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

1. 0:00 – 1:58

   Ari Wallach

   1. AHAndrew Huberman0:00

      (instrumental music) 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 Longpath 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

2. 1:58 – 6:13

   Sponsors: David, Helix Sleep & ROKA

   1. AHAndrew Huberman1:58

      life. Before we 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/huberman. Again, the link is davidprotein.com/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. Now, 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, now 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/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/huberman to get up to 25% off. Today's episode is also brought to us by ROKA. ROKA makes eyeglasses and sunglasses that are of 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 any time and 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 any time 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 ROKA, you can go to roka.com/huberman to get 20% off your purchase. Again, that's roka.com/huberman to get 20% off. And now for my discussion with Ari Wallach.

3. 6:13 – 15:46

   Mental Time Travel; Technology & Present

   1. AHAndrew Huberman6:13

      Ari Wallach, welcome.

   2. AWAri Wallach6:15

      Andrew Huberman. Thank you for having me.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman6:17

      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-time-frame reward schedules. Meaning we want something, we generally have ways of getting it pretty quickly, or at least the information about how we might get it pretty quickly, and we either get it or we don't. And of course, it involves dopamine and a bunch of other things as well. A lot of your work is focused on linking our perception of what we're doing in the present with knowledge about the past and trying to project our current decision-making into the future to try and create a better future, and that's some pretty heavy mental gymnastics, especially when many, perhaps most, but certainly many, many people worldwide are just trying to, like, get through their day without feeling overly anxious, without letting their health get out of control, without... or I should say, their illness get out of control, uh, and on and on. So to kick the ball out, I've got this long-winded question, and it is indeed a question, which is, how do we navigate this conundrum? Like, if we really care about the future, what do we want to do? Where do we want to place our mental frame, and how do we start going about doing that?

   4. AWAri Wallach8:31

      It's a great question, or a great series of questions. Um, one of the things that Homo sapiens do extremely well is what we call mental time travel. We're able to actually take ourselves in the current moment and project out. I- i- in fact, Marty Seligman, uh, kind of the, the father of positive psychology, put forth this idea in this great book called Homo Prospectus that what separates us out from almost every other species, as far as we know, the ones we can talk to, mostly us, is that 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. Now, 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, uh, it's, it's coming from the hippocampus, right? Which one thing about the hippocampus that's amazing is that it's, 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, if we take Ari and Andy 150,000 years ago.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman10:01

      He calls me Andy, folks, but it's Andrew.

   6. AWAri Wallach10:03

      Sorry. Okay.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman10:03

      No, it's okay. Eh, just stick with Andy, but it's-

   8. AWAri Wallach10:05

      I'm gonna stick with Andy.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman10:06

      I'm giving you permission for at least the duration of this episode.

   10. AWAri Wallach10:08

       For the duration of this episode. So, uh, Andrew, now Andy, look, here's the thing. If Ari and Andy are out on the Serengeti 150,000 years ago, right? We Homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago. About 150,000 years ago, we're kind of starting to spread out of the Rift Valley into Africa, and we're now at a point where we're no longer singular, but we're, we're within a kind of a small tribal structure. We want to start hunting larger and larger game. We're no longer reactive. So if we want to go after that game, it's not a foregone conclusion that when we go after something, it's going to do what we 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, for more protein, uh, to exist and to, to grow the group and really to feed the super energy-intensive thing called the human brain. That's where mental time travel starts, and hippocampus takes different memories of different ways we've hunted, a- and been successful in the past or not successful and starts to put together scenarios. N- now fast forward. So that's a very long time ago. You, you, you take us, you know, (laughs) through, through, through the Middle East into Europe, into Asia. 20,000 years ago, our ancestors crossed Beringia, which is now the, the, the Bering Strait, and we're in, we're in North America. And fast-forward to right now. On my way in here, I get a notification on my phone, ding, and I immediately pick up the phone to see, and, and you've covered this before. What, w- what's that new information? What is it that I have to react to? So we're working on 200,000, 300,000-year-old hardware. At the same time, we have a cultural substrate that is, for lack of better words, has hacked into that older part of us to make us, A, want that immediate gratification, and B, force us to now react in a way where that mental time travel has closed that temporal horizon. We're now training ourselves no longer to think about the far future but to actually think about the immediate present, and I don't mean present in a, in a, in a Buddhist way. I mean presentism as in a hall of mirrors. There is no past. There is no future. There's only this moment. And so it's becoming extremely difficult for us as individuals, as societies, as civilization, to think about the long term in, in the way that you and I may have done 150,000 years ago because, uh, winter was coming.... and we would start thinking, "Where are we going to move our family and our tribe or our, our clan?" And we, we would go to warmer climates. We don't even do that anymore, right? We're so in this moment that it's becoming extremely difficult for us to break out of this presentist moment.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman12:47

       I really appreciate your answer for a couple of reasons. Um, 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.

   12. AWAri Wallach13:08

       Mm-hmm.

   13. AHAndrew Huberman13:09

       Right? But what you're describing is actually too much being present, what you're calling presentism. And of course, it depends on what, what's happening in the present. Um, but in the '80s, in the '90s, in the 2000s up to about 2020, because 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.

   14. AWAri Wallach13:50

       Oh, yeah.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman13:50

       But I think between what you're saying and what Jonathan Haidt, who was on this podcast, author of Anxious Generation, Coddling of 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."

   16. AWAri Wallach14:21

       Mm-hmm.

   17. AHAndrew Huberman14:22

       And I'm going to, um, just briefly reference a previous episode of the podcast I did. It's, it's one of my favorite conversations ever on or off microphone was which, which was, excuse me, with Dr. James Hollis, an 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, um, qualified to say this because he's an analyst that that process actually is a reflection of the unconscious mind. So to link these concepts in a, in a more coherent way, is it possible that we are just overwhelmed with notifications, either the traditional type of me- notifications on your phone, but t- 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, uh, you know, as a, as a species? Um, I'm basically validating what you just said even though you don't need my validation and just asking like, how bad is it to just be focused on managing the day-to-day? Or maybe that's, that's a better way to go about life.

