example of what that could look like? And then maybe if you are able to, like what the impact has been when people do that. There's actually a website, Future Me, where you can write a letter to your future self. You can really write it about whatever you want. One of the beauties of this is that you can specify the time period and it'll get returned to you. And so now you're having a conversation with your future self and then a
eventually you'll have a conversation back with your past self who was your present self and so on and so on. I don't mean to get too heady about this. We often recommend that the letters aren't just surface level, but contain deep conversations about
what you think your life will be like, what you want it to be like, who you spend your time with, what will you be doing with your time? Will you be working? Will you be going on vacations, et cetera, depending on the period of time. But then when you write the letter back, write about what your day looks like. What does your week look like? Whatever this period of time is. That's a really difficult exercise. I'm not about to pretend that this is easy, but imagine a
doing that. Imagine stepping five years from now, 10 years from now and saying, how am I spending my time? Some of this is of course unknowable, right? 10 years ago, had you asked me to imagine my days now, I couldn't have told you the various technologies I'd be using. I couldn't have told you how much I'd be working from home and so on and so on, but that's okay.
It's okay that we don't know these things. The point is to try to make that period of time feel more vivid and more emotional. So one of my favorite recent findings has found that these sorts of exercises have lowered anxiety in the present. It allows people to engage in what's called self-distancing. You can sort of step outside of yourself and see how the right now fits into the bigger picture. Other work has found that these sorts of send and reply letters are
has made people more committed to their schoolwork. My own work, we found just writing a letter to your future self, that leads to an increase in the likelihood to go to the gym. And in unpublished work, we've found that a letter writing exercise of sorts, this is more of a Mad Lib style exercise where I have people fill in nouns and verbs and adverbs, et cetera. And then we use those words and fill it into a letter
that's read back to people, we've found that that's helped people be more likely to sign up for an automatic savings account. But that research is not yet published. One of the interventions that you recommend is that, you know, we've talked a lot about trying to travel forward in our minds to envision what we want or who we want to be. There's research that shows that traveling backwards can be even more effective. Can you talk about that?
Sure. So this is work that I've been doing with Kate Christensen, who's a professor at Indiana. In that particular work, rather than ask people to start now and time travel ahead to the future, which is normally the way we've done it, we ask people instead to start in the future and travel back to now. What we find is that that leads to heightened feelings of connection and likelihood to adopt savings products.
I think part of what's happening there is that going on this sort of return trip back from the future to the present, it feels like a shorter trip to make. This is a sort of a strange concept, but
If you want an analogy, when you go to a new restaurant, the trip there often feels subjectively longer than the return trip home. Because when we go home, we're home not when we enter our front door, but when we get to that first landmark that sort of seems like the border of our home. When we go to a restaurant, we're not there until we're in the parking lot or at the front door, whatever it may be.
we think something similar is happening. When we travel from the present to the future, there's uncertainty involved. We're not there in our minds until we've somehow arrived at that abstract unknown future. But when we travel back from the future, the present's a lot more certain. And it feels like that trip now has suddenly been shrunk. What about thinking in terms of days versus years? Great. So there's some other research that suggests that if
If we think about an expanse of time between now and later, it actually may feel subjectively shorter if we think about it in terms of days than in terms of years. In other words, translate the years to days. Days are a shorter unit of time. And so when we add them up, somehow it just feels like we're ticking through them faster than when I say, you know, 10 years from now, 15 years from now. Whatever that's translated to in days, the research has found.
feels like it's a shorter period of time and makes me that much more likely to want to take action. How so much of what you write about in the book when it comes to these kinds of interventions, you're very encouraging, or I should say you urge us to couple them with taking action.
And so one of the things you say is, the goal here is to start to take steps toward the future self that you want. These interventions are a great pathway there. But in order to make good on these commitments that we might make to ourselves, there are a lot of strategies that you provide, a lot of commitment devices. What is one of them that you'd like to recommend that you could talk to us about? Yeah, absolutely. So when we talk about commitment devices, the idea there is
how can we make it easier to make sure that we don't mess up? You know, I have every intention of not going into the candy bin and then tonight I'll roll around. Maybe I won't do it tonight because this conversation will be fresh in my mind, you know? Now, of course, you know, there's the one commitment device is kind of what we call a soft commitment device where I
Just remove the option from the house. You know, I could throw away the candy. It's pretty hard to do because now I'm impacting my kids and my wife as well. They're going to say, where did the candy go? There's other commitment devices that are a little bit, let's call them a little bit more, a little harder, right? So one is to sort of lock things away. I love a company that was called KitchenSafe.
