In this episode, my guest is Ari Wallach, most recently an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs and host of a new TV series titled A Brief History of the Future. We discuss the importance of learning to project our understanding of ourselves and our goals into the future, both for our own sake and for future generations. We also explore how this fosters a sense of unity and community within our species. We examine how technology and modern society influence our perception of time and our ability to make decisions in a fast-paced, reward-driven environment that leads to our best possible future. Additionally, we discuss how the dismantling of traditional institutions has altered people's sense of purpose. We outline protocols to cultivate long-term thinking, connect with core values, and define a deep sense of purpose. This episode provides listeners with actionable tools to merge short- and long-term thinking in ways that create a positive, lasting impact on ourselves, society, and the planet. Access the full show notes for this episide at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman David Protein: https://davidprotein.com/huberman Helix Sleep: https://helixsleep.com/huberman ROKA: https://roka.com/huberman LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Ari Wallach 00:01:58 Sponsors: David, Helix Sleep & ROKA 00:06:13 Mental Time Travel; Technology & Present 00:15:46 Technology; Tools: Transgenerational Empathy; Bettering Today 00:22:00 Tool: Empathy for Others 00:26:09 Empathy for Future Generations, Emotion & Logic 00:31:48 Tool: Emotion to Guide Action 00:36:50 Sponsor: AG1 00:38:02 Tools: Perfect Day Exercise; Cathedral Thinking, Awe & Future Generations 00:43:52 Egoic Legacy, Modeling Behavior 00:51:13 Social Media, Time Capsule, Storytelling 01:00:06 Sponsor: LMNT 01:01:18 Short-Term Thinking; Life Purpose, Science & Religion 01:09:23 Longpath, Telos, Time Perception 01:15:19 Tools: Photo Frames; Behavior & Legacy; Life in Weeks 01:23:02 Tool: Visualizing Future You 01:30:17 Death, Western Society 01:36:20 Tool: Writing Letter to Future Self 01:41:01 Society, Future Harmony 01:47:03 Traditional Institutions, Family, Future Consciousness; “Protopia” 01:58:48 Tool: Behavior & Modeling for the Future 02:08:11 Tool: “Why Tuesdays?”, Examining Self 02:14:58 Zero-Cost Support, YouTube, Spotify & Apple Follow & Reviews, Sponsors, YouTube Feedback, Protocols Book, Social Media, Neural Network Newsletter Disclaimer & Disclosures
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Ari Wallach. Ari Wallach is an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs.
He is also the host of a new TV series, A Brief History of the Future. Today's discussion focuses on perhaps one of the most important questions that any and all of us have to ask ourselves at some point, which is how is it that we are preparing this planet for the future? Not just for our children, if we happen to have children or want children, but for all people.
The human brain, as we know, is capable of orienting its thoughts and its memories to the past, to the present or to the future. But few people actually take the time to think about the future that they are creating on this planet and in culture, within our families, et cetera, for the next generation and generations that follow them.
Ari Wallach is an expert in this topic, and he has centered his work around what he calls long path labs, which is a focus on long-term thinking and coordinated behavior at the individual, organizational, and societal level in order to best ensure the thriving of our species. And while that may sound a bit aspirational, It is both aspirational and grounded in specific actions and logic.
So during today's episode, Ari Wallach spells out for us not just the aspirations, not just what we want, but how to actually create that positive future and legacy for ourselves, for our families and for society at large. It's an extremely interesting take on how to live now in a way that is positively building toward the future.
So by the end of today's episode, you will have a unique perspective on how your brain works, how you frame time perception, and indeed how you frame your entire life. Before you begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort
to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is David. David makes a protein bar unlike any other. It has 28 grams of protein, only 150 calories and zero grams of sugar.
That's right, 28 grams of protein and 75% of its calories come from protein. This is 50% higher than the next closest protein bar. These bars from David also taste incredible. My favorite bar is the cake flavored one. But then again, I also like the chocolate flavored one and I like the berry flavored one. Basically, I like all the flavors. They're all incredibly delicious.
Now for me personally, I try to get most of my calories from whole foods. However, when I'm in a rush or I'm away from home, or I'm just looking for a quick afternoon snack, I often find that I'm looking for a high quality protein source.
And with David, I'm able to get 28 grams of high quality protein with the calories of a snack, which makes it very easy to hit my protein goals of one gram of protein per pound of body weight. And it allows me to do so without taking on an excess of calories. As I mentioned before, they are incredibly delicious. In fact, they're surprisingly delicious. Even the consistency is great.
It's more like a cookie consistency, kind of a chewy cookie consistency, which is unlike other bars, which I tend to kind of saturate on. I was never a big fan of bars until I discovered David Bars. If you give them a try, you'll know what I mean. So if you'd like to try David, you can go to davidprotein.com slash Huberman. Again, the link is davidprotein.com slash Huberman.
Today's episode is also brought to us by Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. I've spoken many times before on this and other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health, and performance.
Now, the mattress we sleep on makes an enormous difference in terms of the quality of sleep that we get each night. We need a mattress that is matched to our unique sleep needs, one that is neither too soft nor too hard for you, one that breathes well and that won't be too warm or too cold for you.
If you go to the Helix website, you can take a brief two-minute quiz, and it asks you questions such as, do you sleep on your back, your side, or your stomach? Do you tend to run hot or cold during the night? Things of that sort. Maybe you know the answers to those questions. Maybe you don't. Either way, Helix will match you to the ideal mattress for you.
