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 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.
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Again, that's Roka.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 conundrum, like if we really care about the future, what do we want to do?Where do we want to place our mental frame?
And how do we start going about doing that?
It's a great question or a great series of questions.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.
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, but it's Andrew.No, it's OK.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 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 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.Now, fast forward.So that's a very long time ago.
You take us you know, through the Middle East, into Europe, into Asia.20,000 years ago, our ancestors crossed Beringia, which is now the Bering Strait.And we're in North America.
And fast forward to right now, on my way in here, I get a notification on my phone. 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 gonna 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, a 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 a better way to go about life.
You need to manage the day-to-day.There are people like me who are full-time futurists.We tend to be very anxious because what we tend to do is think more in the future and 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 Ari, 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 you, 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'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 a long time.We learned my father had stage four cancer.I was 18 years old. And from when he learned to when he passed away, it 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, and 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 a 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 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 wanna 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, 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, 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?
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 feeling bad, you want to bring some resolution to that.If they're feeling good, 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.
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 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.One, it seems like presence, like we need to be present.
Like if we're gonna 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.If we're going to have empathy, 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 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 or 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 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 the 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 we're 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, you know, a hundred times better 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 blood.If you and I go outside and you stepped on a rusty nail a hundred 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.
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.
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 on this, we're going to go back to R 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 gonna get.
Not this media company.Not this media company. I'm not kidding.
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, 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 wanna 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.
Yeah.And then I follow up.And we've done this in other people much smarter than you have done this in studies.We say, Jakob Troop 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 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 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 was the kids say, sorry, not sorry, in the sense that I wanna 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, 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
anxiety to think back to a time when you felt particularly blank, like a time when you felt particularly empowered or particularly curious.
It can be very specific, particularly amused because, 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 excitement, and there's all this idea about getting in vehicles and going places and things of that sort.
So what you're talking about is, I believe, thinking about the emotional states of others, and then from there, I think this is where you're gonna go,
cultivating some action steps that you can take to ensure that that future generation can access those emotions.
Yes, but with a slight correction, because it's not about thinking about their future emotional states, it's actually feeling them.
I see.So it's not saying I want my kids to be happy, I want them to have no trauma. it's feeling what it would be to be happy, no trauma.Right, okay.
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 30, 40 meters off to the side, it hits the bottom and you use the rope to pull yourself there. emotions will pull us towards those futures.It will alter the behaviors.
So time and time again, when we intellectualize and we become overly cognitive in terms of futures that we want to see happen for ourselves, future Ari, or future Wallach family, or future society, or future 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 terrible breakup, I feel so terrible. 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 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 did the 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.Six months.What I've learned in life is it's important to define the relationship.
Yeah, so 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 prosocial emotions, awe,
and empathy and compassion and this one we call love, as what we're connected to the future generations that we want to see, how we want to see them flourish, we are much more likely to see that happen than if we just have a vision of what tomorrow will look like at an intellectual kind of two-dimensional level.
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I really like this because it gets to so many themes that have been discussed on this podcast previously and that exist in the neuroscience literature of like, yes, emotions don't know the clock or the calendar. 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 longterm, 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 wanna 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 outside the bounds of reality.
And those are things that then you write down and that at least in my life have 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 weird self-hypnosis, self-help-y, woo stuff.Like, I'm not, like, come on.I'm like, At that time, I'm like, I'm a neuroscience professor.
Like, I'm not gonna, like, you gotta be kidding me.And it's a remarkable exercise.And the reason I bring it up now in discussion with you is I think you and Martha arrived at a similar place or a similar avenue.
But in your case, you're talking about specifically toward building a future that's not necessarily for you to live in, but for someone else to live in.
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 examples.The Panama Canal, right?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, 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.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 word that you felt is what we call awe. 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, you know, and even, you know, 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.And 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,
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, 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 Oregon.It's like, you know, podium, you know, 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 gonna get credit.You're not gonna have your name huge on the side of the building.
I mean, I don't wanna 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 if they gave half their wealth
and their name might be scraped off a building in 200 years, they might feel differently about it.So short-term contingencies are important.Then again, we call it Rockefeller Plaza, right?Is Lincoln Center named after a Lincoln?
And so on and so forth.So like if people, how do we get the everyday person I consider myself an everyday person.How do we get ourselves working on short-term contingencies for a future that
we can visualize this 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 can be at any building at any major university.The name is put there on marble.You said 200 years.
You went to Berkeley.I went to Berkeley.You went to a bunch of places, but you bounced around, folks.Proof that you can bounce around and still be successful, but maybe you should eventually finish.We'll talk about that later.But Sproul Plaza.Yes.
Sproul Plaza, 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?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,
being put in jail, basically anything.Maybe that's still true, but I don't think it is.But I can't tell you who Sproul is.
The question of legacy is very important.So Sproul Plaza, let's say 250 years from now, that name will probably, it may or may not be there, the plaza, but the name will, maybe it was renamed by someone else.
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.
This is an exciting thought.
It's an exciting and 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.
