Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I amy huberman, and i'm a professor of neurology, ology and optimal gy at stanford school of medicine. My guess today is ari olic. Ari walla is an adJusting associate professor at colombia university school of international and public affairs. He is also the host of a new TV series, a brief history of the future.

Today's discussion focuses on perhaps one of the most important questions that any and all of us have to ask ourselves at some point, which is, how is IT that we are preparing this planet for the future, not just for our children if we happen to have children or want children, but for all people? The human brain, as we know, is capable of orienting its thoughts and its memories to the past, to the present or to the future. But few people actually take the time to think about the future that they are creating on this planet and culture within our families, etta, for the next generation and generations that follow them.

Ari wallach is an expert in this topic, and he has centered his work around what he calls a long path labs, which is a focus on long term thinking and coordinated behavior at the individual, organizational and societal level in order to Better ensure the thriving of our species. And while that may sound a bit aspirational, IT is both aspirational in grounded in specific actions in logic. So during today's episode area, while expells out for us, not just the aspirations, not just what we want, but how to actually create that positive future and legacy for ourselves, for our families and for society large, it's an extremely interesting take on how to live now in a way that is positively building toward the future.

So by the end of today's episode, you will have a unique perspective on how your brain works, how you frame time perception, and indeed, how you frame your entire life. Before you begin, i'd like emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desired effort bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

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welcome everybody. Thank you for help me.

You know, I go way back. And I think that's a good way to frame today's conversation, not by talking about our history by any stretch, but because really, what I want to understand is about time and time perception. So without going into a long dialogue, the human brain is capable of this amazing thing of being able to think about the past, the present or the future, or some combination of the three.

If other animals and insects do that, I would be surprised. But we do that, then we do IT pretty well, provided all mental faculties are intact. One of the key aspects of brain function, however, is to use that ability to try and set goals, reach goals.

And that's a neurochemical process. And I would say these days, more than ever, we Operate on short time frame reward schedules, meaning we want something. We generally have ways of getting IT pretty quickly or at least the information about how we might get IT pretty quickly. And we either get there, we don't and of course involves dop mean in a bunch of other things as well. A lot of your work is focused on linking our perception of what we're doing in the present with knowledge about the past and trying to project our current decision making into the future to try and create a Better future.

And that some pretty heavy mental gymnastics, especially when many, perhaps most, but certainly many, many people worldwide are just trying to get through their day without feeling overly anxious, without letting their health get out of control, without or actually say, their illness get out of control and on and on. So to kick the ball out OK, this long winded question and IT is indeed a question, which is, how do we navigate this, kendra? Like, if we really care about the future, what do do we want to do? Where do we want to place our mental frame? And how do we start going about doing that?

A great question or a great series of questions. One of the things that homosapien s do extremely well as what we call mental time travel, we're able to actually take ourselves in the current moment and project out.

In fact, marty salad men, kind of the of the father positive psychology, put forth this idea in this grape book called homo perspectives, that what separates us out from almost every other species, as far as if we know the ones we can talk to you, mostly us, is that we do two things extremely well. We can do mental time travel towards the future, right? We can think about different possible outcomes, different possible scenarios.

And we can collaborate to make the ones that we want to see manifest, manifest. And that involves language, that involves social and interaction, a whole bunch of other things. But at the end of the day, what we do extremely well as far as we know where the only ones we do IT.

And I think this is part of the reasons why we're so good at what we do as a dominant species on this planet is to project out into futures that we want. We know where this comes from. Mostly it's coming from the hippo campus, right? Which one thing about the begin is amazing is that it's it's almost a tempo.

IT doesn't actually have a time step. And so what he does is to take snapshots of epithetic memories that have happened in the past. We assembles of them so that we can mentally time travel and then figure out these different futures and hours of what might happen. So if we take r and andy, fifty thousand years ago.

he calls me andy folks. But so OK, no, it's okay. I just stick with the andy, but i'm stick with and giving .

you permission for at least the duration of Andrew. Now, andy, look, here's the thing. If r and andy are out on the staring gei hundred and fifty thousand years ago, right? How most? About two hundred thousand years ago, about hundred and fifty thousand years ago, we started to spread out of the rift valley in to africa.

And we're now at a point where we're no longer singular, but within a of a small tribal structure, we want to start hunting larger and larger game. We're no longer reactive, so we want to go after that game. It's not a foregone conclusion that when we go after something is going to do what we want to do, we have to start thinking about different scenarios.

Said that first kind of mental time travel is really coming from our desire for for more protein to exist and to grow the group and really to feed the super energy intensive thing called the human brain, that for mental time travel starts and hippo campus takes different memories of different ways. We've hunted and been successful in the past or not successful and starts to put together scene IOS. Now fast forward.

That's a very long time ago. You take us, you know through through, through the middle east into europe, into asia twenty thousand years ago, our ancestors cross barn jo, which is now the bearing straight and where we're in north amErica and fast word to right now, on my way in here, I get a notification on my phone, and I immediately pick up the phone to see you covered this before. What's that new information? What is that, that I have to react to? So we're working on two, three hundred thousand year old hardware.

At the same time, we have a cultural substrates that is for like a Better words, has hacked into that older part of us to make us a want that immediate gratification and be forced us to now reacting away with that mental time. Travel has closed that temporal horizon. We're now training ourselves no longer to think about the far future, but to actually think about the immediate present.

And I don't mean present in a budd's way, I mean presented sm, as in a hall of mirrors, there is no past. There is no future. There's only this moment.

And so to becoming extremely difficult for us as individuals, a society's of civilization, to think about the long term in in the way that you and I may have done hundred, fifty thousand years ago because the winter was coming and we were starting in where we're going to move our family and our tribal, our company, we would go to warm our client. We don't even do that anymore, right? We're so in this moment, that is becoming extremely difficult for us to break out of this present test moment.

I really appreciate your answer for a couple of reasons um through the nineties and early two thousands and maybe even until twenty twenty, there was a growing movement within science, but also outside of science towards encouraging people to be mindful. This whole notion of being present, right? But what you're describing is actually too much being present.

What you're call in presenting sm and of course, that depends on what what's happening in the present. But in the eighties, in the nineties, in the two thousands, up to about two thousand and twenty. So of course, we're still in the two thousands.

There was this innova future tripping, like people are future tripping. They are spending too much time worrying about the future, too much time worrying about the future. I feel like the horizon on our cognition has really come closer in now.

And as you said, where is like sort of hall of mirrors where it's constant stimulus and response? And I don't want today's discussion to be dooming gloom. Are gonna talk about solutions. But I think between what you're saying and what JoNathan height, who is on this podcast, author of vanities generation coLoring in american mind, professor, and has said, i'm starting to really believe that, yes, the human brain can focus on past, present or future or some combination, but that something about the architecture of our technologies in our human and interactions, because those are so closely into oven, this taking place now, has us really locked in the present in stimulus response. Now, just briefly reference a previous episode, the podcast I did IT.

It's it's one of my favorite conversations to ever honor off microphone was which which was, excuse me, with doctor James holy, eighty four year old union and psychoanalyst, where many important messages there, but one of them was, we need, we absolutely need to take five to ten minutes each day to exit stimulus response mode. Typically, by closing one's eyes and just looking inward, IT doesn't even have to be called meditation. In order to understand what are greater wishes are how to link our current thinking and behavior to the future into the past.

And I think he's qualified to say this because he's an analyst, that that process actually is a reflection of the unconscious mind. So to link these concepts in in a more coherent way is IT possible, that we are just overwhelmed with notifications, either the traditional type of notifications on your phone, but but that we're basic as living in stimulus response all the time now. And if so, what direction is that taking ourselves as individuals, as families, as communities and you know, as a as a species? I'm busy validating what you just said even though you don't need my validation. And just asking like how bad is IT to just be focused on managing the day to day? Or maybe that's that's a Better way to go about life.

You need to manage the day to day. There are people like me who are full time futures. We tend to be very anxious because what we tend to do is think more in the future in oran's presidents, we should be that beans said.

If ninety percent of your day is going about your day dealing with what's right and funny, that's great. What i'm advocating for is what I call kind of trans generational empathy. It's a mouthful.

So we know empathy. You know, you've had guessed on that tran's generational empathy, first, informal starts with empathy and compassion for yourself. Then we move into empathy for those who came before, which then allows us to build empathy for the future, future, future r future, future, andy. But in future generations, and we can get into how to do that.

yeah, maybe we could just part each of those one by one. So how do you to find empathy herself?

So I believe for yourself is in many ways as almost self compassion is recognizing you're doing the best you can with what you have. Part of the issue is we we surround ourselves eye, and i'm guilty of this of of images and quotes and books of how to live your best light, how to be a and anything below that metric of perfection.

You start to feel terrible and you start to kind of ruminate over what you lie in bed at night, and you think, how could I have done that? How I have done that? You forget that you you're only able to handle what you can at that time, and you can't hold yourself up to this idealized yark stick at, look, I do this for a long time we learned my father had staged for cancer as eighteen years old and from really learned to when he passed away was only four months, four months, four months and for a lot that time um I was kind of in denial, right? Like I wasn't actually there with him as much as I should have been, in fact, and we're not won't go into this.

I was actually with you that summer. We were working together that summer at at a summer camp. Now for years I beat myself up.

How could I have done that? I should have been home with him. I was going to be four months.

And then I realized to the self compassion, like eighteen year old, r was only at a place, emotionally and psychologically, to be able to do what I did. And IT wasn't the older thirty or forty year old are of now being like of having these regrets. So empathy for yourself really, really centers you.

IT doesn't mean you will let yourself off the hook IT doesn't mean you can go willing million three people terribly IT means you recognize that who you were even yesterday is many ways different than who you are today. And you've learned. So trans generational empathy has to start with yourself.

IT has to start with being able to look in the mere and say, not perfect. I was born into this world, are into a family, into my, my birth family, or you family that you choose. And they were born to something.

And you work with what you have, but you have to start there. Because so many times I work, people, I talk to, people I want to have empathy, can know for the past and for the future, but they don't have IT for themselves. So if you don't start there, IT becomes very, very difficult to spread out. Uh, first, obviously going backwards. And then ultimately the goal of my work is to get you to spread that out into the future.

I love this concept of empathy yourself because i've heard IT before another context but I haven't heard IT Operationalize ed the way that you describe IT I think yeah we there's a two phrase that come to mind there's a book um call the fighters heart by sam shared in and um a pretty interesting account of all the different forms of martial arts in fighting and there's an interesting part of the book where he says you can't have your twin eth birthday until you're sixteen which is a big giant duh but it's actually a pretty found statement.

And by the way, he went to harm my father was in the seal teams. He he has an interesting lennard in his own right. And I think harvard, he he claims he just painted and smoke cigarette. So a bit of IT of an iconic class in any case.

I think that statement you can have your twin eth birthday until you're nineteen is something that that we forget because of the women amount of attention that we pay to trying to be like others and satisfy external metrics. And so I like to think he he was an agreement with you if I made. The other thing that happened me recently that comes to mind is that I, like many people, prove instagram.