For me, that turned out to be the Dusk mattress, D-U-S-K. I've been sleeping on a Dusk mattress for, gosh, no, more than four years. And the sleep that I've been getting is absolutely phenomenal. So if you'd like to try Helix, you can go to helixsleep.com slash Huberman. Take that two minute sleep quiz and Helix will match you to a mattress that's customized for your unique sleep needs.
Right now, Helix is giving up to 25% off all mattress orders. Again, that's helixsleep.com slash Huberman to get up to 25% off. Today's episode is also brought to us by Roka. Roka makes eyeglasses and sunglasses that are the absolute highest quality.
I've spent a lifetime working on the biology of the visual system, and I can tell you that your visual system has to contend with an enormous number of different challenges in order for you to be able to see clearly from moment to moment. Roka understands all of that and has designed all of their eyeglasses and sunglasses with the biology of the visual system in mind.
Roka eyeglasses and sunglasses were first designed for use in sport, in particular for things like running and cycling. And as a consequence, Roka frames are extremely lightweight, so much so that most of the time you don't even remember that you're wearing them. And they're also designed so that they don't slip off, even if you get sweaty.
Now, even though Roka eyeglasses and sunglasses were initially designed for sport, they now have many different frames and styles, all of which can be used not just for sport, but also for wearing out to dinner, to work, essentially anytime in any setting.
I wear Roka readers at night or Roka eyeglasses if I'm driving at night, and I wear Roka sunglasses in the middle of the day anytime it's too bright for me to see clearly. My eyes are somewhat sensitive, so I need that. I particularly like the Hunter 2.0 frames, which I have as eyeglasses and now as sunglasses too.
If you'd like to try Roca, you can go to roca.com slash Huberman to get 20% off your purchase. Again, that's roca.com slash Huberman to get 20% off. And now for my discussion with Ari Wallach. Ari Wallach, welcome. Andrew Huberman, thank you for having me. You and I go way back.
And I think that's a good way to frame today's conversation, not by talking about our history by any stretch, but because... Really what I want to understand is about time and time perception. So without going into a long dialogue, the human brain is capable of this amazing thing of being able to think about the past, the present, or the future, or some combination of the three.
If other animals and insects do that, I wouldn't be surprised, but we do that. And we do it pretty well, provided all our mental faculties are intact. One of the key aspects to brain function, however, is to use that ability to try and set goals, reach goals, and that's a neurochemical process.
And I would say these days, more than ever, we operate on short timeframe reward schedules, meaning we want something, we generally have ways of getting it pretty quickly, or at least the information about how we might get it pretty quickly, And we either get it or we don't. And of course it involves dopamine and a bunch of other things as well.
A lot of your work is focused on linking our perception of what we're doing in the present with knowledge about the past and trying to project our current decision-making into the future to try and create a better future. And
that's some pretty heavy mental gymnastics, especially when many, perhaps most, but certainly many, many people worldwide are just trying to get through their day without feeling overly anxious, without letting their health get out of control, without, or I should say their illness get out of control, and on and on.
So to kick the ball out, I've got this long-winded question, and it is indeed a question, which is how do we navigate this Like if we really care about the future, what do we want to do? Where do we want to place our mental frame? And how do we start going about doing that?
It's a great question or a great series of questions. One of the things that homo sapiens do extremely well is what we call mental time travel. We're able to actually take ourselves in the current moment and project out.
In fact, Marty Seligman, kind of the father of positive psychology, put forth this idea in this great book called Homo Prospectus, that what separates us out from almost every other species, as far as we know, the ones we can talk to, mostly us, is that we do two things extremely well. We can do mental time travel towards the future, right?
We can think about different possible outcomes, different possible scenarios, and we can collaborate to make the ones that we want to see manifest, manifest. And that involves language, that involves social interaction, a whole bunch of other things.
But at the end of the day, what we do extremely well, as far as we know, we're the only ones who do it, and I think this is part of the reasons why we're so good at what we do as a dominant species on this planet, is to project out into futures that we want. We know... where this comes from mostly. It's coming from the hippocampus, right?
Which one thing about the hippocampus that's amazing is that it's almost atemporal. It doesn't actually have a timestamp. And so what it does is it takes snapshots of episodic memories that have happened in the past, reassembles them. So that we can mentally time travel and then figure out these different future scenarios of what might happen. So if we take Ari and Andy 150,000 years ago.
He calls me Andy, folks. Sorry, okay. No, it's okay. Just stick with Andy. I'm going to stick with Andy. I'm giving you permission for at least the duration of this episode.
For the duration of this episode. So Andrew, now Andy, look. Here's the thing. If Ari and Andy are out on the Serengeti 150,000 years ago, right? Homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago, about 150,000 years ago, we're kind of starting to spread out of the Rift Valley into Africa. And we're now at a point where we're no longer singular, but we're within a kind of a small tribal structure.
We want to start hunting larger and larger game. We're no longer reactive. So we want to go after that game. It's not a foregone conclusion that when we go after something, it's going to do what we want it to do. We have to start thinking about different scenarios.
So that first kind of mental time travel is really coming from our desire for more protein to exist and to grow the group and really to feed the super energy intensive thing called the human brain. That's where mental time travel starts. And hippocampus takes different memories of different ways we've hunted and been successful in the past or not successful and starts to put together scenarios.
