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

26:24Like, you know, is it like notifications preventing us from seeing that we actually have so much that were 100 times better than often we were as a species 50 years ago. Because I feel like a lot of the debates that I see online about climate change, about health, about longevity. It's overwhelming because I feel like people aren't agreeing on the first principles. So let's start with this. 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 we zoom in, if we pull back, there's no better time to be alive as a homo sapient on planet earth than right now.

27:06Now, someone's going to argue right now, they're going to say, no, no, no, no. I mean, according to what metrics, like happiness, health, infant mortality, even as we backslide in this country, being a woman, education, the kind of the calories that we get across the book. But 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 drug store and put something on it. Or we even know that we don't even 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.

27:39So 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, what we do or do not do will dictate, not only the next several years and several decades, potentially the next several centuries. So you've hit it, we're being bombarded by information, most of the information we're attracted to is the negative negativity bias.

28:24UNI, we're going to go back to RNA and 150 ,000 years ago. If we saw this beautiful tree aesthetically and we saw maybe a tree over here that was on fire, UNI would zoom in on the tree on fire and focus on the negative because negative things hurt and kill us. That being said, if UNI run a major media company, UNI both know that the more negative stories that we put out, the more hits we're going to get. The more this media company. Not this media company. I'm just not kidding. But all the other way, 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.

29:06But that negativity bias is still part of us. I think one of the issues that we have to confront as a society is that there are parts of of us, 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, this is Jonathan's elephant in 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 death and despair and the horrific things that we can do to one another.

29:43My personal past on my father's side And I think some of the darkest moments in Homo sapien behavior, and that was not that long ago. So if we want to move into a place that allows us to ask what I think is 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 the elephant and the rider, which you'll do a better job in explaining that I will. No, I love this idea. I mean, we could map it to neural circuits, but I love this idea of high -level concepts and then neural circuits that are very, what Dr.

30:20Paul Conti was on this podcast, psychiatrist, brilliant psychiatrist said, you know, the limbic system, the emotional system doesn't know or care about the clock or the calendar. It just elicits feeling. Yeah. It doesn't care about whether or not that feeling is relevant to the past, the present, or the future. 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 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.

30:59So if I ask someone, what do you want the future to be like for your great grandkids in the 2080s? And they give me a list of kind of bullet points, but they're usually externalized bullet points. shelter, healthcare. Yeah. And then I follow up and, you know, we've done this and other people much smarter than you have done this study. We say, Yacob tropic, NYU, someone who taught me this. How do you want them to feel? That's different, right? This is the Mastios. This is somatic marker hypothesis, 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 amygdala sense of what that is to actually move towards the actions and change in behaviors that you want.

31:44Madison Avenue understands this, marketing understands this. They don't. But the general public tends not to, sorry, keep it tapped you, but also it's was the kids say sorry, not sorry. In the sense that I want to make sure that I highlight something, 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, You know, there's this kind of question, like, are you supposed to feel? Your feelings are you supposed to create new feelings in place of them, especially if they're unpleasant. And it's like, there's no clear answer to that because it's complicated, infinite number of variables.

32:17But she does have this interesting practice whereby 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, it can be very specific, particularly amused. Because 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 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 the go -be -on crying.

33:14It's like curling up in the fetal position, et cetera. You go into the room that's called event, you know, excitement, 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 gonna 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.

33:51I see. So it's not saying I want my kids to be happy. I want them to have no trauma. It's feeling what it would be to have to be happy, no trauma. Right. Because that becomes an anchor. She's 100 % correct. What it does is it, but it places it like a catch anchor. So if you and I were sailors, which we're not, there's a thing called a catch anchor. And a catch anchor is this anchor that you throw 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 future Wallach family, or future society, or future civil and global planetary civilization, if we think about it, that's one thing.

34:48But 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 Seleman says that Freud got it wrong. Freud felt, as Marty says, that emotions were the things that happened in the past that we would use to dwell on, and that was neuroses and anxiety and depression. No, no, no. Emotions are there to help us make better decisions for the future. We are future oriented mammals and species. So what emotions do, it's not meant to be like, oh, I had this terrible breakup, I feel so terrible.

35:29Then I'm gonna go to my therapist, I'm gonna talk about all that stuff that happened in the past. That's one way of looking at it. The other way is your body is telling you in a very, very visceral way, whatever you just did to it that had you in that situation, don't do it again. Because if you do, you're gonna feel a certain way, You know, they did the study where they, at a college campus, they found people who had just been in a kind of a quasi longterm relationship that I got through a breakup. Quasa longterm. In like six months, what I've learned, what I've learned in life is it's important to define the relationship.

35:59Yeah, it's about six months. Okay. And people who had gone through the breakup, they gave, they gave, you know, one group of placebo and another group actually just got a seat of benefit, got Tylenol. And the group that got the acetaminophen actually felt better. Why? Because we actually feel emotions. We actually feel pain. Some of the same circuits are being tripped. And so that says to me that emotions are there to guide future action. So if we can have prosocial emotions, awe and empathy and compassion and this 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.

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37:28For that reason, I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012 and often twice a day, once in morning or mid -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 drinkag1 .com slash Huberman to claim their special offer. Right now they're giving away 5 re -travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's drinkag1 .com slash 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.

38:24We know that's true Except in light of what's immediately pressing. I mean, I would say that stress In the short term, makes us much better thinkers and movers for Saker survival. Yeah. In the long term, it's problematic. But the way that you're describing emotions as a Kedge anchor, as that was called, Kedge with a K. Yeah. Kedge anchor, interesting. As a Kedge 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.

39:15I like that a lot. And again, it maps to some of the work that has largely existed, at least to my knowledge, in popular psychology, whatever you want to call it, self -help, get them a big Martha Beck fan in part because of an exercise that she's included in several, if not all, her books, of this perfect day exercise. You've done this exercise. Now, it's a very interesting exercise. You first sit with your eyes closed and you imagine like really terrible stuff and you experience it in your body and you experience it in your mind and you pay attention to how it feels and it sucks. It doesn't feel good.

39:54Most 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. 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.

40:36And they're not outside the bounds of reality. And those are things that then you write down. and at least in my life have all borne out. So this is something that next to us you do routinely. And when I first heard about this, I was like, okay, this seems like weird, self -hypnosis, self -helpy, woo stuff. Like I'm not like, come on, I'm like, I'm at that time, I'm like, I'm a neuroscience professor. Like I'm not gonna, like you gotta be kidding me. And it's a remarkable exercise. And 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.