I teach on instagram at a and there are a lot of these quote accounts like like life inspiration accounts. And and I would argue that the half life of any one of those poses is pretty short, but summer are pretty interesting. And there's a guy i'll put IT in the shown ote captions. I don't remember off the top my head, not a huge account, not a small account. I think he lives in Austin, and he goes through this long discourse about the chAllenges of the human mind for all the reasons that we're talking about, its ability to flip from past to present to future, IT said.

But then he is, he basically distills down to one actual step per day or per morning, which is, at some point, if you want to grow and be more functionality, you have to ask yourself, what am I going to do today to make my day Better, not to be Better than I was yesterday, right? Which is also in fine statement. But that would never really resonate for me because like yesterday could have been an amazing day.

You might not be as good as yesterday. Everyday is kind of its own unique unit. And our biology really does function on the circadian biology units of twenty four hours. No negotiating that.

So I like this concept of what what can I do today to make my life and hopefully the lives of others Better because IT IT implies a urban action step. It's really focused on the unit of the day, which is really what we've got. Um so that resonated.

So according to your definition, empathy for self starts with understand that we're always doing the best we can with what we've got but that there is a striving kind of woven into that statement that there is a need for striving at what point do we start to develop empathy for others? And what does that look like? Like is empathy for somebody else feeling what they feel? And that's a kind of traditional definition.

Yeah look, we start off with kind of cogent intellectual empathy, right? You kind of think IT um but where you really wanna be able to be is at a place where your their their feelings, our feelings that you can feel and you want to bring IT if there if if they're feeling bad, you want to break out, bring some resolution to that. If you're feeling good, can you can be there with them? The fundamental level, this is miron neurons.

And i'm connecting with you and you are connecting with me. And there's an a genetic adaptive fitness for that, right? We all want to to be in sink because the tribe that works together flushes together and thrives together.

So make sense at that level. But when i'm feeling empathy for another, their state of being can be as important as my own state of being um IT can be look at can be a taxing don't get me wrong. But ultimately bt is what self compassion can give you, because I can give you a state of being where those around you, you are no longer fundamentally disconnected. And I think one of the the great errors of where we have taken this civilization over the past several decades of not centuries is, is this connection disconnection from ourselves, disconnection from each other and disconnection from nature in the planet. So anything we can do to further that connection is gonna benefit us today in the current moment.

I agree um completely if we were to break that down um into the requirements for empathy and connection, one that seems like presence like we need to be present, like we're going to appreciate a firm, a beautiful firm or a dog or a significant another another human being that we happen to encounter we have to be present, we get if we're going to have empathy, we our mind can be some wondering, right? Can be in the past, can be in in the future or we're not going to be able to really touching to the details and the of the experience.

So that seems like requirement number one. The second is that we need to be able to leave whatever um kind of pressures are on us to to tend to other things right like at every neural circuit we know has a pushing a poll. Like in order to get a you need to suppress b this is the way neural circuits work generally you know, flexes and extension.

And the muscles are good analogy for which, by the way, you know, like if you're going to flex your voice up, you try that as essentially relaxing and vice versa. In so many, so many words, the pets are going to dive all over me for that one. But but that sort of how the neural circuits in the brain work, we can actually see all around us by virtue of neurons that respond to either increments of documents and light.

And their difference is actually what allows us to see boundaries, borders usually. So um we need to suppress like our thoughts about where we need to be that day or other things that are going on for us. And then we need to be able to return to our own you know self attention in order to to be functional.

And I think that I think this is where the chAllenge is and where the next question, ries, which is, on the one hand, I could imagine that, okay, we've got so many pressures upon us every day, all day that is getting much harder to be present, to be empathy, to build this idealized future or Better future. But on the other hand, I hear you and other people saying, well, things are so much Better than they were even fifty years ago in terms of health outcomes, believe that are not in terms of, you know, status of people having shelter at sea. And this is a shock to a lot of people that like way.

Second, I see homeless people on the street when I was okay, and now I deal. Well, they were. The people suffering were elsewhere. You didn't perhaps, and see them.

So there are couple levels of question here, but the first one is perhaps, are we much Better off? But we are worse off in the sense set. They're so much in coming that we miss.

The fact we're Better off is IT like notifications preventing us from seeing that we actually have so much that know one hundred times Better than off than we were as a species fifty years ago. Because I feel like a lot of the debates that I see online about climate change, about health. Langevin, it's like it's overwhelming because I feel like people aren't are to Green on the first principles.

So let's start with with this. 2， our human beings Better off in terms of health and longevity than we were. Let's go short, scout, fifty years ago.

So like in aggregate, because we can find pig's and values right when we zoom in, if we pull back, there is no Better time to be alive as a homosapien on planet earth. And right now, now someone going to argue right now in this health.

in mortality.

we book in this country being a woman um education, uh the kind of the colors that we get h across the big if you and I go outside, you stepped on a rusty nail one hundred years ago, good chance you would die right now. We just go to the to to the drug store and put something on IT.

Or you even know we don't even if put anything on that, we can put IT underneath high pressure water for thirty seconds, and that'll clean out because we now know germ theory, right? So net net, this is the best time to be alive. All the markers you go to gap minder, if you want. And you can see that we are doing Better. We are progressing.

The issue is that we are now at an inflection point because the things that we do or do not do across the major issues of our day and how we deal with them, climate change, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, um what we do or do not do will dictate totally the next several years and several decades, potentially the next several centuries. So so you've hit we're being bombarded by information. Most of the information were attracted to is the negative, negativity, bias unite on this.

We're going to go back to r and hundred and fifty thousand years ago. If we ve saw beautiful tree aesthetically and we saw me be a tree, we hear that was on fire. You and I would zoom in on the tree on fire and focus on the negative, because negative things hurt and kill us. That being said, if you and I run a major media company, you and I both know that the more negative stories that we put out, the more hits we're going to get this .

media company.

the I would argue some of your success comes from the fact that you don't wallow in the negativity. And there's a real first in a hunger and desire to learn more about who we are and how we can make ourselves Better. But that negativity bias are still part of us, right?

I think one of the one of the issues that we have to confront as a society is that there are parts of us, the the, the prefrontal cortex, parts of us that are amazing, that build microphones, that have conversations, that stream across internet. And then there are parts of us, you know, this is JoNathan elephant in the writer. There are parts of us that happen below the service, that have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years of legacy.

And we often want to either be up here and say, no, we're so smart or so great, or you want to wallow in the in the kind of the death despair and the horrific things that we can do to one another. You know, my personal past on my father side, and I think some of the darkest moments in homosapien behavior, and that was not that long ago. So if we want to move in into a place that allows us to ask what I think is the the fundamental question of time, which is how do we become the great ancestors the future needs us to be. We need to find a way to both tap into to the to the elephant and the writer, which you'll do a Better .

job of me and I apt in neural circuits, but I love this idea of high level concepts and then neural circuits that are very um what doctor paul county was on this podcast psychiatry, brilliant psychiatrist said, you know the limbic c system um the emotional system doesn't know or care about the clock or the calendar is just illicit feeling yes. Doesn't care about whether not that feeling is relevant to the past, the present of the future IT. IT just has a job which is just is bring out a particular feeling .

you're jumping to have a little bit, but that's OK because what your jumping into is when we ask and we want to have an empathic connection, we want to empathy with future generations. We don't want IT to just be cognitive. We don't want IT just to be intellectual.

We actually wanted to be emotional. So I ask someone, what do you want the future to be like for your great grand and kids in the in the twenty eighties? And they give me a list of kind of bullet point, but they're usually .

externalized bullet point, shelter, healthcare.

And then I follow up, we've done this, another people, much far they have on this studies. We say, yc, true. And I want to tell me this how you want them to feel that's different, right? This is the motives um this is dramatic mark hypothesis there right where if you really want something to happen, it's not just about visualizing IT it's about visualizing IT and connecting IT to the emotional amigas less sense of what that is to actually move towards the actions and changing the behaviors that you want medicine and avenue you understands as marketing understands this but but the general .

public tends not that sorry keep in that you but also it's was the kids say sorry, not sorry in the sense that I want to make sure that I highlight something marth. Bec is somebody who I think is done some really brilliant work. Create practices where when one is not feeling what they want to feel, there's this kind of question like based best to feel your feelings. Are you supposed to create new feelings in place of them, especially if their unpleasant and like there's no clear answer that up because it's complicated, infinite number of variables.

But he does have this interesting practice whereby it's it's a bit like a meditation where if you're struggling with something like may be you're struggling with board room or not knowing where to go with your life or you're not happy or you just feel some underlying anxiety to think back to a time when you felt particularly blank, like a time when you felt particularly empowered or particularly curious. Um IT can be very specific, particularly um amused because and the ideas that in anchoring to the emotion state first you call to mind a bunch of potential action steps. And the reason I like this approach is that that is at least one way that couldn't go the brain works, which is that the emotion states are linked to a bunch of action step possibilities, kind of like A A magic library, where if you go into the room called sadness, there, a bunch of action steps associated with the go beyon crying, like clearing up in the field position, is that you go to the room that's called event, you know, excitement.

And and there is all this idea about getting in vehicles and going places and things that sort. So what you're talking about is, I believe, thinking about the emotional states of others. And then from there, I think, is where you're going to go cultivating some action steps that you can take to ensure that the future generation can access those emotions. Yes.

but with a slight correction, because it's not about thinking about their future emotional states, is actually feeling them.

I see. So it's tonight saying I want my kids to be happy. I want them to I want them to have no trauma.

It's um it's feeling what IT would be to have to be happy. Yeah no trauma. Yes right because that becomes like that .

becomes an anchor right? That this she's one hundred percent crite. What IT does is to put in places that it's like a cat anker.

So if you and I were sailors, we're not there's a thing called the cage anker and the catch anker is that this anchor that you throw you know thirty forty meters after the sixty hits the bottom and use the rope to pull yourself there. Emotions were police towards those futures. IT will alter the behaviors.

So time and time again, when we intellectualize and we become overly cognitive in terms of futures that we want to see happen for ourselves, future R I or future wallie family, our future society or future civil lobo planetary civilization. If we think about IT, that's one thing. But to actually execute on those goals, we have to actually connect the emotional state that we want to be in to drive that function.

Remember, look, there's a one of the things that martial lemon says, that the fried wrong fluid felt, as Martin says, that emotions were these things that we, that happened in the past, that we would used to dal on. And that was in the roseanne IDE depression. No, no, no.

Emotions are there to help us make Better decisions for the future. We are future oriented mammals and species. So what emotions do? It's not meant to be like, oh, you know, I I had this like terrible break up.

I feel so terrible then i'm going to go to my theory, but want to talk about all that stuff up in the pet. That's one way of in the other way is your body is telling you in a very, very visual way. Whatever you just did to that had you in that situation. Don't do again. Again, if you do, you're going to feel you they did the study where they at college campus, they found people who had just been in A A long term relationship .

that I gone .

through a break up.