Ding!
And I immediately pick up the phone to see, and you've covered this before, what's that new information? What is it that I have to react to? So we're working on two 300,000-year-old hardware. At the same time, we have a cultural substrate that is, for lack of better words, has hacked into that older part of us to make us, A, want that immediate gratification, and B,
force us to now react in a way where that mental time travel has closed that temporal horizon. We're now training ourselves no longer to think about the far future, but to actually think about the immediate present. And I don't mean present in a Buddhist way. I mean presentism as in a hall of mirrors. There is no past. There is no future. There's only this moment.
And so it's becoming extremely difficult for us as individuals, as societies, as civilization to think about the long term in the way that you and I may have done 150,000 years ago, because winter was coming. And we would start thinking, where are we going to move our family and our tribe or our clan? And we would go to warmer climates. We don't even do that anymore, right?
We're so in this moment that it's becoming extremely difficult for us to break out of this presentist moment.
I really appreciate your answer for a couple of reasons. Through the 90s and early 2000s, and maybe even until 2020, there was a growing movement within science, but also outside of science, towards encouraging people to be mindful, this whole notion of being present, right? But what you're describing is actually too much being present, what you're calling presentism.
And of course, it depends on what's happening in the present. But in the 80s, in the 90s, in the 2000s, up to about 2020, so of course we're still in the 2000s, there was this notion of future tripping. Like people are future tripping. They're spending too much time worrying about the future, too much time worrying about the future. I feel like the horizon on our
cognition has really come closer in now. And as you said, we're in this like sort of hall of mirrors where it's constant stimulus and response. And I don't want today's discussion to be doom and gloom. We're going to talk about solutions.
But I think between what you're saying and what Jonathan Haidt, who is on this podcast, author of Anxious Generation, Coddling in the American Mind, professor at NYU, et cetera, has said, I'm starting to really believe that yes,
the human brain can focus on past, present, or future, or some combination, but that something about the architecture of our technologies and our human interactions, because those are so closely interwoven, that's taking place now has us really locked in the present in stimulus response. And I'm gonna just briefly reference a previous episode of the podcast I did.
It's one of my favorite conversations ever on or off microphone, which was, excuse me, with Dr. James Hollis, 84-year-old Jungian psychoanalyst, where he had many important messages there, but one of them was, We need, we absolutely need to take five to 10 minutes each day to exit stimulus response mode, typically by closing one's eyes and just looking inward.
It doesn't even have to be called meditation in order to understand what our greater wishes are, how to link our current thinking and behavior to the future and to the past. And I think he's qualified to say this because he's an analyst that. that process actually is a reflection of the unconscious mind.
So to link these concepts in a more coherent way, is it possible that we are just overwhelmed with notifications, either the traditional type of notifications on your phone, but that we're basically just living in stimulus response all the time now? And if so, what direction is that taking ourselves as individuals, as families, as communities, and as a species?
I'm basically validating what you just said, even though you don't need my validation and just asking, like, how bad is it to just be focused on managing the day to day? Or maybe that's that's a better way to go about life.
You need to manage the day to day. There are people like me who are full time futures. We tend to be very anxious because what we tend to do is think more in the future and aren't as present as we should be. That being said. If 90% of your day is going about your day dealing with what's right in front of you, that's great. What I'm advocating for is what I call kind of transgenerational empathy.
It's a mouthful. So we know empathy. You've had guests on that. Transgenerational empathy first and foremost starts with empathy and compassion for yourself. Then we move into empathy for those who came before, which then allows us to build empathy for the future, future, future Ari, future, future Andy, but then future generations. And we can get into how to do that.
Yeah, maybe we could just parse each of those one by one. So how do you define empathy for self?
So empathy for yourself is – in many ways, it's almost self-compassion. It's recognizing you're doing the best you can with what you have. Part of the issue is we surround ourselves – and I'm guilty of this – of images and quotes and books of how to live your best life, how to be amazing, and anything –
below that metric of perfection, you start to feel terrible and you start to kind of ruminate over what, what you, you know, you lie in bed at night and you think, how could I have done that? How could I have done that? And you forget that you, you're only able to handle what you can at that time. And you can't hold yourself up to this idealized yardstick.
Look, I dealt with this for, for a long time. We learned my father had stage four cancer. I was 18 years old. Um, And from when we learned to when he passed away was only four months. Four months. Four months. And for a lot of that time, I was kind of in denial, right? Like I wasn't actually there with him as much as I should have been. In fact, we won't go into this.
I was actually with you that summer. We were working together that summer at a summer camp. Now, for years, I beat myself up. How could I have done that? I should have been home with him. It was only going to be four months. And then I realized, and this is the stealth compassion, like 18-year-old Ari was only at a place emotionally and psychologically to be able to do what I did.
And it wasn't the older 30- or 40-year-old Ari of now being like – of having these regrets. So empathy for yourself really, really centers – it doesn't mean you let yourself off the hook. It doesn't mean you can go willy-nilly and treat people terribly. It means you recognize that who you were even yesterday is in many ways different than who you are today and what you've learned.
So transgenerational empathy has to start with yourself. It has to start with being able to look in the mirror and say, I'm not perfect. I was born into this world, into a family, into my birth family or family that you choose, and they were born into something.
