Emily Falk

And then we meet with each other a week later.

And only a very small number of the things that were actually on the list maybe have been accomplished.

And it's not that anybody has been slacking off or anybody had bad intentions, but just that everything always takes longer than you think.

And then other things come up.

And sometimes there's 20 things that didn't make it onto that original to-do list, but that were really important in the moment.

Yeah, I mean, what I hear is somebody who has tried to do something in the past, right?

He set a goal and then other things that he hadn't accounted for come up.

And so he gets back together with Tammy.

And clearly he's done this multiple times because he's made a video and tried to protect himself against it in the future, right?

So we do this all the time.

We try to talk to ourselves or make resolutions or write down ideas about how our future selves should behave.

Yeah, I mean, it's an idea that goes back for centuries, millennia, and it's also an idea that's represented in all kinds of modern media.

And like the clips you played earlier, it's funny because we can relate to it, right?

It's funny because it's so common that none of us is thinking, why are Chandler and Rachel interested in eating more of the cheesecake?

Or, you know, well, Ron should just be able to stop himself because so many of us have been in that kind of situation before.

The value system is a constellation of brain regions that handle our choices, the choices that we're making consciously between drinking a milkshake or not drinking a milkshake, between whether we're going to go out on a date with somebody or stay home and deal with our emails.

And the value system calculates these choices in what neuroscientists call a value calculation.

Yeah, basically, for each of our choices, it's identifying what are the different things that we're choosing between.

It's assigning a subjective value to each of those different choices that depends on our current context, our past experiences, our future goals.

And then based on that subjective value, that subjective reward that it's anticipating from each of the choices—