What i've learned in life is is important .

to define the relations. So about six months up, and people would go to the break up they gave, they give you one group of ebo, and another group actually just got to see T A minute ant got talent. Or and the group that got the active mini fine actually felt Better.

why? Because those because we actually feel emotions, we actually feel painting, some of the same circuits are being tripped. And so that says to me that emotions are there to guide future action. So if we can have pro social motions and empathy and compassion, and this this one we call love, as what we are connected to the future generations that we want to see, how we want to see them flash, we are much more likely to see that happen than if we just have a vision of what tomorrow will look like at an intellectual kind of two dimensions level.

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I really like this because he gets to so many themes that have been discussed on this podcast previously in the existing the news science of literature of like, yes, emotions don't know the clock or the calendar and that's something a bad thing and often times it's discuss as a bad thing like go when you're feeling stressed, you're not able to access the party, your brain that can make Better decisions. We we know that's true except in in light of what's immediately pressing. I mean I would take that stress in the short term makes us much Better thinkers and movers for taker survival.

In the long term its is problematic. But the way that you're describing emotions as a kedge anchor, as that was called kedges with A K yes, kedge anchor, interesting as a key anchor to pull us forward, also leverages the fact that emotions don't know about the clock or the calendar and that the order of Operation here seems to be emotions first, then action steps born out of those emotions, and then future state hopefully arrived. That if it's a set along the right path, I like that a lot.

And again, IT maps to some of the work that has largely existed, least to macos gy. In popular psychology, whatever you want to call itself help gana a big marthe's c fan, in part because of an exercise that she's included in several, with not all her books of this perfect day exercise here done. This exercise is a very interesting exercise.

You you first sit with your eyes closed and you imagine, like really terrible stuff, and you experience IT in your body, and you experience IT in your mind, and you just pay attention to how IT feels. And IT sucks. IT doesn't feel good.

Most people don't have too much trouble doing that exercise. Then you shift over, I think you're swift, a little break or may be move around a little bit and then you do a perfect day exercise where no rules. You lie down or sit down, close your eyes and you can imagine your date includes anything you want.

You can be anywhere you want you. The room can move from one country to the next IT doesn't matter. And you also experience the sensations in your body.

And in that second exercise is remarkable. Have done at several times. now. There are little seeds of things kind of pop out where you go oh, like I didn't realize that would be part of my perfect day and they're not outside the bounds of reality.

And those are things that then you write down and that, at least in my life, have a all born out. So this is something next size you do routinely. And when I first heard about this is like, okay, this seems like like weird self IT knows a self help y wu stuff.

Like, i'm not like, come on, come a at that time I am a neuroscience professor. Like i'm not going like you got to be kidding me and it's a remarkable exercise. And the reason I bring IT up now in disgust with you is I think you and Martha arrived at a similar place or a similar avenue. But in your case, you're talking about specifically toward building a future that's not necessarily for you to live in, for someone else .

to live IT. Oh, look, that the the core of my philosophy is is in a story that I heard a very long time ago comes IT comes from the toward. That means that the story exists in many cultures.

And so there's there there's A A man named honey walking, you know, when he comes across a much older man whose planned in a cab tree and he says to the older man, know why you plant in a cab tree? This, how long will I be until this castree bears fruit even has shared, because I ve at least years, and because why? Why planted? No, you won't around for that.

And the old man says, what? I was Young. I played in the shapes of a capital.

I ate from the character, so it's my job to plant this character now. Um this is how society is move forward. This is how we become great, is by planting countries whose shape we will never know.

And look, I can give you a bunch of exit the panama canal, right? That was a great, you know, another way that we think about this, we call this cathedral thinking. So now when we're in california, that you'll put up a home in three or four days. But back in the day, I took a really long time to build great things so you go back to three hundred years ago um even further and often times the architect and the original stone mazing who would plant the keystone would not be alive to see this cathedral or or mosques len built that's cathedral thinking it's doing things whose whose fruits you will not be around to take a advantage of to read and and to have as part .

of your life and and I love IT and I love the notion of caae dro thinking just the visual there or mask thinking I went the blue mosque yeah like I mean, I i've seen some amazing architecture. I love architecture and I was like, okay, like to be a beautiful building. And I was like, wow. But that .

that you felt is what we call on. And that sense of all at what they built is what I am advocating for us to build in the world today, is so that when our descendants look back and they say, what, what did I? What did andy do? They have odds, not because we necessary build cathedrals, IT bees. We, we took actions, both very small and very large, to ensure that they would flush, that they would have those care trees.

And I think what what I realize is that I don't know who built the bloom mosque specifically. I don't know who the architect was. I should.

And even last earlier this year, we were in sydney. I went to Cindy upper house. We did alive there a beautiful building I learned that had been built over a very long period of time.

I can tell you that the architect was danish. I can't remember his name. So part of what we're talking about here is giving up um our need for attribution, giving up our need for credit.

And gosh, this is the opposite of social media, right? Social media is all about getting credit no. And yet in science where people care a lot about credit while they are alive and and my scientist colleagues hate this.

but they .

know IT deeply, which is, with the exception of instead and a few others, most people will not be associated with their incredible discoveries, even the textbook discoveries twenty years out.

And I know this because my dad's is a scientist, and I know a lot about the scientist that we're head of him and he taught me this early on he said with rare exception you know the discoveries are not um you know no one can say, oh, that's the discovery of so and so they talk about the discovery people will build on IT so you're part of a process for which you won't get credit in the long run. You will get credit in the short run. And and that brings me around to perhaps that a point.

It's more relevant to everybody, not not just scientists, which is IT. We are all trained to work on the short term contingencies, reward schedules. We know we achieve something we get you get an a, you get to b, you get a trophy.

A we just came from the olympic track and fuel trials and an organ. It's like, you know podium, you know bronze over gold. And and so yes, you're part of a larger legacy.

You're building towards larger legacy in the examples that you give. But part of IT is understanding that um you're not gone to get credit. You're not going to have your name huge on the sides of the building.

I mean, I don't want have too many examples, but I work at a university for which there is an endowment the size of a country, right? We're very blest to have that endowment. The buildings have names on the side of them.

The reason they have named on the side of them is because people gave money, typically gave money to the university to have their name on the side of the building to be immortalized. What's interesting for many reasons, both sociopolitical, but also rather reasons those names change over time. So if if people knew that they they if they gave half their wealth and their name might be scraped off a building in in two hundred years, they might feel differently about IT.

So short term and contingencies are important. Then again, we call IT rockfalls plaza. Yes right? It's lincoln center .

named after .

a lincoln ah you're the new york and so on and so for so so like if people um how do we get the everyday person and I consider myself in everyday person, how do we get ourselves working on short term contingencies for a future that we can visualize this Better for the next generation and let go of our need for credit?

Great series of of points and questions about so part of what your talking about is egoist legacy, right? So you mentioned a building we want you. I can be any any building at any major university. The name is put there. Marble.

you said two hundred years you went to work, you a bunch place, yes, but he bounce around, proof that you can bounce around and still be successful. But maybe you should eventually finish. We will talk that layer, but spiral paua, yes, spring lauser see to the free speech movement.

Or now you could argue not so free speech movement. That's my, I said that. Yes, I said spiral.

Paul, I can't tell you who spray was. Do you know who spare was? exactly? I can tell you the arches. I can tell you there was a free speech movement. I can tell you the sauce and bands play there. I can tell you that it's supposed to be a place we can say anything and be exempt from you know um being put in jail, basically anything. Maybe that's still true, but I don't think IT is um but I can tell who sprawls .

the question of lagasse is very important so sprout prauge a and let's say two hundred and fifty years from now that name will probably may may not be there the plausible but the name that maybe he was renewed by someone else um so for kinds s of industry that can put down several million dollars and put their name on the side of a building.

That's that's one form of legacy that is not the every every person that being said, if I have three children so let's say they continue on at two point, two children, whatever. You know, my descendants in two hundred and fifty years, brow blauw mar may not still be called that. But in two hundred and fifty years I will have roughly fifty thousand descendants is for my wife, I know exiting for the exciting is scary that so what what is going to impact the future? And by the way, if you want to keep giving money to put your name on the side of building.

please do so. Do I should just be put anthropy at universities and elsewhere? People think of is like, oh, people ego ic legacy sure also pays for hundreds .

of thousands of scholarships. The opportunity for arch, but for the everyday person like you or or me, if if I if I wanted impact the future, which I do, could learn. I'm not the kind of features where I I don't I don't predict the future.

My job at this point in time, I was I manifested in this biological entity called ari wali, is not to predict the future, is to help folks make Better decisions today so that we have Better futures in the. In the near term, the medium term, the far off tomorrows. So what's going to impact those fifty thousand walls c descendants? It's not gonna anything that I did ego ici in terms of getting a recognition.

What's going to impact them? And and we know this in many ways, from across multiple disciplines was going to impact them, is going to be how I am with my children and my wife and my partner and the behaviors that I model, because those become, those become the means. Sorry, we like, we need IT.

Susan blackmore, ore has mean theory, right? Not not internet means where you know watch a lot of those, but true means these cultural units that we hand off both laterly and and and and and forward to logically ally to other generations, especially those closest to us. If you want to impact the future, there's a bunch of things you can do and reduce your carbon footprint, give money, vote this.

I want all those to happen in a positive way. But the end of the day is monkey see, monkey do. How you and I interact right now will obviously impact our relationship, everyone who's listen, reviewing, but then everyone is this in reviewing how they are with the personnel, hands of them, the coffee, the bar, or they are with their partner. How they model those behaviors is going to impact the future in a greater way, I will argue, than most of the ways we ego ics think about having a legacy.

I totally agree and I think um you all enough and Frankly, i'm excited to be old enough that I have a max statements without being old enough to know that like I believe that our species for the most part but everyone I feel like most, most people, if raised in a low trauma environment with adequate resources, will behave really well.

There are exceptions and there may be sociopaths that are born with really disrupted neural circuitry that they have to do evil or feel you know but I think um it's clear that trauma um and chAllenge can can require behavior and certainly the brain um to create you know what we see is evil right? So but I think most people are good. Yes, most people are are of genuine goodness.

And I do think that we model behavior. I think that adequate is something that I guess, as a forty nine year old person, I just does that make me midday age of the middle age of I live hopefully to be about one hundred. But we will see bullet bus for cancer. I'm to give .

IT where are not?

You read your book fully, right? There's a response to that they could go either way. The i'd like to think that reading the book fully will extend life as opposed of short in life, yes, but if nothing else, maybe it'll cure in soma. The the idea here is that if we're going to invest in in being our best selves, one would hope that other people respond to that the way that you said, you know that that will kind of mirror each other. Good behavior breeds good behavior.

In my lifetime i've seen uh real um increase in the number of rules and regulations and a decrease in adequate like and what I would call and I don't this isn't a real term, I don't think, but like spontaneous adequate, more genuine adequate, like people being kind just to be kind, not because they're a afraid of a consequence. And I have a theory um and i'll go through this quickly. I I saw a documentary recently about the history game shows where I learned that the first commercial was during the world series where when damage o was making run on the home run record, so they used a sports game that was televised in on the radio to have first commercial, then the game shows, which were basically commercials for the products.

That's what they were. And they use human interaction as a way to make IT more interesting between the contestants in the host. And then came reality T V shows. And then now I would argue that social media is the reality T V show and we're all able to opt in and cast ourselves in IT and that the way that people get more um let's say, presence on the show is to do things that are more hyperbolic. It's very hard i've tried and I think managed to some extent to do so too.

