Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols | Ari Wallach

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Ari wallik Ari wallik is an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University's 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 in culture within our families etc for the next generation and generations that follow them Ari wallik is an expert in this topic and he has centered his work around what he calls long Path Labs which is a focus on long-term thinking and coordinated Behavior at the individual organizational and societal level in order to best ensure the thriving of our species and while that may sound a bit aspirational it is both aspirational and grounded in specific actions and logic so during today's episode re Wallock spells 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 at 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 to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is David David makes a protein bar unlike any other it has 28 grams of protein only 150 calories and 0 grams of sugar that's right 28 grams of protein and 75% of its calories come from protein this is 50% higher than the next closest protein bar These Bars from David also taste incredible my favorite bar is the cake flavored one but then again I also like the chocolate flavored one and I like the berry flavored one basically I like all the flavors they're all incredibly delicious now for me personally I try to get most of my calories from Whole Foods however when I'm in a rush or I'm away from home or I'm just looking for a quick afternoon snack I often find that I'm looking for a highquality protein source 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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 wouldn't be surprised but we do that and we do it pretty well provided all our mental faculties are intact one of the key aspects to 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 it or we don't and of course it involves dopamine and 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's some pretty heavy mental gymnastics especially when many perhaps most but certainly many many people worldwide are just trying to like get through their day without feeling overly anxious without letting their health get out of control without or I should say their illness get out of control uh and on and on so to kick the ball out I've got this long- winded question and it is indeed a question which is how do we navigate this conundrum like if we really care about the future what do we want to do where do we want to place our mental frame and how do we start going about doing that it's a great question or a great series of questions um one of the things that homo sapiens do extremely well is what we call mental time travel we're able to actually take ourselves in the current moment and project out in fact Marty Seligman uh kind of the the father of positive psychology put forth this idea in this great book called homo prospectus that what separates us out from almost every other species as far as we know the ones we can talk to mostly us is that 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 interaction a whole bunch of other things but at the end of the day what we do extremely well as far as we know we're the only ones who do it and I think this is part of the reasons why we're so good at what we do as a dominant on this planet is to project out into Futures that we want we know where this comes from Mostly it's it's it's coming from the hippo campus right which one thing about the campus that's amazing is that it's it's almost atemporal it doesn't actually have a time stamp and so what it does is it takes snapshots of epithetic memories that have happened in the past reassembles them so that we can mentally time travel and then figure out these different future scenarios of what might happen so if we take Ari and Andy 150,000 years ago he calls me Andy folks but Andrew no it's okay just stick with Andy but I'm gonna stick with Andy I'm giving you permission for at least the duration of this episode duration of this episode so uh Andrew now Andy look here's the thing if Arian Andy are out on the serengetti 150,000 years ago right we Homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago about 150,000 years ago we're kind of starting to spread out of the rift valley into Africa and we're now at a point where we're no longer longer singular but we're within a kind of a small tribal structure we want to start hunting larger and larger game we're no longer reactive so if we want to go after that game it's not a foregone conclusion that when we go after something it's going to do what we wanted to do we have to start thinking about different scenarios so that first kind of mental time travel is really coming from our desire for for more protein to exist and to to grow the group and really to feed the super energy intensive thing called the human brain that's where mental time travel starts and hippocampus takes different memories of different ways we've hunted and and been successful in the past or not successful and starts to put together scenarios now fast forward so that's a very long time ago you you you take us you know through through through the Middle East into Europe into Asia 20,000 years ago our ancestors cross Binga which is now the the the bearing straight and we're we're in North America and fast forward to right now on my way in here I get a notification on my phone Ding and I immediately pick up the phone to see and and you've covered this before what what's that new information what is it that I have to react to so we're working on two 300,000 year old Hardware at the same time we have a cultural substrate that is for lack of better words has hacked into that older part of us to make us a want that immediate gratification and B Force us to now react in a way where 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 in a in a in a Buddhist way I mean presentism as in a Hall of Mirrors there is no past there is no future there's only this moment and so it's becoming extremely difficult for us as individuals as societies as civilization to think about the long term in in the way that you and I may have done 150,000 years ago because winter was coming and we were start thinking where are we going to move our family and our tribe or our clan and we we would go to warmer climates we don't even do that anymore right we're so in this moment that it's becoming extremely difficult for us to break out of this presentist moment I really appreciate your answer for a couple of reasons um through the 9s and early 2000s and maybe even until 2020 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 calling presentism and of course it depends on what what's happening in the present um but in the 80s in the 90s in the 2000s up to about 2020 of course we're still in the 2000s there was this notion of future tripping like people are future tripping they're 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 we're in this like sort of Hall of Mirrors where it's constant stimulus in response and I don't want today's discussion to be Doom and Gloom we're going to talk about Solutions but I think between what you're saying and what Jonathan height who was on this podcast author of anxious generation codling in the American mind professor at NYU Etc 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 and our human interactions because those are so closely interwoven that's taking place now has us really locked in the present in stimulus response and I'm going to um just briefly reference a previous episode of the podcast I did it's it's one of my favorite conversations ever on off microphone was which which was excuse me with Dr James Hollis 84-year-old yian psychoanalyst where he had many important messages there but one of them was we need we absolutely need to take 5 to 10 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 our greater wishes are how to link our current thinking and behavior to the Future and to the past and and I think he's um 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 basically just living in stimulus response all the time now and if so what direction is that taking ourselves at individuals as families as communities and you know as a as a species um I'm basically 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 dayto day or maybe that's that's a better way to go about life you need to manage the day-to- day there there are people like me who are full-time futurists we tend to be very anxious because what we tend to do is think more in the future and AR as present as we should be that being said if 90% of your day is going about your day dealing with what's right in front of you that's great what what I'm advocating for is what what I call kind of transgenerational empathy it's a mouthful uh so we know empathy you know you've had guess on that transgenerational empathy first and foremost 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 Ari future future Andy but then future generations and we we can get into how to do that yeah maybe we could just parse each of those one by one so how do you define empathy for self so empathy for yourself is in many ways it's almost self-compassion it's recognizing you're doing the best you can with what you have part of the issue is we we surround ourselves I and I'm guilty of this of of images and quotes and books of how to live your best life that how how to be amazing and anything below that metric of perfection you start to feel terrible and you start to kind of ruminate over what what you you know you lie in bed at night and you think how could I have done that how could I have done that and 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 yard stick look I Del through this for for a long time we learned my father had stage four cancer I was 18 years old um and from from R he learned to when he passed away it was only four months four months four months and for for for a lot of 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 we're not going to we won't go into this I was actually with you that summer we were working together that that summer um 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 it was only going to be four months and then I realized and this is this self-compassion like 18-year-old Ari was only at a place emotionally in psychologically to be able to do what I did and it wasn't the older 30 or 40y old Ari of now being like of having these regrets so empathy for yourself really really centers you it doesn't mean you let yourself off the hook it doesn't mean you can go willy-nilly and treat people terribly it means you recognize that who you were even yesterday is in many ways different than who you are today and and what what you've learned so transgenerational empathy has to start with yourself it has to start with being able to look in the mirror and say I'm not perfect I was born into this world uh into a family into uh you know like my my my my birth family or or or you know family that you choose and they were born into something and you work with what you have but you have to start there because so many times I I I work with people I talk to people and they say oh I want to have empathy and you know for for 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 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 for self because I've heard it before in other contexts but I haven't heard it operationalized the way that you describe it I think um yeah we uh there's a two two phrases that come to mind uh there's a book uh called a Fighter's Heart by Sam Sheridan and um it's a pretty interesting account of all the different forms of martial arts and fighting and there's an interesting part of the book where he says you know you can't have your 20th birthday until you're 19 which is a big giant duh but it's actually a pretty profound statement and by the way he went to Harvard he's a smart kid his father was a in the SEAL Teams he he has an interesting lineage in his own right and I think what at Harvard he he claims he just um painted and smoked cigarettes so you know bit of a bit of a uh bit of an iconic last in any case I think that statement you can't have your 20th birthday until you're 19 is something that that we forget because of the immense amount of attention that we pay to uh trying to be like others and satisfy external metrics and so I like to think he he was in agreement with you uh if I may the the other um thing that happened to me recently that comes to mine is that um I like many people peruse Instagram I teach on Instagram Etc and there are a lot of these quote accounts like like life inspiration accounts and and I would argue that the halflife of any one of those posts is is pretty short but some are are pretty interesting and and there's a guy I'll put it in the show note captions I don't remember off the top of my head um 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 a lot of the reasons that we're talking about its ability to flit from past to present to Future Etc but then he says you know it basically just SS down to one actionable step per day or per morning um which is at some point if you want to grow and be more functional you have to ask yourself you what am I going to do today to make my day better not to be better than I was yesterday right which is also a fine statement but that one never really resonated for me because like yesterday could have been an amazing day you might not be as good as yesterday right every day is kind of its own unique unit and our biology really does function on these circadian biology units of 24 hours there's no negotiating that so I 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 verb in action step and 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 understanding that we're always doing the best we can with what we've got but that there's a striving kind of woven into that statement that that there is a need for striving um at what point do we start to develop empathy for others and what does that