Basically, it was started with the exact candy problem in mind. This entrepreneur, Dave Krippendorf, he created a little safe that has an electronic timer on it. So I put my stuff in there. The timer ranges anywhere from a minute to 10 days.
And I put my stuff in there and I set the timer and lo and behold, I can't get it until that timer goes off. The only way to get it, by the way, is a hammer where you just break the thing. I talked to him about this. Now, this is, you know, you'd think this is great for the kitchen snacks. But he said it turned out that users were using it for all sorts of things to put away drugs and alcohol, prescription medicine.
Phones. So many different things that he changed the name from KitchenSafe to KSafe, which I think is so telling. There's so many things in our lives that we don't want to give ourselves access to. I actually use it not every night, but I use it a lot of nights around dinner time for my phone. I put it in there and it's
It's an amazing experience because for two hours, I set this timer for two hours, there's not even a temptation. I'll try, oh, I'll put the phone in the kitchen while we eat dinner in the dining area with the kids. And well, I'll get up for seconds and the phone's right there. I might as well just quickly check my email. And it's just there. It's a temptation. But when it's locked away, it's just no longer a temptation anymore.
And so that has been, for me personally, that's been really effective at that particular problem. There are also other ones as well that I discuss in the book, but I love that particular one.
Making sacrifices today for our future selves, that can feel really hard, very challenging. There are ways, though, that you share that you can make it easier to do. And some of those are sort of mental or emotional. Some of them are actions to take. What's one that maybe you use yourself or that you would recommend?
I like the phrase, make the big small. So let me just step back for a second. I think what you're pointing to here is that any of these trade-offs, if you will, between the present and the future involve sacrifices made by our present selves for benefits that will accrue to these kind of unknown future selves. One way to get around that problem is to try to make the sacrifices, quote unquote, feel easier to make.
I love the idea of breaking things down. Like I said, making the big small. You know, in one of our research studies, we asked people if they wanted to sign up for a savings account when we framed it as $5 a day.
They're a lot more likely to do that compared to when we frame it as $150 a month. The daily framing, it just feels easier. You know, I can think of a lot of different things I'd be willing to give up that cost me five bucks a day. And it's a lot harder to think of something that's $150 a month. So, you know, I like to translate that same line of thinking into my own life, right? So I like running once I'm on a run, right?
And I have a really hard time getting going. And so, you know, other folks have suggested this, but I think it's the same idea. I really try to say, what about, you know, what about instead of going on a 30-minute run, I'm just going to try going on a five-minute one. And then I'll go on the next five minutes and then the next five minutes. And what I love about that is I've kind of broken things down there.
It's not, I've got to get started and I've got to go on this 30 minute run. And I know some people might be listening and saying 30 minutes doesn't sound like that bad for a run, but you know, it can be five minutes and then another five minutes and another five minutes. It feels a lot more digestible.
If you're a person who over-indexes on living today for your future self, it might be hard for us to believe, but there are people who probably do this. Can there be downsides to this? So absolutely. One of my favorite recent research findings is from Paolo Giuliano. She's a colleague of mine here at UCLA, and she's found that
You look at thousands of people all over the world, and they have these measures of patience and delay of gratification that economists have used. And you find this interesting relationship between patience and well-being. And it looks something like this. If we're not all that patient, if we can't really delay gratification, we're not that happy. The more and more we can do this, the more and more patient we are, the happier we are, up to a certain point,
In which case the relationship starts to go the other way. If we're too patient, if we live too much for tomorrow, now you start to see this negative impact on our wellbeing. And you might hear this and think, that's not me. That doesn't happen to people. But, but then you start thinking there's all different times in our lives when I think we regularly do this. Um,
One great example is what's called procrastination of positive experiences. If you've ever had a gift card that you've just been waiting to use until the right moment, and then you end up never using it or the business closes, well, that's an example of living too much for tomorrow instead of focusing on today. And I think what's interesting about this is that it's another case where we're making life harder for our future selves.