   18. AWAri Wallach15:45

       You need to manage

4. 15:46 – 22:00

   Technology; Tools: Transgenerational Empathy; Bettering Today

   1. AWAri Wallach15:46

      the day-to-day. There, there are people like me who are full-time futurists. W- 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, what I'm advocating for is what, what I call kind of transgenerational empathy. It's a mouthful. Uh, so we, we know empathy, you know, y- y- 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, we can get into how to do that.

   2. AHAndrew Huberman16:34

      Yeah, maybe we could just parse each of those one by one.

   3. AWAri Wallach16:36

      Yeah.

   4. AHAndrew Huberman16:36

      So how do you define empathy for self?

   5. AWAri Wallach16:39

      So empathy for yourself is, i- in many ways it's, it's almost self-compassion. It's recognizing you're doing the best you can with what you have. Part of the issue is we, we surround ourselves, I... and I'm guilty of this, of, of images a- and quotes and books of how to live your best life, how, how to be amazing. And anything below that metric of perfection, you start to feel terrible and you start to kind of ruminate over what, what you, you know, you lie in bed at night and you think, "How could I have done that? How could I have done that?" And you forget that you, you're only able to handle what you can at that time and you can't hold yourself up to this idealized yardstick. Uh, look, I delved through this for, for a long time. We learned my father had stage IV cancer when I was 18 years old. Um, and from, from when we learned to when he passed away was only four months.

   6. AHAndrew Huberman17:33

      Four months.

   7. AWAri Wallach17:33

      Four months. And for, for, for a lot (laughs) of that time, um, I was kind of in denial, right? Like, I wasn't actually there with him as much as I should have been. I- i- in fact, a- and we're not going to, we, we won't go into this, I was actually with you that summer. We were working together that, that summer, um, at a, 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 self-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, of having these regrets. So empathy for yourself really, really centers you b- it doesn't mean you let yourself off the hook. It doesn't mean you can go willy-nilly and treat people terribly. It means you recognize that who you were even yesterday is in many ways different than who you are today and, and what, 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, uh, into a family, into a, you know, my, my, my, my, my birth family or, or, or, you know, the family that you choose, and they were born into something, and you work with what you have. But you have to start there because so many times, I, I, I work with people and I talk to people, and they say, "Oh, I want to have empathy and com- you know, for, for the, for the past and for the future." But they don't have it for themselves. So if you don't start there, it becomes very, very difficult to, to spread out, uh, first obviously going backwards, and then ultimately, the goal of my work is to get you to spread that out into the future.

   8. AHAndrew Huberman19:17

      Uh, I love this concept of empathy for self because I've heard it before in other contexts, but I haven't heard it, uh, operationalized the way that you describe it. I think, um, yeah, we, uh, there's, uh, two phrases that come to mind. Uh, there's a book, uh, called The Fighter's Heart by Sam Sheridan, and, um, it's a pretty interesting account of all the different forms of martial arts and fighting. And there's an interesting part of the book where he says, you know, "You can't have your 20th birthday until you're 19," which is a big giant duh. But it's actually a pretty profound statement. And by the way, he went to Harvard. He's a smart kid. His father was a, in the SEAL teams. He, he has an interesting lineage in his own right. And I think what, at Harvard, he, he claims he just, um, painted and smoked cigarettes. So, you know, (laughs) he's a bit of a, bit of a, uh, 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, that we forget because of the immense amount of attention that we pay to, uh, trying to be like others and satisfy external metrics. And so, I like to think he, he was in agreement with you, uh, if I may. The, the other, um, thing that happened to me recently that comes to mind is that, um, I, like many people, peruse Instagram. I teach on Instagram, et cetera. And there are a lot of these quote accounts or like kind of like life inspiration accounts, and, and I would argue that the half-life of any one of those posts is, is pretty short. But some are, are pretty interesting, and, and there's a guy, I'll put it in the show note captions. I don't remember off the top of my head. Um, not a huge account, not a small account, I think he lives in Austin, and he goes through this long discourse about the challenges of the human mind for a lot of the reasons that we're talking about, its ability to flit from past to present to future, et cetera. But then he, he says, you know, it ba- it basically just settles down to one actionable step per day or per morning, um, which is, at some point, if you want to grow and be more functional, you have to ask yourself, you know, "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?

   9. AWAri Wallach21:36

      Yeah. (laughs)

   10. AHAndrew Huberman21:36

       Every day is kind of its own unique unit, and our biology really does function on these circadian biology units of 24 hours, so no negotiating that. So I li- I like this concept of what, what can I do today to make my life and hopefully the lives of others better? Because it, it implies a verb, an action step, and it's really focused on the unit of the day, which is really what we've got. Um, so that resonated. So according

5. 22:00 – 26:09

   Tool: Empathy for Others

   1. AHAndrew Huberman22:00

      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.

   2. AWAri Wallach22:08

      Mm-hmm.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman22:09

      That, that there is a need for striving. Um, at what point do we start to develop empathy for others, and what does that look like? Like, is empathy for somebody else, um, feeling what they feel? I mean, that's the kind of traditional definition.

   4. AWAri Wallach22:20

      Yeah, I mean, look, we, we, we start off with kind of cognitive intellectual empathy, right? So you can-

   5. AHAndrew Huberman22:24

      Mm-hmm.

   6. AWAri Wallach22:24

      ... you kind of think it.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman22:26

      Mm-hmm.