look like like is empathy for somebody else um feeling what they feel I mean that's the kind of traditional definition yeah I mean look we we start off with kind of cognitive intellectual empathy right so you you kind of think it um but where you really want to be able to be is at a place where your their their feelings are feelings that you can feel and you want to bring if they're if they're feeling bad you want to bring some resolution to that if they're feeling good you can you can be there with them at a fundamental level this is you know mirror neurons and I'm connecting with you and you are connecting with me and there's a genetic adaptive Fitness for that right we all want to kind of be in sync because the tribe that works together flourishes together and thrives together so it makes 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 it can be taxing don't get me wrong but ultimately that is what self-compassion can give you because it 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 if not centuries is is disconnection disconnection from ourselves disconnection from each other and disconnection from nature in the planet so anything we can do to further that connection is going to 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 uh one it seems like presence like we we need to be present like we're going to appreciate a a fern a beautiful Fern or a dog or a significant other or another human being that we happen to encounter we have to be present we can't if we're going to have empathy we our mind can't be someplace else can't be wandering right can't be in the past can't be in the future or we're not going to be able to really touch into 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 every neural circuit we know has a push and a pull like in order to get a you need to suppress B and this is the way neural circuits work generally you know flexors and extensors in the muscles are a good analogy uh for uh which by the way you know like if you're going to flex your bicep um your your tricep is essentially relaxing and vice versa in so many so many words the pts are going to dive all over me for that one but in that's sort of how neural circuits in the brain work we we can actually see all around us by virtue of neurons that respond to either increments and decrements in light and their difference is actually what allows us to see boundaries borders visually 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 atttention in order to to be functional and I think that I think this is where the challenge is and where the next question arises which is on the one hand I could imagine that okay we've got so many pressures upon us every day all day that it's getting much harder to be present to be empathic and 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 50 years ago in terms of health outcomes believe it or not in terms of you know status of uh people having shelter Etc and this is a shock to a lot of people they're like wait a second I didn't see homeless people on the street when I was a kid and now I do well they were the people suffering were elsewhere you didn't perhaps didn't see them so there are a couple levels of question here but the first one is um perhaps are we much better off but we are worse off in the sense that there's so much incoming that we miss the fact that we're better off like you know is it like notifications preventing us from seeing that we actually have so much that we're we're we're you know 100 times better than off than we were as a species 50 years ago because I I feel like a lot of the debates that I see online about climate change about health about longevity it's like it's overwhelming because I feel like people aren't aren't agreeing on the first principles so let's start with with this are are human beings better off in terms of Health and Longevity than we were let's go short scale 50 years ago so look in aggregate because we can find Peaks and valleys right when when we zoom in if we pull back there's no better time to be alive as a homo sapien on planet Earth than right now now someone's going to argue right now and they're going to say no no no no I mean according to what metrics like happiness health infant mortality uh even even as we backslide in this country being a woman um education uh the kind of the calories that we get across the look if you and I go outside and you stepped on a rusty nail 100 years ago good chance you would die right now we just go to the you know to the to the drugstore and put something on it or we even know that we don't have to put anything on it we can just put it underneath high pressure water for 30 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 can 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 not only the next several years and several decades potentially the next several centuries so so you've hit it we're being bombarded by information most of the information we're attracted to is the negative negativity bias you and I on this we're going to go back to RN Andy 150,000 years ago if we saw this beautiful tree aesthetically and we saw maybe a tree over here 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 the more this media not this media company I'm just I'm not getting but all the other way well that I I would argue some of your success comes from the fact that you don't wallow in the negativity and there's a real thirst and a hunger and desire to learn more about who we are and how we can make ourselves better but that negativity bias is 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 the internet and then there are parts of us you know this is Jonathan's elephant and the writer there are parts of us that happen below the surface that have hundreds of thousands if not millions of years of legacy and we often want to either be up here and say oh we're so smart we're so great or we want to wallow in the in the kind of the death and despair and the horrific things that we can do to one another you know my personal past on my father's side is I think some of the darkest moments in Homo Sapien 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 our 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 will'll do a better job of me expl in explaining than I will no I love this idea I I mean we could map it to neural circuits but I love this idea of high level Concepts and and then neural circuits that are very um what Dr Paul KY was on this podcast psychiatrist brilliant psychiatrist said you know the the the the lyic system yeah um the emotional system doesn't know or care about the clock or the calendar it just elicits feeling yeah doesn't care about whether or not that feeling is relevant to the past the present or the future it just it just has a job which is just just bring out a particular feeling you're jumping ahead a little bit but that's okay because what what you're jumping into is when we ask and we want to have an empathic connection we want to have empathy with future Generations we don't want it to just be cognitive we don't want it just to be intellectual we actually want it to be emotional so if I ask someone uh what do you want the future to be like for your great grandkids in the in the 2080s and they give me a list of kind of bullet points but they're usually externalized bullet points shelter Health Care yeah and then I follow up and you know we've done this in other people much smarter than me have done this studies we say yako trop at NYU is the one who taught me this um how do you want them to feel that's different right this is damaso's um this is somatic marker hypothesis Theory 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 amydala sense of what that is to actually move towards the actions and changing the behaviors that you want Madison Avenue understands this marketing understands this they don't but the general public tends not to sorry I keep interrupt you but also it's way as the kids say sorry not sorry in the sense that I want to make sure that I highlight something um Martha Beck is somebody who I think has done some really brilliant work creating practices where when one is not feeling what they want to feel um you know there's this kind of question like are you supposed to feel your feelings or are you supposed to create new feelings in place of them especially if they're unpleasant it's it's like there's no clear answer to that because it's complicated infinite number of variables but she does have this interesting practice whereby it's it's a bit like a meditation where if you're struggling with something like maybe you're struggling with boredom 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 could be very specific particularly um amused because and the idea is that in anchoring to the emotion State first you call to mind a bunch of potential action steps and the reason I like this um approach is that that is at least one way that quote unquote the brain works which is that the emotion states are linked to a bunch of action step possibilities kind of like a magic Library where if you go into the room called sadness there are a bunch of action steps associated with that go beyond crying it's like curling up in the fetal position Etc you go into the room that's called um Advent you know excitement and and there's all this idea about getting in vehicles and going places and things of that sort so what you're talking about is I believe thinking about the emotional states of others and then from there I think this is where you're going to go cultivating some action steps that you can take to ensure that that future generation can access those emotions yes but with a slight correction because it's not about thinking about their future emotional states it's actually feeling them I see so it's not saying I want my kids to be happy I want them to Fe I want them to have no trauma it's um it's feeling what it would be to have to be happy no trauma yes right because that becomes like that becomes an anchor right that this she's 100% correct what it does is but it places it it's like a cat anchor so if you and I were sailor which we're not we would there's a thing called a CED anchor and a CJ anchor is this anchor that you throw you know 30 40 meters off to the side it hits the bottom and you use the rope to pull yourself there emotions will pull us 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 Ari or or future wallik family or future Society or future civil Global 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 this is one of the things that Marty Selman says that that Freud got it wrong Freud felt as Marty says that emotions were these things that we that happened in the past that we would use to dwell on and that was neurosis and anxiety and depression no 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 breakup I feel so terrible uh then I'm going to go to my therapist I'm going to talk about all that stuff that happened in the past that's one way of looking at the other way is your body is telling you in a very very visceral way whatever you just did to that had you in that situation don't do it again because if you do you're going to feel a certain way you know they did this study where they at at a college campus they they found people who had just been in a kind of a quasi longterm relationship that had gone through a breakup quasi long-term fine what I've learned what I've learned in life is it's important to define the relationship it was about six months um and people had gone to the breakup they they gave they gave you know one group of placebo and another group actually just got aaminin got Tylenol and the group that got the acetaminophen actually felt better why because those because em we actually feel emotions we actually feel pain that some of the same circuits are being tripped and so that says to me that emotions are there to guide future action so we can have pro-social emotions awe and empathy and compassion and this this's one we call love as what we're connected to the Future Generations that we want to see how we want to see them flourish 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-dimensional level I'd like to take a quick break and ackowledge our sponsor ag1 by now many of you have heard me say that if I could take Just One supplement that supplement would be ag1 the reason for that is ag1 is the highest quality and most complete of the foundational nutritional supplements available what that means is that it contains not just vitamins and minerals but also probiotics prebiotics and adaptogens to cover any gaps you may have in your diet and provide support for a demanding life for me even if I eat mostly Whole Foods and minimally processed foods which I do for most of my food intake it's very difficult for me to get enough fruits and vegetables vitamins and minerals micronutrients and adaptogens from food alone for that reason I've been taking ag1 daily since 2012 and often twice a day once in the morning or midm morning and again in the afternoon or evening when I do that it clearly bolsters my energy my immune system and my gut microbiome these are all critical to brain function mood physical performance and much more if you'd like to try ag1 you can go to drink a1.com huberman to claim their special offer right now they're giving away five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again that drink a1.com huberman to claim that special offer I really like this because it gets to so many themes that have been discussed on this podcast previously and that exist in the Neuroscience literature of like yes emotions don't know the clock or the calendar yeah and that sounds like a bad thing and oftentimes it's discussed as a bad thing like oh when you're feeling stressed you're not able to access the parts of your brain that can make better decisions we we know that's true except in of what's immediately pressing I mean I would say that stress in the short term makes us much better thinkers and movers for sake of survival yeah um in the long term it's it's problematic but the way that you're describing emotions as a