And you work with what you have, but you have to start there because so many times I work with people and I talk to people and they say, oh, I want to have empathy for the past and for the future, but they don't have it for themselves. So if you don't start there, it becomes very, very difficult to spread out. First, obviously going backwards.
And then ultimately, the goal of my work is to get you to spread that out into the future.
I love this concept of empathy for self because I've heard it before in other contexts, but I haven't heard it operationalized the way that you describe it. I think, yeah, there's two phrases that come to mind. There's a book called A Fighter's Heart by Sam Sheridan. And it's a pretty interesting account of all the different forms of martial arts and fighting.
And there's an interesting part of the book where he says, you know, you can't have your 20th birthday until you're 19, which is a big giant duh. But it's actually a pretty profound statement. And by the way, he went to Harvard. He's a smart kid. His father was in the SEAL teams. He has an interesting lineage in his own right.
And I think at Harvard, he claims he just painted and smoked cigarettes. So, you know, it's a bit of an iconoclast. In any case, I think that statement, you can't have your 20th birthday until you're 19, is something that we forget because of the immense amount of attention that we pay to trying to be like others and satisfy external metrics.
And so I like to think he was in agreement with you, if I may. The other thing that happened to me recently that comes to mind is that I, like many people, peruse Instagram. I teach on Instagram, et cetera. And there are a lot of these quote accounts, like life inspiration accounts. And I would argue that the half-life of any one of those posts is pretty short. But some are pretty interesting.
And there's a guy, I'll put it in the show note captions. I don't remember off the top of my head. Not a huge account, not a small account. I think he lives in Austin. And He goes through this long discourse about the challenges of the human mind for a lot of the reasons that we're talking about, its ability to flip from past to present to future, et cetera.
But then he says, it basically distills down to one actionable step per day or per morning, which is at some point, if you want to grow and be more functional, you have to ask yourself, what am I going to do today to make my day better? Not to be better than I was yesterday, right?
Which is also a fine statement, but that one never really resonated for me because like yesterday could have been an amazing day. You might not be as good as yesterday, right? Every day is kind of its own unique unit. And our biology really does function on these circadian biology units of 24 hours. There's no negotiating that.
So I like this concept of what can I do today to make my life and hopefully the lives of others better? Because it implies a verb, an action step, and it's really focused on the unit of the day, which is really what we've got. So that resonated. So according to your definition, empathy for self starts with understanding that we're always doing the best we can with what we've got.
but that there's a striving kind of woven into that statement, that there is a need for striving. At what point do we start to develop empathy for others? And what does that look like? Like, is empathy for somebody else feeling what they feel? I mean, that's the kind of traditional definition.
Yeah, I mean, look, we start off with kind of cognitive intellectual empathy, right? So you kind of think it. But where you really want to be able to be is at a place where their feelings
are feelings that you can feel and you want to bring if they're if they're feeling bad you want to bring some resolution to that if they're feeling good you can you can be there with them at a fundamental level this is you know mirror neurons and i'm connecting with you and you're connecting with me and there's a genetic adaptive fitness for that right we all want to kind of be in sync because the tribe that works together flourishes together and thrives together so it makes sense at that level
But when I'm feeling empathy for another, their state of being can be as important as my own state of being. Look, it can be taxing, don't get me wrong. But ultimately, that is what self-compassion can give you because it can give you a state of being where those around you, you are no longer fundamentally disconnected. And I think one of the
The great errors of where we have taken this civilization over the past several decades, if not centuries, is disconnection. Disconnection from ourselves, disconnection from each other, and disconnection from nature and the planet. So anything we can do to further that connection is going to benefit us today in the current moment.
I agree completely. If we were to break that down...
into the requirements for empathy and connection uh one it seems like presence like we need to be present like we're going to appreciate a fern a beautiful fern or a dog or a significant other or another human being that we happen to encounter we have to be present we can't if we're going to have empathy we our mind can't be someplace else can't be wandering right can't be in the past can't be in the future or we're not going to be
able to really touch into the details of the experience. So that seems like requirement number one. The second is that we need to be able to leave whatever kind of pressures are on us to tend to other things, right? Like every neural circuit we know has a push and a pull. Like in order to get A, you need to suppress B. And this is the way neural circuits work generally.
Flexors and extensors in the muscles are a good analogy for which by the way, you know, like if you're going to flex your bicep, your tricep is essentially relaxing and vice versa in so many, so many words. The PTs are going to dive all over me for that one. But that's sort of how neural circuits in the brain work.
We can actually see all around us by virtue of neurons that respond to either increments and decrements in light. And their difference is actually what allows us to see boundaries, borders visually. So we need to suppress like our thoughts about where we need to be that day or other things that are going on for us.
And then we need to be able to return to our own, you know, self-attention in order to be functional. And I think that, I think this is where the challenge is and where the next question arises, which is on the one hand, I could imagine that, okay, we've got so many pressures upon us every day, all day.
that it's getting much harder to be present, to be empathic, and to build this idealized future or better future. But on the other hand, I hear you and other people saying, well, things are so much better than they were even 50 years ago in terms of health outcomes, believe it or not, in terms of status of people having shelter, et cetera. And this is a shock to a lot of people.
They're like, wait a second, I didn't see homeless people on the street when I was a kid, and now I do. Well, they were people suffering... were elsewhere. You didn't perhaps didn't see them.