   8. AWAri Wallach22:26

      Um, but where you really want to be able to be is at a place where y- your, their, their feelings are feelings that you can feel and you want to bring i- i- if they're, if they're feeling bad, you want to ki- kind of 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, 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, so it makes sense at that level. But when I'm feeling empathy for another, their state of being can be as important as my own state of being. Um, it, it can be, look, it can be taxing, don't get me wrong, but ultimately, that is what self-compassion can give you because it can give you a state of being where those around you, you are no longer fundamentally disconnected. And I think one of the, the great errors of where we have taken this civilization over the past several decades if not centuries is, is disconnection. Disconnection from ourselves, disconnection from each other, and disconnection fr- from nature and the planet. So anything we can do to further that connection is going to benefit us today in the current moment.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman23:43

      I agree, um, completely. If we were to b- break that down, um, into the requirements for empathy and connection, uh, one, it seems like presence. Like, we, we need to be present. Like, if we're going to appreciate a, a fern, a beautiful fern or a dog or a significant other or another human being that we happen to encounter, we have to be present. We ca- or if we're going to have empathy, we, our mind can't be some place else.

   10. AWAri Wallach24:11

       Can't be wandering.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman24:12

       Right. Can't be in the past, can't be in the future-

   12. AWAri Wallach24:14

       Yeah.

   13. AHAndrew Huberman24:14

       ... or we're not going to be able to really touch into the details and the, of the experience. So that seems like requirement number one. The second is that we need to be able to leave whatever, um, kind of pressures are on us to d- to tend to other things, right? Like, e- every neural circuit, we know, has a push and a pull. Like, in order to get A, you need to suppress B, and this is the way neural circuits work generally. You know, flexors and extensors in the muscles are a good analogy.... uh, for, uh, which, by the way, you know, like if you're gonna flex your bicep, um, your, your tricep is es- essentially relaxing and vice versa, i- in so many, so many words. The PTs are gonna dive all over me for that one, but b- and that's sort of how neural circuits in the brain work. We, we can actually see all around us by virtue of neurons that respond to either increments and decrements in light, and their difference is actually what allows us to see boundaries, borders visually. So, um, we need to suppress, like, our thoughts about where we need to be that day or other things that are going on for us, and then we need to be able to return to our own, you know, self-attention in order to, to be functional. And I think that, I think this is where the challenge is and where the next question arises, which is, on the one hand... I could m- imagine that, okay, we've got so many pressures upon us every day, all day, that it's m- getting much harder to be present, to be empathic, and to build this idealized future or better future. But on the other hand, I hear you and other people saying, "Well, things are so much better than they were even 50 years ago in terms of health outcomes, believe it or not, in terms of, you know, sh- uh, status of, uh, 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... The people suffering were elsewhere. You didn't, perhaps didn't see them.

   14. AWAri Wallach26:08

       Mm-hmm.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman26:08

       So,

6. 26:09 – 31:48

   Empathy for Future Generations, Emotion & Logic

   1. AHAndrew Huberman26:10

      there are a couple levels of question here, but the first one is, um, perhaps, are we much better off but we are w- worse off in the sense that there's so much incoming that we miss the fact that we're better off? Like, you know, (laughs) is it like notifications preventing us from seeing that-

   2. AWAri Wallach26:27

      Yeah.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman26:27

      ... we actually have so much that we're, we're, we're, you know, 100 times better than w- off than we were as a species 50 years ago? 'Cause I, I feel like a lot of the debates that I see online about climate change, about health, about longevity, it's like, it's overwhelming because I feel like people aren't, aren't agreeing on the first principles. So let's start with, with this. Are, are human beings better off in terms of health and longevity than we were, let's go short scale, 50 years ago?

   4. AWAri Wallach26:55

      So look, in aggregate, because we can find peaks and valleys, right, when, when we zoom in, if we pull back, there's no better time to be alive as a homo sapien on planet Earth than right now. Now, someone's gonna argue right now, they're gonna say, "No, no, no."

   5. AHAndrew Huberman27:09

      I mean, according to what metrics, like happiness?

   6. AWAri Wallach27:11

      Health, infant mortality, uh, e- even, even as we backslide in this country, b- being a woman, um, e- education, uh, the, kind of the calories that we get. A- across the board. Look, if you and I go outside and you stepped on a rusty nail 100 years ago, y- good chance you would die. Right now, we just go to the, you know, to the, to the drugstore and put something on it, or we even know that we don't even have to put anything on it. We can just put it underneath, uh, 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 that we are now at an inflection point, because the things that we do or do not do across the major issues of our day and how we deal with them, climate change, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, um... What we do or do not do will dictate not only the next several years and several decades, potentially the next several centuries. So, so you've hit it. We're being bombarded by information. Most of the information we're attracted to is the negative, negativity bias. You and I on this, we're gonna 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, 'cause 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 gonna get, the more-

   7. AHAndrew Huberman28:50

      Not this media company. (laughs)

   8. AWAri Wallach28:52

      Not this media company.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman28:52

      I'm just, I'm not kidding, but yeah. (laughs)

   10. AWAri Wallach28:53

       But all the other one. Well, that, I mean, I, I, I would argue some of your success comes from the fact that you don't wallow in the negativity and there's a real thirst and a hunger and desire to learn more about who we are and how we can make ourselves better. But that negativity bias is still part of us, right? I think one of the, one of the issues that we have to confront as a society is that there are parts of us, the, the, the prefrontal cortex parts of us that are amazing, that build microphones, that have conversations that stream across the internet, and then there are parts of us, you know, this is Jonathan's elephant and the 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, in the kind of the death and despair and the horrific things that we can do to one another, right? You know, my personal past on my father's side is, I think some of the darkest moments in homo sapien behavior, and that was not that long ago. So if we want to move in- i- into a place that allows us to ask what I think is the, the fundamental question of our time, which is how do we become the great ancestors the future needs us to be, we need to find a way to both tap into, to the, to the elephant and the rider, which you'll do a better job of me expla- uh, in explaining than I will.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman30:12

       No, I love this idea. I li- I mean, we could map it to neural circuits, but I love this idea of high level concepts and, and then neural circuits that are very, um, what Dr. Paul Conti was on this podcast, psychiatrist, brilliant psychiatrist said, you know, the, the, the l- the limbic system-

   12. AWAri Wallach30:26

       Yeah.