41:24Oh, look, the core of my philosophy is in a story that I heard a very long time ago. It comes from the Talmud. That means that the story exists in many cultures. And so there's a man named Hony walking, you know, and he comes across a much older man who's planting a caribtree. And he says to the older man, you know, why are you planting a caribtree? How long will it be until this caribtree bears fruit? Or even has shade? And he goes, I'll be at least 40 years. And he goes, well, why plant it? You know, you won't be around for that. And the old man says, what I was young, I played in the shade of a caribtree.

42:04I ate from the caribtree. So it's my job to plant this caribtree now. This is how societies move forward. This is how we become great is by planting caribtrees whose shade we will never know. And look, I can give you a bunch of exz... You know, the Panama Canal, right? That was a great... You know, but another way that we think about this, we call this cathedral thinking. So now, when we know we're in California, they'll put up a home in three or four days. But back in the day, it took a really long time to build great things. So you go back two, three hundred years ago, even further. And oftentimes, the architect and the original stone basin, who would plant the keystone, would not be alive to see this cathedral or mosque fully built.

42:51That's cathedral thinking. It's doing things whose fruits you will not be around to take advantage of, to reap and to have I was part of your life. And I love it and I love the notion of cathedral thinking, just the visual there or mosque thinking, I went to the blue mosque. And you go, 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, wall. But like, so that word that you felt is what we call awe. 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 did Ari, what did Andy do, they have, oh, it's not because we necessary built cathedrals, it's because we took actions both very small and very large to ensure that they would flourish, that they would have those carib trees.

43:52And I think 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 that 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 our need for attribution. Yeah. Giving up our need for credit. And gosh, this is the opposite of social media. Social media, it's all about getting credit.

44:34And yet in science, where people care a lot about credit while they're alive, and my scientists colleagues hate this, but they know it deeply. It's also the business model of academic science now. 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 discoveries, 20 years out. And I know this because my dad's a scientist, and I know a lot about the scientists that were head of him, and he taught me this early on. He just said, you know, with rare exception, you know, the discoveries are not, you know, no one's gonna say, oh, that's the discovery of so -and -so.

45:13They 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 that brings me around to perhaps a point that's more relevant to everybody, not just scientists, which is that we are all trained to work on these short -term contingencies, reward schedules where we achieve something we get credit. You get an A, you get a trophy. We just came from the Olympic track and field trials in Oregon. It's like podium, bronze over gold. So yes, you're part of a larger legacy, you're building toward a larger legacy in the examples that you give.

45:52but part of it is understanding that you're not going to get credit. You're not going to have your name huge on the side of the 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 country, right? We're very blessed to have that endowment. The buildings have names on the side of them. 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 the building to be immortalized. What's interesting for many reasons, both socio -political but also other reasons, those names change over time.

46:26If people knew that they, if they gave half their wealth and their name might be scraped off a building in 200 years, they might feel differently about it. So, short -term contingencies are important. Then again, we call it Rockefeller Plaza, right? It's Lincoln Center named after a Lincoln. Yeah, probably. Sure it is. You're the New Yorker. And so on and so forth. Or so, like if people, how do we get the everyday person, and I consider myself an everyday person, 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?

47:08Great series of points and questions brought up. So part of what you're talking about is egoic legacy. So you mentioned a building, it can be at any building at any major university, the name is put there on marble, You said 200 years. You went to Berkeley. I went to Berkeley. You went to a bunch of places. But 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 Sproul Plaza. Yes. Sproul Plaza, see to the free speech movement, although now you could argue, not so free speech movement. That's my, I said that.

47:39Yes, I said that. Sproul Plaza, I can't tell you who Sproul was. Do you know who Sproul was? Exactly. I can tell you the arches. I can tell you that it was a free speech movement. and 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, being put in jail, basically anything. Maybe that's still true, but I don't think it is. But I can't tell you who Sproul is. The question of legacy is very important. So Sproul Plaza, let's say 250 years from now, that name will probably, it may or may not be there, the Plaza, but the name, well, maybe it was renamed by someone else.

48:18So for tines of industry that can put down several million dollars and put their name on the side of a building, that's one form of legacy. That is not the every, every person. That being said, if, you know, I have three children. So let's say they continue on at 2 .2 children or whatever, you know, my descendants. In 250 years, Sproul Plaza mayor 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. This is an exciting thought. The exciting is scary thought. So what is going to impact the future? And by the way, if you wanna keep giving money to put your name on the side of buildings, please do so.

49:00Yeah, no, please do that. Please do so. Please do so. I should just make very clear. We'll put the philanthropy at universities and elsewhere. People think it was like, oh, people, it go like a see. Sure also pays for hundreds of thousands of scholarships the opportunity for research and you need to do it 100 percent it's vital It's vital But for the everyday person like you or me if I if if if I want to impact the future Which I do because we're at I'm not the kind of futures where I'm gonna I don't predict the future My job at this point in time I'm manifested in this biological entity called Ariwaleg is not to predict the future.

49:40It's to help folks make better decisions today so that we have better futures in the near term, the medium term in the far off tomorrow's. So what's going to impact those 50 ,000 wallet descendants? Is not going to be anything that I did egoically in terms of getting a recognition. What's going to impact them, and we know this in many ways from across multiple disciplines, So 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 the memes. Susan Blackmore has meme theory, not internet memes where I watch a lot of those.

50:25But true memes, these cultural units that we hand off both laterally and forward to 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 it, how they are with the person who hands them the coffee, the barista or they are with their partner.

51:03How they model those behaviors is going to impact the future in a greater way. I will argue that most of the ways we egoically think about having a legacy. I totally agree and I think, you know, I'm old enough and frankly I'm excited to be old enough that like, hey, 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 people, if raised in a low trauma environment, with adequate resources will behave really well. There are exceptions and there may be sociopaths that are born with really disrupted neural circuitry that they just have to do evil or feel, you know.

51:48But I think it's clear that trauma and challenge can rewire behavior and certainly the brain to create what we see as evil. But I think most people are good. Most people are of genuine goodness. And I do think that we model behavior. I think that etiquette is something that, I guess, as a 49 -year -old person, I guess does that make me middle age? Of middle age, I'll probably live, hopefully, to be about 100. But we'll see. Bullet Buster Cancer. Give it away, guys. It depends on whether or not you read your book fully. Right. Right. There's a response to that that could go either way. I like to think that reading the book fully will extend life as opposed to short in life.

52:36Yes. But if nothing else, maybe it'll cure insomnia. The idea here is that if we're going to invest in being our best selves, one would hope that other people will respond to that the way that you said, you know, that will kind of mirror each other. Good behavior, breeds, good behavior. In my lifetime, I've seen a real 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.