So there are a couple of levels of question here, but the first one is perhaps are we much better off, but we are worse off in the sense that there's so much incoming that we miss the fact that we're better off.
Like, you know, is it like notifications preventing us from seeing that we actually have so much that we're, we're, we're, you know, a hundred times better than off than 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 sapien on planet Earth than right now. Now, someone's going to argue right now, and they're going to say, no, no, no, no.
I mean, according to what metrics, like happiness?
Health, infant mortality, even as we backslide in this country, being a woman, education. the kind of the calories that we get across the book. 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 drugstore 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, right? So net-net, this is the best time to be alive. All the markers, you can go to Gapminder if you want, and you can see that we are doing better. We are progressing. The issue is...
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. You and I, we're going to go back to Ari and Andy 150,000 years ago. If we saw this beautiful tree aesthetically and we saw maybe a tree over here that was on fire, you and I would zoom in on the tree on fire and focus on the negative because negative things hurt and kill us.
That being said, if you and I run a major media company, you and I both know that the more negative stories that we put out, the more hits we're going to get.
Not this media company. Not this media company. I'm just saying. I'm 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. But that negativity bias is still part of us, right? I think one of the issues that...
we have to confront as a society is that there are parts 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, you know, this is Jonathan's elephant in the rider.
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 kind of the death and despair and the horrific things that we can do to one another.
You know, my personal past on my father's side is I think some of the darkest moments in homo sapien behavior, and that was not that long ago. So if we want to move 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 of me in explaining than 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. Paul 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.
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 to 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.
So 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, health care.
Yeah. And then I follow up and, you know, we've done this and other people much smarter than me have done this study. We say, Jakob Tropp at NYU is the one who taught me this. How do you want them to feel? That's different, right? This is Damasio's – this is somatic marker hypothesis theory, right? Where if you really want something to happen, it's not just about visualizing it.
It's about visualizing it and connecting it to the emotional amygdala sense of what that is to actually move towards the actions and changing behaviors that you want. Madison Avenue understands this. Marketing understands this.
But the general public tends not to, sorry, I keep interrupting you, but also it's what does the kid 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. But 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
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, and the idea is that in anchoring to the emotion state first, you call to mind a bunch of potential action steps.
And the reason I like this approach is that that is at least one way that, quote unquote, the brain works, which is that the emotion states are linked to a bunch of action step possibilities, kind of like a magic library where if you go into the room called sadness, there are a bunch of action steps associated with that go beyond crying. It's like curling up in the fetal position, et cetera.
You go into the room that's called 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 going to go,
cultivating some action steps that you can take to ensure that that future generation can access those emotions yes but with a slight correction because it's not about thinking about their future emotional states it's actually feeling them i see so it's not saying i want my kids to be happy i want them to feel i want them to have no trauma it's um
It's feeling what it would be to be happy, no trauma.
Yes.
Right.
Because that becomes an anchor, right? She's 100% correct. What it does is it places it. It's like a kedge anchor. So if you and I were sailors, which we're not, there's a thing called a kedge anchor. And a kedge anchor is this anchor that you throw, you know, 30, 40 meters off to the side. It hits the bottom and you use the rope to pull yourself there, right?
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 global planetary civilization… If we think about it, that's one thing.
But to actually execute on those goals, we have to actually connect the emotional state that we want to be in to drive that function. Remember, look, this is one of the things that Marty Seligman says, that Freud got it wrong. Freud felt, as Marty says, that emotions were these things that happened in the past that we would use to dwell on, and that was neuroses and anxiety and depression.
No, no, no, no. Emotions are there to help us make better decisions for the future. We are future oriented mammals and species. So what emotions do, it's not meant to be like, oh, you know, I had this like terrible breakup. I feel so terrible. And then I'm going to go to my therapist. I'm going to talk about all that stuff that happened in the past. That's one way of looking at it.
The other way is your body is telling you in a very, very visceral way, whatever you just did that had you in that situation, don't do it again. Because if you do, you're going to feel a certain way. You know, they did this study where they... At a college campus, they found people who had just been in a kind of a quasi-long-term relationship that had gone through a breakup.
Quasi-long-term. Six months. What I've learned in life is it's important to define the relationship.
It was about six months. Okay. And people who had gone through the breakup, they gave one group a placebo and another group actually just got acetaminophen, 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 pro-social 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.
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, AG1. By now, many of you have heard me say that if I could take just one supplement, that supplement would be AG1. The reason for that is AG1 is the highest quality and most complete of the foundational nutritional supplements available.
What that means is that it contains not just vitamins and minerals, but also probiotics, prebiotics, and adaptogens to cover any gaps you may have in your diet and provide support for a demanding life.
For me, even if I eat mostly whole foods and minimally processed foods, which I do for most of my food intake, it's very difficult for me to get enough fruits and vegetables, vitamins and minerals, micronutrients, and adaptogens from food alone. For that reason, I've been taking AG1 daily since 2012, and often twice a day, once in the morning or 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 five free 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. Yes, emotions don't know the clock or the calendar.
Yeah.
And that sounds like a bad thing. And oftentimes it's discussed as a bad thing. Like, oh, when you're feeling stressed, you're not able to access the parts of your brain that can make better decisions. We 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 sake of survival.
In the long term, it's problematic. But the way that you're describing emotions as a Kedge anchor, is that what it's called? Kedge with a K? 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 set along the right path. I 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 or whatever you want to call it, self-help.