It's very hard to create a very, very popular social media channel in this reality T V show that we are all in on social media by just being super nice to everybody um and being you can but it's much harder than if you they are high friction a player because it's less interesting. There's less drama um IT takes more attention. But I do think that there are pockets of that.

So lexing man used to talk about this like is there are social media platform where people are rewarded for being benevolent, for modeling, good, adequate because they genuinely like that. And um I say social media because I think so much of life now is taking place there and that's the opportunity to reach people across content ents and and far away in time as well right to time stamp down thing. So here's my quite is there a version of social media that is not just on the half life of like twelve hours? What was twisted at that? What was retweet? Because I would argue that and even the highest.

Reality social media posts have a half life of about six months to a year maybe not even that there are few means like the guy looking at the other girl walking in the other way those kind of means that seem to proceed but most of them don't. Um so is there a time capsule sort of version of social media? Because I look on the internet, like on youtube and I would say they're probably three or four youtube videos namely the see jobs commencements beach at stanford in twenty fifteen maybe last lecture by a andy push before he died of penrod's cancer, maybe ba Brown's ted talk on vulnerability.

I'm thinking mainly in the self helps space, personal development space here. And Frankly, aside from that, and most things as popular as they may seem, hundred million views, two hundred million views, compared to literature, compare to music, compare to poetry, compared to visual arts, it's gonna be gone. But i'd like to think that these podcast episodes are gona project forward thirty, forty years into the future.

But if we look at the history of what's on youtube and we look at the half life of any social media post IT may not be the case. In fact, it's very likely to notice tes. One would hope that they morphed into something that last. But the question here is, is the reversion of social media that acts a time capsule to teach the sorts of principles that you're talking about .

in the show that I just did a previous the future one of one of the places I visit um are these caves in the south of spain, three hundred people of the surface that are extremely rare because what these caves have in them, side by side, are both kind of hand paintings done by both neanderthals and homosapien, the one of the few places where they exist side by side. So before we talk about social media, we have to talk about the what that really is is story telling.

And we're trying in social media as we know that right now we're trying to tell the world a story about who we are and what I stand for, why am I hear and why do I matter? And notice me, my life meant something. But when we go back to that cave of our student, where those drawings were from forty, fifty thousand years ago, IT was, these are the animals that are here.

Here's when they come by. This is going back to the very beginning, our conversation. This is a time of year you should expect to see these animals in this area, right? And I was when Nancy bardach, I calls for a cultural time versus mechanical time.

So when because that's the way we used to think from from forty thousand years to the agricultural revolution, twelve thousand and ten twelve years ago, to probably going to a couple of hundred years ago, we didn't remember the minute hand only existed on the analog clock started about two hundred years ago. Yeah, didn't think in minutes. We really think the the clock, as we know, is the mechanical clock, as we know that only comes about during the industrial revolution, and especially the movie start death trained.

Remember.

the trains count down IT was stone edge IT was some dial seasons, right? The way we would think about the future, right? right? When people say, oh, are you you're future is like this is people like you have always existed.

Now, the idea of the future, that is this thing out there that's gonna royal over us is relatively new. Because up to a couple hundred years ago, r and andy, we did exactly what probably what our fathers did, and our kids would do exactly what we did. There was no kind of evolution in in social structure.

But at the advent, as we, my father did, he is a scientist in the other domains of life.

But this goes back to behavior. The number one predicted, if someone is going to read the newspapers.

if their parents read the newspaper and open the pair and poke IT from behind, and I want to his attention.

we can talk about that in a second. The attention part. And so when I look, when I look at when I started answer your question about social media, I look at IT as an anthropologist from mars. That's how I go into every situation.

I want to say, why is that that we're doing, what we're doing, how did that come about? And how might we learn from that so that we can potentially go in different direction, if if we choose? All storytelling is really a way of doing cultural transmission, of means, of ideas, of ways of being, so that we can flush and move forward as a species.

So then if you take that at this, at its, at its truth, what is social media right now? But nothing but a kind of a hall of mirrors of our culture right now. What will they say two hundred or years from now when they look at these posts with with the legs and things that um the metrics s that we used to judge ourselves individually and say what what happened to the species?

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Again, that's drink element dot com slash huberman to claim a free sample pack. Mean, when the reasons I fall in love with biology is that, yes, we are evolving as a species, but I would argue slowly enough that any fundamental knowledge about biology of the human body is is a core truth about us way back when and now and very likely into the future and of course, technologies will modify that. Medicine will modify our biology at that.

But I get great piece from that. Um and most of the call protocols that I describe on the podcast about viewing sunlight, IT said a circuit an rithmetic ity IT that has been core to our our biology and our well being one hundred thousand years ago and very likely IT will be quarter our biog hundred thousand years from now. I therefore worry about any technology that shortens up our time scale of um motivation and reward and I use social media so I am not anti social media by any stretch.

In fact, i'm quite pro provided is kept in check other JoNathan hides ideas. I really like those um but let me put this way, if I go to loss of as which I do enjoy doing from time to time and not a gaming addi, I guess I say that enough times people going to say when getting up, but I enjoy playing a little bit of a slot. I play low level stuff that doesn't required any thinking um and I often do pretty well for whatever reason because I know want to leave probably um but this as is all about short term thinking and short term reward contingency. It's actually designed in every respect you to forget that there are these other longer .

time scales and that whether .

no natural light in most lighthearted clocks in many of them the the world random reward schedule that there is designed to keep you playing. Um and I would argue that a lot of social media like that, not all of IT, but a lot of IT is like that um what likes and responses in some cases is fighting as what people want.

They want to fight because they like dad emotion that IT will the algorithms figure you out so that they shorten up your your temporal window. And so when people say we were walking around with a little slot machine in our pocket all day long with our smart phone, actually think that's right. I think it's right.

It's more like a casino, however, where that casino harbors all sorts of different games, and they are gonna find the one that you like. Some people like playing rett. I have like playing relet.

Some people like crap. Some people like poker. Some people like to bed on a game where you get to sit the whole game with the possibility winning. A friend of mine who's actually an addiction councillor, he said, you know, the gambling addiction is the absolute worst of all the addictions.

why? Because the next time really could change every year, unlike alcoholism or drug addiction or other forms addiction, where the next time is just going take you further down in gambling, there is the realistic possibility that the next time could change everything, and that destroys lives. So if we are walking around with a sort of casino in our pocket, how do we get out of that mindset, much less use that tool in order to get into these longer term and investments for the future? This is what I want to know.

How do we get into the metaphor cave painting scenario? Because what that means that the stories that i'm seeing on social media today probably are meaningless toward my future? Probably more than likely.

yes.

but I need to be informed. But you know, I saw the debates. Like how much more do I need to hear about what was happening with the debates from other people? Probably zero. Like there's no new information there. The only thing that can happen, as I can get caught in the little ID of the tide pool that, uh, is the the argue, the debate about the debate or the debate about the debate about the debate.

So I mean, IT takes a strong, strong mind to divorce oneself from all of that, much less get into this longer term thinking and maybe this is why David organs is always out running and hate social media so much even though he's used IT to good end to to share his message um I mean what is that that we can do to disengage from that short term contingency reward mindset and behaviors? And what in the world can we do instead? Yeah is IT go paint like on the side of a cave is IT write a book is IT um I mean, how do how do we do that? And and let's check off the box of like we need to end our kids.

We need to tend our health. We need to get our sleep. We need to get to lesa assume that we're taking care, the fundamentals of health and well being, which doesn't leave whole lot time afterwards.

Anyway, what do we do like like where where the story, where should the stories go? Where do we put them? I I feel really um impassion by this because you know to vote my life to this right and I teach biology because I believe its in transit time, but I care about the future and I am well aware that you know in thirty years the idea that there was a guy on the internet talking about the importance of getting morning sunlight, sure that might happen, you know, but probably known care, just like I realized about halfway through my scientific career that sure I was tender at stanford.

D want some words, enjoy the research, enjoy the data day. But I realized that, okay, there's some. I feel good about the the research contributions we made, but that I knew that people weren't going to be like, oh, huberman discovered this because I had already forgotten the people thirty two years ahead.

And I know the litter really well. So like, how do how do you square these different, these different mental frames? I it's it's a kn.

Well, this is the fundamental question of our time, is what is the purpose of our species being here on earth? And for thousands of years, that was answered by religion. The idea about who we are and why we are here, more often than not, was answered in the afterlife. But that along came our friend, rationality, in logic and and in the renaissance, the enlightenment. And he said, i'll give you the folk quote, god is dead and now are basically screwed.

But I don't believe that. I mean, I believe in god. I think I ve thought i've gone recording that before. So and there are many people who believe in god after life, yes, but it's still is difficult to navigate the day to day.

because I want to separate out what c rationality and the scientific method did if I didn't actually kill god. What IT actually did was they killed the structures that are rose to intermediate between us and god, A, K, A, the church. And this is not a conversation about theology. This is the conversation about structures and about power.

So science destroyed religion.

One hundred percent destroyed the stories that religion told us about our larger purpose. Because what ended up happening, you look, often times folks will say, well, we know, science destroyed, destroy god and destroyed religion because they told us where we came from. We didn't.

We're not coming from seven days, right? Where where god spon the earth and created to hevens. And seven days, I think we're at a point now we were starting to realize that science actually tells us going back thirteen point seven billion years ago to the big bang.

We equipped with that number up to today. Science is told has is telling us how we got to this point. What science cannot do in what technology cannot do is tell us where we should be going. And so what i'm not and not saying god, you've telling with which or spirituality.

what i'm saying is argue, you can tell D, D.

to tell us. No, i'm not gonna gue.

But turney just said that science, technology can not tell us where we need to go.

Now look here, we started off by, we started off the word that I do this, this mindset that I am advocating for, I call long path. Long path sits on three pillars. These are the kind of, to use your nomenclature.

There are three protocols. One, trans generational empathy, empathy with yourself, empathy with the past, and then and then empathy with the future. You need those three. The second pillar is futures thinking.

You'll notice its future within s as opposed to the singular future, because we often think of the future as a non, the thing that's out there, as opposed to what the future really is, which is a verb, is something that we do. And the final pillar, the one that is the most difficult for us, wrap our head around, is this idea of telos ultimate aim, ultimate goal. What are we here for? So we all suffer from what I call a life span bias.

So the the most important unit of time to Andrew herberman is from your birth to your death. We're all wired that way because that the literature of the science that I grew up with, I I grew W. P.

And I want to be a geneticist, right? That's where I started. What the literature tells us about us as a biological entity is that the most important of time is from my birth to my death.

But the reality is for our species, and IT has been going back hundreds of thousand years, is that these things actually overlap. I come from my parents, that I am here and now my children. These are not distinct unit. There is massive overlap SE.

In terms of the culture, the emotional, the psychology of what I got from them, what i'm giving to my kids, but what ends up happening in a lifespan bias society, the one that we exist right now, we have lost to tell us we have lost the ultimate aim or goal or purpose for our species, for our civilization on on this planet. I'm not going to tell you what that is. What I am going to say is when you don't have that, because god is no longer in the picture, religion is no longer the picture we flying about.