CJ anchor is that what it's called CED with a K yep yeah CJ anchor interesting um as a c 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 operations here seems to be emotions first then action steps born out of those emotions and then future State hopefully arrived at if it's a you know set along the right path yeah I like that a lot um and again it maps to some of the work that has largely existed at least to my knowledge in popular psychology or whatever you want to call it self-help again I'm a big Martha Beck fan in part because um of an exercise that she's included in I think several if not all her books of this perfect day exercise have you done this exercise it's a very interesting exercise you um you first uh 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 and it sucks it doesn't feel good um most people don't have too much trouble doing that exercise then you shift over I think you're supposed to take a little break or maybe 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 the room can morph from one country to the next it doesn't matter and you also experience the sensations in your body and in that second exercise it's remarkable I've done it 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 um outside the bounds of reality and those are things that then you write down and that at least in my life have um all borne out so this is something an exercise you do routinely and when I first heard about this I was like okay this seems like like weird self- hypnosis self-help woo stuff like I'm not like come on I'm like I'm a at that time I'm like I'm a neuroscience Professor like I'm not going to like you got to be kidding me and it's a remarkable exercise and um the reason I bring it up now in discussion 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 but for someone else to live in oh look the the the the core of My Philosophy is is in a story that I heard a very long time ago it comes it comes from the TM mod that being said the story exists in many cultures and so there's a there's a there's a man named Hony walking you know and he comes across a much older man who's planting a carab tree and he says to the older man you know why are you planting a carab tree this how long will it be until this carab tree bears fruit or even has shade and he goes oh it'll be at least 40 years and he goes well why why plant it you know you won't be around for that and the old man says when I was young I played in the shade of a carob tree I ate from the carab tree so it's my job to plant this carab tree now um this is how societies move forward this is how we become great is by planting carab trees whose shade we will never know and look I can give you a bunch of you know the Panama Canal right that was a great you know it another way that we think about this call this Cathedral thinking so now when we know we're we're in California they'll put up a home in 3 or 4 days but back in the day it took a really long time to build great things so you go back two 300 years ago um even further and oftentimes the architect and the original stonemason who would plant the Keystone would not be alive to see this Cathedral or or mosque fully built that's Cathedral thinking it's doing things whose whose fruits you will not be around to to take advantage of to to to to reap and and to have as part of your life and uh and I love it and I love the notion of Cathedral thinking um just the the visual there or mosque thinking I went to the Blue Mosque yeah yeah like I mean I've seen some amazing architecture I love architecture and I was like okay like it'll be a beautiful building and I was like wow that wo that wo that you felt is what we call a yeah and that sense of awe 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 Ari what did Andy do they have a it's not because we necessarily built Cathedrals it's because we we took actions both very small and very large to ensure that they would flourish that they would have those carab trees and I think what um what I realize is that I don't know who built the Blue Mosque specifically I don't know who the architect was I should you know and even you know last earlier this year we were in Sydney I went to Sydney Opera house we did a live there it's a beautiful building I learned they had been built over a very long period of time I can tell you that the architect was Danish but I can't remember his name so part of what we're talking about here is giving up um our need for attribution yep giving up our need for credit and gosh this is the opposite of social media right social media it's all about getting credit you know um and yet in science where people care a lot about credit while they're alive and and my scientist colleagues hate this but they know it deeply too it's also the business model of academic science right now right right which is that with the exception of Einstein and a few others most people will not be associated with their incredible discoveries even the textbook discovery 20 years out and I know this cuz my dad's a scientist and I know a lot about the scientists that were ahead of him and he taught me this early on he just said you know with rare exception you know the discoveries are not um you know no one's going to say oh that's the discovery of soand 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 a point that's more relevant to everybody not not just scientists which is that we are all trained to work on these short-term contingencies reward schedules where you know we achieve something we get credit you get an A you get a B you get a trophy we just came from the Olympic track and field trials in uh in Oregon it's like you know Podium you know bronze silver gold and um and so yes you're part of a larger Legacy You're Building toward a larger Legacy in the examples that you give but part of it is understanding that um you're not going to get credit you're not gonna have your name huge on the side of a building I mean I don't want to give too many examples but I work at a university for which there's an endowment the size of a of a country right we're very blessed to have that endowment the buildings have names on the side of them then the reason they have names on the side of them is because people gave money typically gave money to the university to have their name on the side of a building to be immortalized what's interesting be for many reasons both sociopolitical but also other reasons those names change over time so if if people knew that they that they if they gave half their wealth um and their name might be scraped off a building in in 200 years they might feel differently about it so short-term contingencies are important then again we call it Rockefeller Plaza y right um it's it's Lincoln Center named after a Lincoln yeah Pro yeah sure it is you're the New Yorker you know um and so on and so forth so so like if people um how do we get the everyday person and I consider myself an everyday person how how do we get ourselves working on short-term contingencies for a future that we can visualize as better for the next generation and let go of our need for credit great series of of points and questions brought up so part of what you're talking about is egoic Legacy right so you mentioned a building we won't you it could be at any any building at any major university the name is put there on marble you said 200 years you went to Berkeley you went to a bunch of places but um he bounced around folks proof that you can bounce around and still be successful but maybe you should eventually finish we'll talk about that later but Sprout Plaza yes Sprout Plaza see to the Free Speech movement although now you could argue not so free speech movement that's my I said that yes I said that Sprout Plaza like I can't tell you who Sproul was do you know who spra was no exactly I can tell you the Arches I can tell you that it was a free speech movement I can tell you that I saw certain bands play there I can tell you that it's supposed to be a place where you 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't tell you who sprawl is the question of legacy is very important so Sprout Plaza let's say 250 years from now that name will probably it may may not be there the plaza but PE the name will maybe it was renamed by someone else um so for Titans 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 you know I I have three children so let's say they continue on at 2.2 children or whatever you know my descendants in 250 years Sprout Plaza may or may not still be called that but in 250 years I will have roughly 50,000 descendants that's a scary from my wife I know it's an exciting thought it's an exciting it's a scary thought 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 buildings please do so oh yeah no please do that please do so please please do that I should just be very clear philanthropy at universities and elsewhere people think of it as like oh people egoic Legacy sure also pays for hundreds of thousands of scholarships the opportunity for people and research and you need to do it 100% it's vital it's vital it's vital but for the everyday person like you or or me if if I if if if I want to impact the future with which I do cuz remember I'm I'm not the kind of futurist where I'm going to I don't I don't predict the future my job at this point in time I'm manifested in this biological entity called Ari wallik is not to predict the future it's to help folks make better decisions today so that we have better Futures in the in the near-term the medium-term and the far off tomorrows so what's going to impact those 50,000 wallet descendants is not going to be anything that did egoic in terms of getting recognition what's going to impact them and and we know this in many ways from across multiple disciplines what's 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 memes right like we Susan Blackmore has meme theory right not not internet memes where you know I watch a lot of those but true memes these Cal units that we hand off both laterally and and and and forward you know to longitudinally to other Generations especially those closest to us if you want to impact the future there's a bunch of things you can do right reduce your carbon footprint give money vote this I want all of those to happen in a positive way but at the end of the day it's monkey see monkey do how you and I interact right now will obviously impact our relationship everyone who's listening or viewing but then everyone who's listening and viewing how they are with the person who hands them the coffee the Barista 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 egoic think about having a legacy I totally agree and I I think um you know I'm old enough and frankly I'm excited to be old enough that like I can make statements about being old enough to know that like I believe that our species is for the most part benevolent I feel like most most people if raised in a um low trauma environment um 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 just have to do evil or feel you know but I think um it's clear that trauma um and challenge can can rewire behavior and certainly brain um to create you know what we see as evil right so but I think most people are good yeah um most people are are of genuine goodness um and I do think that we Model Behavior I think that etiquette is something that I guess as a 49y old person I guess does that make me middle age I'm of middle age I'll probably live hopefully to be about a 100 but we'll see bullet Buster cancer I'm going to give it give it what I got depends on whether or not you read your book fully right that that there's a response to that um that could go either way um the I like to think that reading the book fully will extend life as opposed to shorten life yes but um if nothing else maybe it'll cure insomnia the um the the idea here is that if we're going to invest in in being our best selves one would hope that other people will respond to that the way that you said you know that that we'll kind of mirror each other good behavior breeds good behavior in my life time I've seen a real um increase in the number of rules and regulations and a decrease in Etiquette like and what I would call and I don't this isn't a real term I don't think but like spontaneous etiquette or Genuine etiquette like people being kind just to be kind not because they're afraid of a consequence um and I have a theory um and I'll go through this quickly I I saw a documentary recently about the history of game shows where I learned that the first commercial was during the World Series where when de was making a run on the home run record so they used a sports game that was televised and on the radio to have a first commercial then they had game shows which were basically commercials for the products that's what they were and they used human interaction as a way to make it more interesting between the contestants and the host and then came reality TV shows and then now I would argue that social media is the reality TV 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 just say presence on the show is to do things that are more hyperbolic yeah more outlandish like the like it's very hard I've tried and I think managed to some extent to do so to it's very hard to create a very very popular social media channel in this reality TV 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 you're a high friction uh 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 Lex Freedman used to talk about this like is there a social media platform where people are rewarded for being benevolent for modeling good etiquette 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 continents and and Far Away um in time as as well right to timestamp down things so here's my question is there a version of social media that is not just on the halflife of like 12 hours what was tweeted Etc what was retweeted because I would argue that and even the highest uh virality social media posts have a halflife of about six months to a year it maybe not even that there are a few memes like the guy looking