Again, I'm a big Martha Beck fan in part because of an exercise that she's included in, I think, several, if not all of her books of this perfect day exercise. Have you ever done this exercise? 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 just pay attention to how it feels and it sucks. It doesn't feel good. Most people don't have too much trouble doing that exercise. Then you shift over. I think you're 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 day 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. And they're not, um, outside the bounds of reality. And those are things that then you write down and that at least in my life have, um, all borne out. So this is something, an exercise you do routinely.
And when I first heard about this, I was like, okay, this seems like, like weird self-hypnosis, self-helpy woo stuff. Like, I'm not like, come on. I'm like, I'm a, At that time, I'm like, I'm a neuroscience professor. Like, I'm not going to like, you got to be kidding me. And it's a remarkable exercise.
And the reason I bring it up now in discussion with you is I think you and Martha arrived at a similar place or a similar avenue. But in your case, you're talking about specifically toward building a future that's not necessarily for you to live in, but for someone else to live in.
Oh, look, the core of my philosophy is in a story that I heard a very long time ago. It comes from the Talmud. That being said, this story exists in many cultures. And so there's a man named Honi walking – And he comes across a much older man who's planting a carob tree. And he says to the older man, why are you planting a carob tree?
How long will it be until this carob tree bears fruit or even has shade? And he goes, oh, it'll be at least 40 years. And he goes, well, why plant it? You won't be around for that. And the old man says... When I was young, I played in the shade of a carob tree. I ate from the carob tree. So it's my job to plant this carob tree now. This is how societies move forward.
This is how we become great, is by planting carob trees whose shade we will never know. And look, I can give you a bunch of – the Panama Canal, right? That was a great – another way that we think about this, we call this cathedral thinking. So now when 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 200, 300 years ago. Or even further, and oftentimes the architect and the original stonemason who would plant the keystone would not be alive to see this cathedral or mosque fully built. That's cathedral thinking. It's doing things whose fruits you will not be around to take advantage of, to reap and to have as 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 years ago. Yeah. I mean, I've seen some amazing architecture. I love architecture. And I was like, okay, it'll be a beautiful building. And I was like, whoa.
That woe 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 awe. It's not because we necessarily 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 carob trees.
And 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. And even earlier this year, we were in Sydney. I went to Sydney Opera House. We did a live there. It's a beautiful building. I learned they had been built over a very long period of time. I can tell you that the architect was Danish, but I can't remember his name.
So part of what we're talking about here is giving up our need for attribution, giving up our need for credit. Gosh, this is the opposite of social media, right? Social media, it's all about getting credit, you know? And yet in science where people care a lot about credit while they're alive, and my scientist colleagues hate this, but they know it deeply too.
It's also a business model of academic science right 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 ahead of him. And he taught me this early on.
He just said, you know, with rare exception, you know, the discoveries are not, um, you know, no one's going to say, oh, that's the discovery of so-and-so. 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 B, you get a trophy. We just came from the Olympic track and field trials in Oregon. It's like podium, bronze, silver, gold.
And so, yes, you're part of a larger legacy. You're building toward a larger legacy in the examples that you give. But part of it is understanding that 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 a building to be immortalized. What's interesting for many reasons, both sociopolitical, but also other reasons, those names change over time.
So if people knew that 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? Is Lincoln Center named after a Lincoln?
Yeah, I'm sure it is.
You're the New Yorker, you know, and so on and so forth. 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.
Great series of points and questions brought up. So part of what you're talking about is egoic legacy, right? So you mentioned a building. It could be 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, yes. Sproul Plaza, seat of the free speech movement. Although now you could argue, not so free speech movement. That's my, I said that.
Yes, I said that. Sproul Plaza, like, I can't tell you who Sproul was. Do you know who Sproul was? No. Exactly. I can tell you the Arches. I can tell you that it was a free speech movement. I can tell you that I saw certain bands play there. I can tell you that it's supposed to be a place where you can say anything and be exempt from, you know,
um being put in jail basically anything maybe that's still true but i don't think it is um but i can't tell you who sprawl is the question of legacy is very important so sprawl plaza let's say 250 years from now that name will probably it may or may not be there the plaza but p the name will maybe it was renamed by someone else um so for titans of industry that can put down several million dollars and put their name on the side of a building
That's one form of legacy. That is not the every person. That being said, I have three children. So let's say they continue on at 2.2 children or whatever, my descendants. In 250 years, Sproul Plaza may or may not still be called that. But in 250 years, I will have roughly 50,000 descendants.
That's a scary.
For my wife, I know.
This is an exciting thought.
It's an exciting and it's a scary thought. So what is going to impact the future? And by the way, if you want to keep giving money to put your name on the side of buildings, please do so.
Yeah, no, please do that. Please do so.
Please do that. I should just be very clear.
Philanthropy at universities and elsewhere. People think of it as like, oh, people, egoic legacy. Sure. Also pays for hundreds of thousands of scholarships, the opportunity for people to- And research, and you need to do it 100%. It's vital. It's vital.
It's vital. But for the everyday person like you or me, if I want to impact the future, which I do, because remember, I'm not the kind of futurist where I don't predict the future. My job at this point in time, as I manifested in this biological entity called Ari Wallach, is not to predict the future.