And we're looking for metrics to judge, am I doing the right thing? Do I matter where people know who I am? Twitter, years from now, when my is my sense of purpose connected to anything larger? And without these larger religious structures that we had for thousands of years? The answers? No.

I bet. But there are still many people on the plane believing got in a religious. yes. Or there are there, are there. So does that mean that there are immune from this like like their fusion?

Well, no, because there's other confusions that come from IT, right? There's other religion as its practice in majority parts of the world. And this is the a hate mail is mostly about power and conversion and control, not the essence .

not to take up for every major religion. Yes, I would take for every religion like the essence of IT is is about love.

The essence is about love. And a municipality from the human condition to connect to something larger, to connect to the divine. The problem is when the business models get in the way.

like with anything.

like with anything. And so but that's .

true of science too. And I know a lot about the different models.

You references ced earlier, right? science. It's no longer like no pure medici type science where you're doing these things and like it's publishers parish, there's business models. Can can we take you from the lab to the can be one hundred percent and that is part of where we are. What i'm asking for when we have conversation about our tells is to rise up out of this current moment and say, most mammals kind of have about a million years that they exist on us, be from front of when they rise up to when they go to think where we're in the first third of this ballgame.

Reassuring yeah, we're because I keep hearing about that. The fact we're almost that's where about a third of the way google ally said something gives me, i'm just kidding. Lots of things that you said give me confidence in our future. So most notably that you're talking about this started interact but i'm not accomplish you. So maybe um the most notably that um you know I think you're the first person outside of the sub branch of neuroscience, which is a very small sub branch people that study time perception to really call to to people's consciousness that the human brain can expand or contract its time perception and we do this all day long in in high sailed, high stress, high excitement um life and thinking shrinks the appeared that right IT contracts the appeal and makes us very good dealing with things in the present get to the next day or the next hour, collapse, going to continue, read, read, repeat.

It's it's the opposite of what the butters the traditionally said, which was to be present in order to see the timelessness is why I am a big fan of the I I forget the name it's I will have to this in the um the us atomic prayer which talks about releasing me from the timebomb ata of consciousness to timelessness sounds very mystical but with really talking about is get me out of the motive stress into the mode of relaxation that allows me to see how the now links with the past and relates to the future. Impossible to do when we're under stress, trying to figure out like how we're going to get some place in traffic to pick up the kids. They're not waiting outside the school along.

impossible. You, you, you just can't you the two deep breaths in the long x sale, like IT, works to bring your level of automation ic rosal down. You navigate that situation Better.

But IT is the hyper rare individual who thinks, well, look, you know, this is linked to some larger time scale, like when we are stressed, the horizon gets right up. club. So you're one of the first people talk about this dynamic relationship with that horizon.

Is there a way that we can leverage the immediate cy of our experience, that fact, to actually create useful tools for the future? Like, so for instance, before we start recording the time about the notion of time, i've been keeping a time capture for a long time, that the first idea for this king, when I was a kid, we should build scape ramps in the backyard. And on there, forget that right before we put down the first layer of playwood, we put a time capture in there.

We all like rote low notes and things I think um some put Candy and there is something as we kind of a cool concept, right? But social media to me does not seem like a time capsule. I feel like it's just gonna get turned over, turn over, turn over.

What are the real time capture of human experience? So you said religion, religious doctrine, bible kan. Ta being the big three and there are others, of course, but those are the big three bible korean tour.

There was a big three time captions. Okay, then we've got literature, music, poetry, visual art. So paintings, drawings and sculpture.

What else do we have? So let's let's bring this down, uh to the individual like what what I why pray one of my practices is, uh I go through a couple of them. And so so one of them, if if you come to my home, which hopefully you know you'll come over your home, yeah but you know .

it's been a while, a while that was .

a complaint that I do I have to invite you use .

I talk about after time whenever .

I make IT get true. So with a shelf, with a bunch of family photos, and do you know those photos of my grandparents, my parents, myself, my kids? And then to the right of that, there's actually people like, why didn't, you know, take care of this? There's always there's a blank photo frame, blank those in five, three kids, they're Young.

But that blank photo frame, uh, represents by my grandkids or future generations. It's for something that I can immediately see, what I think about the decisions, that what I said, long path is a mindset that all these complicated things also monitors. I want to get into an argument with my wife or or I have a conversation with you, or anything like that.

And I and I immediately have the stimulus of response. I want to act in the short term, but I actually want to see the bigger picture. And again, this is highly self referential. Understand that. I'll just say a long path.

I say, like what? What are we you really trying to do here? What is this actually all about? And that because i've been doing this long enough, bring me back when I see that third anti picture frame.

IT always reminds me that i'm here for this one segment. There is a segment before and there's a segment coming after me. And so how I am in my daily interactions is going na impact that.

How far is such a few questions more specifically about you? Because I think what you're doing here is your convertible, a process, a protocol, if you will, that anyone can use. And I I would argue that the shift from printed photos, large from printed photos to electronic photos, has made this problematic you know that makes made certain things simpler er like if you change relationships, you can just delete a father as opposed to having actually take photographs from previous relationship and make sure that none around and take your next relationship would understandably take issue with that. I'm not speaking for my experience here, but how far back to your photos go interest .

the photos of my grandparents, who both parishes in the holy cost were saved by my father, who was in world were two, fought with the jewish underground, made his way through europe to give a where eventually met my mom and I was born um the photos that we have, he'd kept in his wallet for several decades and we and he had them kind of reconstructed and turn in that as far back as we go.

So grandparents, yeah okay. And then you're married, you have three kids and then you have this this mt. Photos and mt.

Photo frame and your same age as me. You're fifty or forty nine, forty, forty nine. Thank you. But you seem to be in good health, yes, and .

seemingly Young, right?

Yeah, you have energy. You have always had a lot of energy. You used to call yourself, are I for I you said you're like .

a farri that's each other since .

we were little kids um he's always had a ton of energy actually. He heard himself phone and he was Younger, and he was in full traction, like cast of his whole lower body. And he would dance on the floor, on his arms.

And I gave vie garages or treat mill the bum on his hands, even when he can't. We was left. Okay, so chances are you'll meet your grandkids. Perfuse ly, yeah, god willing, you'll meet your grandkids. And but probably not your great Green kids.

Probably not. Okay, well, I have a different tool o like in the sense that this this big lump of cells will probably not meet my great grandchildren, but we will meet them. I'm a hundred percent show of is the way that i've modeled been in the world to partners, be the my wife, my children, business colleagues.

That month my kids will be in the rooms, sometimes among work calls, right? You know, nothing confidential. And though they're they'll hear in the background y'll here, interact how I am in the current human moment, they are learning, they are receiving.

That is how i'm going to meet my great ranker. That's how I will be in the room with them. How I have been is going to impact thirty year four generations out that that fifty thousand descendants that I talked about earlier, two hundred and fifty years from now, I will meet them, I will be with them. They may not know my name, who I am, but hopefully the way they treat a stranger or they interact with their partners um comes about how I did that model behavior, that .

transmission. Yeah, I get IT. And it's interesting because I think that will anyone on the internet so people will see you on the internet, probably at least you know, I think thirty fifty years out you google your name or whenever it's called at that point, google you again, try whenever you say google and people go, why do you talk about a difference?

Because that's the one everyone uses. Unless you doctor go, because you are friend people. So when someone comes up with the like a truly Better one, mayweather get replaced. But meanwhile google um so they'll get your great grandkids could possibly know you there they could hear this conversation, this very conversation.

I think that's part the reason why people go on social media, not just to be consumers, but they want they want to leave something they're really not thinking about IT consciously, but they want to leave something for the future. I use a tool, um dad, I learned from a friend. He has this your life in in your life in weeks.

I think it's called and is this you know you fill in chart where you you put your birthday, you put your predicted lifespan. So for me, I put a hundred that feels good to me. I'm not interesting living much past one hundred.

And must there some technology that would allow me do that a lot of bigger and my friends would be around. So any mark off the that you fill in these little squares and I did this morning actually and you know, i'm not quite halfway through, but i'm about halfway through and it's an interesting thing to see your life in that representation. Oh, wow.

I can inspire Better decision making because we can lose track where we are in time. And some of us, including me, are not very good at tracking time. People have ever waited for me on an appointment.

Know this. I don't. I track a very oriented in space, not well oriented in time. So um the the problem with these charts is that or photos on the shelf, I would argue, is they have great utility but the problem is that they're not in the forefront of our consciousness .

throughout the day right?

Like I filled out that chart, I didn't think about IT again until now. And when we are pressed with the decision, in some cases, we have the opportunity to step back and say, OK, look in the bigger archer of things. I got to go go left here even though I want to go right.

This is just the right thing for my bigger picture, the bigger picture. So you is there away. Is there maybe a technology that actually serves us to anchor us to best decision making um for given best time being we would call IT in a row science best time winning mode of time winning forgiven decision.

I think he asked yourself a quest when you're facing not should I have chicken for lunch but maybe a slightly well, maybe that question too just asked yourself, am I been a great ancestor? What will allow me to be a great ancestor? How will the sentence look back on this decision? So left, right, that's onna elevate you.

I talked about that you talk about deleting photos and and stuff like that. So i'll tell you about the work. What, on my advisory boards, a guy named how harsh fields, smart, great guide.

Ua, um there is a lot of future, you work. And so what he did was, and I do all the short version of this, a bunch of people into an F M R I functional MRI to see you and wear the flow is. And he asked them, he did a series of questions, where is I think about yourself right now? In one party, your brain let up.

And then I go, okay, I want you to think about this celebrity. I think he used mat damon and that apartment and another part of their brain lit up. And now I wanted to think about yourself ten years from now.

And guess what? The part of the brain that lit up for the celebrities and and met was the same part that lit up when thinking about you ten years from now. So you can have a big idea of who future are.

You was, but you weren't horley connected to them, right? He was like a stranger to you pulled them out. One group did nothing.

Another group, he took a photo of them, and he took a photo, ages them and then puts them into a three, you know, a virtual reality, and you're in a room, and at one point, you know, know, this is going to happen. As you walk ross the room, you see a marrying. You look at yourself in the mary in the photo of you, but age ten years. So you're seen an older version of you. yes.

So I mean, and cool.

very cool. Does this intervention pulls them out, brings them back, I think two weeks later, and he, hey, has them hypothetically put money away for savings account? You know exactly what happens.

The people who saw a version of their age self put more money away for a future retirement account than the folks that I didn't. So the question is, not only are we disconnected from the future, you know, my future designers, i'm disconnected from my future self. So what i've done and you you'll see this in the show, it's, it's, it's scary.

Look, just like my dad. You'll always look like your dad when you do this is even though we we've been banging on social media, you can go on snap or other places. We're little ajo, right? You make you look ten, fifteen years older and you can send IT to your partner really last. So I took a screen shot.

and I proved that laugh as a pose, saying.

you look great. No, no, no problem. Like, oh, my god. And so so I I once I read about this house research many years ago, I printed that out on my little home printer, cut IT out and it's on my bathroom mayor.