53:15And I have a theory and I'll go through this quickly. 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 Dimagia 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.

53:54And that the way that people get more, let's just say, presence on the show is to do things that are more hyperbolic. Yeah, more outlinked. Like, it's very hard. I've tried and I think managed just to some extent to do so too. 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 and being, you can, but it's much harder than if you're a high friction player because it's less interesting. There's less drama. It takes more attention. But I do think that there are pockets of that. So Lex Readman used to talk about this.

54:37Like is there a social media platform where people are rewarded for being benevolent, for modeling good etiquette because they genuinely like that? And 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 far away in time as well, right, to time stamp down things. So here's my question. Is there a version of social media that is not just on the half -life of like 12 hours, what was tweeted, etc. What was retweeted? Because I would argue that and even the highest virality Social media posts have a half life of about six months to a year.

55:19It 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

55:30So is there a time capsule sort of version of social media because I look on the internet like on YouTube and I would say there are probably three or four YouTube videos namely the Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford in 2015 maybe last lecture by a Randy Pousche before he died of pinker out at cancer maybe Benet 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 book 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 gonna be gone Right, I like to think that these podcast episodes are gonna 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 half -life of any social media post It may not be the case In fact, it's very likely it's not the case.

56:33One 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 the places I visit are these caves in the south of Spain, 300 feet below the surface, that are extremely rare because what these caves have in them side by side are both kind of hand paintings done by both Neanderthals and 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 what that really is storytelling.

57:13And we're trying, 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 when 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 Nancy Bardocky calls horticultural time versus mechanical time.

57:47So when you because that's the way we used to think from 40 ,000 years to the agricultural revolution to a thousand, 10 to a thousand years ago, to probably up until a couple of 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 think in minutes. We barely thought, look, the clock, as we know it, the mechanical clock, as we know it only comes about during the industrial revolution, and especially when we start to have trains, remember the transcontinental? Is it all sundial then? It was Stonehenge, it was Sundial, it was seasons, right?

58:21The way we would think about the future, right? When people say, oh, are you a futurist? Like, people like you have always existed. Now, the idea of the future that is this thing out there that's gonna royal over us is relatively new. Cause up until a couple hundred years ago, are in 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 social structure, but at the advent as we get to be argued on a lot of things that my father did. He was a scientist and there are other domains of life, but yeah, this goes back to modeling behavior, right?

58:58The number one predictor if someone's gonna read the newspapers if their parents read the newspaper. Yeah, so my dad would say you'd open the paper Do you know poke it from behind? Yeah, I want his attention and the bow we can talk about that in a second the attention part and so So 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 if we choose?

59:31All 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 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 the likes and things that the metrics that we use to judge ourselves individually and say what happened to the 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.

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1:00:43To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration in electrolytes, I dissolve one packet of element in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I wake up in the morning, and I drink that basically first thing in the morning. I also drink element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise I'm doing, especially on hot days if I'm sweating a lot and losing water and electrolytes. If you'd like to try element, you can go to drinkelement .com slash huberman spelled drinklmnt .com slash huberman to claim a free element sample pack with the purchase of any element drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement .com slash huberman to claim a free sample pack.

1:01:18I mean one of the reasons I fell in love with biology is that yes we are evolving as a species but I would argue you 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, et cetera. But I get great peace from that. And most of the so -called protocols that I described on the podcast about viewing sunlight, et cetera, circadian rhythmicity, et cetera, has been core to our biology and our well -being 100 ,000 years ago.

1:01:59And very likely it will be core to our biology 100 ,000 years from now. I therefore worry about any technology that shortens up our time scale of motivation and reward. And I use social media. So I am not anti social media by any stretch. In fact, I'm quite pro provided it's kept in check. I'll add Jonathan Heights ideas. I really like those. But let me put this way. If I go to Las 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 addict. But I enjoy playing a little bit of a relator, a little bit of slots.

1:02:47I play do pretty well for whatever reason because I know when to leave probably. But Vegas is all about short -term thinking and short -term reward contingency. It's actually designed in every respect to get you forget that there are these other longer time scales and that's why there's no natural light in most cases. There's no lights, there's no clocks in many of them. The intermittent random intermittent reward schedule that's there is designed to keep you playing. 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. Rewrite likes and responses, in some cases fighting is what people want.

1:03:25They 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 we're walking around with a little slot machine in our pocket all they 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.

1:03:57A friend of mine who's actually an addiction counselor, he said, 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 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?

1:04:32This is what I want to know. How do we get into the metaphorical cave painting scenario? Because 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 pool that is the, the debate about the debate or the debate about the debate about the debate.

1:05:09So, 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 out running and hates social media so much, even though he's, you know, used it to good end to share his message. 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? Is it goat paint like on the side of a cave? Is it write a book? Is it, I mean, how do we do that? And then let's check off the box of like we need to tend our kids.

1:05:55We need to tend our health. We need to get our sleep. We need to get under. Let's just assume that we're taking care of the fundamentals of health and well -being Which doesn't leave a whole lot of 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'm I feel really Impassioned by this because you know I devote my life to this right and I teach biology because I believe it's fundamental in 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 known, we'll care, just like I realized about halfway through my scientific career that sure I was 10 years at Stanford, won some awards, enjoyed the research, enjoyed the day to day, but I realized, okay, I feel good about the research contributions we made, but that I knew that people weren't gonna be like, oh, Huberman discovered this because I had already forgotten the people 32 years ahead, and I know the literature really well.

1:07:04So, like, how do you square these different, these different mental frames? 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 the renaissance and the enlightenment. And as Nietzsche 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.

1:07:49I mean, I've gone on record saying that before. So, and there are many people who believe in God in their afterlife. Yeah. But it still is difficult to navigate the day to day. Well, because I want to separate out 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 there's a lot of 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 larger purpose.

1:08:26Because what ended up happening, look, oftentimes folks will say, well, science destroyed God and destroyed religion because it told us where we came from. We're not coming from seven days where God spun the earth and created the heavens and 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 spirituality What I'm saying is that you're not going to you're not going to argue you can tell God God what to tell us now I'm not going to argue but wait but but but when you just said that science and technology cannot tell us where we need to go No look here.

1:09:23We started off by we started off So the work that I do that this this mindset that I am advocating for I call long path long path sits on three pillars These are the kind of to use your nomenclature. There are three protocols. One, transgenerational empathy, empathy with yourself, empathy with the past, 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 thing that's out there as opposed to what the future really is, which is a verb, it's something that we do.

1:10:00Then 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 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 thousand years, is that these things actually overlap.