Oh yeah, no, please do that.
Please do so, please.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 going to be how I am with my children and my wife and my partner and the behaviors that I model, because those become those become the means right we like we need Susan Blackmore has mean theory right not not internet means where you know I watch a lot of those, but true means these cultural units that we
hand off both laterally and forward 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 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, 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,
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 100, but we'll see.Bullet bust or cancer, I'm going to give it what I got.Yeah.
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, more 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. 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 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 and most things as popular as they may seem, 100 million views, 200 million views, compared to literature, compared to music, compared to poetry, compared to visual arts, it's gonna be gone, right?
I like to think that these podcast episodes are gonna project forward 30, 40 years into the future.But if we look at the history of what's on YouTube, and we look at the half-life of any social media post, it may not be the case.
In fact, it's very likely it's not the case.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 Barducci calls horticultural time versus mechanical time.Because that's the way we used to think.
from 40,000 years to the agricultural revolution, 10,000, 12,000 years ago, to probably up until a couple of hundred years ago, we didn't remember.The minute hand only existed on the analog clock starting about 200 years ago.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 when we start to have trains.
Remember the transcontinental railroad?
It was stone hedge.It was sundial.It was seasons, right?The way we would think about the future.When people say, oh, Ari, you're a futurist.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 was a scientist in their other domains of life, but yeah.
This goes back to modeling behavior, right?The number one predictor if someone's gonna read the newspaper is if their parents read the newspaper.
Yeah, so my dad would say, you'd open the paper.And I'd poke it from behind when I wanted his attention.
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 truth, what is social media right now but nothing but a kind of a hall of mirrors of our culture right now?
What will they say 200 years from now when they look at these posts with the likes and the metrics that we use to judge ourselves individually and say, what happened to this species?
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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, it's a core truth about us way back when and now, and very likely into the future.
And of course, technologies will modify that, medicine will modify our biology, et cetera.But I get great peace from that.
and most of the so-called protocols that I described on the podcast about viewing sunlight, et cetera, circadian rhythmicity, et cetera, has been core to our biology and our 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 understanding timescale 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.But 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 of slots.I play all the low level stuff that doesn't require any thinking.
And I often do pretty well for whatever reason, because I know when to leave probably. But Vegas is all about short-term thinking and short-term reward contingency.
It's actually designed in every respect to forget that there are these other longer timescales.
And 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.
Reward likes and responses in some cases fighting is what people want They want to fight because they like that emotion that it will the algorithms figure you out so that they shorten up your your temporal window Yeah, and so when people say 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 gonna 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 wanna 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 I saw the debates, how much more do I need to hear about what was happening at the debates from other people?Probably zero.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 let's check off the box of like, we need to tend to our kids, we need to tend to our health, we need to get our sleep, we need to get our... Let's just assume that we're taking care of the 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, 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, I feel good about the research contributions we made, but that I knew
that people weren't gonna be like, oh, Huberman discovered this because I had already forgotten the people 32 years ahead.And I know the literature really well.So like, how do you square these different mental frames?It's a conundrum.
This is the 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.
Well, because I want to separate out what scientific rationality and the scientific method did is it didn't actually kill God.What it actually did was it killed the structures that arose to intermediate between us and God. a.k.a.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... And I'm not saying God should be telling what we should be doing or spirituality.
What I'm saying is that... You're not gonna argue you can tell God what to tell us.
But wait, 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, 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 our Species for our civilization on this planet.
I'm not gonna tell you what that is What I am gonna say is when you don't have that because God is no longer in the picture religion is no longer in the picture We flounder about and we're looking for metrics to judge.Am I doing the right thing?
Do I matter?Will people know who I am 200 years from now?Will my is is my sense of purpose?Connected to anything larger and without these larger religious structures that we had for thousands of years.The answer is no
But there are still many people on the planet who believe in God and are religious.
More than there are that aren't 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 its practice 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 control.
Not at its essence.Not at its essence.
And I would say that for every major religion.Yes. I would say for every religion, like the essence of it is about love.
The essence is about love and emancipation from the human condition to connect to something larger, to connect to the divine.The problem is when the business models get in the way, right?
Right, like with anything.
Like with anything.And so… But that's true of science too.I mean, I know a lot about the business models and science.You referenced it earlier, right?Science, it's no longer like, you know, pure Medici type science where you're doing these things and
It's published, it's perished, there's business models, can we take it from the lab to the, can we do it?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 from kind of when they rise up to when they go extinct.
in the first third of this ballgame, right?
That's reassuring.Yeah, we're in the… Because I keep hearing about, you know, the fact that we're almost done.So, we're about a third of the way through.We're in the bottom of the 30.Oh, goodness.All right.
Well, you finally said something that gives me… I'm just kidding.Lots of things that you've said give me confidence in our future.Most notably that you're talking about this… Sorry to interrupt, but I'm going to compliment you.