It's to help folks make better decisions today so that we have better futures in the near term, the medium term, and the far off tomorrows. So what's going to impact those 50,000 Wallach descendants is not going to be
Anything that I did egoically in terms of getting recognition, what's going to impact them, and we know this in many ways from across multiple disciplines, what's going to impact them is 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, right? Susan Blackmore has meme theory, right?
Not internet memes, where I watch a lot of those, but true memes, these cultural eunuchs that we... hand off both laterally and forward, you know, longitudinally to other generations, especially those closest to us. If you want to impact the future, there's a bunch of things you can do, right? Reduce your carbon footprint, give money, vote this. I want all of those to happen in a positive way.
But at the end of the day, it's monkey see, monkey do. How you and I interact right now will obviously impact our relationship, everyone who's listening or viewing.
But then everyone who's listening and viewing it, how they are with the person who hands them the coffee, the barista, or they are with their partner, how they model those behaviors is going to impact the future in a greater way, I will argue, than most of the ways we 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 I can make statements about being old enough to know that, like, I believe that our species is, for the most part, benevolent. I feel like most 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, but I think it's clear that trauma and challenge can rewire behavior and certainly the brain to create, you know, what we see as evil, right? So, 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? I'm of middle age. I'll probably live hopefully to be about a hundred, but we'll see. Bullet bus or cancer, I'm going to give it what I got.
It depends on whether or not you read your book fully.
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 shorten life. Yes. 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, that we'll 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 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.
And I have a theory, and I'll go through this quickly. I saw a documentary recently about the history of game shows. Mm-hmm. where I learned that the first commercial was during the World Series when DiMaggio was making a run on the home run record. So they used a sports game that was televised and on the radio to have a first commercial.
Then they had game shows, which were basically commercials for the products. That's what they were. And they used human interaction as a way to make it more interesting between the contestants and the host. And then came reality TV shows. And then now I would argue that social media is the reality TV show and we're all able to opt in and cast ourselves in it.
And that the way that people get more, let's just say presence on the show is to do things that are more hyperbolic. Like it's very hard, I've tried and I think managed to some extent to do so too. It's very hard to create a very, very popular social media channel
in this reality 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 Friedman used to talk about this. Like, is there a social media platform where people are
rewarded for being benevolent, for modeling good etiquette, because they genuinely like that. And 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 timestamp down things. So here's my question. Is there a version of social media that
that is not just on the half-life of like 12 hours, what was tweeted, et cetera, what was retweeted. Because I would argue that even the highest virality social media posts have a half-life of about six months to a year. 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.
So is there a time capsule sort of version of social media? Because I look on the internet, like on YouTube, and I would say there are probably three or four YouTube videos, namely the Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford in 2015, maybe last lecture by Randy Pausch before he died of pancreatic 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, 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 going to be gone. I like to think that these podcast episodes are going to project forward 30, 40 years into the future.
But if we look at the history of what's on YouTube... and we look at the half-life of any social media post, it may not be the case. In fact, it's very likely it's not the case. One would hope that they morph into something that lasts. But the question here is, is there a version of social media that acts as a time capsule to teach the sorts of principles that you're talking about?
In the show that I just did, A Brief History of the Future, one of 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, is storytelling. And we're trying to, in social media as we know it right now, we're trying to tell the world a story about who we are and what I stand for. Why am I here and why do I matter? And notice me. My life meant something.
But when we go back to that cave that I stood in where those drawings were from 40,000, 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. And it was what Nancy Bardocki calls horticultural time versus mechanical time.
Because that's the way we used to think – From 40,000 years to the agricultural revolution 12,000, 10,000, 12,000 years ago to probably up until a couple hundred years ago, we didn't remember. The minute hand only existed on the analog clock starting about 200 years ago. Really? 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 then when we start to have trains, remember the transcontinental- Is it all sundial then? It was Stonehenge. It was sundial. It was seasons, right? The way we would think about the future, right? When people say, oh, Ari, you're a futurist.
Like this is people like you have always existed. No, the idea of the future- That is this thing out there that's going to roil over us is relatively new. Because up until a couple hundred years ago, Ari and Andy, we did exactly what our – probably what our fathers did. And our kids would do exactly what we did. There was no kind of evolution in social structure.
But at the advent as we – I guess it could be argued I've done a lot of things that my father did. He is a scientist and there are other domains of life, but yeah.
This goes back to modeling behavior, right? The number one predictor if someone's going to read the newspaper is if their parents read the newspaper.
Yeah, so I might tell you who'd say you'd open the paper and poke it from behind when I wanted his attention.
Well, we can talk about that in a second, the attention part. And so – 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?
All of storytelling is really a way of doing cultural transmission of memes, of ideas, of ways of being so that we can flourish and move forward as a species.
so then if you take that at its at its at its truth what is social media right now but nothing but a kind of a hall of mirrors of our culture right now what will they say 200 years from now when they look at these posts with with the likes and things that um the metrics that we use to judge ourselves individually and say what what happened to this species
I'd like to take a brief break to thank one of our sponsors, Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium in the correct ratios, but no sugar. Now, I and others on the podcast have talked a lot about the critical importance of hydration for proper brain and bodily function.
Research shows that even a slight degree of dehydration can really diminish cognitive and physical performance. it's also important that you get adequate electrolytes in order for your body and brain to function at their best. The electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, and potassium are critical for the functioning of all the cells in your body, especially your neurons or nerve cells.