at the other girl walking the other way those kinds of memes that seem to persist but most of them don't um so is there a time capsule sort of uh version of social media because I look on the internet like on YouTube and I would say there probably three or four YouTube videos namely the Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford in 2015 maybe last lecture by Randy P before he died of pancreatic cancer maybe Ben Brown's Ted Talk on vulnerability I'm thinking mainly in the self-help space personal development space here and frankly aside from that and a um most things as popular as they may seem 100 million views 200 million views compared to literature compared to music compared to poetry compared to visual arts it's G to be gone right I like to think that these podcast episodes are going to project forward 30 40 years into the future but if we look at the history of what's on YouTube and we look at the halflife of any social media post it may not be the case in fact it's very likely it's not the case one would hope that they morph into something that lasts but the question here is is there a version of social media that acts as a time capsule to teach the sorts of principles that you're talking about in the show that I just did a brief history of the future one of one of the places I visit um are these caves in the south of Spain 300t below the surface that are extremely rare because what these cave have in them side by side are both kind of hand paintings done by both neanderthals and Homo sapiens it's one of the few places where they exist side by side so before we talk about social media we have to talk about the the the what that really is is storytelling and we're trying to in social media as we know it right now we're trying to tell the world a story about who we are and what I stand for why am I here and why do I matter and notice me my life meant something but we go back to that cave that I stood in where those drawings were from you know 40 50,000 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 of our conversation this is a time of year you should expect to see these animals in this area right and it was what what Nancy bardaki calls Horticultural time versus mechanical time so when you because that's the way we used to think from from 40,000 years to the Agricultural Revolution 12,000 10 12,000 years ago to probably up until a couple hundred years ago we didn't remember the minute hand only existed on the analog clock starting about 200 years ago we just yeah we didn't we didn't think in minutes we barely thought look the the clock as we know it the mechanical clock as we know it only comes about during the Industrial Revolution and especially then when we start to have trains remember the train count sundal then it was it was Stonehedge it was Sundial those Seasons right the way we would think about the future by the way when people say oh AR you're you're a future fut like this is people like you have always existed now the idea of the future that is this thing out there that's going to Roy over us is relatively new because up until a couple hundred years ago Ari and Andy we did exactly what our 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 asess it could be argu I've done a lot of things that my father did he was a scientist and their other domains of life but yeah goes back to modeling Behavior right the the the number one predictor if someone's going to read the newspaper is if their parents read the newspaper yeah some my D who said he'd open the paper and poke it from behind when I wanted his attention well we can talk about that in a second um the the the attention part and so when I look when I look at when I start answering 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 it 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 a different direction I if we choose all of Storytelling is really a way of doing cultural transmission of memes of ideas of ways of being so that we can flourish and move forward as a species so then if you take that at its 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 200 years from now when they look at these posts with with the likes and things that um the metrics that we use to judge ourselves individually and say what what happened to this species I'd like to take a brief break to thank one of our sponsors element element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't that means the electrolytes sodium magnesium and pottassium in the correct ratios but no sugar now I and others on the podcast have talked a 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purchase of any element drink mix again that's drink element.com huberman to claim a free sample pack I mean one of the reasons I fell 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 a it's 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 Etc but it there I get great peace from that um and most of the so-call protocols I describ on the podcast about viewing sunlight Etc circadian rhythmicity Etc has been core to our our biology and our well-being 100,000 years ago and very likely it will be quarter our biology 100,000 years from now I therefore worry about any technology that shortens up our um time scale of um motivation and reward and I use social media so I am not antisocial media by any stretch in fact I'm quite Pro provided it's kept in check all of Jonathan Height's uh ideas I I really like those um but let me put it this way if I go to Los Vegas which I do enjoy doing from time to time I'm not a gambling addict I guess if I say that enough times people are going to say I'm a gambling ad but I enjoy playing a little bit of roulette or a little bit the slots I play all the lowlevel stuff that doesn't require any thinking um and I often do pretty well for whatever reason um because I know when to leave probably um but Vegas is all about short-term thinking and short-term reward contingency it's actually designed in every respect to get you for to forget that there are these other longer time scales and that's why there's no natural light in most casinos lights there's no clocks in many of them um the uh the intermittent random intermittent reward schedule that there is designed to keep you playing um and I would argue that a lot of social media is like that yeah not all of it but a lot of it is like that um reward likes and responses in some cases fighting is what people want they want to fight because they like that emotion that it will the algorithms figure you out so that they shorten up your your temporal window yeah and so when people say oh we're walking around with a little slot machine in our pocket all day long with our smartphone I 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're going to find the one that you like some people like playing roulette I happen to like playing roulette some people like crap some people like poker some people like to bet on a game where you get to sit the whole game with the possibility of winning a friend of mine who's actually an addiction counselor he said you know the gambling addiction is the absolute worst of all the addictions why because the next time really could change everything unlike alcoholism or drug addiction or other forms of addiction where the next time is just going to 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 investments for the future this is what I want to know how do we get into the metaphorical uh you know cave painting scenario because this what it means is 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 at the debates from other people probably zero like there's no new information there the only thing that can happen is I can get caught in the little Eddy of the tide poool that uh is the the argu 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 Goggins is always outrunning and hates social media so much even though he's you know used it to good end to to share his message um I mean what is it that we can do to disengage from that short-term contingency reward mindset and behaviors and what in the world can we do instead yep is it go paint like on the side of a cave is it write a book is it um I mean how do we how do we do that and and let's check off the box of like we need to tend our kids we need to tend to our health we need to get our sleep we need to get our let's just assume that we're taking care of the the fundamentals of health and well-being which doesn't leave a whole lot time afterwards anyway what do we do like like what where where are the story where should the stories go where do we put them I I'm I feel really um impassioned by this because you know I devote my life to to this right and I teach biology because I believe it's fundamental and transcends time but I care about the future and and I'm well aware that you know in 30 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 no one will will care just like I realized about halfway through my scientific career that sure I was tenured at Stanford won some awards enjoyed the research enjoyed the day-to-day but I realized 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 32 years ahead and I know the literature really well so like how how do you how do you square these different these different mental frames it's I it's it's it's a conundrum well this is a 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 and logic and and and the Renaissance and the Enlightenment and as nii said I'll give you the full quote God is dead and now we're basically screwed but I don't believe that I mean I believe in God I mean I've I've gone on record saying that before so and there are many people who believe in God in the afterlife but it's still is difficult to navigate the day to-day well because I want to separate out what what scientific rationality and the scientific method did is it didn't actually kill God what it actually did was it killed the structures that arose to intermediate between us and God aka the church and this is not a conversation about theology this is a conversation about structures and about power so science destroyed religion 100% it destroyed the stories that religion told us about our large purpose because what ended up happening look often times folks will say well you know science destroyed destroyed God and destroyed religion because it told us where we came from we didn't we're not coming from seven days right where where God spun the Earth and created the heavens in seven days I think we're at a point now where we're starting to realize that science actually tells us going back 13.7 billion years ago to the Big Bang we can quibble with that number up to today science is told has is telling us how we got to this point what science cannot do and what technology cannot do is tell us where we should be going and so what I'm not and I'm not saying God should be telling what we should be doing or or spirituality what I'm saying is you're not going to you're not going to argue you can tell God God what to tell us no I'm not going to argue but wait but but the but the term you just said that that Science and Technology cannot tell us where we need to go no look here we started off by we started off so the work 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 the to use your nomenclature there three protocols one transgenerational 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 it's future with an S as opposed to the singular future because we often think of the future as a noun the sing that's out there as opposed to what the future really is which is a verb it's something that we do then the final pillar the one that is the most difficult for us to 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 lifespan bias so the most important unit of time to Andrew huberman is from your birth to your death we're all wired that way because that's the literature the science that I grew up with I I grew up 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 unit of time is from my birth to my death but the reality is for our species and it has been going back hundreds of thousands years is that these things actually overlap I come from my parents then I am here and now my children these are not distinct units there's massive overlaps in terms of the culture the 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 biased Society the one that we exist in right now is we have lost the Telos 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 in the picture we flounder about and we're looking for metrics to judge am I doing the right thing do I matter will people know who I am 200 years from now will my is is my sense of purpose connected to anything larger and without these larger religious structures that we had for thousands of years the answer is no but there are still many people on the planet who believe in God and are religious yes right so more than there are that are religious so does that mean that they're immune from this like like confusion not 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 where I'm going to get a lot of hate mail is mostly about power and coersion and control not at its Essence not I would say that for every major religion yes I would say for every religion like the the essence of it is is is about love the essence is about love and emancipation 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 right right like with anything like with anything and so that's true of science too I mean I know a lot about the business model you referenced it earlier right science it's it's no longer uh like you know pure medich type science where you're doing these things and like it's it's published it's Parish there's business models can can we take it from the lab to the can we 100% And that is part of where we are what I'm asking for when we have a conversation about ours is to rise up out of this current moment and say most mammals kind of have about a million years that they exist on Earth from from kind of when they rise up to when they go extinct we're we're in the first third of this ball game right that's reassuring yeah we're in the because I keep hearing about