So, maybe you… I'll stop talking now.That most notably that, you know, I think you're the first person
outside of the sub-branch of neuroscience, which is a very small sub-branch, people that study time perception, to really call to people's consciousness that the human brain can expand or contract its time perception.And we do this all day long.
And high salience, high stress, high excitement, life and thinking shrinks the aperture, right?
It contracts the aperture and makes us very good at dealing with things in the present, get to the next day or the next hour, collapse, go and continue, repeat, repeat, repeat.
It's the opposite of what the Buddhists traditionally said, which was to be present in order to see
The timelessness, this is why I'm a big fan of the, I forget the name, it's, Rob, we'll have to edit this in, the Asatoma Prayer, which talks about release me from the time-bound nature of consciousness to timelessness.
Sounds very mystical, but what they're really talking about is get me out of the mode of stress into the mode of relaxation that allows me to see how the now links with the past and relates to the future.
Impossible to do when we're under stress trying to figure out like how we're going to get someplace in traffic to pick up the kids so they're not waiting outside the school alone.Impossible.
You just can't, the two deep breaths and the long exhale, like it works to bring your level of autonomic arousal down, make you navigate that situation better.
But it is the hyper rare individual who thinks, well, look, you know, this is linked to some larger timescale.Like when we are stressed, the horizon gets right up close.
So you're one of the first people to talk about this dynamic relationship with that horizon.Is there a way that we can leverage the immediacy of our experience, that fact, to actually create useful tools for the future?
Like, so for instance, before we started recording, we were talking about the notion of time capsules.I've been keeping a time capsule for a long time.The first idea for this came when I was a kid.We used to build skateboard ramps in the backyard.
And I'll never forget that right before we put down the first layer of plywood, we put a time capsule in there.We all like wrote little notes and did things.I think someone put some candy in there or something.It's kind of a cool concept, right?
Social media to me does not seem like a time capsule.I feel like it's just going to get turned over, turned over, turned over.What are the real time capsules of human experience?
So you said religion, religious doctrine, Bible, Koran, Torah being the big three.And there are others of course, but those are the big three, Bible, Koran, Torah.Those are big three time capsules.Okay.
Then we've got literature, music, poetry, visual art.So paintings, drawings, and sculpture. What else do we have?
So let's bring this down to the individual, like what one of my practices is.I'll go through a couple of them.And so one of them, if you come to my home, which hopefully you'll come.
I've been to your home.Yeah, but you know.It's been a while.It's been a while.That was a complaint.
That was a, you know.I don't know if I haven't invited you or you just, we'll talk about it afterwards.
Whenever I make it to Manhattan, I have a hard time getting out of Manhattan.
It's true. So we have a shelf with a bunch of family photos.And, you know, there's photos of my grandparents, my parents, myself, my kids.
And then to the right of that, there's actually, and people are always like, why didn't you, you know, take care of this?There's always, there's a blank photo frame. blank.
Those, you know, I have three kids, they're young, but that blank photo frame represents my grandkids or future generations.It's just something that I can immediately see what I think about the decisions.That's why I said long path is a mindset.
So there's all these complicated things and It's also a mantra.
So when I get into an argument with my wife or I have a conversation with you or anything like that, and I immediately have this stimulus arousal response where I want to act in the short term, but I actually want to see the bigger picture.
And again, this is highly self-referential.I understand that.I'll just say long path.I'll say like, what are we really trying to do here?What is this actually all about?And that, because I've been doing this long enough, brings me back.
So when I see that third empty picture frame, It always reminds me that I'm here for this one segment.There was a segment before and there's a segment coming after me.And so how I am in my daily interactions is gonna impact that.
How far, so just a few questions more specifically about you, because I think what you're doing here is you're concretizing a process, a protocol, if you will, that anyone can use.
And I would argue that the shift from printed photos, largely from printed photos to electronic photos has made this problematic. I mean, it's made certain things simpler.
Like if you change relationships, you can just delete a folder as opposed to having to actually take photographs from a previous relationship and make sure they're not around in case your next relationship would understandably take issue with that.
I'm not speaking from experience here, but how far back do your photos go?
It's interesting, the photos of my grandparents, who both perished in the Holocaust, were saved by my father, who was in World War II, fought with the Jewish underground, made his way through Europe to Cuba to Mexico, where he eventually met my mom and I was born.
The photos that we have, he had kept in his wallet for several decades, and he had them kind of reconstructed and turned in.That's as far back as we go.
So grandparents.Yeah.Okay, and then you're married, you have three kids, and then you have this, Empty photo frame.Empty photo frame.And you're the same age as me.You're 50 or 49?49.Thank you. but you seem to be in good health.
And seemingly young, right?
Yeah, you have energy.You've always had a lot of energy.You used to call yourself Ari Ferrari.You said you're like a Ferrari.
That's why they named you Ari.
Ari and I have known each other since we were little kids.He's always had a ton of energy.Actually, he hurt himself when he was younger and he was in full traction, like cast of his whole lower body.
And he would dance on the floor on his arms, kind of like David Goggins will treadmill on his hands, even when he can't move his legs. Okay, so chances are you'll meet your grandkids.