To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and 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 drinkelement.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. I mean, one of the reasons I fell in love with biology is that
Yes, we are evolving as a species, but I would argue slowly enough that any fundamental knowledge about biology of the human body is a 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 wellbeing 100,000 years ago, and very likely it will be core to our biology 100,000 years from now. I therefore worry about any technology that shortens up our ability 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, a la Jonathan Haidt's ideas. I really like those. let me put it 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 roulette or a little bit less slots. I play all the low level stuff that doesn't require any thinking. And I often do pretty well for whatever reason. Cause 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 to forget that there are these other longer timescales.
That's why there's no natural light in most casinos.
There's no lights. There's no clocks in many of them. The 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. Not all of it, but a lot of it is like that. likes and responses. In some cases, fighting is what people want. They want to fight because they like that emotion.
The algorithms figure you out so that they shorten up your temporal window. And so when people say, oh, we're walking around with a little slot machine in our pocket all day long with our smartphone, I actually think that's right. I think it's right. It's more like a casino, however, where That casino harbors all sorts of different games and they're going to find the one that you like.
Some people like playing roulette. I happen to like playing roulette. Some people like crap. Some people like poker. Some people like to bet on a game where you get to sit the whole game with the possibility of winning. A friend of mine who's actually an addiction counselor, he said, you know, the gambling addiction is the absolute worst of all the addictions. Why?
Because the next time really could change everything. Unlike alcoholism or drug addiction or other forms of addiction, where the next time is just going to take you further down. In gambling, there is the realistic possibility that the next time could change everything. And that destroys lives.
So if we are walking around with a sort of casino in our pocket, how do we get out of that mindset, much less use that tool? in order to get into these longer-term investments for the future? This is what I want to know. How do we get into the metaphorical 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 debate about the debate or the debate about the debate about the debate. So, I mean, it takes a strong, strong mind to – Divorce oneself from all of that, much less get into this longer-term thinking.
And maybe this is why David Goggins is always out running and hates social media so much even though he's 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 go 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. We need to tend our health. We need to get our sleep. We need to get, let's just assume that we're taking care of the fundamentals of health and wellbeing, which doesn't leave a whole lot of time afterwards anyway, what do we do? Where should the stories go? Where do we put them?
I feel really impassioned by this because I devote my life to this, right? And I teach biology because I believe it's fundamental and transcends time. But I care about the future. And I'm well aware that in 30 years, The idea that there was a guy on the internet talking about the importance of getting morning sunlight. Sure, that might happen, you know, but probably no one will care.
Just like I realized about halfway through my scientific career that, sure, I was tenured at Stanford, won some awards, enjoyed the research, enjoyed the day-to-day. But I realized, okay, there's some – I feel good about the research contributions we made. But that I knew – that people weren't going to be like, oh, Huberman discovered this because I had already forgotten the people 32 years ahead.
And I know the literature really well. So like, how do you square these different mental frames? It's a conundrum.
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 then 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. I mean, I've gone on record saying that before. And there are many people who believe in God in the afterlife. But it still is difficult to navigate the day to day.
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 together. AKA the church. And this is not a conversation about theology. This is a conversation about structures and about power.
So science destroyed religion?
100%. It destroyed the stories that religion told us about our larger purpose. Because what ended up happening, look, oftentimes folks will say, well, you know, science destroyed God and destroyed religion because it told us where we came from. We're not coming from seven days, right, where God spun the earth and created the heavens in seven days.
I think we're at a point now where we're starting to realize that science actually tells us, going back 13.7 billion years ago to the Big Bang, we can quibble with that number. Up to today, science is 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 saying God should be telling what we should be doing or spirituality.
What I'm saying is – You're not going to argue you can tell God what to tell us.
No. I'm not going to argue.
But the term you just said, that science and technology cannot tell us where we need to go.
No. Look, here – we started off by – we started off – so the work that I do, this 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, this thing that's out there, as opposed to what the future really is, which is a verb. It's something that we do.
Then the final pillar, the one that is the most difficult for us to wrap our head around is this idea of telos, ultimate aim, ultimate goal. What are we here for? So we all suffer from what I call a lifespan bias. So the most important unit of time to Andrew Huberman is from your birth to your death. We're all wired that way because that's the literature, the science that I grew up with.
I grew up and I want to be a geneticist, right? That's where I started. What the literature tells us about us as a biological entity is that the most important unit of time is from my birth to my death. But the reality is for our species, and it has been going back hundreds of thousands of years, is that these things actually overlap. I come from my parents, then I am here, and now my children.
These are not distinct units. There's massive overlaps in terms of the culture, the emotional, the psychology of what I got from them, what I'm giving to my kids. But what ends up happening in a lifespan-biased society, the one that we exist in right now, is we have lost the telos. We have lost the ultimate aim or goal or purpose for ourselves. species, for our civilization on this planet.
I'm not going to tell you what that is. What I am going to say is when you don't have that because God is no longer in the picture, religion is no longer in the picture, we flounder about and we're looking for metrics to judge. Am I doing the right thing? Do I matter? Will people know who I am 200 years from now? Is my sense of purpose connected to anything larger?
And without these larger religious structures that we had for thousands of years, the answer is no.
But there are still many people on the planet who believe in God and are religious.
Yes.
More than there are that are religious. So does that mean that they're immune from this confusion?
Well, no, because there's other confusions that come from it, right? There's other religion as it's practiced 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. Not at its essence. Not at its essence.