you know the fact that we're almost so we're about a third of the way through we're the bottom we're in the bottom of the third in oh goodness yeah all right well well you finally said something that gives me I'm just kidding lots of things that you've said um give me confidence in our future most notably that you're talking about this sorry to interrupt but I'm going to compliment you so maybe I'll stop talking now um that most notably that um you know I think you're the first person outside of um the subbranch of Neuroscience which is a very small subbranch people that study time perception to really Call to um to people's Consciousness that the human brain can expand or contract its time perception and we do this all day long and high sence high stress High excitement um life and thinking shrinks the aperture right it contracts the aperture and makes us very good at dealing with things in the present get to the next day or the next hour collapse go and continue repeat repeat repeat it's it's the opposite of what the Buddhists that traditionally said which was to be present in order to see uh the timelessness this is why I'm I'm a big fan of the um I I forget the name it's uh Rob we'll have to edit this in the um um the otoma prayer which talks about Release Me From the time-bound nature of Consciousness to timelessness sounds very mystical but what they're really talking about is get me out of the mode of 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 someplace in traffic to pick up the kids so they're not waiting outside the school alone impossible you you you just can't you the two deep breath and the long exhale like it works to bring your level of autonomic arousal down make 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 close so you're one of the first people to talk about this Dynamic relationship with that Horizon is there a way that we can Leverage The immediacy of our experience that fact to actually create useful tools for the future like so for instance before we started recording we're talking about the notion of time capsules I've been keeping a time capsule for a long time the the first idea for this came when I was a kid we used to build skateboard ramps in the backyard and I'll never forget that right before we put down the first layer of plywood we put a time capsule in there we all like wrote little notes and did things I think um someone put some candy in there or something it's kind of a cool concept right but social media to me does not seem like a time capsule I feel like it's just going to get turned over turned over turned over what are the real time capsules of Human Experience so you said religion religious Doctrine Bible Quran Torah being the big three and there are others of course but those are the big three Bible Karan Torah those are big three time capsules 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 what I what my pract what one of my practices is uh or I'll go through a couple of them um and so so one of them if if you come to my home which hopefully you know you'll come over been to your home yeah but you know it's been a while it's been a while that was a complaint that was a you know wait I don't know if I haven't invited you or you just I whatever we'll talk about it afterwards whenever I make it to Manhattan I have a hard time getting out of Manhattan that's true um so we have a Shelf with a bunch of family photos and you know there's photos of my grandparents my parents myself my kids and then to the right of that there's actually and people are always like why didn't you you know take care of this there's always there's a blank photo frame just blank those you know I have three kids they're young but that blank photo frame uh represents my my grandkids or future Generations it's something that I can immediately see when I think about the decisions that's why I said long path there's a mindset there's all these complicated things and it's also a mantra so when I 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 arousal response where I want to act in the short term but I actually me want to see the bigger picture and again this is highly self-referential I understand that I'll just say long path I'll say like what what are we really trying to do here what is this actually all about and that because I've been doing this long enough brings me back so when I see that third empty picture frame it always reminds me that I'm here for this one segment there was a segment before and there's a segment coming after me and so how I am in my daily interactions is going to impact that how far so just a few questions more specifically about you because I think what you're doing here is you're concretizing a process a protocol if you will that anyone can use and I I would argue that the shift from printed photos largely from printed photos to electronic photos has made this problematic you know um I mean it's made certain things simpler like if you change relationships you can just delete a folder as opposed to having to actually take photographs from a previous relationship and make sure they're none around in case your next relationship would understandably take issue with that I'm not speaking from experience here um but how far back do your photos go it's interesting the the the the photos of my grandparents who both perished in the Holocaust were saved by my father who was in World War III fought with the Jewish underground made his way through Europe to Cuba to Mexico where he eventually met my mom and I was born um the photos that we have he had kept in his wallet for several decades and and he had them kind of reconstructed and turned in that's as far back as we go so grandparents yeah okay and then you're married you have three kids um and then you have this this empty photo frame empty photo frame and um you're same age as me your 50 or 49 49 49 thank you uh but you seem to be in good health yes um and seemingly young right yeah you have energy you've always had a lot of energy you used to you used to call yourself Ari Ferrari you said you're like a Ferrari that's why they I don't think this know each other since we were little kids um he's always had a ton of energy actually he hurt himself when 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 kind of like David Goggins will treadmill um on his hands even when he can't move his legs okay so chances are you'll meet your grandkids hopefully yeah God willing you'll meet your grandkids um and but probably not your great grandkids probably not okay well I have a different tool but let me say something I will not probably meet them biologically like in in the sense that this this big lump of cells will probably not meet my great-grandchildren but we will meet them I'm 100% sure of is the way that I've modeled being in the world to Partners be they my wife my children business colleagues that modeling my kids will be in the room sometimes when I'm on work calls right you know nothing confidential and they you know they'll hear they'll hear in the background they'll hear how I 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-grandkids that's how I will be in the room with them how I have been is going to impact 30 or 40 Generations out that that 50,000 descendants that I talked about earlier 250 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 it that modeled behavior that transmission yeah I get it and um it's interesting because I think that well and you're on the internet so people will see you on the internet probably at at least you know I think 30 50 years out if you Google your name or whatever it's called at that point Googling you know I get in trouble when I say Googling people go why don't you talk about difference because that's the one everyone uses yeah unless you use Duck Duck Go because you're afraid what people so um when someone comes up with a like a truly better one maybe it'll get replace but meanwhile Google um so they'll get to your great grandkids could possibly know you there they could hear this conversation yeah this very conversation I think that's part of the reason why people go on social media not just to be consumers but they want they want to leave something they're probably not thinking about it consciously but they want to leave something for the future I use a tool um that I learned from a friend he has this um your life in in uh your life in weeks I think it's called and it's this you know you fill-in chart where you you put your birthday you put your predicted lifespan so for me I put a 100 it feels good to me I'm not interested in living much past 100 unless there's some technology that would allow me to do that with a lot of vigor and my friends would be around so and you mark off the the that you fill in these little squares and um I did this morning actually and you know I'm not quite halfway through but I'm about halfway through and it it's a it's an interesting thing to see your life in that representation you go oh wow it can inspire better decision- making because we can lose track of where we are in time and some of us including me are not very good at tracking time people that have ever waited for me on an appointment know this I don't I track I'm 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 um 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 even think about it again until now and when we are pressed with a decision in some cases we have the opportunity to step back and say okay look in the bigger Arc of things I got to go left here even though I want to go right this is the the right thing for my bigger picture the bigger picture bigger pict path yes so you know is there a way is there maybe a technology that actually serves us to Anchor us to best decision-making um for a given uh best time bin we would call it in Neuroscience best time binning mode of time binning for a given decision I think you need ask yourself a question when when you're facing a you know not should I have turkey or chicken for lunch but maybe a slightly or maybe that question too just ask yourself am I being a great ancestor what will allow me to be a great ancestor how will descendants look back on this decision go left or right that's going to elevate you look I talked about that you talked about you know deleting photos and and stuff like that so I'll tell you about the work one of my on my Advisory Board is a guy named Hal herfield smart great guy to UCLA um who does a lot of future you work and so what he did was and I'll do the short version of this like a bunch of people into an fmri functional MRI to see kind of where the flow is and he asked them he did a series of questions where it's like think about yourself right now and one part of your brain lit up and then he goes okay I want you to think about this celebrity I think he used Matt Damon and L Lee Portman and another part of their brain lit up and he said I want you to think about yourself 10 years from now and guess what the part of the brain that lit up for the celebrities Natalie and Matt was the same part that Lit Up When thinking about you 10 years from now so you had a vague idea of who future Ari was but you weren't totally connected to them right it was like a stranger to you pulled them out one group did nothing another group he took a photo of them and he you know took a photo ages them and then puts them into a 3D you know uh virtual reality and you're in a room and at one point you don't know this is going to happen as you walk across the room you see a mirror and you look at yourself in the mirror and it's a photo of you but age 10 years so you're seeing an older version of you yikes so I mean and cool very cool does this intervention pulls them out brings them back I think two weeks later and he h he 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 didn't so the question is not only are we discount connected from the future my you know my future descendants I'm disconnected from My Future Self so what I've done and you you you'll see this in the show it's it's it's scary CLE look just like my dad and you'll always look like your dad when you do this is even though look a lot like my mom we've been we've been bagging on social media you you can go on Snap or other places where that'll AG you right it'll make you look 10 15 years older and you can send it to your partner everybody laughs so I I I took a screenshot and I everybody laughs as opposed to saying you great no no no everyone's like oh my God and so so I I once I read about this house research many years ago I printed that out you know my little home printer cut it out and it's on my bathroom mirror and every day I spend two or three seconds staring at Future older Ari in his 70s that's how I make better decisions today and those better decisions aren't just about putting money for retirement it's about also how do I take care you know do I floss or not you know you you get end of of the night you want to just brush your teeth and go to bed huh no you need to floss at night you need to floss at night we did an episode on noral health and I learned from the from the dentist the most important the most important way to take care of future self is flossing by the way just to be clear I've learned this from many people um he's it's actually true it's so key for brain and body unbelievably key the dentists are going to thank you but we don't do it but if you look at your mouth 20 years from now staring at you as you're smiling with the older version of Andy with you you know a little bit less hair a little bit more wrinkles um you're going to do it this is what howw 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 and connect with it um that's about having compassion for yourself that's part of this kind of transgenerational uh empathy component the one thing I want to Circle back on because we could we could quickly fly past it is this idea of Futures thinking versus the the singular future yeah I definitely want to touch on that can I just ask you a question real quickly before here of course this notion of of um let's say a protocol for