Yeah, God willing, you'll meet your grandkids, but probably not your great-grandkids.Probably not.Okay, well, I have a different tool.
But let me say something.Yeah.I will not probably meet them biologically, like in the sense that this big lump of cells will probably not meet my great-grandchildren, but we'll meet them.
I'm 100% sure of is the way that I've modeled being in the world to partners, be they my wife, my children, business, colleagues.That modeling, my kids will be in the room sometimes when I'm on work calls, right?You know, nothing confidential.
And they'll hear in the background, they'll hear how I interact, how I am in the current human moment. They are learning.They are receiving.That is how I'm going to meet my great-grandkids.That's how I will be in the room with them.
How I have been is going to impact 30 or 40 generations out.That 50,000 descendants that I talked about earlier, 250 years from now, I will meet them.I will be with them.
They may not know my name, who I am, but hopefully the way they treat a stranger or they interact with their partners comes about how I did it, that model behavior, that transmission.
Yeah, I get it.And it's interesting because I think that, well, and you're on the internet, so people will see you on the internet probably at least, I think 30, 50 years out, if you Google your name or whatever it's called at that point, Googling.
I get in trouble whenever I say Googling, people go, why don't you talk about a different... Because that's the one everyone uses, unless you use DuckDuckGo, because you're afraid of what people might...
when someone comes up with like a truly better one, maybe it'll get replaced, but meanwhile, Google.So they'll get to, your great grandkids could possibly know you there.They could hear this conversation, this very conversation.
I think that's part of the reason why people go on social media, not just to be consumers, but they want to leave something.They're probably not thinking about it consciously, but they want to leave something for the future.
I use a tool that I learned from a friend.He has this, your life in, your life in weeks, I think it's called.And it's this, you know, you fill in chart where you put your birthday, you put your predicted lifespan.
So for me, I put a hundred, it feels good to me.I'm not interested in living much past a hundred unless there's some technology that would allow me to do that with a lot of vigor and my friends would be around.
So, and you mark off the, that you fill in these little squares.And I did this morning actually.And, you know, I'm not quite halfway through, but I'm about halfway through.And it's an interesting thing to see your life in that representation.
and go, oh, wow, it can inspire better decision-making because we can lose track of where we are in time.And some of us, including me, are not very good at tracking time.People that have ever waited for me on an appointment know this.
I track, I'm very oriented in space, not well-oriented in time.So the problem with these charts is that, or photos on the shelf, I would argue, is they have great utility, but the problem is that
they're not in the forefront of our consciousness throughout the day, right?Like I filled out that chart.I didn't even think about it again until now.
And when we are pressed with a decision, in some cases we have the opportunity to step back and say, okay, look, in the bigger arc of things, I got to go left here, even though I want to go right.This is the right thing for my- The bigger arc.
The bigger picture.The bigger picture.The bigger picture.The long path, yes.So, you know, is there a way, is there maybe a technology that actually serves us
to anchor us to best decision making for a given, best time bin, we would call it in neuroscience, best time binning, mode of time binning for a given decision.
I think you need to ask yourself a question.When you're facing a, you know, not should I have turkey or chicken for lunch, but maybe a slightly, or maybe that question too.Just ask yourself, am I being a great ancestor?
What will allow me to be a great ancestor?How will descendants look back on this decision, go left or right?That's going to elevate you.You talked about deleting photos and stuff like that, so I'll tell you about the work.
On my advisory board is a guy named Hal Hirschfield, smart, great guy at UCLA.
There's a lot of future you work and so what he did was and I'll do the short version of this it's like a bunch of people into an fMRI functional MRI to see you kind of where the flow is and he asked him he did a series of Questions where it's like think about yourself right now and one part of your brain lit up and then he goes, okay I want you to think about this celebrity I think he used Matt Damon and Natalie Portman and another part of their brain lit up and
And he said, I want you to think about yourself 10 years from now.And guess what?The part of the brain that lit up for the celebrities, Natalie and Matt, was the same part that lit up when thinking about you 10 years from now.
So you had a vague idea of who future Ari was, but you weren't totally connected to them, right?It was like a stranger to you. pulled them out.One group did nothing.
Another group, he took a photo of them and he, you know, took a photo, ages them, and then puts them into a 3D, you know, virtual reality.
And you're in a room and at one point, and you don't know this is going to happen, as you walk across the room, you see a mirror and you look at yourself in the mirror and it's a photo of you, but aged 10 years.
So you're seeing an older version of you.
Yikes.I mean, and cool.Very cool.
Does this intervention, pulls them out, brings them back, I think two weeks later, and he has them hypothetically put money away for savings account.You know exactly what happens.
The people who saw a version of their aged self put more money away for a future retirement account than the folks that didn't.So the question is, not only are we disconnected,
from the future, my future descendants, I'm disconnected from my future self.
So what I've done, and you'll see this in the show, it's scary because I look just like my dad and you'll always look like your dad when you do this, is even though we've been bagging on social media, you can go on Snap or other places where they'll age you, right?