1:10:46I come from my parents, that I am here, and now my children, these are not distinct units. There's massive overlaps in terms of the culture, or the emotional, the psychology of what I got from them, what I'm giving to my kids. But what ends up happening in a lifespan bias society, the one that we exist in right now, is we have lost the tell us, we have lost the ultimate aim or goal or purpose for our species, for our civilization on this planet. I'm not gonna tell you what that is. What I am gonna 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?

1:11:25Do I matter? Will people know who I am 200 years from now? Well, my 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 in our religious. Yes. So does that mean that they're immune from this like fusion? 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 coercion and control.

1:12:05Not in essence. Not in essence. Not in essence. Not for every major religion. Yes. I would say for every religion, like the essence of it 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. That's why I know a lot about the business model. You referenced it earlier, right? Science, it's no longer like, you know, pure Medici -type science, where you're doing these things and it's like, it's published, it's parishes.

1:12:40There's business models can you come and take it from the lab to the, can we do 100 percent? And that is part of where we are. What I'm asking for when we have a conversation about our toes 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 be from for kind of when they rise up to when they go extinct. We're in the first third of this ballgame, right? That's reassuring. Yeah, we're in that world. Because they keep hearing about, you know, the fact that we're almost at, so we're about a third of the way through. We're in the bottom of the third.

1:13:11Goodness. Well, you finally said something that gives me, I'm just kidding. There are lots of things that you've said give me confidence in our future. So because I'm notably that you're talking about this starting trip, but I'm going to compliment you. So maybe you'll be talking about that most notably that, you know, I think you're the first person outside of the sub branch of neuroscience, which is a very small sub branch, people that study time perception to really call to people's consciousness that the human brain can expand or contract its time perception. And we do this all day long and high salience, high stress, high excitement, life and thinking shrinks the aperture.

1:14:02It 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 the opposite of what the Buddhist traditionally said, which was to be present in order to see the timelessness. This is why I'm a big fan of the, I forget the name, it's Ra will have to add this in the the Asatoma 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.

1:14:42Impossible to do when we're under stress trying to figure out how we're going to get some place in traffic to pick up the kids so they're not waiting outside the school alone. Impossible. You just can't, the two deep breaths and the long exhale, it works to bring your level of autonomic rouse 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.

1:15:18Is 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 a time about the notion of time capsules I've been keeping a time capsule for a long time that 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 Someone put some candy in there or something. It's kind of a cool concept, right?

1:15:53But Social media to me does not seem like a time capsule I feel like it's just gonna get turned over, turned over, turned over. What are the real time capsules of human experience? So you said religion, religious doctrine, Bible, Koran, Torah being the big three. And there are others, of course. But those are the big three. Bible, Koran, Torah, those are big three time capsules. Okay. Then we've got literature, music, poetry, visual art. So paintings, drawings, sculpture. What else do we have? So let's bring this down to the individual. Like what I, what I practice, what one of my practices is, or I'll go through a couple of them.

1:16:38And so one of them, if you come to my home, which hopefully you'll come over to your home. Yeah, but you know, it's been a while. It's been a while. That was a complaint. That was, you know, I haven't invited you, or you just, I don't know, we'll talk about it afterwards. Whenever I make a demand hat, and I have a hard time getting out of a man hat. And that's true. So we have a shelf with a bunch of family photos. And 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 take care of this? There's a blank photo frame.

1:17:16Just blank. Those, you know, I have three kids, they're young. but that blank photo frame represents my grandkids or future generations. It's just something that I can immediately see what I think about the decisions. That's what I said long path is a mindset. So all these complicated things. It's also a mantra. So when I get into an argument with my wife or wherever conversation with you or anything like that, and I immediately have the stimulus or rousal response where I wanna act in the short term, but I actually wanna see the bigger picture. And again, this is highly self -refrential. I understand that.

1:17:50I'll just say long path. I'll say like, 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 gonna impact that. How far is there 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 would argue that the shift from printed photos, largely from printed photos to electronic photos, has made this problematic.

1:18:29You know, 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 that none around, in case your next relationship, would understandably take issue with that. I'm not speaking from experience here. But how far back do your photos go? It's interesting. The photos of my grandparents who both perished in the Holocaust were saved by my father who was in World War II, fought with the Jewish Underground, made his way through Europe to Cuba to Mexico, where eventually met my mom and I was born.

1:19:03The photos that we have, he had kept in his wallet for several decades and he had them reconstructed and turned in. That's as far back as we go. So grandparents. Yeah. Yeah, okay, and then you're married, you have three kids, and then you have this empty photo frame. Empty photo frame. And you're same age as me, you're 50, you're 49. 49. Thank you. But you seem to be in good health. Yes. And seemingly young, right? Yeah, you have energy. You've always had a lot of energy. Yeah. You used to call yourself Ari Ferrari. You said you were like a Ferrari. That's what I mean. I don't think this is a nice idea.

1:19:39I know each other since we were little kids. He's always had a ton of energy. Actually, he heard 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 with treadmill 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. 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 the sense that this big lump of cells will probably not meet my great -grandchildren.

1:20:20But we'll meet them. I'm at 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 what I'm on work calls, right? You know, nothing confidential. And 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 gonna 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 four generations out that 50 ,000 descendants that I talked about earlier, 250 years from now, I will meet them, I will be with them.

1:21:06They may not know my name, who I am, but hopefully the way they treat a stranger or they interact with their partners comes about how I did it, that modeled behavior, that transmission. Yeah, I get it. And it's interesting because I think that, well, and you're on the internet. So people will see you on the internet. Probably at least, you know, I think 30, 50 years out, if you Google your name or whatever it's called at that point, Google it. I get in trouble whenever I say Googling people go, why don't you talk about difference? Because that's the one everyone uses. Unless you use duck .co, because you're afraid of what people might have.

1:21:43So when someone comes up with a, like a truly better one, maybe they'll get replaced. But meanwhile, Google, 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 that I learned from a friend. He has this, your life in weeks, I think it's called, and it's this, you know, you fill in char, where you put your birthday, you put your predicted lifespan.

1:22:22So for me, I put 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, that you fill in these little squares. And I did this morning, actually, and, you know, I'm not quite halfway through, but I'm about halfway through. And it's an interesting thing to see your life in that representation. Oh, wow. 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.

1:22:55People have ever waited for me on an appointment. No this. I don't I track I'm very oriented in space not well oriented in time. So The the problem with these charts is that Or photos on the shelf I would argue Is they have great utility, but the problem is that They're not in the forefront of our consciousness Throughout the day, right like I filled out that chart. I didn't even think about it again until now and 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 gotta go left here even though I wanna go right.