   13. AHAndrew Huberman30:27

       ... um, the emotional system doesn't n- know or care about the clock or the calendar.

   14. AWAri Wallach30:31

       Yep.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman30:31

       It just elicits feeling.

   16. AWAri Wallach30:34

       Yeah.

   17. AHAndrew Huberman30:34

       Doesn't care about whether or not that feeling is relevant to the past, the present, or the future. It just, it just has a job, which is just to bring out a particular feeling.

   18. AWAri Wallach30:42

       You're jumping ahead a little bit, but that's okay because what y- what you're jumping into is...... when we ask and we want to have an empathic connection, we want to have empathy with future generations, we don't want it to just be cognitive. We don't want it just to be intellectual. We actually want it to be emotional. So if I ask someone, uh, "What do you want the future to be like for your great grandkids in the, in the 2080s?" And they give me a list of kind of bullet points, but they're usually externalized bullet points.

   19. AHAndrew Huberman31:10

       Shelter, healthcare.

   20. AWAri Wallach31:12

       Yeah. And then I follow up and, you know, we've done this, and other people much smarter than me have done this in studies. We say, and Yaakov Trope at NYU is the one who taught me this, um, "How do you want them to feel?" That's different, right? This is Damasio's, um... this is somatic markers 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 change in behaviors that you want. Madison Avenue understands this. Marketing understands this. They don't-

   21. AHAndrew Huberman31:47

       But, but the

7. 31:48 – 36:50

   Tool: Emotion to Guide Action

   1. AHAndrew Huberman31:48

      general public tends not to. Sorry to keep interrupting you-

   2. AWAri Wallach31:50

      Yeah.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman31:50

      ... but also it's always, as the kids say, sorry, not sorry, in the sense that I wanna make sure that I highlight something. Um, Martha Beck is somebody who I think has done some really brilliant work creating practices where when one is not feeling what they want to feel, um, you know, there's this kind of question like, are you supposed to feel your feelings or are you supposed to create new feelings in place of them-

   4. AWAri Wallach32:10

      Mm-hmm.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman32:10

      ... especially if they're unpleasant? And it's like, there's no clear answer to that because it's complicated, uh, infinite number of variables. But she does have this interesting practice whereby it's, it's a bit like a meditation where if you're struggling with something, like maybe you're struggling with boredom or not knowing where to go with your life, or you're not happy, or you just feel some underlying anxiety, to think back to a time when you felt particularly blank. Like a time when you felt particularly empowered or particularly curious, um, it could be very specific, particularly, um, amused because... And the idea is that in anchoring to the emotion state first, you call to mind a bunch of potential action steps. And the reason I like this, um, approach is that that is at least one way that, quote unquote, "the brain works," which is that the emotion states are linked to a bunch of action step possibilities, kind of like a, a magic library-

   6. AWAri Wallach33:07

      Mm-hmm.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman33:08

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

   8. AWAri Wallach33:45

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

   9. AHAndrew Huberman33:52

      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 have, to, to be happy-

   10. AWAri Wallach34:03

       Yes.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman34:03

       ... with no trauma.

   12. AWAri Wallach34:04

       Yes.

   13. AHAndrew Huberman34:05

       Right. Okay.

   14. AWAri Wallach34:05

       Because that becomes, like, that becomes an anchor, right? That this, she's 100% correct. What it does is, but it places a, it's like a kedge anchor. So if you and I were sailors, which we're not, we would, we... there's a thing called a kedge anchor, and a kedge anchor is, is this anchor that you throw, you know, 30, 40 meters off to the side. It hits the bottom and you use the rope to pull yourself there. Emotions will pull us towards those futures. It will alter the behaviors. So time and time again, when we intellectualize and we become overly cognitive in terms of futures that we wanna see happen for ourselves, future Ari or, or future Wallach family or future society or future civil- global planetary civilization, if we think about it, that's one thing. But to actually execute on those goals, we have to actually connect the emotional state that we want to be in to drive that function. Remember, look, this is one of the things that Marty Seligman says that Freud got it wrong. Freud felt, as Marty says, that emotions were these things that we... that happened in the past that we would use to dwell on and that was 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, you know, I, I had this, like, terrible breakup. I feel so terrible. Uh, and then 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, 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, they did this study where they, at a, at a college campus, they, they found people who had just been in a kind of a quasi long-term relationship that had gone through a breakup.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman35:53

       Quasi long-term.

   16. AWAri Wallach35:54

       Yeah, like six months.

   17. AHAndrew Huberman35:55

       Please, please define.

   18. AWAri Wallach35:55

       Six months.

   19. AHAndrew Huberman35:55

       What I've learned, what I've learned in life is it's important to define the relationship.

   20. AWAri Wallach35:59

       Yes. It was about six months.

   21. AHAndrew Huberman36:00

       Okay.

   22. AWAri Wallach36:00

       Um, and people who had gone through the breakup, they, they gave, they gave, you know, one group a placebo and another group actually they just got acetaminophen, got Tylenol. And the group that got the acetaminophen actually felt better. Why? Because those... Because emo- 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, and empathy and compassion and this, this one we call love, as what we're connected to the future generations that we wanna see, how we wanna 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.