And every day I spent two or three seconds staring at future older r in his seventies. That's how I make Better decisions today. And those Better decisions are not just about playing money for retirement. It's about also how do I take care, you know, do I floss or .

not get a 打印？ Learn from the from the date.

The most important way to take care of future yourself is floating. By the way, I just to be clear, going this for .

many people actually true. So you for you and .

thank. But if you look at your mouth twenty years from now, stand at you as you're smile with the older version of the andy, with your little bit less, have a little bit more wrinkles, you're going to do IT. This is what house work has showed. So that's another thing that i've done is just look at that look at that image of future you and connect with IT um that's about having compassion for yourself that's part of this kind of trans generational amp thing about IT. The one thing I want to circle back on because we can we can quickly fly past IT, is this idea of futures thinking versus the singular future.

Yeah, I definitely want to touch on that.

Can I just ask you a question really quickly before her, of course, this notion of take a protocol for imagining future self, or actually visualizing future ourself, not as a way to scare yourself health habits, although if IT works great, but as a way to um yeah really get your mind into the reality that if you survive, you're gna get older by definition and that person needs care and an an an environment and your kids are gna grow up to. We know this. Okay, that's all obvious.

I feel like barring accident or injury or disease, most people have a kind of intuitive sense of how long they're going to live. And there is I say this is, I remember when Steve jobs was alive because I was a postdoc in paleo then, and would see him occasionally around palo, and then you read the altorius ics and biography about him, and he seemed like he had a very clear sense that someday he would die. And he lived his life essentially according to that principle, and in some sense may have justified being a little bit outrages at times, a little bit your high friction at times, through the sense of urgency like he was important, get things done and get them done right and to discard with a lot of kind of like popular convention.

And he's kind of celebrated for IT, i'm sure few people dislike. And I think most people celebrate him for IT. I guess he had some sense of how long he was gna live.

And then one point, maybe that sense was inflated. And then bo, your dad divert when you were very Young. Do you think that that gave you a perspective that you know at any moment you can be four months out. You get the four months notice that you're going to be dead in four months like like the shape you're are thinking about about the future.

I mean, my dads, now i'm not saying this is A I mean, no, it's it's interesting that there may been a distant advantage, of course, not is dying, of course, but to the idea that IT really creates this intervals, cy, about not just the present, but the future. I remember we were very Young. You like, I want kids.

You got going on a family like, I think first among all of us, really early and for those whose parents you know are so alive and and you know, I seem to be vigilant yet they feel less of a sense of urgency, right? Which sounds wonderful. Parents are alive, vigorous.

Okay, that's a blessing. But if IT prevents you from living your life in a way that's really linked to your your futures, that's not good. So do you think that we have an intuitive sensors or an unconscious sense of how long we are likely to live like a kind of arrange? Because Steve kind of argued that in some of his writings in speaking so like.

let's talk about death. So it's my contention that one of the things that keeps us from thinking about the far future and acting and behaving a way that will will alter IT for the Better is the fact that is to truly think and feel yourself into the far future means that you onna have to think about a moment where you no longer exists.

One thousand nine hundred seventy two earners backer wrote a book which you'll know all about, the book based on the title called the denial of death. He won the pillar surprise for IT. And and beg's contention was that we are the only species that, at a very early age, recognizes that we are only here for a short period of time.

But more than anything, at one point time we will die, we will cease to exist. And IT was beggars contention further, that everything, religion, culture, a laptops, convertibles, everything that we create is our way of pushing back the very understanding that at one point we will see to exist. And IT horrifies us.

I could not agree more, and i'm so, so grateful that you mention this book because in this idea from becker, because I would argue that every addiction, every single addiction, is based on a fear of death and an attempt to shorten the timescale of thinking, shorten the time scale of reward, shorten the time scale of everything to avoid that reality.

And it's the reality that we learn of at a very early age intuitively, because we see death around us more and more. Now in america, especially in the western world, we push back from death. We do everything we can to to, to avoid even, just, even old people that we put them in old age homes.

They used to be, we live together right in in these multi generation homes. Because older people, I would argue, reminders of death are reminders of our own mortality. And so until we can reconcile ourselves, truly an individual and maybe not a collectives level that we will seize to exist, IT becomes extremely and is extremely difficult to future, to future properly, to future in the way that i'm advocating for, which is about being a great ancestor, to future descendants and generations.

And so in the work that i've done in in the show that I did, I did something, people were very confused. You, the show about the future beef to the future. When I go, you're onna, go see all this cool technology, but that part of what we do, but in the middle of the show and episode for I go to the high mountain desert into travels all over the world.

But when I go to the high mountain desert outside of two on, and I sit with the lure, Arthur, a death deler, and what, you know, mostly time when we think of a dual, that we think of someone helping birth a child in the world, what a death do. What does that help us and help our loved ones eggs at this world? And SHE does something extraordinary.

Other cultures, some religions, have this. He does something called a death meditation in the show. I do IT. And you can find these online, where you literally go through A A guided meditation, where you go from breathing to a sensation of breath, to literally just becoming one with the soil, the very intense thing to go through.

But I went through a version of the death meditation as you related to what I was eighteen years old, because I literally am the one who picked up the phone from the hospital at two in the morning, out home from college. And I picked them up. I I don't know to say hello.

I picked up the phone. I said, this is his son, because he also calling IT you in the morning. And IT was a charge nurse, and he goes, I want to bring up to speed related age of cancer.

Your father is not responding. We've been doing cpr. There are no orders on what to do. What you want is to do. I made that call because obviously was going.

That was my way of confronting the silence of my of his mortality and my own mortality very, very properly. Um other people have their own early brushes with death. I would argue that there is a certain level you touched on this of a manana page.

When you've come close, you you don't want to wish you on anyone. When you've come close to seen what that looks and feels like, you always sudden become free from the burdens that society places on you in the earners background, an way of trying to push back mortality because you know longer. Give a shit because you've now you now know where it's all gonna and you've seen IT um as a society in the west, in america, we do the exact opposite of that.

We inject things into our body, into our of everything can to push IT back because we want more quantity, but we don't think about the quality of the life that we want. Now that being said, you you go to japan, uh, ninety percent of the companies that are over a thousand years old on planet earth right now in japan. So part of IT is our culture.

Part of IT is different cultures of how they think and respect elders and death. And they understand that we don't need to exist within this own lifestyles as but we're actually part of a chain, a great chain, of being those who came before the pozen coins of that, the baggage of that. And then it's my role to side what I want to keep and what I want to let go.

And then what I want to transmit to the next generation. That larger purpose, that larger tell us, is what's missing right now that I think we need back in western society, not just so that we're grounded and happy, that's yes, and more content. But because we are able to do that as we confront what we do or do not do about climate change, what we do, do not do about synthetic biology, what we do or do not do about artificial intelligence, because right now, especially on the last two, the technology is calling us what to do.

And we don't need more smartness. We need more wisdom. And part of that wisdom is going to come about by us integrating the fact that you needed to that at one point we won't be here.

How do we do that? I mean, like we can do IT conceptual, like you want to set the stage for that, whoever ends up in that empty frame to have a Better life. But it's it's hard to do like I think most people who wanted to lights who knows what happens next, but it's very hard to get them working for something that they don't have the ability to imagine and the people that they don't even know.

So in other words, if we have a hard enough time imagining ourselves in the future, you gave us a tool. Look at the age version of yourself. I love that. And if there is a website that will do that, we can put a link to one of captions, put a reminder that you will get older, you are getting older in the in this very moment and try and live for that the well being of that person and the people around them and look at IT so that that creates a protocol for the self how do we protocol the the future setting um the futures. Approach the verb ing of the future or into the future for people around us and for people that we don't even really know and that we probably will never even meet. Great question .

um before we wanted that, lets double click on the on the individual incentive. So we talk about the aging photo that you can do. There's also another thing you can do that is very powerfully you touched on this earlier, which is writing a letter to your future self um you you can do this long path out or you can .

find future me and yeah.

it's the number one tool that we use. So I when I I give talks, I give shockingly, people have you come and talk .

to what .

I say to them is can go through a version of a different conversation like this. Now they know what I want to do, that I want you to write a letter to your future self can be delivered in five years from now. And I thought this was a common practice because i've been doing IT from a very early age. But apparently it's not to write a little .

to your future self and maybe once or twice.

And so i'll let you a little secret. This is the change occurs not when you receive the letter, but when you actually write IT because you're actually thinking in a way about future you in a way that you Normally don't, which is who's going to receive this letter?

Where do I want them to be um and what I find more often than not, if people come after me, come come up to me afterwards ago so right i'd never even thought who do I want to be in five or ten years like what side art of what I wanted kind of connect to? What am I optimizing for? How do I make myself Better in that way? So I want to make sure people understand that if you can't look at a pone of yourself, age, the very least right letter to your future self.

And what is the letter include?

Dear andy, dear, are. And then whatever you want to put in, right? This is a one to one private conversation with your future self.

What are your hopes? What are your dreams? What are your desires? What are you afraid of? What do you want to see happen? Because til you put out there, uh, you know, you can't beat if you can see IT, right? You have to actually visualize what that is and putting in not not the negative, but what you really want to see. Aspirations in that letter now starts creating A A road map to getting there.

But the at the very kind of bottom of the paramo of what that road map is, is visualizing what that success looks like, right? So I was in high glan track and I start off by doing you the the one hundred very kind of individual sport and then eventually um I went for I to run in the four by one hundred which is a real race. And what I learned from my coach coach tEllen was that the four by one hundred is very important, that all four runners run very, very fast, obviously.

But where that race is one or lost is in the transition zone is in the past of the baton. And so when you write a letter to yours, future yourself, yes, you're connecting to your future, but what it's really also helping you do is realized that life is not a hundred yard dash, it's actually a reay and you're Carrying a baton that was handed to you that you are not going to hand off. And i'm arguing that we right now, what I call where in this entry title moment between kind of what wasn't what will be as a, as a planetary civilization, we are in this transition zone.

And what we do or do not do in this entitle, in this transition zone with the baton that is hot, sapping, planetary flash ing culture, um is gonna matter much more than we think IT doesn't the current moment of of social media page, so that that's such on the individual, let's go to that collective. We have to decide as individuals, which some of these protocols will help you do, but we have to decide as the society that we wanna actually tackle the question of to what end. Because in the arranger of god, in the arranger of the afterlife, in that in in what was given to us by religion for one hundred thousands of years, some sort of guarantee that we were going on to heaven or hell.

Now that that is no longer there, for a lot of people, for something still is, and IT still helps them make Better decisions, I would argue, in the data day. But for those who no longer have that, we have to decide that. And this can be from an ego ic level, that the decisions that we make or do not make are either going to a hook up in a great way, future generations or or or not mean that we can be in those three category.

We can be one or two doesn't matter who cares of yolo or we can say we want to be part of a much larger project. Um talk about this a lot like the kind you can tell, but my bias like I don't say human like the homosapien project. I think that guy said we're kind of at the bottom or the top of the third.