1:23:33This is the right thing for my... The bigger picture. The bigger picture. The bigger picture. The bigger picture. So, is there a way? Is there maybe a technology that actually serves us to anchor us to best decision making for a given best time bin, we would call it, in neuroscience, best time -bending mode of time -bending for a given decision. I think you asked yourself a question. 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?

1:24:10How will descendants look back on this decision? Go left or right, that's gonna elevate you. Look, I talked about that. You talked about, you know, deleting photos and stuff like that, so I'll tell you about the work. One of my advisory boards, a guy named Hal Hershfield's smart, great guy to use CLA. There's a lot of future U work. So what he did was, and I'll do the short version of this, it's like a bunch of people into an FMRI, functional MRI to see who kind of wear the flow is. And he asked him, he did a series of questions where he's like, think about yourself right now and one part of your brain lit up.

1:24:44And then he goes, okay, I want you to think about this celebrity. I think he used Matt Damon and Natalie Portman and another part of their brain lit up. And they 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 got 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 took a photo, ages them, and then puts them into a 3D virtual reality.

1:25:22And you're in a room and at one point, and you don't know this is gonna happen, as you walk across the room, you see a mirroring, you look at yourself in the mirror, and it's a photo of you but aged 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? It brings them back, I think two weeks later, and 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.

1:25:51So the question is, not only are we disconnected from the future, my future descendants, I'm disconnected from my future self. So what I've done, and you'll see this in the show, it's scary because I look just like my dad and you'll always look like your dad when you do this, is even though we've been and bagging on social media, you can go on snap or other places where they'll age you, right? It'll make you look 10, 15 years older and you can send it to your partner or everybody lasts. So I took a screenshot and I proved what it was as opposed to saying you look great. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's like, oh my God.

1:26:26And so, so 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 is 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, do I floss or not? You know, you get a end of the night, you wanna just brush your teeth and go to bed, huh? No, it needs a floss at night. You need to floss at night. We did an episode on Neural Health.

1:26:59Yeah. I learned from the dentist. It's important, the most important way to take care of future self is flossing by the way, just to be clear, I've learned this for many people. He's actually true. No, it's true. So key for brain and body health. The dentist are gonna thank you. But we don't do it, but if you look at your mouth 20 years from now, staying 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, you're gonna do it. This is what housework has showed. So that's another thing that I've done is just look at that, look at that image of future you and connect with it.

1:27:31That's about having compassion for yourself. That's part of this kind of transgenerational empathy component. The one thing I want to circle back on because we could quickly fly past it is this idea of futures thinking versus the singular future. Yeah, I definitely want to touch on that. Can I just ask you a question real quickly before her? Of course. This notion of, 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 really get your mind into the reality that if you survive, you're going to get older by definition.

1:28:11And that person needs care and an environment. And your kids are going to grow up too. We know this. Okay. So that's all obvious. I feel like barring accident or injury or disease. Most people have a kind of intuitive sense of how long they're going to live. And the reason I say this is, you know, I remember when Steve Jobs was alive because I was a post -doc in Palo Alto then and would see him occasionally around Palo Alto. And then, you know, read the Walter Isaac's 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.

1:28:51And in some sense, may have justified being a little bit outrageous at times and a little 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 a few people dislike but I think most people celebrate him for it. I guess he had some sense of how long he was going to live and then one point maybe that sense was inflated and then boom your dad died 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 form on this notice that you're going to be dead in four months.

1:29:32Like, like, didn't shape your thinking about the about the future. I mean, my dad's now, I'm not saying this as a, I mean, no, it's interesting that there may have been a distinct advantage, of course, not to his dying, of course. But to the idea that it really creates this insurgency 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. Yeah. Really early. And for those whose parents are still alive and seem to be vigorous, maybe they feel less of a sense of urgency, which sounds wonderful.

1:30:07Parents are alive, vigorous. That's a blessing, but if it prevents you from living your life in a way that's really linked to your futures, that's not good. So do you think that we have an intuitive sense or an unconscious sense of how long we are likely to live, like a kind of a range? because Steve kind of argued that in some of his writings and speaking. So look, 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 alter it for the better is the fact that it's 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.

1:30:51In 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 Pillars Surprise for it. And Becker's contention was that we are the only species that at a very early age recognizes that we are only here for a short period of time, but more than anything at one point in time, we will die. We will cease to exist. And it was Becker's contention further that everything, religion, culture, laptops, convertibles, everything that we create is our way of pushing back the very understanding that at one point we will cease to exist and it horrifies us.

1:31:28I could not agree more and I'm so, so grateful that you mentioned this book and this idea from Becker because I would argue that every addiction, every single addiction is based in a fear of death. And then attempt to shorten the timescale of thinking, shorten the timescale of rewards, or shorten the time scale of everything to avoid that reality. And it's the reality that we learn of at a very early age, intuitively, because we see death around us. More and more now in America, especially in the Western world, we push back from death. We do everything we can to avoid, even just even old people, that we put them in old age homes.

1:32:08It used to be we lived together, right? 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 the show that I did, I did something, people are very confused. It's like, you know, the show about the future, be fishing for the future, everyone's like, oh, you're gonna go see all this cool technology.

1:32:48But that's part of what we do. But in the middle of the show, an episode four, I go to the High Mountain Desert and 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 doula. And what she does, you know, mostly time when we think of a doula, we think of someone helping birth, a child in 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 you can find these online.

1:33:25Where you literally go through a meditation where you go from breathing to cessation 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 Because I literally am the one who picked up the phone from the hospital at two 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 and I said this is his son because 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 It's his relate stage of cancer.

1:34:01Your 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 mortality very, very abruptly. Other people have their own early brushes with death. I would argue that there is a certain level and you touched on this of emancipation when you've come close. 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 Ernest Beckarian way of trying to push back mortality because you no longer give a shit Because you've now you now know where it's all gonna go and you've seen it As a society in the West in America we do the exact opposite of that We inject things into our body and 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.

1:35:07Now that being said, you go to Japan, 90 % of the companies that are over 1000 years old on planet earth right now are in Japan. So part of it is our culture, part of it is different cultures, 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 wanna keep and what I wanna let go, and then what I wanna transmit to the next generation. That larger purpose, that larger tell us is what's missing right now, that I think we need back in Western society, not just so that we're grounded and happy, that's yes and we're 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.

1:36:05Because 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. to have a better life, but 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.