imagining future self or actually visualizing future self not as a way to scare yourself into better health habits although if it works great but as a way to um you know really get your mind into the reality that if you survive you're going to get older by definition and that person needs care and in an environment and your kids are going to grow up too we know this okay that's all obvious um 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 the reason I say this is um you know I remember when Steve Jobs was alive because I was a postto in paloalto then and would see him occasionally around paloalto um there and then you know read the Walter Isaacson biography about him and it seemed like he had a very clear sense that someday he would die and he lived his life essentially according to that principle and and in some sense may have Justified being a little bit outrageous at times and a little bit you know High friction at times um through this sense of urgency like it was important to 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 him I think most people celebrate him for it um I guess he had some sense of how long he was going to live and then at one point maybe that sense was inflated and then boom your dad died very when you were very young do you think that that gave you a perspective that you know at any moment you could be four months out you get the four month's notice that you're going to be dead in four months like like do it shape your thinking about the about the future I mean my dad's now I'm not not saying this as a I mean no it's it's interesting that there may been a distinct advantage of course not to his dying of course but to the idea that it it really creates the sense of urgency about not just the present but the future I remember we were very young you're like I want to have kids you got going on a family like I think first among all of us y really early and for those whose parents you know are still alive and and you know and seem to be vigorous maybe 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 sense or or an unconscious sense of how long we are likely to live like a kind of a range cuz kind of argued that in some of his writings and speaking so look the 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 in a way that will will alter it for the better is the fact that to truly think and feel yourself into the far future means that you're going to have to think about a moment where you no longer exist 1972 Ernest Becker 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 Becker's contention was that we 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 in time we will die we will cease to exist and it was Becker's contention further that everything religion culture uh laptops convertibles everything that we create is our way of pushing back the the very understanding that at one point we will cease to exist and it horrifies us I could not agree more and I'm so so grateful that you mention this book be and this idea from Becker because I would argue that every addiction every single addiction is based in a fear of death and an attempt to shorten the time scale of thinking shorten the time scale of rewards shorten the time scale of everything to avoid that reality and it's a reality that we learn of at a very early age intuitive 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 you know we we we put them in old age homes it used to be we Liv together right in these in these multigenerational homes because older people I would argue remind us of death remind us of our own mortality and so until we can reconcile ourselves truly at an individual maybe even at a collective level that we will cease 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 and in in the show that I did I did something people were very confused like you know the show about the future brief history of the future everyone's like oh you're going to go see all this cool technology blah blah blah blah that's part of what we do but in the middle of the show in episode four I go to the high mountain desert in we travel all over the world but I go to the high mountain desert outside of Tucson and I sit with the Lua Arthur a death duela and what she does you know you know mostly the time when we think of a doula we think of someone helping birth a a child into the world what a death Doula does is help us and help our loved ones exit this world and she does something extraordinary other cultures some religions have this she does something called a death meditation and in the show I do it and then you you can find these online where you literally go through a medit a guided meditation where you go from breathing to sensation of breath to literally just becoming one with the soil it's a very intense thing to go through but I went through a version of the death meditation as you've alluded to when I was 18 years old cuz I literally am the one who picked up the phone from the hospital at 2 in the morning I was home from college and I picked it up I didn't even I didn't even say hello I picked up the phone I said this is his son cuz who else was calling it to in the morning and it was a charge nurse and she goes I want to bring you up to speed he Rel late stage of cancer your father is not responding we've been doing CPR there are no orders on what to do what do you want us to do so I made that call because it was obvious of where it was going that was my way of confronting the salience of my of his mortality and my own mortality very very abruptly um other people have their own early brushes with death I would argue that there is a certain level and you touched on this of of emancipation when you've come close you don't you don't want to wish it on anyone but when you have come close to seeing what that looks and feels like you all of a sudden become free from the burdens that society places on you in the in the earnest bararan way of trying to push back mortality because you no longer give a because you've now you now know where it's all going to go 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 everything we 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 go to Japan uh 90% of the companies that are over a thousand years old on planet Earth right now are 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 lifespan bias but we're actually part of a chain a great chain of being those who came before the pros and cons of that the baggage of that and then it's my role to decide 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 Telos 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 need to be able to do that as we confront what we do or do not do about climate change what we do or 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 telling 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 alluded to that at one point we won't be here how do we do this I mean like we can do it conceptually like you want to set the stage for that whoever ends up in that empty frame um to have a better life but it's it's hard to do like I think most people assume once it's lights out 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 Aged version of yourself I love that and if there's a website that we'll do that we can put a link to it the show note 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 verbing 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 go on that let's let's double click on the on the individual incentive so we talked about the Aging photo that you can do uh there's also another thing you can do that's very powerful you touched on this earlier which is writing a letter to your future self um so you know you can do this at at longpath org you can find Future me websit you have a you have a yeah yeah it's the number one tool that we use so when I when I give when I give talks I give shockingly people have me come and talk to large groups not shockingly come on what what I say to them is you know we'll kind of go through a version of a different conversation like this um I'll say now what I want you to do is I want you to write a letter to your future self it's going to 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 letter to your future self yeah I can't I mean maybe once or twice we did it and so I'll let you in a little secret the the this is um 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 is people come after me come come up to me afterwards and I go to write I'd never even thought who do I want to be in five or 10 years like what's that Arc of what I want to kind of connect to what am I optimizing four how do I make myself better in that way so I want I want to make sure people understand that if you can't look at a photo of yourself age the very least write a letter to your future self and what does the letter include dear Andy dear Ari and then whatever you want to put in right this is a onetoone 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 until you put out there uh you know you can't be it if you can't 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 aspirationally in that letter now starts creating a a road map to getting there because at the very at the very kind of bottom of the Pyramid of what that road map is is visualizing what that success looks like right so I was um in high school I ran track and I started off by doing you know the The 100 uh very kind of in in individual Sport and then eventually um as I went forward I started running the 4X 100 which is a relay race and what I learned from my coach coach Ted tilan um was that the 4X 100 it's 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 passing of the Baton and so when you write a letter to your future self yes you're connecting to your future but what it's really also helping you do is realize that life is not a 100 yard dash it's actually a relay and you're carrying a bon that was handed to you that you are now going to hand off and I'm arguing that we right now what I call we're in this intertial moment between kind of what was and 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 intertitle in this transition zone with the Baton that is homo sapen planetary flourishing culture and um is going to matter much more than we think it does in the current moment of social media pings so that that's that's touch it on the individual let's go up to that Collective we have to decide as individuals which some of these protocols will help you do but we have to decide as a society that we want to actually tackle the question of to what end because in the Erasure of God in the Erasure of the afterlife in that in in what was given to us by religion for hundred thousands of years some sort of guarantee that we would go on to heaven or hell now that that is no longer there for a lot of people for some it still is and it still helps them make better decisions I would argue in the day-to-day but for those who no longer have that we have to decide that and this can be from an egoic level that the decisions that we make or do not make are either going to hook up in a great way future Generations or or or not be we can be in those three categories we can be one or two it doesn't matter who cares I'm just going to you know like YOLO or we can say we want to be part of a much larger project um I talk about this a lot like the the kind of you can tell my bias here like I don't say human like the homo sapien project I think like I 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 focused as to whether or not we leave Earth and we go to Mars and we become an Interstellar species I'm focus on who we are cuz 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 humanity the best of the humans that we've met we can all rise to that level so instead of there being like a hundred great heroes in the world who are just so heartfelt you know like the dolly llama or or Mother Teresa or even Einstein that that could actually be are those three still in t they've been canceled yet no they're still they're still with us they're still with me with me but look even when you get into their look you asked one of the ways how how do you build transgenerational empathy with the past read people's biographies especially autobiographies and you see they had it really tough and they're not as perfect and as saintly as we think they are and those right and the autobiographies are of course through their own lens through their own l so the biographies give you or or you read their letters to their lovers or to their Partners like this kind that person's kind of an right like but but at the end of the day if we as a society want to find ourselves where more of us than less of us are at this heightened sense of kind of intellectual and spiritual and emotional activation that's not going to happen overnight but if we say that's the goal that we want we want to see people will argue 9 billion 7 Bill billion three billion whatever the population of homos sapiens is on planet over the next several centuries or Millennia if we want to see them flourishing in a way that's beyond what science fiction has ever even showed us if we make that decision that your life what what Andy Andrew huberman is doing his work when Ari walk 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 uh world of instant buying of crap that we don't need on the internet yeah or that we do need and it's just a shorter time scale reward thing like I'm I don't believe that everything that happens on social media that we buy or the pleasure that we get in our our lifespan or day is bad I don't think you know I'm a capitalist too what I what I think is that it's just one it is but one time window of of kind of operations just I just think it's good to have flexibility right it's sort of like in in nutrition they talk about metabolic fle flexibility it's it's all about balances about Harmony how are we in harmony with with the future that that that is that is what I'm advocating for 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 um 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 are hoping that the super high Achievers right the Steve Jobs's the Elon the