8. 36:50 – 38:02

   Sponsor: AG1

   1. AHAndrew Huberman36:50

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9. 38:02 – 43:52

   Tools: Perfect Day Exercise; Cathedral Thinking, Awe & Future Generations

   1. AHAndrew Huberman38:02

      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 la- literature of, like, yes, emotions don't know the clock or the calendar.

   2. AWAri Wallach38:15

      Yeah.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman38:16

      And that sounds like a bad thing and oftentimes it's discussed as a bad thing. Like, oh, when you're feeling stressed you're not able to access the parts of your brain that can make better decisions. We- we know that's true, except i- 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 f- for sake of survival.

   4. AWAri Wallach38:35

      Yeah.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman38:36

      Um, in the long term, it's, it's problematic. But the way that you're describing emotions as a Kedge anchor?

   6. AWAri Wallach38:46

      Yeah.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman38:46

      Is that what it's called? Kedge with a K?

   8. AWAri Wallach38:47

      Yep.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman38:48

      Yeah. Kedge anchor. Interesting. Um, 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-

   10. AWAri Wallach39:08

       Mm-hmm.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman39:08

       ... and then future state hopefully arrived at if it's, uh, you know, set along the right path.

   12. AWAri Wallach39:14

       Yeah.

   13. AHAndrew Huberman39:16

       I like that a lot. Um, and again, it maps to some of the work that has largely existed, at least to my knowledge, in popular psychology or whatever you want to call it, self-help. Again, I'm a big Martha Beck fan, in part because, um, of an exercise that she's included in, uh, I think several if not all her books of this perfect day-

   14. AWAri Wallach39:37

       Mm-hmm.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman39:37

       ... exercise. Have you ever done this exercise?

   16. AWAri Wallach39:38

       No.

   17. AHAndrew Huberman39:38

       It's a very interesting exercise. You, um, you first, uh, sit with your eyes closed and you imagine, like, really terrible stuff and you experience it in your body and you experience it in your mind and you just pay attention to how it feels, and- and it sucks. It doesn't feel good. Um, most people don't have too much trouble doing that exercise. Then you shift over. I think you're supposed to take a little break or maybe move around a little bit, and then you do a perfect day exercise where no rules. You lie down or sit down, close your eyes, and you can imagine your day includes anything you want. You can be anywhere you want. Y- the- you... 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, uh, all borne out w- So this is something, uh, 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 gonna..." Like, "You've got to be kidding me." And it's a remarkable exercise. And, um, the reason I bring it up now in discussion with you is I think you and Martha arrived at a similar place or a similar avenue, but in your case you're talking about specifically toward building a future that's not necessarily for you to live in, but for someone else to live in.

   18. AWAri Wallach41:24

       Oh. Look, the, the, the core of my philosophy is, is in a story that I heard a very long time ago. Uh, it comes, it comes from the Talmud. That being said, this story exists in many cultures. And so there's a, there's a, there's a, a man named Honi walking, you know, and he comes across a much older man who's planting a carob tree. And he says to the older man, you know, "Why are you planting a carob tree? This... 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, why plant it? You know, you won't be around for that." And the old man says, "When I was young, I played in the shade of a carob tree. I ate from the carob tree, so it's my job to plant this carob tree now." Um, 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- I can give you a bunch of ex- you know, the Panama Canal, right? That was a great, you know... It, but th- another way that we think about this, we call this cathedral thinking. So now when, you know, we're, 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, um, 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, or mosque fully built. That's cathedral thinking. It's doing things whose, whose fruits you will not be around to, to take advantage of, to, to, to, to reap, and, and to have as part of your life.

   19. AHAndrew Huberman43:03

       And, uh, and I love it and I love the notion of cathedral thinking. Um-... just the visual there or mosque thinking. I went to the Blue Mosque years ago.

   20. AWAri Wallach43:13

       In Istanbul?

   21. AHAndrew Huberman43:13

       Yeah.

   22. AWAri Wallach43:13

       Yep.

   23. AHAndrew Huberman43:14

       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, "Whoa." You know? But I, so I just-

   24. AWAri Wallach43:23

       But that, that, that whoa, that whoa that you felt is what we call awe.

   25. AHAndrew Huberman43:26

       Yeah. Right.

   26. AWAri Wallach43:27

       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, what did Ari, what did Andy do?" They have awe. It's not because we necessarily built cathedrals, it's because we, we took actions, both very small and very large, to ensure that they would flourish, that they would have those carob trees.

10. 43:52 – 51:13

    Egoic Legacy, Modeling Behavior

    1. AWAri Wallach43:52

    2. AHAndrew Huberman43:52

       And I think what, um, what I realize is that I don't know who built the Blue Mosque, specifically. I don't know who the architect was. I should, you know?

    3. AWAri Wallach44:03

       Mm-hmm.

    4. AHAndrew Huberman44:03

       And even, you know, last, earlier this year we were in Sydney, I went to the Sydney Opera House, we did a live there. It's a beautiful building. I learned that it had been built over a very long period of time. I can tell you that the architect was Danish, but I can't remember his name. So part of what we're talking about here is giving up, um, our need for attribution.

    5. AWAri Wallach44:22

       Yep.

    6. AHAndrew Huberman44:23

       Giving up our need for credit. And gosh, this is the opposite of social media, right? Social media, it's all about getting credit, you know? Um, and yet in science, where people care a lot about credit while they're alive, and, and my scientist colleagues hate this, but they know it deeply too, right?

    7. AWAri Wallach44:42

       It's also, it's also a business model of academic science right now.