We have at least several hundred thousand more years to go. I am not as focus as to whether that we leave over than we go to mars. When you come and enter the Stellar species, I more focus on who we are because i've met, like you, i've met great hearts and minds. And I think that as a society, if we take care of everyone's basic needs, if we look at kind of the best of human energy, the best of the humans that we've met, we can all rise to that level. So instead of they're being like a hundred great heroes in the world who are just so heartfelt, you know, like the di lama or mother trees, sorry, or even einstein, that that could actually be there.

Are those three still in tatter?

They've been cancelled. No, they're still with us there still with with me. But look, even when you get into their bye, you asked one of the how do you build trands generational empathy with the past, read people's biography, especially autobiography. And you see they had a really tough and they're not as perfect in a stanly.

We think they are. And those right in the autobiography.

of course, through their own. So the body give you, you read their letters to their lovers or their partners like. But at the end of the day, if we have society want to find ourselves where more of us than less of us are, this heighten sense of kind of intellectual and spiritual and emotional activation. That's what can happen overnight.

But if we say that's the goal that we want, we want to see, people will argue nine billion, seven bill billion, three billion, whenever the population of homosapien on planet over the lex, several centuries or millennia, if we want to see them flushing a way that's beyond what science fiction is never even showed us, if we make that decision, that your life, what and Andrew euro man is doing is over. But are you walk and is contributing to that? That gives you a sense of purpose that I think religion used to give us, that we are now sorely lacking in a social media, a world of instant bine of crap that we do need on the .

internet or that we do need. And that is just a shorter time scale reward thing. Like I don't believe that everything that happens on social media that we buy or the pleasure that we get in our our lifespan our day is bad.

I don't think you know in a capitalist too, what I I think is, is just one IT is but one time window of kind of Operation. Just I just think it's good at flexibility, right? It's so like in nutrition, they are about meta lic visibility.

It's about baLance, about harmony. How are we in harmony with with the future? That that is what i'm advocated.

So I love IT and I I also know that a lot of people love IT. Even if they don't know, they love IT, meaning they perhaps haven't heard IT framed the way that you describe IT in your book, on your show and today. But I think a lot of people just hoping that the super high achiever, s right, the Steve jobs, is the islands that I don't know how people feel .

about politicians nowadays.

but, you know, but the people building technologies who seem to really care about the future, I mean, say what you want about islam, but the guy is building stuff for the now and for the future. Yes, I am. He's doing yet that they will take care of IT for next generations, right? Just like there are those the editions and the anchises and the you know, you have to be careful with names these days because that almost everyone has something associated with them where you're going to a trigger someone.

But i'll just be you know relaxed about and say, like I would even say like you even like a jane good all like appreciation of our relationship with animals and what they have to contribute to to our own understanding ourselves in our planet that kind of think so um you know those people are shot in the the life that i've had and and I feel pretty great about that um so many people are probably saying, okay, make sense for my family but you know what do I have to contribute um and you give the example of the fact that children are always observing. They Carry forward the patterns and the and the traits and certainly the responses that they observe in their parents. What's okay? What's not okay? Starting in the eighties and in the nineties in this country there were many more divorces and fractured homes than there were previously um as a consequences also been a fracturing of the kind of collective celebration of of holidays like the things that have anchored us through time are happening less frequently now many these have become commercialized but that was always the case. You know people are getting Christmas present one way or another. So um you know do you think that that the kind of fracturing of the family unit has contributed to some of this lack of um let just call IT longer path this um thinking and decision making.

Look, I think it's the fracturing of the institutions that had been with us for the past several hundred years that is leading to a an expansion al rise in short term behavior.

okay. So you mention religion maybe for a moment. We you just talk about universities these days, in part because of the distrust of science and in part because of distrust of government and in part because of the distrust in traditional media.

Um there's more and more ideas being kicked around that no formal education is not as valuables that used to be and people always say the examples of the mark oker bergs and. Others who didn't finish college, but I would argue they got in, chose to leave, they took leave of absence, they didn't drop out. And they are rare individuals, ryan holiday said.

At best, I think if you are struggling in college, you are absolutely the kind of person that needs to stay in college with rare exception less. There's like a mental health issue or some of physical health issue that needs to be tended to. Because nowhere else in life, except perhaps the military is there is such a clear designate set of steps that can take you from, you know, point a to point b with a credential that you can leverage in the real world for builds.

And I completely agree with that. But I would also argue that academic institutions and financial institutions have changed. Political institutions have changed, and there's there's a deep distrust. So we are having a harder time relying on them to make good decisions. That I you saw a lot of presence of university major universities fired recently, including stanford there I said that IT happened um but also harvest in other places for different reasons and and fired might be not the character m they decide to resign whatever IT was there are no longer there there they have no one's in um and so there's a lot distrust. So what can we rely on if it's not if if people are having less faith in religion, less faith in academic institutions, less faith in like what we got.

we got really good in academia, at least on the social science aside, as saying what was wrong with the system, but not about what the systems we wanted them to be. Because going back several hundred years ago, coming through the entity, especially well run, is out into the enlightenment.

The enlightenment gave us back this idea of a new mednick tive based on on, on rationality and logos, and the ability to kind of understand the world by breaking IT down into its component parts of that science. Um fast for and several hundred years. And we're at the point now we're really good at saying what doesn't work, but very, very bad about saying what does work in what we do want. Because by saying what we do want means that we have to put for some sort of meta narrative, some thread, some official future that we can hang ourselves .

on and IT tells us a lot about declaration of values. It's one thing to say um which is scary for a lot of people because it's one thing to say that doesn't work. That's no good. That's no good. It's easy to be your credit.

What you're describing has incredible parallels to what to health like you when I started the podcast even before when I was posting on social media was during the locked down and IT was like all this fear about everything and I said, listening like I I can't solve this larger issue related to what mayor may not be going on. But what's obvious, people are stress just as bad when it's chronic. People aren't sleeping that bad, especially when it's chronic.

And i've got some some potential solution, some tools, some error tools. So a lot of the the backbone of the human lab podcast is about the things you do more so than the things you don't do. So what you're describing is essentially feel the consist of like breaking things down, but isn't offering solutions.

So that sounds very similar. And I think that people love potential solutions even if one acknowledges, look, this might not solve every sleep issue IT very well could make, you know, positive ground towards some of IT or make IT fifty percent Better. Twenty percent Better in some is one hundred percent Better.

And of course, there are those for whom the tools don't work, and they need to go to three more, to more extreme measures. But I hear you saying that religion provided the solutions, not just pointing to problems. People are not looking at that as much anymore.

The a big institutions like an academic institutions, political institutions, let's face IT, regardless where one sits on once at the other or the other, they're constantly fighting is like twelve. Our new cycle design just point fingers so that nobody actually has to say what they really believe in a clear, tangible way. There are those that do that a bit more than others, but it's a mess.

And then in terms of the family unit, this is what I was including to before. I feel like family units and values and structures are becoming more rare, at least in the traditional view of the family. I remember parents.

kids.

which is not by no means of requirement to call something a family. But so, so, like, so are you saying that we all have to look at IT? Like IT obviously starts with the individual, but that every that part of the work of being a human being now and going forward is to learn this futures approach. If we have to .

be future conscious, we again, this go back to the transient eric component. We have to critically assess where we came from and wide at this point. So we have start about the nuclear family with the idea that year children would be, coin quote, sleep train and put into another room is relatively new. That from the Victorian era, right, where you would put your kids in another room, because if you go back to most indigenous cultures, everyone slept together. And this happened for thousands of years.

And they can yeah .

or in one big room or or in a long time. Hi, I there like english, but they definitely all up together like that. The my and look, everyone can look, i'm going to say this in a non judgmental wait, is in sound, very judgment, mental.

I walk on the street sometimes, and I see kids and strollers being pushed by a seemingly healthy adult, right? The kid is detached. And there, in this kind of, is a bugging which comes from seventeen, eighteen century england.

But if you look at most cultures around the world for thousands of years, what they did was they wore their babies for what we call the fourth trimester, usually the mother. So bunched patrol reasons for that, but literally would have a rap on and the baby would be rapped and be held very close to that. The baby beyond be in the when you really wrap them with a twenty yard rap, it's skin to skin, right? And looked.

And there's a reason like like everything there's a reason for everything, you know, for a human baby to come out of the mother as cognitive, intellectually and physically ready as a baby chimpanzee would take eighteen months of gestation. But we only do night. You know why? right? We do IT because our brains got so big because of all that protein, because are and andy are hunting together using our prospect earlier on this story that the baby has to come out at nine months, because when we went from walking on all forms to being by Peter, the the female pElvis closes and there's only so much room for the baby to come out. So they come out early. yes.

So the brain had completed development internally. You'd have only still borne. I'm presuming there was a branch of our earlier version of species that many mothers and and babies died in child because of this, they were deselected.

So we found we found the optimal baLance of nine months roughly, right? But what that means is the baby has to be attached and close to the mother because it's totally helpless. Um the point is that so much of what we do, we don't critically examine.

So you're talking about you know the breakdown of the family picture. I would argue that breakdown isn't happening now. That break down happen when we decided to move from you know tries and plans of raising children and move into a Victorian area mindset where we we take the grand pet. You there's very few species on planet earth that after the female um goes through metaphors, they still live basically elephants, whales and humans right why? Because all of the species where you need elders elders to help care for the Young because of the affair mentioned early, early, a brazen.

But maybe it's also the propagation of of story, as you said earlier, that can inform Better decisions.

So so and wisdom is like .

spoken cave paintings.

basically. yeah. And so we need to those stories about what does that mean to have a proper family structure, as whether there's a nuclear family of four or five or twenty of ancient uncles and around, look, we did pretty well for the person couple hundred thousand years.

And then there was all these things that religion disrupted, right? Taking the children away from the mom. Let's all come from petanque beliefs.

Now we're at this point in this intertainment l moment where if the critically examined, why is IT? We do what we do, what are the things that we want to keep and what are the things we want to let go and how do we move forward? And your question was, well, why do they want to do that? What what is the incentive structure? And i'm arguing that the incentive structure for us to do that because because we actually care about where we take our species, where we move forward in the universe, given the fact that so much had to go right to get us to this point, i'm often asked this question, you know, um god, how do how do we get so messed up? And what is gonna .

look like we get so much up because said there are Better than I get the question .

like how's IT that we mess up? But I obvious that we didn't mess that. We're actually doing much Better.

Look, I walk into daughter's room and I look at their bookshelf, fifteen year old twin daughters and every piece of fiction that takes place somewhere in the future is to stop an all the futures they know are the hunger games, are the hundred, are the maize runner a world that has gone bad? Um I understand the we talked about this earlier. There's the negativity bias, so are going to be attracted .

to reading about those things.

Sellers, the best sellers are all the these to stop an there's always love interest in teenage thing, but always the backdrop is always to stop a and we're tracked to that in the same way we're tracked to a dumpster fire because we want to see the things that destroy us can act as the stop an stories, can act as an early warning system. If you keep doing this, one thing that you're doing and extracted that a few decades, it'll look like this.

What we're missing, and you just have the nail on the head, are the stories about what if we get IT right? We call prototype. So know, utopia is a perfect war that always collapsed, is on itself.