um I don't know how people feel about politicians nowadays but you know but the people building Technologies who to really care about the future I mean say what you want about Elon but the guy is building stuff for the now and for the future y I mean he's doing it um that they will take care of it for next Generations right just like there were those the Edison and the Einstein and the you know the you have to be careful with names these days because almost everyone has something associate with them where you're going to trigger someone but I'll just be you know um relaxed about it and say like would even say like uh you know even like a Jane Goodall like the appreciation of our relationship with animals and what they have to contribute to to our own understanding of ourselves and our planet that kind of thing so um you know those people ushered in the the life that I've had and um 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 gave the example of the fact that children are always observing they carry forward the patterns and the and the traits um and certainly the responses that they observe in their parents what's okay what's not okay you know starting in the 80s and in the 90s in this country there were many more divorces in fractured homes than uh there were previously um as a consequence there's 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 of these have been become commercialized but that was always the case you know people were getting Christmas presents one way or another so um you know do you think that the the kind of fracturing of the family unit has contributed to some of this lack of of um let's just call it longer path um thinking and decision- making look I I I think it's the the fracturing of the institutions that have been with us the past several hundred years that is leading to uh an exponential rise in short-term Behavior okay so you mentioned religion uh maybe for a moment we could just talk about universities yeah these days in part because of the distrust of Science and in part because of the distrust of in government and in part because of the distrust in traditional media um there's more and more uh ideas being kicked around that you know formal education is not as valuable as it used to be and people always cite the examples of the Mark Zuckerberg's and uh others who didn't finish college but I would argue they got in and chose to leave they took leave of absence they didn't drop out and they are rare individuals Ryan holiday said it best I think if you are struggling in college you're absolutely the kind of person that needs to stay in college um with rare exception unless there's like a mental health issue or some a physical health issue that needs to be tended to because nowhere else in life except perhaps the military is there such a clear designated set of steps that take you from um you know point A to point B with a credential that you can leverage in the real world for for builds um 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 a there's a deep distrust so we we are having a harder time relying on them to make good decisions I you saw a lot of presidents of University major universities fired recently um including Stanford there I said it it happened um but also Harvard and other places for different reasons and and fired might be not the correct term they decide to resign whatever it was they're no longer there they have new ones in um and so there's a lot of distrust so what can we rely on like if it's not if if people are having less faith in religion less faith in academic institutions less faith in like what do we got we got really good in academ at least on the social sciences side of saying what was wrong with the systems but not about what the systems we wanted them to be because going back several hundred years ago coming you know through the Enlighten especially well Renaissance into the enlightenment the enlightenment gave us back this idea of a new meta narrative based on on on rationality and logos and and the ability to kind of understand the World by breaking it down into its component parts of that science um fast forward several hundred years and we're at the point now where we're really good at saying what doesn't work but very very bad about saying what does work and what we do want because by saying what we do want means that we have to put forth some sort of meta narrative some thread some official future that we can hang ourselves on and it tells us a lot about it's sort of like Declaration of values it's one thing to say um which is scary uh 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 a Critic what you're describing has incredible par to what to health like you know when I started the podcast and even before when I was posting on social media it was during the lockdowns and it was like all this fear about everything and I said listen like I I can't solve this larger issue related to what may or may not be going on but what's obvious people are stressed stress is bad when it's chronic people aren't sleeping that's bad especially when it's chronic and I've got some some potential Solutions some tools some zero cost tools so a lot of the the backbone of the hubman Lab podcast is about the things you do more so than the things you don't do so what you're describing is essentially a field that consists of like breaking things down but isn't offering Solutions so it sounds very similar and I think that um 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 50% better 20% better in some cases 100% better and of course there are those For Whom the the tools don't work and they need to go to through more to more Extreme Measures but um I hear you saying that religion provided the solutions not just pointing to problems people are not looking at that as much anymore the uh big institutions like AC academic institutions political institutions let's face it regardless of where one sits on one side of the aisle or the other they're constantly fighting it's like 12- hour news cycle designed you 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 it's a it's a mess and then in terms of the family unit this is what I was alluding to before I feel like family units and values and structures are becoming more rare at least in the traditional view of the family um let let let's remember two parents kids Etc which is not by no means a requirement to call something a family but so like where so are you saying that we all have to look as like it obviously starts with the individual but that every that part of the work of being a human being now in going forward is to learn this Futures approach we have to be future conscious we but again this goes back to the transgenerational component we have to critically assess where we came from and why we're at this point so we talk let's talk about the nuclear family let's um the idea that your children would be quote unquote sleep trained and put into another room is relatively new that's from the Victorian era right where you would put your kids in another room because if you go back to most indigenous cultures everyone together and this happened for thousands of years and the kids pile yeah or in one big room or or in a long house huh I don't know if they were like piglets but they definitely all s together look the the my and look everyone can look I'm going to say this in a non-judgmental way but it's going to sound very judgmental I walk down the street sometimes and I see kids in strollers being pushed by a seemingly healthy adult right the kid is detached and they're in this kind of this buggy which comes from 17 18th 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 a bunch of patriarchal reasons for that but they literally would have a wrap on and the baby would be wrapped and be held very close to them this is the baby beorn thing well the baby beorn you put the baby on front of you but it's facing out when you really wrap them with like a 20 yard WP it's skin to skin right and and and look and there's a reason like like everything there's a reason for everything you know B for for a human baby to come out of the mother as cognitively intellectually and physically ready as a baby chimpanzee would take 18 months of gestation but we only do nine you know why right we we do it because our brains got so big because of all that protein because of AR and Andy were hunting together using our prospection earlier on this story that the baby has to come out at 9 months because when we from walking on all fours to being bipedal the female pelvis closes and there's only so much room for that baby to come out so they come out early yeah the brain had completed development internally the you'd have only stillborn I mean presumably there was a branch of our earlier version of species that many mothers and and uh babies died in child birth because of this they were deselected but that's not the we found we found the optimal balance of 9 months roughly right but what that means is the baby has to be attached and close to the 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 structure I would argue that breakdown isn't happening now that breakdown happened when we decided to move from you know tribes and clans of raising children and move into a Victorian area mindset where we we take the grandparent you know there there's very few species on planet Earth that after the female um goes through menopause they still live basically elephants whales and humans right why because those are the species where you need others Elders to help care for the young because of the a for mentioned early early uh birthing but maybe it's also the the propagation of of story as you said earlier that can inform better decisions so we we need stories wisdom is like spoken cave paintings basically yeah and so we need so those stories about what does it mean to have a proper family structure as you know whether it's a nuclear family of four or five 20 of aunts and uncles and around look we did pretty well for the first couple hundred thousand years and then there was all these things that religion disrupted right taking the children away from the mom these all come from puritanical beliefs now we're at this point in this intertitle moment where we have to critically examine 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 of and how do we move forward and your question was well why do they want to do that what is it what is it what's 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 right I'm I'm often asked this question you know um God how do we how do we get so messed up and what is it going to look like wait are are we so messed up because you said we're about a third of the way through our our things are better than yeah so I get I get the I get the question like how is it that we messed up and I always say we didn't mess up we're actually doing much better look I I walk into my daughter's room and I look at their bookshelf 15-year-old twin daughters and every piece of fiction that takes place somewhat in the future is dystopian all the Futures they know are the Hunger Games are the hund are the Maze Runner a world that has gone bad um I understand the we talked about this earlier that's the negativity bias people going to be attracted to reading about those things kids read that stuff now oh my those are the best sellers the best sellers are all the these dystopian there's always a love interest in a teenage thing but it's always the backdrop is always dystopia and we're attracted to that in the same way we're attracted to a dumpster fire because we want to see the things that dystopias can act as dystopian stories can act as an early warning system if you keep doing this one thing that you're doing and extrapolate out a few decades it'll look like this what we're missing and you just you hit the nail on the head are the stories about what if we get it right what what we call protopia so you know you Utopia is this perfect world that always collapses on itself it's really dystopia a size dystopia we talked about is a terrible terrible World a protopia 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 I'm answering your question from a few minutes ago that we start setting stories in protopia in better tomorrow in tomorrows where not everything is perfect but where we have made significant progress now it won't be perfect there'll still be divorces and maybe murders and Mayhem but if we start will say okay that all sounds great like I I for one say you know that the shift from the notion of building a better future through self-sacrifice rather you can make it a almost like pro- self and others Endeavor the way you've described it empathy for self empathy for others getting some control over the um you know contraction dilation of your time window making sure that you know what you you take good care of yourself but you take care of the the future Generations as well like for the that empty frame the now empty frame um and then moving from dystopia to protopia that that all sounds great but I think a lot of people might think okay well at best I could do that for myself and the people that um that I know it's going to be hard to do that as as a greater good for the greater good and you could say well that does contribute to the greater good this is actually very similar to what we tell um graduate students when they're uh they get their first round of data you go okay well the data often times not always but often times you you say well the data are cool like if it continues this way that' be 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 MH that your three reviewers and maybe 20 other people will read and you're going to spend the next five years of your life on this thing maybe three but probably five years of your life and you'll get your PhD and there's always this question like do you ditch 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 whereas you know there are other projects you go whoa like that's you know that's like One Wing of the cathedral and and it's a rare instance where that happens and a lot of it's