It'll make you look 10, 15 years older and you can send it to your partner and everybody laughs. So, I took a screenshot and I- People laugh as opposed to saying you look great.
Everyone's like, oh my God.And so, once I read about this, Hal's research, many years ago, I printed that out, my little home printer, cut it out, and it's on my bathroom mirror.
And every day, I spend two or three seconds staring at future older Ari in his 70s. That's how I make better decisions today.And those better decisions aren't just about putting money for retirement.It's about also, how do I take care?
Do I floss or not?At the end of the night, you want to just brush your teeth and go to bed.
No, you need to floss at night.
You need to floss at night.
We did an episode on oral health.Yeah, I know.And I learned from the dentist right before sleep.
The most important way to take care of future self is flossing, by the way, just to be clear.I've learned this from many people.
He's actually true.No, it's true.It's so key for brain and body health.
The dentists are going to thank you.
But we don't do it.But if you look at your mouth 20 years from now, staring at you as you're smiling with the older version of Andy with, you know, a little bit less hair, a little bit more wrinkles, you're going to do it.
This is what Hal's work has showed.So, that's another thing that I've done is just look at that image of future you and connect with it. So, that's about having compassion for yourself.That's part of this kind of transgenerational empathy component.
The one thing I want to circle back on, because we could quickly fly past it, is this idea of futures thinking versus the singular future.
Yeah, I definitely want to touch on that.Can I just ask you a question real quickly before here?
let's say a protocol for imagining future self, or actually visualizing future self, not as a way to scare yourself into better health habits, although if it works, great, but as a way to really get your mind into the reality that if you survive, you're gonna get older by definition, and that person needs care and in an environment, and your kids are gonna grow up too, we know this.
Okay, so that's all obvious.I feel like, barring accident or injury or disease, most people have a kind of intuitive sense of how long they're going to live.
And the reason I say this is, I remember when Steve Jobs was alive, because I was a postdoc in Palo Alto then and would see him occasionally around Palo Alto.And then read the Walter Isaacson biography about him.
And it seemed like he had a very clear sense that someday he would die.And he lived his life essentially according to that principle.
and in some sense may have justified being a little bit outrageous at times and a little bit, you know, high friction at times through the sense of urgency.
Like it was important to get things done and get them done right and to discard with a lot of kind of like popular convention.And he's kind of celebrated for it.I'm sure a few people dislike him.I think most people celebrate him for it.
I guess he had some sense of how long he was going to live.And then at one point maybe that sense was inflated and then boom. your dad died when you were very young.
Do you think that that gave you a perspective that, you know, at any moment you could be four months out, you could get the four months notice that you're gonna be dead in four months?Like, did that shape your thinking about the future?
I mean, my dad's now, I'm not saying this as a... I mean, no, it's interesting that there may have been a distinct advantage, of course, not to his dying, of course, but to the idea that it really creates this sense of urgency about not just the present, but the future.
I remember when we were very young, you're like, I wanna have kids.You got going on a family, like, I think first among all of us, really early.
And for those whose parents are still alive and seem to be vigorous, maybe they feel less of a sense of urgency.
which sounds wonderful, parents are alive, vigorous, okay, that's a blessing, but if it prevents you from living your life in a way that's really linked to your futures, that's not good.
So do you think that we have an intuitive sense or an unconscious sense of how long we are likely to live, like a kind of a range?Because Steve kind of argued that in some of his writings and speaking.
So let's talk about death.
So it's my contention that one of the things that keeps us from thinking about the far future and acting and behaving in a way that will alter it for the better is the fact that to truly think and feel yourself into the far future means that you're going to have to think about a moment where you no longer exist.
In 1972, Ernest Becker wrote a book, which you'll know all about the book based on the title, called The Denial of Death.He won the Pulitzer Prize for it.
And Becker's contention was that we're the only species that at a very early age recognizes that we are only here for a short period of time, but more than anything at one point in time we will die, we will cease to exist.
And it was Becker's contention further that everything, religion, culture, laptops, convertibles, everything that we create is our way of pushing back the very understanding that at one point we will cease to exist and it horrifies us.
I could not agree more.And I'm so, so grateful that you mentioned this book and this idea from Becker, because I would argue that every addiction, every single addiction, is based in a fear of death.
And then attempt to shorten the timescale of thinking, shorten the timescale of reward, shorten the timescale of everything to avoid that reality.
And it's a reality that we learn of at a very early age intuitively because we see death around us.More and more now in America, especially in the Western world, we push back from death.We do everything we can to avoid, even just old people,
that we put them in old age homes.It used to be we lived together in these multi-generational homes because older people, I would argue, remind us of death, remind us of our own mortality.
And so until we can reconcile ourselves truly at an individual, and maybe even at a collective level, that we will cease to exist, it becomes extremely and is extremely difficult to future, to future properly, to future in the way that I'm advocating for, which is about being a great ancestor to future descendants and generations.