1:36:45So 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 will do that, we can put a link to it and show no captions. Put a reminder that you will get older. You are getting older in this very moment and try and live for the well -being of that person and the people around them and look at it. So that creates a protocol for the self. How do we protocol the future setting, 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.

1:37:27Great question. Before we go into that, let's double click on the individual incentive. So we talked about the aging photo that you can do. 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. So you can do this at longpath .org. You can find future me website. You have a, you have a, you have a, yeah, yeah, it's the number one tool that we use. So when I give, when I give talks, I give shockingly people have me come and talk to large groups. No, shockingly. What I say to them is, you know, we'll kind of go through a version of a different conversation like this.

1:38:05I'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. This is the change occurs not when you receive the letter, but when you actually write it. Because you're actually thinking in a way about future you in a way that you normally don't, which is who's gonna receive this letter?

1:38:38Where do I want them to be? And what I find more often than not is people come up to me afterwards and go to write, I never even thought who do I wanna be in five or 10 years? Like what's that arc of what I want to kind of connect to what am I optimizing for 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 right a letter to your future self and what is the letter include Dear Andy dear Ari and then whatever you want to put in right this is a one -to -one Private conversation with your future self.

1:39:14What 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? You can't beat 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 aspiration 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. So I was in high school, I ran track. And I started off by doing the 100, very kind of in an individual sport.

1:39:56And then eventually, as I went forward, I started running the 4x100, which is a relay race. And what I learned from my coach, Coach Ted Tillion, was that the 4x100, 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 connected to your future, but what it's really also helping you do is realize that life is not a hundred yard dash. It's actually a relay and you're carrying a baton that was handed to you that you were now going to hand off.

1:40:33And I'm arguing that we right now, what I call, we're in this intertidal moment between what was and what will be as a planetary civilization. We are in this transition zone and what we do or do not do in this intertidal, in this transition zone with the baton that is homo -saping planetary, flourishing, culture, it's going to matter much more than we think it does in the current moment of social media pains. So that's touching 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.

1:41:19Because in the erasure of God, in the erasure of the afterlife, in what was given to us by religion for hundreds thousands of years, So I'm 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 not. It can be, we can be in those three categories.

1:41:54We 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. Talk about this a lot, like the kind of, you can tell, but my bias here, like, I don't say even 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 come and enter stellar species. I'm more focused on who we are because I've met like you. I've met great hearts and minds and I think that as 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.

1:42:42So instead of there being like 100 great heroes in the world who are just so heartfelt, you know, like the Dalai Lama or Mother Teresa or even Einstein, that that could actually are those three still in touch or they've been canceled yet? No, they're still with us. They're still with me. But look, even when you get into their, look, you asked one of the ways, 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 in as saintly as we think they are. And those, right, in the autobiographies are of course through their own life.

1:43:13Through their own life. So the biographies give you, or you read their letters to their lovers or to their partners and you're like, yeah, there's kind of, there's no kind of an asshole, right? But at the end of the day, if we as 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 billion, 3 billion, whatever the population of homo sapiens is on planet over the next several centuries or millennia.

1:43:52We wanna 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 Andrew Huberman is doing is a work and Ari Wawkes 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 world of instant bind 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 don't believe that everything that happens on social media, that we buy, or the pleasure that we get in our lifespan or day is bad.

1:44:31I don't think I'm a capitalist too. What I think is that it's just one, it is but one time window of kind of operations. Yeah, there's things. I just think it's good to have flexibility, right? It's sort of like in nutrition, they talk about metabolic flexibility. It's not about balance about harmony. How are we in harmony with the future? That is what I'm advocating for. I love it. I also know that a lot of people love it, even if they don't know they love it, meaning they perhaps haven't heard it framed the way that you describe it in your book on your show and today. But I think a lot of people just are hoping that the super high achievers, right?

1:45:12The Steve Jobs is the Elon's the I don't know how people feel about politicians nowadays, but you know But the people building technologies who seem to really care about the future I mean say what you want about Elon but the guy is building stuff for the now and for the future. Yeah, I mean he's doing it That they will take care of it for next generations. Right? Just like there were those the Edison's and the Einstein's and the you know, you have to be careful with names these days because almost everyone has something associated with them where you're gonna trigger someone but I'll just be you know, relaxed about and say like I would even say like a 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 ourselves and our planet, that kind of thing.

1:46:03So, you know, those people ushered in the life that I've had and I feel pretty great about that. So, many people are probably saying, okay, make sense for my family, but, you know, what do I have to contribute? And you give the example of the fact that children are always observing, they carry forward the patterns and the traits 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 and fractured homes than there were previously As a consequence, there's also been a fracturing of the kind of collective celebration of Holidays like the things that have anchored us through time are Happening less frequently now many of these have become commercialized, but that was always the case You know, people are getting Christmas presents one way or another.

1:47:03So, um, You know, do you think that the the kind of fracturing of the family unit has contributed to some of this lack of Let's just call it longer path Thinking and decision making look I think it's the the fracturing of the institutions that have been with us for the past several hundred years that is leading to An exponential rise in short term behavior. Okay So you mentioned religion, maybe for a moment, we just talk about universities. These days, in part because of the distrust of science, and in part because of the distrust of government, and in part because of the distrust in traditional media, there's more and more ideas being kicked around that formal education is not as valuable as it used to be.

1:47:53And people always cite the examples of the Mark Zuckerbergs and 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 with rare exception. Unless there's like a mental health issue or some or physical health issue that needs to be tended to because nowhere else in life except perhaps the military is there such a clear designate set of steps that can take you from you know, point A to point B with a credential that you can leverage in the real world for builds.

1:48:31And 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 deep distrust. So we are having a harder time relying on them to make good decisions. You saw a lot of presidents of universities, major universities, fired recently, including Stanford. There I said it happened, but also Harvard and other places for different reasons. And fired might be not the correct term, they decided to resign, whatever it was. They're no longer there, they have new ones in. And so there's a lot of distrust.

1:49:11So what can we rely on? Like if it's not, if people are having less faith in religion, less faith in academic institutions, less faith and like what do we got? We got really good in academia, 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 through the Enlightenment, especially well, right as long as into the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment gave us back this idea of a new meta -narrative based on rationality and logos and the ability to kind of understand the world by breaking it down into its component parts So that science fast -forward several hundred years.

1:49:52And 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, sort of like declaration of values. It's one thing to say, which is scary for a lot of people because it's one thing to say that doesn't work That's no good. That's no good. It's easy to be a critic. Yeah. What you're describing has incredible parallels to what to health Yeah, like you know when I started the podcast and even before when I was posting on social media was during the Lockdowns and it was like all this fear about everything and I said listen like I can't solve this larger issue related to What may or may not be going on?