The gift card one, I've now deprived my future self of the memories of experiencing this. I've deprived my present self from going to that restaurant or whatever it is. If I tell myself that I'm working really hard and spending longer hours now because this will be better for the future, but I'm missing things with my friends or family, well, I might convince myself this is good for the long run, but ironically, it might not be.
I like how you say that, you know, essentially we're missing out on experiences. We're missing out on memories that we might want to hold on to. Yeah, I think that's right. In writing the book and doing this research, one of the things that I've kind of come to realize is that there's a constant sort of conversation and back and forth between present and future selves. It's not like present self does one thing, future self experiences another. There's sort of a
a constant shifting between now and later. You know, if I do something now, I'll benefit from it later, but I'm, I may also benefit from it now. You know, if I, if I overindulge now, that could be great. And I may also feel bad tomorrow that I've made things worse for some distant future self. There's sort of constant shifting of time perspectives here. What I like about this is that it means that if I live for today, if I, you know, celebrate the present,
it's not necessarily overly indulgent to do so because there can be times where living for today really can also help increase my well-being tomorrow. The key is to figure out the harmony between now and later so that our present day selves as well as our future selves can both experience increased well-being. And that's not an easy thing to do, but that's my hope is that
more of us can go about that sort of back and forth. Yeah, your book got me thinking about the fact that if this future self really is kind of, in my mind, a future person...
That I'm in constant negotiation daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, future yearly with this future self, right? Like it's a constant negotiation process. I think that's exactly right. Other researchers have used the analogy of the negotiation table and how our future selves are sort of the silent partner. We can try to imagine what they would say, but unlike a real negotiation, they don't actually get to speak up. Yeah.
Until it's too late for them. There are two questions I'd love to wrap up the podcast with. One has to do with the theme of curiosity, since it's really a podcast about curiosity. What are you most curious about today? One of the things that I'm really curious about right now is what are the various ways that we can get people to relate to their future selves? And how can some of these methods work for some people and not others? You know, we talked about the visualizations and the letters, but
One thing that gets a little lost is that we've tested these sorts of interventions across wide groups of people. And what I'm really curious about on the next horizon is trying to figure out
which interventions work best for which people? Is it different age groups, different professions or socioeconomic status, gender, race, et cetera? Because certainly when it comes to social science and human behavior, one size fits all is not the right approach. But appreciating heterogeneity may be a much better and more effective way to go about it. So I'd really love to know more about that down the line.
Hal, is there anything I haven't asked that you'd like to speak to? One thing that I've been thinking about over and over as I started writing the book, but particularly as I wrapped it up was...
How do we grapple with these sorts of issues when both the present and the future feel increasingly uncertain? The flavor of the day right now is AI, of course, and taking over and what's going to happen. But it doesn't have to be that. In six months, it still may be that or maybe something else.
Certainly from a subjective standpoint, it feels like we are in a rapidly changing environment, which can make it very hard to say, what will the future look like? And I'm not even talking about the distant future. What will it look like two years from now, five years from now, et cetera? And so I've been grappling with how do you encourage people to engage in plan making when things are so uncertain? And it's a really hard question to answer because
But one that I think nonetheless is important to deal with because if you don't plan, things just get...
compounded and even worse over time. And so despite the uncertainty, we still have to engage in some degree of thinking about the future and plan making and trying to figure out how to get folks to do that, especially on the younger end of the spectrum, is a real challenge that we face right now. I can't thank you enough. It has been such a pleasure to speak with you. And this is such a very, very, I think, important and also fascinating book. Thank you, Gail. I really appreciate it. I loved talking with you today.
Curious Minds at Work is made possible through a partnership with the Innovator Circle, an executive coaching firm for innovative leaders. A special thank you to producer and editor Rob Makeabelly for leading the amazing behind-the-scenes team that makes it all happen. Each episode, we give a shout-out to something that's feeding our curiosity. This week, it's a play titled Here There Are Blueberries by Moises Kaufman and Amanda Gronich.
It's the story of an album of Nazi-era photos sent to an archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The shocking discovery made by the museum's research team challenges our understanding of humanity. It's a powerful play.