And so in the work that I've done and in the show that I did, I did something, people were very confused.The show about the future, Beef History of the Future, everyone's like, oh, you're gonna go see all this cool technology, blah, blah, blah.
That's part of what we do.But in the middle of the show, in episode four, I go to the high mountain desert, we travel all over the world, but I go to the high mountain desert outside of Tucson, and I sit with the Lua Arthur, a death doula.
And what she does, you know, mostly time when we think of a doula, we think of someone helping birth a child into the world.What a deaf doula does is help us and help our loved ones exit this world. And she does something extraordinary.
Other cultures, some religions have this.She does something called a death meditation.
And in the show I do it, and you can find these online, where you literally go through a guided meditation where you go from breathing to cessation of breath to literally just becoming one with the soil.It's a very intense thing to go through.
But I went through a version of the death meditation, as you've alluded to, when I was 18 years old. Because I literally am the one who picked up the phone from the hospital at two in the morning.I was home from college and I picked it up.
I didn't even say hello.I picked up the phone and I said, this is his son.Because who else was calling at two in the morning?And it was a charge nurse.And she goes, I want to bring you up to speed.It's the late stage of cancer.
Your father is not responding.We've been doing CPR.There are no orders on what to do.What do you want us to do?So I made that call because it was obvious of where it was going.
That was my way of confronting the salience of his mortality and my own mortality very, very abruptly.Other people have their own early brushes with death.
I would argue that there is a certain level, and you touched on this, of emancipation when you've come close.You don't want to wish it on anyone.
But when you've come close to seeing what that looks and feels like, you all of a sudden become free from the burdens that society places on you in the Ernest Beckerian way of trying to push back mortality.Because you no longer give a shit.
Because you now know where it's all going to go and you've seen it. As a society in the West, in America, we do the exact opposite of that.We inject things into our body, into everything we can to push it back.
Because we want more quantity, but we don't think about the quality of the life that we want.Now that being said, you go to Japan.
90% of the companies that are over a thousand years old on planet Earth right now are in Japan So part of it is our culture part of it is different cultures of how they think and respect elders and death and they understand That we don't need to exist within this own lifespan bias but we're actually part of a chain a great chain of being those who came before and
The pros and cons of that, the baggage of that, and then it's my role to decide what I want to keep and what I want to let go, and then what I want to transmit to the next generation.
purpose, that larger telos is what's missing right now, that I think we need back in Western society.
Not just so that we're grounded and happy, that's yes, and we're content, but because we need to be able to do that as we confront what we do or do not do about climate change, what we do or do not do about synthetic biology, what we do or do not do about artificial intelligence.
Because right now, especially on the last two, the technology is telling us what to do, And we don't need more smartness, we need more wisdom.
And part of that wisdom is going to come about by us integrating the fact that you alluded to, that at one point we won't be here.
How do we do this?I mean, like we can do it conceptually, like you want to set the stage for that, whoever ends up in that empty frame to have a better life. but it's hard to do.
Like I think most people assume once it's lights out, who knows what happens next, but it's very hard to get them working for something that they don't have the ability to imagine and the people that they don't even know.
So in other words, if we have a hard enough time imagining ourselves in the future, you gave us a tool.Look at the aged version of yourself.I love that.And if there's a website that will do that, we can put a link to it in the show note captions.
Put a reminder that you will get older.You are getting older in this very moment and try and live for the wellbeing of that person and the people around them and look at it.So that creates a protocol for the self.
how do we protocol the future setting, the futures approach, the verbing of the future or into the future for people around us and for people that we don't even really know and that we probably will never even meet?
Great question.Before we go on to that, let's double click on the individual incentive.So we talked about the aging photo that you can do. There's also another thing you can do that's very powerful.
You touched on this earlier, which is writing a letter to your future self. So you can do this at longpath.org, you can find future me websites.You have a... Yeah, yeah, it's the number one tool that we use.
So when I give talks, I give shockingly people have me come and talk to large groups.Not shockingly, come on.What I say to them is, we'll kind of go through a version of a different conversation like this.
And I'll say, now, what I want you to do is I want you to write a letter to your future self.It's gonna be delivered in five years from now.
And I thought this was a common practice, because I've been doing it from a very early age, but apparently it's not, to write a letter to your future self.
Yeah, I can't, I mean, maybe once or twice.
We did it, and so I'll let you in on a little secret.The change occurs not when you receive the letter, but when you actually write it.
because you're actually thinking in a way about future you in a way that you normally don't, which is, who's gonna receive this letter?Where do I want them to be?And what I find more often than not is people come up to me afterwards and I go,
To write, I'd never even thought, who do I want to be in five or 10 years?Like, what's that arc of what I want to kind of connect to?What am I optimizing for?How do I make myself better in that way?
So I want to make sure people understand that if you can't look at a photo of yourself age, at the very least, write a letter to your future self.
And what does the letter include?
Dear Andy, dear Ari, and then whatever you want to put in.This is a one-to-one private conversation with your future self.What are your hopes?What are your dreams?What are your desires?What are you afraid of?What do you want to see happen?