    8. AHAndrew Huberman44:45

       Right, right, right, which is that with the exception of Einstein and a few others, most people will not be associated with their incredible discoveries, even the textbook discoveries, 20 years out. And I know this 'cause 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 gonna say, 'Oh, that's the discovery of so-and-so.'" They, they talk about the discovery, people will build on it. So you're part of a process for which you won't get credit in the long run. You will get credit in the short run. And, and that brings me around to perhaps a point that's more relevant to everybody, not, not just scientists, which is that we are all trained to work on these short-term contingencies, reward schedules, where, you know, we achieve something, we get credit. "You get an A, you get a B, you get a trophy." We just came from the Olympic track and field trials in, uh, in Oregon, and it's like, you know, podium, you know, bronze, silver, gold. And, um, and so yes, you're part of a larger legacy, you're building toward a larger legacy in, in the examples that you give, but part of it is understanding that, um, you're not gonna get credit. You're not gonna have your name huge on the side-

    9. AWAri Wallach45:58

       Mm-hmm.

    10. AHAndrew Huberman45:58

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

    11. AWAri Wallach46:10

        Mm-hmm.

    12. AHAndrew Huberman46:10

        The reason they have names on the side of them is because people gave money, typically, gave money-

    13. AWAri Wallach46:15

        Mm-hmm.

    14. AHAndrew Huberman46:15

        ... to the university to have their name on the side of a building to be immortalized. What's interesting be- for many reasons, both sociopolitical, but also other reasons, those names change over time. So-

    15. AWAri Wallach46:26

        Yeah.

    16. AHAndrew Huberman46:27

        ... if, if people knew that they, that they, if they gave half their wealth, um, and their name might be scraped off a building in, in 200 years, they might feel differently about it. So short term contingencies are important. Then again, we call it Rockefeller Plaza-

    17. AWAri Wallach46:40

        Yep.

    18. AHAndrew Huberman46:40

        ... right? Um, it's, is Lincoln Center named after a Lincoln?

    19. AWAri Wallach46:44

        Yeah, pro- yeah, I'm, I'm sure it is.

    20. AHAndrew Huberman46:45

        (laughs) I don't know.

    21. AWAri Wallach46:45

        Some, some Lincoln, yeah.

    22. AHAndrew Huberman46:46

        You're the New Yorker. You know? Um, and so on and so forth. So, so like if people, um, how do we get the everyday person, and I consider myself an everyday person, how, how do we get ourselves working on short term contingencies for a future that we can visualize as better for the next generation and let go of our need for credit?

    23. AWAri Wallach47:08

        Great series of, of points and questions brought up. So part of what you're talking about is egoic legacy, right? So y- you mentioned a building. We won't u- it can be at any, any building at any major university, the name is put there in marble. Y- you said 200 years.

    24. AHAndrew Huberman47:20

        Well, you went to Berkeley at one point.

    25. AWAri Wallach47:21

        I went to Berkeley.

    26. AHAndrew Huberman47:21

        You went to a bunch of places.

    27. AWAri Wallach47:22

        Yeah.

    28. AHAndrew Huberman47:23

        But, um, he bounced around, folks. Proof that you can bounce around and still be successful, but maybe you should eventually finish. We'll talk about that later, but Sproul Plaza.

    29. AWAri Wallach47:31

        Yes.

    30. AHAndrew Huberman47:32

        Sproul Plaza, seat of the free speech movement.
11. 51:13 – 1:00:06

    Social Media, Time Capsule, Storytelling

    1. AWAri Wallach51:13

    2. AHAndrew Huberman51:14

       I totally agree, and I, I think, um, you know, I'm o- old enough and frankly I'm excited to be old enough that like I can make statements about being old enough to know that like i- I believe that our species is for the most part benevolent. I feel like most, most people, if raised in a, um, low trauma environment-

    3. AWAri Wallach51:34

       Mm-hmm.

    4. AHAndrew Huberman51:37

       ... um, with adequate resources will behave really well. There are exceptions and there may be sociopaths that are born with really disrupted neural circuitry that they just have to do evil or feel, you know. But I think, um, it's clear that trauma, um, and challenge can, can rewire behavior and certainly the brain, um, to create, you know, what we see as evil. Right? So, but I think most people are good.

    5. AWAri Wallach52:04

       Yeah.

    6. AHAndrew Huberman52:04

       Uh, most people are, are of genuine goodness. Um, and I do think that we model behavior. I think that etiquette is something that I guess as a 49-year-old person, I guess does that make me middle-aged? I'm of middle age. I'll probably live hopefully to be about 100, but we'll see. Bullet busts or cancer, I'm gonna give it, give it what I got.

    7. AWAri Wallach52:24

       I think it depends on whether or not-

    8. AHAndrew Huberman52:25

       Yeah.

    9. AWAri Wallach52:25

       ... you read your book fully. (laughs)

    10. AHAndrew Huberman52:26

        (laughs) Right. Uh, that, that, there's a response to that, um, that could go either way. Um, the, I like to think that reading the book fully will extend life as opposed to shorten life.

    11. AWAri Wallach52:36

        Yes.

    12. AHAndrew Huberman52:37

        But, um, if nothing else, maybe it'll cure insomnia. The, um, the, the idea here is that if we're going to invest in, in being our best selves, one would hope that other people will respond to that the way that you said, you know, that, that we'll kind of mirror each other. Good behavior breeds good behavior. In my lifetime, I've seen a real, um, increase in the number of rules and regulations and a decrease in etiquette. Like, and what I would call, and I don't, this isn't a, a real term I don't think, but like spontaneous etiquette or genuine etiquette, like people being kind just to be kind-

    13. AWAri Wallach53:12

        Mm-hmm.

    14. AHAndrew Huberman53:12

        ... not because they're afraid of a consequence.

    15. AWAri Wallach53:13

        Mm-hmm.

    16. AHAndrew Huberman53:14

        Um, and I have a theory, um, and I'll go through this quickly. I, I saw a documentary recently about the history of game shows-

    17. AWAri Wallach53:22

        Mm-hmm.