It's really just stopping a ze to stop. What we talked about is a terrible, terrible world, a prototype. This idea put forth by Kevin Kelly is a Better tomorrow.

Not perfect, but one we're making progress. So it's unbelievably important. And this is how answering your question for a few minutes ago that we start setting stories in prototype in Better tomorrows.

In tomorrows, we're not everything is perfect, but where we have made significant progress. Now I won't be perfect dell. It'll be divorces and maybe murder in maham. But if we start back dropping our future visions in worlds that are Better than they are today, I would argue that will be the stories that started acting as a cage to help pulls through this narrow moment of a flux and chaos. Is this the title?

How do we do IT at scale? Um because I think a lot of people listening to this will say, okay, that all sounds great like I for one say you that the shift from the notion of building a Better future through self sacrifice, rather you can make IT almost like pro self and others endeavor the way you've describe an empathy for self, empathy for others, getting some control over the, you know contraction dilatation of your time window, making sure that know you take a care yourself but you take care of the the future generations as well.

Like for the that empty frame, the now empty frame and then moving from this topia to prototype that that all sounds great, but I think a lot of people might think, okay. Well, at best I could do that for myself in the people that that I know this can be hard to do that as as a greater good for the greater good. And you could say, well, that does contribute the greater good.

This is actually very similar to what we tell graduate students when there ah they get their first round of data. You OK well, the data often times, not always, but often times you say the data are cool. Like if IT continues this way, ve been an interesting story and they get the sense and you already have the sense because you have the experience to know.

Like the best case scenario is, is a nice solid paper that your three reviewers and maybe twenty other people will read and you spend the next five years of your life on this thing, maybe three, but probably five years of your life and you will get your PHD. And there's always this question like you dish that project and go for something else or do you stay with that project? In other words, what you're saying is you get to put your brick on the wall, but it's a brick whether you know there are other projects you go wow, like that's that's like one wing of the cathedral and and it's a rare instance where that happens in a lot of its lock.

And IT doesn't always work out anyway. But what we're saying here is, you know, how hard people are willing to work is often related to what they feel the potential payers will be if they can sense the pay off. And by the way, I love the protocols that you offer for the empty frame, the journey to future ourself, this notion of time captain your present thinking into the future um the aging yourself these these are very actionable things.

I planned to do them um and I think they're very valuable. But if I understand correctly, you are interested in creating a movement of sorts um where many, if not everybody is thinking this way because the other model is okay. Well, the Ellen will take care of IT for us and um or the know or the system so broken and like there's nothing I can do, i'm just trying to make ends meet. So how does one create a like a like a reward system or a social media platform or you know how does one you know join up with other people who are trying to do this?

So the question of getting that is. In in a lot of the work that i've read and listen to on this podcast often times, it's about how do we you know, obviously, how do we how do we optimize your self and and I mean that a good way, not in a selfish way.

How do we make ourselves Better, right? That we have to started, i'm advocating for, for how do we optimize society, how do we optimize civilization? And this is a clear case where, unlike when we think of scale being, you make more widget at a cheaper Price, this is really a one plus one plus one plus one at infinity.

So IT is and them if we think about, just for example, how many listeners and viewers are of this podcast in millions, right um and how many people they interact with within their with their closest sphere and you go out right. So right now your listers have the potential to live and act long pathy in this way where they are doing something for a greater they are thinking about their purpose in the world as nested within the larger purpose of our species to to allow for more mass flushing in the future, uh, for generations to come. If you think about your listeners and how they interact and how they model behavior, your attention in their spears.

You're at thirty, forty, fifty million people, right? That's a very, very large number. Um and what we know about social emotional contagion is that these things are kintail ous. They are means the season blackmore s work. That's how IT scales and actually is one of those things where you're not going to you know just add powder um and IT all a sudden will will create this this autumn future for everyone is only one person that doesn't like we all have a role to play IT.

It's like literally what what I would want is anyone who's listening or watching this uh when they're undoing IT um take a few minutes and think about what what kind of futures do I want for myself, for my family, for the generations to come in? What is my role in that great play? What do I have to do? And yes, you need the protocols kind of bring you back into there, right? For me, it's easily.

I wrote the book, I did the show. I can just think long path. I can do IT for either this going to be the first time they're talking about this or anything thing thing about that for years.

Even in the smallest interactions, they start doing IT. And this gives kind of the same institution complexity theory. This stuff starts to actually reverberate.

That's how we do IT. You know there's that we don't need a march for long term ism, right? We don't need bumper stickers. Thank you.

There will be no bumper stick. There will no buff stickers.

There will be no bumper stickers. It's about placing our very essence and our actions within the realm of possibility for the futures that we want in our role in that and then the purpose.

So I don't care if you're barria, if you're a surfing instructor, if you are you know brilliant pod caster um whatever is that you do do IT with the intention and recognition that you are a wave being in the world that has ramifications and reverberations beyond this current moment. And you said earlier, well know who knows if anyone will listen your podcast. What I can tell you with certainty, i'm sure probably early happened is a large language model. And LLM we call A I right now is already or at will at some point in just the huberman lab podcast.

We have a human lab. There you have verse a very heavily, but there you can ask me questions. So it's pretty good and sounds a bit like me the jokes are dry.

the right and function and mostly funny but you i'll give you some more um but eventually that we're that will percussion out so at the speed of things are going three or four years from now this very conversation how were model would what I learned in school, discourse ethics, how we talk to one another, that is teaching these machines how to think and act in who and what we are, how to become the best of or the worst of ourselves.

What we put out there, the kind of the public facing content, is going to become what these machines think of as how they should be in where modelling IT for for them. And going back to the higher education example for a second, I think higher education, like many institutions as as A I and what we call that fully comes online is going to radical radical change and IT will be you know A A cambridge and oxford tuder and everyone's year and higher education this idea that you can come together um to receive information will start to dissipate from higher education. But what higher education will start to do, and I think will I need to focus on, is not just the intellectual and and the cognitive but also the psychological and the emotional core of who you are and helping you develop that .

will aid to that um you know there was a former guest on this podcast or or there was a guest on this podcast previously a doctor when he zu keys professor than what you think now she's the dean of artist sciences I think is the correct title and you know she's trying to bring some of her laboratories data on the value of even very brief meditations to stress management in college first, to help students manage the stress that is college and being in your early ones.

But I think there's a larger theme there which is to try and teach emotional development, to teach self regulation um because many people don't get that, I mean, you know or they get IT, but then there are big gaps um and I love the way that you're describing this. Basically it's it's a it's a lens, if I if I may, it's a lens into human experience. It's very dynamic and is really in concert with the fact that the human brain has the capacity for this dynamic representation of time.

Like focus on like all for the now there will be parts of your day, no doub today where you just have to solve the now you're not thinking about the greater good and then the ability to dilute your consciousness um in in the temporal sense and to solve for things that are more long term, make these investments towards the future. Um I wonder though, you know how can we incentivize people to be good, to do good and how can we incentivize people to do this on a backdrop of a lot tic, short term carrots and short term horizons, I think you've given us some answers. And they're very powerful ones, such as the aging self image exercise i'm journaling into the future writing the future self, the empty frame, the empty frame exercise of linking up with our ancestors and thinking about where we're at now and where we want to go.

Is there anything else that you want to add meaning? Is there anything that we should all be doing? Should we all be reading more biography? Should we? Um if I look back through history, it's both dark and light. Like what is there anything else that you really encourage people to do to be the best version of themselves for this life and the ones that come come next？

I've touched on this. We we need to examine in ourselves why is that we do and are the way that we are, right? You know why in this country we build on tuesday?

I don't have any idea.

So most advanced democracies vote over the weekend or a couple of weekends in america, we wrote on tuesday because that was the time that was necessary for someone to leave church on sunday, right on horseback into the big city vote on tuesday and ride back before a market day on wednesday.

So glad you going to tell me it's not because um then people can still watch my night. Foobar.

now this is a long before my night football. And so I think why we vote on tuesday um the metaphor for so much of who we are and have become as individuals and in the society a big fan of cognitive behavioral therapy of cbt I think partially because what he does is IT IT has a look at what those what are those negative stories that we tell ourselves but then because you can just say stop doing something, you can just distinguish, be able you have to add and put in a positive story.

What I ve tried to do with some of our time here today, and when I want people to partially take away, more than partly to really take away and bring in, is examine that, you know, the White tuesday, what are those stories that you've inherited? Some of them are gonna macro social, like you are defined by the society, by what you own, by the badge on your car that says how successful you are. That's a story.

The story has been fed to us. There are other stories that are very personal. These are stories that concern to be very private and go back generations within our family.

And then to understand, some of those stories show us, some of those stories don't serve us. But after the certain that we then have to write a new story, we have to write a new story for ourself. Who am I? Why am I here isn't going to be answered by a religion or god or a book or a podcasts er futures.

It's couldn't be answered by looking and searching inside of yourself about how does you got here, what really matters and where you want to contribute and help move us forward as a as a species on spaceship earth, you know as not as not as a passenger but is crew on this vessel and how we're going to move forward. So the stories have served as well and have not served as well. And to move forward, it's OK now to say i'm going to write these stories that serve me.

I'm going to see the future not as a now, not as a thing that i'm heading toward or that's going to tumble over me, but that i'm going to create and those stories may be very in intra personnel. They may be into personnel, they may be political. There may be business that maybe what you buy, what you consume, but you have to have agency, you have to install a sense of hope into your own life and a sense of all, and a sense of really just empathy for who you are and where we are. If we want to collectively move forward into the futures, that will allow our students to look back on us and say, they were great ancestors.

I love IT. And I also just want to highlight the importance of record keeping of of putting things down on paper, or maybe an electronic forum creating time capture for the future generations. Because think a lot of what people probably are thinking are worried about a little bit is like, okay, I can do all this stuff to try, make things Better and even give up the desire for any kind of credit.

But, you know, not feeling like IT will be of any significance. But what i've learned from you today is that you IT starts with the self, and then IT radiates out to the people we know, and that maybe we cohabitate with. But even if we don't, habitat with anybody really is out for us.

And that IT is important to get a sort of time caps are going so that people can feel like they have some significance in the future that they may not ever have immediate experience of, but really like and those ripples forward and get a sense of those ripples are moving forward. So for that reason, and especially given the nature of this podcast, for the reason that you gave these very concrete protocol, if you will, um that we've highlighted in the in the time stamps, of course, as tools as as protocols. Um I really wanted thank you because often times discussions about past, present, in future can get a bit abstract in a bit vae for people.

And you've done us all a great service by making them very concrete and actionable. That's so much of what this podcast is about. Its one part information, one part option for action, right? We don't tell people what to do, but we give them the option for action.

I'm certainly going to adobe pt some of these protocols and also we're taking the time to come to talk with us today, share your wisdom and share what you're doing in many ways. Well, IT is not in many ways, that is absolutely part of what you're describing, which is putting your. Best self toward how things can be Better now in the future.

It's also you know great pleasures. Sit down with somebody i've known for so many years and and learn from you. So it's it's a real honor and a privilege. And I know everyone else listening to and watching this feels the same way. So thank you so much.

Thank you for you. me.

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