Because until you put out there You can't beat if you can't see it, right?
You have to actually visualize what that is and putting in, not the negative, but what you really want to see aspirationally in that letter, now starts creating a roadmap to getting there.
Because at the very kind of bottom of the pyramid of what that roadmap is, is visualizing what that success looks like, right?So I was, in high school I ran track. And I started off by doing the 100, very kind of an individual sport.
And then eventually, as I went forward, I started running the 4x100, which is a relay race.And what I learned from my coach, Coach Ted Tillian, was that the 4x100, it's very important that all four runners run very, very fast, obviously.
But where that race is won or lost is in the transition zone, is in the passing of the baton. And so when you write a letter to your future self, yes, you're connecting to your future.
But what it's really also helping you do is realize that life is not a 100-yard dash.It's actually a relay.And you're carrying a baton that was handed to you that you are now going to hand off.
And I'm arguing that we right now, what I call we're in this intertidal moment between kind of what was and what will be as a planetary civilization. we are in this transition zone.
And what we do or do not do in this intertidal, in this transition zone, with the baton that is homo sapien, planetary, flourishing culture, is going to matter much more than we think it does in the current moment of social media pings.
So that's touching on the individual.Let's go up to that collective.We have to decide as individuals, which some of these protocols will help you do, but we have to decide as a society. that we want to actually tackle the question of to what end.
Because in the erasure of God, in the erasure of the afterlife, in what was given to us by religion for hundreds, thousands of years, some sort of guarantee that we would go on to heaven or hell, now that that is no longer there for a lot of people, for some it still is, and it still helps them make better decisions, I would argue, in the day-to-day.
But for those who no longer have that, We have to decide that, and this can be from an egoic level, that the decisions that we make or do not make are either going to hook up in a great way future generations or not.
We can be in those three categories.We can be one or two.It doesn't matter.Who cares?I'm just going to, you know, like YOLO.Or we can say we want to be part of a much larger project.
I talk about this a lot, like the kind of, you can tell by my bias here, like I don't say human, like the Homo Sapien project, I think, like I said, we're kind of at the bottom or the top of the third, we have at least several hundred thousand more years to go.
I'm not as focused as to whether or not we leave Earth and we go to Mars and we become an interstellar species.I'm more focused on who we are, because I've met, like you, I've met great hearts and minds, and I think that as a society,
If we take care of everyone's basic needs, if we look at kind of the best of humanity, the best of the humans that we've met, we can all rise to that level.
So instead of there being like a hundred great heroes in the world who are just so heartfelt, you know, like the Dalai Lama or Mother Teresa or even Einstein,
that that could actually be... Are those three still in touch or they've been canceled yet?
No, they're still with us.They're still with me.But look, even when you get into their... Look, you asked one of the ways, how do you build transgenerational empathy with the past?
Read people's biographies, especially autobiographies, and you see they had it really tough and they're not as perfect and as saintly as we think they are.
And those, right, and the autobiographies are, of course, through their own lens, right?Through their own lens.
So the biographies give you, or you read their letters to their lovers or to their partners, and you're like, God, this guy, that person's kind of an asshole, right?
But at the end of the day, if we as a society want to find ourselves where more of us than less of us are at this heightened sense of kind of intellectual and spiritual and emotional activation, that's not gonna happen overnight.
But if we say that's the goal that we want, we want to see, people will argue, 9 billion, 7 billion, 3 billion, whatever the population of Homo sapiens is on planet Earth over the next several centuries or millennia.
We want to see them flourishing in a way that's beyond what science fiction has ever even showed us.
If we make that decision that your life, what Andrew Huberman is doing in his work, what Ari Walker is contributing to that, that gives you a sense of purpose that I think religion used to give us that we are now sorely lacking in a social media world of instant buying of crap that we don't need on the internet.
or that we do need, and it's just a shorter timescale reward thing.I don't believe that everything that happens on social media or that we buy or the pleasure that we get in our lifespan or day is bad.I don't think, I'm a capitalist too.
What I think is that it's just one, it is but one time window of kind of operations.I just think it's good to have flexibility, right?It's sort of like in nutrition, they talk about metabolic flexibility.
It's not about balance, it's about harmony.How are we in harmony with the future?That is what I'm advocating for.
So I love it.And I also know that a lot of people love it, even if they don't know they love it, meaning they perhaps haven't heard it framed the way that you describe it in your book, on your show, and today.
But I think a lot of people just are hoping that these super high achievers, right, the Steve Jobses, the Elons, the
I don't know how people feel about politicians nowadays, but the people building technologies who seem to really care about the future, I mean, say what you want about Elon, but the guy is building stuff for the now and for the future.
I mean, he's doing it, that they will take care of it for next generations, right?
There were those, the Edisons and the Einsteins and the, you know, the, I don't, you have to be careful with names these days because almost everyone has something associated with them where you're going to trigger someone, but I'll just be, you know, relaxed about it and say, like, I would even say like,
you know, even like a Jane Goodall, like the appreciation of our relationship with animals and what they have to contribute to our own understanding of ourselves and our planet, that kind of thing.