    18. AHAndrew Huberman53:23

        ... where I learned that the first commercial was during the World Series where when DiMaggio was making a run on the home run record.

    19. AWAri Wallach53:28

        Hmm.

    20. AHAndrew Huberman53:29

        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.

    21. AWAri Wallach53:38

        Yeah.

    22. AHAndrew Huberman53:38

        And they used human interaction as a way to make it more interesting between the contestants and the host. And then came reality TV shows, and then now I would argue that social media is the reality TV show and we're all able to opt in and cast ourselves in it. And that the way that people get more, um, let's just say presence on the show is to do things that are more hyperbolic.

    23. AWAri Wallach54:03

        Yeah, more outlandish.

    24. AHAndrew Huberman54:04

        Right.

    25. AWAri Wallach54:04

        Yeah.

    26. AHAndrew Huberman54:04

        Like, like the, like it's very hard. I've tried and I think managed to s- 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, um, and being ... Y- you can, but it's much harder than if you're, you're a high friction, uh, player 'cause it's less interesting. There's less drama. Um, it takes more attention. But I do think that there are pockets of that. So Lex Fridman used to talk about this. Like is there a social media platform where people are rewarded for being benevolent, for modeling good etiquette because they genuinely like that? And, um, I say social media because I think so much of life now is taking place there and that's the opportunity to reach people across continents and, and far away, um, in time as well, right? To timestamp 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, et cetera, what was retweeted? 'Cause I would argue that and even the highest, uh-... virality social media posts have a half-life of about six months to a year. It, maybe not even that.

    27. AWAri Wallach55:21

        Even that.

    28. AHAndrew Huberman55:21

        There are a few memes, like the guy looking at the other girl walking the other way, those kinds of memes that seem to persist, but most of them don't. Um, so is there a time capsule sort of, uh, version of social media? Because I look on the internet, like on YouTube, and I would say there are probably three or four YouTube videos, namely the Steve Jobs commencement speech at Stanford in 2015, maybe Last Lecture by, uh, Randy Pausch before he died of pancreatic cancer, maybe Brené 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 bu- um, most things, as popular as they may seem, 100 million views, 200 million views, compared to literature, compared to-

    29. AWAri Wallach56:10

        Mm-hmm.

    30. AHAndrew Huberman56:10

        ... music, compared to poetry, compared to visual arts, fff, 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. Uh, 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?
12. 1:00:06 – 1:01:18

    Sponsor: LMNT

    1. AWAri Wallach1:00:06

    2. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:06

       I'd like to take a brief break to thank one of our sponsors, LMNT. LMNT 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 LMNT 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 LMNT 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 LMNT, you can go to drinklmnt.com/huberman, spelled drink L-M-N-T dot com slash Huberman to claim a free LMNT sample pack with the purchase of any LMNT drink mix. Again, that's drinklmnt.com/huberman to claim a free sample pack.

13. 1:01:18 – 1:09:23

    Short-Term Thinking; Life Purpose, Science & Religion

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:01:19

       I mean, one of the reasons I fell in love with biology is that...... yes, we are evolving as a species, but I would argue slowly enough that any fundamental knowledge about biology of the human body is a, it's a core truth about us way back when and now, and very likely into the future. And of course, technologies will modify that, medicine will modify th- our biology, et cetera. But it, the, I get great peace from that, um, 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, our biology and our well-being 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, um, timescale of, um, motivation and reward. And I use social media, so I am not anti-social media by any stretch. In fact, I'm quite pro, provided it's kept in check, à la Jonathan Haidt's, uh, ideas. I, I really like those. Um, but, uh, 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 a- but I enjoy playing a little bit of roulette or a little bit the slots. I play all the low-level stuff that doesn't require any thinking. Um, and I often do pretty well, for whatever reason, um, 'cause I know when to leave probably. Um, but Vegas is all about short-term thinking-

    2. AWAri Wallach1:02:55

       Mm-hmm.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:56

       ... and short-term reward contingency.

    4. AWAri Wallach1:02:57

       Mm-hmm.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:58

       It's actually designed in every respect to get you for- to forget-

    6. AWAri Wallach1:03:01

       Yeah.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:01

       ... that there are these other longer timescales and, and -

    8. AWAri Wallach1:03:04

       Well, th- that's why there's no natural light in most casinos.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:06

       There's no lights. There's no clocks in many of them. Um, the, uh, the intermittent, random intermittent reward schedule that's there is designed to keep you playing. Um, and I would argue that a lot of social media is like that.

    10. AWAri Wallach1:03:18

        Yeah.

    11. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:19

        Not all of it, but a lot of it is like that. Um, reward, uh, likes and responses, in some cases fighting is what people want. They want to fight 'cause they like that emotion, that it will f- the algorithms figure you out so that they shorten up your, your temporal window.

    12. AWAri Wallach1:03:32

        Yeah.

    13. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:33

        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.

    14. AWAri Wallach1:03:40

        Yeah.

    15. AHAndrew Huberman1:03:41

        I, I think it's right. It's more like a casino, however, where that casino harbors all sorts of different games and they're gonna find the one that you like. Some people like playing roulette. I happen to like playing roulette. Some people like craps. 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-

    16. AWAri Wallach1:04:06

        Yeah.

    17. AHAndrew Huberman1:04:07

        ... unlike alcoholism or drug addiction or other forms of addiction where the next time it is just gonna 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.

    18. AWAri Wallach1:04:33

        Mm-hmm.

    19. AHAndrew Huberman1:04:33

        How do we get into the metaphorical, uh, you know, cave painting scenario?

    20. AWAri Wallach1:04:37

        Yeah.

    21. AHAndrew Huberman1:04:37

        Because this, what it means is that the stories that I'm seeing on social media today probably are meaningless toward my future, probably.