1:50:38But 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 potential solutions, some tools, some zero cost tools. So a lot of the backbone of the human lab podcast is about the things you do more so than the things you don't do. So what you're describing is essentially a field that consists of like breaking things down, but isn't offering solutions. So it sounds very similar. And I think that people love potential solutions. Even if one acknowledges, look, this might not all of every sleep issue, it very well could make positive ground towards some of it or make it 50 % better, 20 % better, in some cases 100 % better.

1:51:19And of course, those for whom the tools don't work and they need to go through more extreme measures. But I hear you saying that religion provided the solutions not just pointing to problems. People are not looking at that as much anymore. the big institutions like 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 new cycle design, 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 a mess.

1:51:57And 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. Let's remember two parents, kids, etc. Which is not by no means a requirement to call something a family, but so like, so are you saying that we all have to look at it like it obviously starts with the individual, but that every that part of the work of being a human being now and going forward is to learn this futures approach. We have to be future conscious. We, but again, this goes back to the transgenerational component.

1:52:31We have to critically assess where we came from and why we're at this point. So we talk about the nuclear family. Let's, the idea that your children would be, quote unquote, sleep train and put into another room is relatively new. That's from the Victorian era where you would put your kids in another room. Because if you go back to most indigenous cultures, everyone slept together. And this happened for thousands of years and the kids. A big pile. Yeah. Or in one big room or in a long house. They're like piglets, but they definitely all slept together. Look, everyone can look. I'm going to say this in a non -judgmental way, but it's going to sound very judgmental.

1:53:11I walk down the street sometimes and I see kids in strollers being pushed by a seemingly healthy adult. The kid is detached and there in this kind of this buggy, which comes from 1718th 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 this. This is the baby beorn thing. Well, the baby beowing, put the baby on front of you, but it's facing out.

1:53:45When you really wrap them with like a 20 yard wrap, it's skin to skin, right? And look, and there's a reason, like everything, there's a reason for everything. You know, bait for a human baby to come out of the mother as Cognitive intellectually and physically ready as a baby chimpanzee would take 18 months of gestation But we only do nine. You know why? Right? Well, you we do it because our brains got so big because of all that protein because of our and Andy We're hunting together using our perfection earlier on this story that the baby has to come out at nine months because when we went from walking out all fours to being bipedal, the female pelvis closes, and there's only so much room for that baby to come out.

1:54:28So they come out early. Yeah, it's the brain had completed development internally. You'd have only still born. I mean, presumably there was a branch of our earlier version of species that many mothers and babies died in childhood because of this. They were deselected. That's not the problem. And so we found the optimal balance of nine months, roughly, right? But what that means is the baby has to be attached and close to the mother because it's totally helpless. The point is that so much of what we do, we don't critically examine. So you're talking about the breakdown of the family structure. I would argue that breakdown isn't happening now.

1:55:04That breakdown happened when we decided to move from you know, tribes and clans of raising children and moving to a Victorian area mindset where we take the grand... You know, there's very few species on planet Earth that after the female 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 aforementioned early, early, birthing. But maybe it's also the propagation of story, as you said earlier, that can inform better decisions. So we need stories. And wisdom is like spoken cave paintings, basically.

1:55:44Yeah, 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 or 20 of ants and uncles and around Look we did pretty well for the purse 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 peritannical beliefs now. We're at this point in this intertinal moment where if they critically examine Why is it we do what we do? So 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?

1:56:17And your question was, well, why do they want to do that? What's the incentive structure? And I'm arguing that the incentive structure for us to do that 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 often asked this question, you know, God, how do we get so messed up? And what is it gonna look like? Wait, are we so messed up? Because you said we're about a third of the way through our things are better than ever. Yeah, so I get the question like, how is it that we messed up?

1:56:55And I always say we didn't mess up. We're actually doing much better. Look, 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 Hundred, are the Maze Runner. A world that has gone bad. I understand, we talked about this earlier, there's the negativity bias, people are gonna be attracted to reading about those things. Kids read that stuff now. Oh my, those are the best sellers. The best sellers are all these dystopian. There's always a love interest and a teenage thing, but it's always, the backdrop is always dystopia.

1:57:34And 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 a... 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 hit the nail on the head, are the stories about what if we get it right? What we call protopia. So, you know, utopia is this perfect world that always collapses on itself. It's really dystopian -a -size. It's the Stopea we talked about as a terrible world. A protopia, this idea put forth by Kevin Kelly, is a better tomorrow, not perfect, but one we're making progress.

1:58:13So it's unbelievably important, and this is how I'm answering your question from a few minutes ago, that we start setting stories in protopias in better tomorrows. In tomorrows, we're not everything is perfect, but where we have made significant progress. Now it won't be perfect, there'll still be divorces and maybe murderers in Mayhem. But if we start back dropping our future visions in worlds that are better than they are today, I would argue that will be the stories that start acting as a catch to help pull us through this narrow moment of flux and chaos that is this intertidal. How do we do it at scale?

1:58:50Because I think a lot of people listening to this will say, okay, that all sounds great. Like I for one say, you know, 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 empathy for self -empathy for others Getting some control over the You know contraction and dilation of your time window Making sure that you know what you take a carry yourself, but you take care of the the future generations as well like for that empty frame, the now empty frame. And then moving from dystopia to protopia, that all sounds great.

1:59:30But I think a lot of people might think, okay, well, at best I could do that for myself and the people that I know. It's gonna be hard to do that 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 graduate students when they get their first round of data. You go, okay, well, the data oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes you say, oh, the data are cool. Like, if it continues this way, that'd 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 a nice solid paper.

2:00:09Uh -huh. That your three reviewers and maybe 20 other people were read. And you're gonna 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 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 its luck and it doesn't always work out anyway, but But what we're saying here is how hard people are willing to work is often related to what they feel the potential payoff will be.

2:00:55If they can sense the payoff, and by the way, I love the protocols that you offer, the empty frame, the journaling to future self, this notion of time capsuling your present thinking into the future, the aging of self, these are very actionable things I plan to do them, and I think they're very valuable. But if I understand correctly, you are interested in creating a movement of sorts where many, if not everybody, is thinking this way because the other model is, okay, well the Elon's will take care of it for us. And I'm, or the, 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.

2:01:34So, how does one create a, like a, like a reward system or a social media platform or how does one join up with other people who are trying to do this? So the question you're getting at is 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 optimize the self? And I mean that in a good way, not in a selfish way. How do we make ourselves better? That's where you have to start. I'm advocating for how do we optimize society? How do we optimize civilization? This is a clear case where unlike when we 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.