luck and it's doesn't always work out anyway but you know what we're saying here is you know how hard people are willing to work is often related to what they feel the potential payoff will be if they can sense the payoff and by the way I love the protocols that you offered the empty frame the journaling to future self this notion of time capsuling your your present thinking into the future um the Aging of self these are these are very actionable things I plan 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 this way because the other model is okay well the Elon will take care of it for us and I'm um or the uh you know the or the system's 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 you're getting at is in in a lot of the work that I've read and listened to on this podcast often times it's about how do we you know obviously how do we how do we optimize the self and I mean that in a good way not in a selfish way um how do we make ourselves better right that's where you have to start I'm advocating for for how do we optimize Society how do we optimize civilization and this is a clear case where unlike when think of scale being you know make more widgets at a cheaper price this is really a one plus one plus one plus one at Infinity so if at infinum if we think about just for example how many listeners and viewers there are of this podcast Millions right um and how many people they interact with within their within their closest sphere and you go out right so right now that your listeners have the potential to live and act long paath and in this way where they're doing something for a greater they're thinking about their purpose in the world as nested within the larger purpose of our species to to allow for more mass flourishing in the future uh for generations to come if you think about your listeners and how they interact and how they Model Behavior your potenti and in their spheres you're at 30 40 50 million people right that's a very very large number um and what we know about social emotional contagion is that these things are contagious they are memes this is Susan Blackmore's work um that's how it scales it actually is one of those things where you're not going to you know just add powder um and it all of a sudden will will create this this optimal future for everyone because only one person that does it like we all have a role to play in it it's like literally what what I would want is anyone who's listening or watching this uh when they're done 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 and what is my role in that great play what do I have to do and yes you need the protocols to kind of bring you back into there right for me it's easy because I wrote the book I did the show I can just think long path I can do it for others this is going to be the first time they're thinking about this or maybe they've been thinking about it for years even in their smallest interactions they start doing it and we you know this is this gets into kind of the Santa Fe Institute and complexity Theory this stuff starts to actually reverberate that's how we do it you know there's not we don't need to March for long-termism right we don't we don't we don't need bumper stickers thank you there will be no bumper stickers there bumper 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 and our role in that and then the purpose I don't care if you're a barista if you're a surfing instructor if you're a you know brilliant podcaster um whatever it is that you do do it with the intention and recognition that you're modeling a way of being in the world that has ramifications and reverberations Beyond this current moment I you said earlier well you know who knows if anyone will listen to your podcast what I can tell you with certainty because I'm sure it's probably already happened is a large language model an llm some you know what we call AI right now is already or it will at some point ingest the hubman Lab podcast yeah we have one we have a hubman lab AI there you go we haven't advertise it very heavily but it's there you can ask me questions it's pretty good it sounds a bit like me the jokes are dry they're dry and not funny I say mostly funny but you'll get I'll give you some more um but eventually that will pull that will percolate out so at the speed of things are going three or four years from now this very conversation how we're model what what I learned in school discourse ethics how we talk to one another that is teaching these machines how to think and act and who and what we are and 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 and we're modeling it for for for them um and going back to the higher education example for a second I think higher education like many institutions as as AI what we call that fully comes online is going to radically radically change and it will be you know a Cambridge or an Oxford tutor in everyone's ear and higher education this idea that you kind of come together um to receive information will start to dissipate from higher education but what higher education will start to do and I think what I need to focus on is not just the intellectual and and and the cognitive but also the psychological and the emotional uh core of who you are and helping you develop that well aen to that uh you know there was a former guest on this podcast uh or there was a guest on this podcast previously uh Dr Wendy Suzuki's professor at NYU I think now she's the dean of of um Arts and 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 kind of to help students manage the stress that is college and being in your early 20s um 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 that or they get it but then there are big gaps um and I I love the way that you're describing this basically it's it's a it's a lens I if I if I may it's it's a lens into Human Experience that's very Dynamic um um and is really in concert with the fact that the human brain has the capacity for this dynamic repres presentation of time like focus on like solve for the now there will be parts of your day no doubt today where you just have to solve for the now you're not thinking about the great or good um and then the ability to dilate your your Consciousness um in in the temporal sense and and to solve for things that are more longterm make these Investments towards the future um I wonder though you know how can we incentivize people to be good to do good um and how can we incentivize people to do this on a backdrop of a lot of short-term carrots and short-term Horizons um I think you've given us some answers um and they're very powerful ones such as the Aging self image exercise um journaling into the future writing to Future Self the empty um frame the empty frame uh exercise 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 um 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 the ones that come come next I've touched on this we we we need to examine in ourselves why is it we do and are the way that we are right do you know why in this country we vote on Tuesday I don't have any idea so most advanced democracies vote over the weekend or a couple of weekends in America we vote on Tuesday because that was the time that was necessary for someone to leave church on Sunday ride on Horseback into the big city vote on Tuesday and ride back before Market Day on Wednesday I'm so glad you're going to tell me it's not because um then can still watch Monday Night Football no this is long before Monday Night Football and so I think why we vote on Tuesday um it's a metaphor for so much of who we are and have become as individuals and as a society um I'm a big fan of cognitive behavioral therapy of CBT I think partially because what it does is it it has us look at what of those what are those negative stories that we tell ourselves but then because you can't just say stop doing something you can't just extinguish a behavior you have to add and put in a positive story what I've tried to do with some of our time here today and what I want people to partially take away more than partially to really take away and bring in is examine the you know the why Tuesdays what are those stories that you've inherited some of them are going to be macrosocial like you are defined by this Society by what you own by the badge on your car that says how successful you are that's a story it's a story that's been fed to us there are other stories are very personal these are stories that can sometimes be very private and go back Generations within a family and then to understand some of those stories serve us some of those stories don't serve us but after Discerning that we then have to write a new story we have to write a new story for oursel who am I why am I here isn't going to be answered by a religion or a God or a book or a podcast or a futurist it's going to 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 as crew on this vessel and how we're going to move forward so the stories have served us well and they have not served us well and to move forward forward it's okay 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 this thing that I'm heading towards or that's going to Tumble over me but that I'm going to create and those stories may be very in in in intrapersonal they may be interpersonal they may be political they may be business they may be what you buy what you consume but you have to have agency you have to instill a sense of hope into your own life and a sense of awe 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 descendants to look back on us and say they they were great ancestors I love it and I also um just want to highlight the importance of um recordkeeping of of putting things down on paper or maybe in electronic form creating time capsules for the future Generations because I think a lot of what people probably are thinking or worried about a little bit is like okay I can do all this stuff to try and make things better and even give up the desire for any kind of credit but um you know not feeling like it will be of any significance but what I've learned from you today is that you know it starts with the self and then it radiates out to um the people we know and that maybe we um cohabitate with but even if we don't cohabitate with anybody it radiates out from us and that it is important to get a sort of Time Capsule going so that um people can feel like they have um some significance in the future that they may not ever have immediate experience of but to really like send those ripples forward and get the sense that 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 protocols if you will um that we've highlighted in the in the time stamps of course as tools as as protocols um I really want to thank you because oftentimes discussions about past present and future can get a bit abstract and a bit vague for people and um 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 it's 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 adopt some of the these protocols and also for taking the time to come to talk with us today um share your wisdom and share what you're doing and in many ways well it is not in many ways it is absolutely part of what you're describing which is um putting your best self toward how things can be better now and in the future it's also you know a great pleasure to sit down with somebody I've known for so many years and uh and uh learn from you so it's a it's a real honor and a privilege and I know um everyone else listening to and watching this feels the same way so thank you so much thank you for having me thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Ari wallik to find links to his book to his television show and other resources related to long path please see the show note captions if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us in addition please subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and Apple you can leave us up to a five-star review please check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast if you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the hubman Lab podcast please put those in the comment section on YouTube I do read all the comments for those of you that haven't heard I have a new book coming out it's my very first book it's entitled protocols an operating manual for the human body this is a book that I've been working on for more than 5 years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to Stress Control protocols related to focus and motivation and of course I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included the book is now available by pre-sale at protocols book.com there you can find links to various vendors you can pick the one that you like best again the book is called protocols an operating manual for the human body if you're not already following me on social media I am huberman lab on all social media platforms so that's Instagram X formerly known as Twitter threads Facebook and Linkedin and on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools some of which overlaps with the content of the hubman Lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the content on the hubman Lab podcast again that's huberman lab on all social media channels if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter our neural network newsletter is a zeroc cost monthly newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as protocols in the form of brief 1 to three page PDFs those protocol PDFs are on things like neuroplasticity and learning optimizing dopamine improving your sleep deliberate cold exposure deliberate heat exposure we have a foundational Fitness protocol that describes a template routine that includes cardiovascular training and resistance training with sets and Reps all backed by science and all of which again is completely zero cost to subscribe simply go to huberman lab.com go to the menu tab up in the upper right corner scroll down to newsletter and provide your email and I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Ari Wallock and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science [Music]