    22. AWAri Wallach1:04:47

        More than likely, yes.

    23. AHAndrew Huberman1:04:47

        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, uh, is the, the argu- the debate about the debate or the debate about the debate about the debate.

    24. AWAri Wallach1:05:10

        Yeah.

    25. AHAndrew Huberman1:05:10

        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 u- ex- you know, used it to good end to, uh, to share his message. Um, I mean, w- 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?

    26. AWAri Wallach1:05:45

        Yep.

    27. AHAndrew Huberman1:05:45

        Is it go paint, like, on the side of a cave? Is it write a book? Is it, um... I mean, how do we, how do we do that? And then let's check off the box of like we need to tend to our kids, we need to tend-

    28. AWAri Wallach1:05:55

        Yeah.

    29. AHAndrew Huberman1:05:55

        ... to our health, we need to get our sleep, we need to get our nut-

    30. AWAri Wallach1:05:57

        Sure.
14. 1:09:23 – 1:15:19

    Longpath, Telos, Time Perception

    1. AWAri Wallach1:09:23

       here... L- we started off by, we started off... So, so the work that I do, th- this, this mindset that I am advocating for, I call longpath. Longpath s- sits on three pillars. These are the kind of the, the, to use your nomenclature, they're three protocols.

    2. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:39

       Mm-hmm.

    3. AWAri Wallach1:09:39

       One, transgenerational empathy. Empathy with yourself, empathy with the past, and then th- 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 'cause 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 and 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 m- most important unit of time to Andrew Huberman is from your birth to your death. We're all wired that way because that's... The literature, the science that I grew up with, I, I grew up and I wanted 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, 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 telos. We have lost the ultimate aim or goal or purpose for our species, for our civilization on, 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? Eh, eh, do I matter? Will people know who I am 200 years from now? Will my, w- i- i- is, is my sense of purpose connected to anything larger?" And without these larger religious structures that we had for thousands of years, the answer is no. I am n-

    4. AHAndrew Huberman1:11:41

       But, uh, but, but there are still many people on the planet-

    5. AWAri Wallach1:11:43

       Oh, yeah.

    6. AHAndrew Huberman1:11:44

       ... who believe in God and are religious.

    7. AWAri Wallach1:11:45

       Yes.

    8. AHAndrew Huberman1:11:46

       Right? So is that-

    9. AWAri Wallach1:11:46

       More than there are that aren't religious.

    10. AHAndrew Huberman1:11:48

        So does that mean that they're i- immune from this, like, like, confusion?

    11. AWAri Wallach1:11:51

        They're not... Well, no, because there's other confusions that come from it, right? There's other... R- religion as it's practiced in majority parts of the world, and this is where I'm gonna get a lot of hate mail, is mostly about power and coercion and, and control.

    12. AHAndrew Huberman1:12:05

        Not at its essence.

    13. AWAri Wallach1:12:06

        Not at its essence.

    14. AHAndrew Huberman1:12:07

        And I would say that for every major religion.

    15. AWAri Wallach1:12:08

        Yes.

    16. AHAndrew Huberman1:12:09

        I would say for every religion, like, the, the essence of it is, is-

    17. AWAri Wallach1:12:12

        The, the-

    18. AHAndrew Huberman1:12:13

        ... is about love.

    19. AWAri Wallach1:12:13

        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?

    20. AHAndrew Huberman1:12:24

        Right. Like with anything.

    21. AWAri Wallach1:12:25

        Like with anything. And so we-

    22. AHAndrew Huberman1:12:28

        But that's true of science too.

    23. AWAri Wallach1:12:30

        That's awfully-

    24. AHAndrew Huberman1:12:30

        I mean, I know a lot about the business models of science.

    25. AWAri Wallach1:12:31

        You just re- y- you referenced it earlier, right? Science, it's, it's no longer, uh, like, you know, pure Medici-type science where you're doing these things and like... It's, it's publish, it's perish. It's, there's business models.

    26. AHAndrew Huberman1:12:41

        But even-

    27. AWAri Wallach1:12:41

        Can you, can we take it from the lab to the-

    28. AHAndrew Huberman1:12:43

        Yeah.

    29. AWAri Wallach1:12:43

        Can we do... 100%. And that is part of where we are. What I'm asking for when we have a conversation about our telos 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, from kind of when they rise up to when they go extinct. We're, we're in the first third of this ballgame, right?"

    30. AHAndrew Huberman1:13:05

        Well, that's reassuring.
15. 1:15:19 – 1:23:02

    Tools: Photo Frames; Behavior & Legacy; Life in Weeks

    1. AHAndrew Huberman1:15:19

       there a way that we can leverage the immediacy of our experience, that fact, to actually create useful tools for the future? Like, so for instance, before we started recording, we were talking 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.

    2. AWAri Wallach1:15:46

       Mm-hmm.

    3. AHAndrew Huberman1:15:46

       We all, like, wrote little notes and did things. I think, um, someone put some candy in there or something. It's kind of a cool concept, right? But social media to me does not seem like a time capsule. I feel like it's just gonna get turned over, turned over, turned over. What are the real time capsules of human experience? So you said religion, religious doctrine.

    4. AWAri Wallach1:16:05

       Mm-hmm.

    5. AHAndrew Huberman1:16:06

       Bible, Quran, Torah being the big three. (laughs) And there are others of course.

    6. AWAri Wallach1:16:10

       Yes.

    7. AHAndrew Huberman1:16:10

       But those are the big three. Bible, Quran, Torah. Those are the big three time capsules.

    8. AWAri Wallach1:16:14

       Yeah.

    9. AHAndrew Huberman1:16:14

       Okay. Then we've got literature, music, poetry, visual art. So paintings, drawings, and sculpture. What else do we have?

Episode duration: 2:17:36