2:02:30So, at Infinitum, if we think about, just for example, how many listeners and viewers are of this podcast, millions, right? And how many people they interact with within their closest sphere and you go out, right? So right now, your listeners have the potential to live and act long pathian 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 allow for more mass flourishing in the future for generations to come. If you think about your listeners and how they interact and how they model behavior, your potential and their spheres, you're at 30, 40, 50 million people, right?

2:03:16That's a very, very large number. And what we know about social emotional contagion is that these things are contagious. They are memes. This is Susan Blackmore's work. That's how it scales. It actually is one of those things where you're not going to, you know, just add powder and it all of a sudden will create this, this optimal future for everyone. It's only one person it does. We all have a role to plan it. It's like literally what I would want is anyone who's listening or watching this when they're undoing it, take a few minutes and think about 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?

2:04:02What 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, it's going to be the first time they're thinking about this or maybe they think about it for years, even in the smallest interactions they start doing it, and this gets into the kind of the Santa Fe Institute and complexity theory, this stuff starts to actually reverberate. That's how we do it. We don't need a march for long -termism. We don't need bumper stickers. Thank you. There will be no bumper stickers.

2:04:34There 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 brilliant podcaster, whatever it is that you do do it with the intention and recognition that you are modeling a way of being in the world that has ramifications and reverberations beyond this current moment. And 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, something we know, we call AI right now, is already, or at some point, ingest the Heuberman lab podcast.

2:05:23Yeah, we have one. We have a Heuberman lab AI. There you go. We haven't advertised it very heavily, but it's there. You can ask me questions. So it's pretty good. it, it sounds a bit like me. The jokes are dry. The dry and not funny. I'll get to say it mostly funny, but you'll get it. I'll give you some more. But eventually that will percolate out. So at the speed of things are going three or four years from now, this very conversation, how we're mod, what I learn 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 them.

2:06:09And going back to the higher education example for a second, I think higher education, like many institutions, as AI, what we call that, fully comes online, it's 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 to receive information will start to dissipate from higher education. But what higher education will start to do, and I think we'll have to focus on, is not just the intellectual and the cognitive, but also the psychological and the emotional core of who you are and helping you develop that.

2:06:47Well, amen to that. You know, there was a former guest on this podcast, or there was a guest on this podcast previously, Dr. Wendy Suzuki's Professor at NYU. I think now she's the dean of Arts and Sciences. I think it's the correct title. And she's trying to bring some of her laboratory's data on the value of even very brief meditations to stress management in college first to help students manage the stress that is college being in your early 20s. But I think there's a larger theme there which is to try and teach emotional development, to teach self -regulation because many people don't get that.

2:07:27I mean, you know, or they get it, but then there are big gaps. And I love the way that you're describing this. Basically, it's a lens. If I may, it's a lens into human experience. It's very dynamic. and is really in concert with the fact that the human brain has the capacity for this dynamic representation of time, like focus on, like 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 greater good, and then the ability to dilate your consciousness in the temporal sense and to solve for things that are more long -term.

2:08:07Make these investments towards the future. I wonder though, you know, How can we incentivize people to be good, to do good, and how can we incentivize people to do this on a backdrop of a lot of short -term carrots and short -term horizons? I think you've given us some answers, and they're very powerful ones, such as the aging self -image exercise. I'm journaling into the future, writing to future self, the empty frame, exercise, linking looking 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?

2:08:52Should we all be reading more biography? Should we, if I look back through history, it's both dark and light. Like, is there anything else that you really encourage people to do to be the best version of themselves for this life and the ones that come next. I've touched on this. We need to examine in ourselves why is it we do and are the way that we are. 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 leave church on Sunday, ride on horseback into the big city, vote on Tuesday and ride back before market day on Wednesday.

2:09:48So glad you were gonna tell me it's not because then people can still watch Monday night football. Now this is long before Monday night football. And so I think why we vote on Tuesday, it's a metaphor for so much of who we are and have become as individuals and as a society. I'm a big fan of cognitive behavioral therapy of CBT. I think partially because what it does is it has this look at one of 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 Y Tuesday's.

2:10:34So what are those stories that you've inherited? Some of them are going to be macro social. Like you are defined by the society by what you own, by the badge on your car that says how successful you are. That's a story. That's a story that's been fed to us. There are other stories that are very personal. These are stories that can sort of 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 ourselves. Who am I?

2:11:10Why 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 species on spaceship earth, you know, 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, 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 noun, not as a thing that I'm heading towards or that's going to tumble over me, but that I'm going to create.

2:12:04And those stories may be very in intra personal, 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 were great ancestors. I love it and I also just want to highlight the importance of record keeping 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 are probably 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 not feeling like it will be of any significance.

2:13:07But what I've learned from you today is that it starts with the self and then it radiates out to the people we know and that maybe we cohabitate with, but even if we don't cohabitate with anybody, it radiates out from us and that it is important to get a sort of time capsule going so that people can feel like they have some significance in the future that they may never 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, that we've highlighted in the time timestamps, of course, as tools, as protocols.

2:13:57I 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 you've done a solid, 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. We don't tell people what to do, but we give them the option for action. I'm certainly going to adopt some of these protocols. And also, we're taking the time to come to talk with us today, share your wisdom, and share what you're doing in many ways. Well, it is not in many ways.

2:14:32It is absolutely part of what you're describing, which is putting your best self toward how things can be better now and in the future. It's also great pleasure to sit down with somebody I've known for so many years and learn from you. So it's a it's a real honor and a privilege and I know everyone else listening to and watching this feels the same way So thank you so much. Thank you for having me Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Ari Wallach 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 are enjoying this podcast Please subscribe to our YouTube channel That's a terrific zero cost way to support us in addition Please subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and Apple and on both Spotify and Apple.

2:15:21You 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 Huberman 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 five years, and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience.

2:15:53It covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control protocols related to focus and motivation. Of course, I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by pre -sale at ProtocolsBook .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.

2:16:28And on all those platforms, I discuss science and science -related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the content on the Hubertman Lab podcast. Again, that's Hubertman Lab on all social media channels. If you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter, our neural network newsletter is a zero -cost monthly newsletter that includes podcasts summaries as well as protocols in the form of brief one -to -three -page PDFs. Those protocol PDFs are on things like neural plasticity and learning, optimizing dopamine, improving your sleep, deliberate cold exposure, deliberate heat exposure.

2:17:02We 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 HubermanLab .com, go to the menu tab up in the upper right corner, scroll down a 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 Wallach. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.