So, you know, those people ushered in the life that I've had, and I feel, pretty great about that.So many people are probably saying, okay, makes sense for my family, but what do I have to contribute?
And you give the example of the fact that children are always observing, they carry forward the patterns and the traits, and certainly the responses that they observe in their parents, what's okay, what's not okay.
Starting in the 80s and in the 90s in this country, there were many more divorces and fractured homes there were previously.As a consequence, there's also been a fracturing of the kind of collective celebration of holidays.
Like the things that have anchored us through time are happening less frequently now.Many of these have become commercialized, but that was always the case.People were getting Christmas presents one way or another.So,
You know, do you think that the kind of fracturing of the family unit has contributed to some of this lack of, let's just call it longer path thinking and decision-making?
Look, I think it's the fracturing of the institutions that have been with us for the past several hundred years that is leading to an exponential rise in short-term behavior.
Okay, so you mentioned religion.Maybe for a moment we can just talk about universities.These days, in part because of the distrust of science,
and in part because of the distrust in government and in part because of the distrust in traditional media, there's more and more ideas being kicked around that formal education is not as valuable as it used to be.
People always cite the examples of the Mark Zuckerbergs and others who didn't finish college but I would argue they got in and chose to leave.They took leave of absence.They didn't drop out and they are rare individuals.
Ryan Holiday said it best, I think, if you are struggling in college, you're absolutely the kind of person that needs to stay in college, with rare exception, unless there's like a mental health issue or some physical health issue that needs to be tended to, because nowhere else in life, except perhaps the military, is there such a clear designated set of steps that can take you from, you know, point A to point B with a credential that you can leverage in the real world for builds.
And I completely agree with that. I would also argue that academic institutions and financial institutions have changed.Political institutions have changed and there's a deep distrust.
So we are having a harder time relying on them to make good decisions.You saw a lot of presidents of university – major universities fired recently including Stanford.There, I said it. but also Harvard and other places for different reasons.
And fired might be not the correct term.They decided to resign.Whatever it was, they're no longer there.They have new ones in.And so there's a lot of distrust.So what can we rely on?
Like if it's not, if people are having less faith in religion, less faith in academic institutions, less faith in like, what do we got?
we got really good in academia, at least on the social sciences side, of saying what was wrong with the systems, but not about what the systems we wanted them to be.
Because going back several hundred years ago, coming through the Enlightenment, especially, well, Renaissance into the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment gave us back this idea of a new meta-narrative based on rationality and logos, and the ability to kind of understand the world by breaking it down into its component parts, that's science.
Fast forward several hundred years, and we're at the point now where we're really good at saying what doesn't work, but very, very bad about saying what does work and what we do want.
Because by saying what we do want means that we have to put forth some sort of meta-narrative, some thread, some official future that we can hang ourselves on.
And it tells us a lot about, it's sort of like declaration of values.It's one thing to say, which is scary for a lot of people, because it's one thing to say that doesn't work, that's no good, that's no good.It's easy to be a critic.
What you're describing has incredible parallels to what, to health.Like, you know, when I started the podcast and even before when I was posting on social media, it was during the lockdowns and it was like all this fear about everything.
And I said, listen, like, I can't solve this larger issue related to what may or may not be going on. But what's obvious, people are stressed, stress is bad when it's chronic.People aren't sleeping, that's bad, especially when it's chronic.
And I've got some potential solutions, some tools, some zero cost tools.So a lot of the backbone of the Huberman Lab podcast is about the things you do more so than the things you don't do.
So what you're describing is essentially a field that consists of like breaking things down, but isn't offering solutions.So it sounds very similar.
And I think that people love potential solutions, even if one acknowledges, look, this might not solve every sleep issue, it very well could make, you know, positive ground towards some of it, or make it 50% better or 20% better, in some cases, 100% better.
And of course, there are those for whom the tools don't work, and they need to go through more to more extreme measures. I hear you saying that religion provided the solutions, not just pointing to problems.
People are not looking at that as much anymore.The big institutions like academic institutions, political institutions, let's face it, regardless of where one sits on one side of the aisle or the other, they're constantly fighting.
It's like 12-hour news cycle designed to just point fingers so that nobody actually has to say what they really believe in a clear, tangible way. There are those that do that a bit more than others but it's a mess.
Then in terms of the family unit, this is what I was alluding to before.I feel like family units and values and structures are becoming more rare, at least in the traditional view of the family.
two parents, kids, et cetera, which is not by no means a requirement to call something a family.
But so like, so are you saying that we all have to look as like, it obviously starts with the individual, but that part of the work of being a human being now and going forward is to learn this futures approach?
We have to be future conscious, but again, this goes back to the transgenerational component, we have to critically assess where we came from and why we're at this point.Let's talk about the nuclear family.
The idea that your children would be quote-unquote sleep trained and put into another room is relatively new.That's from the Victorian era, where you would put your kids in another room.
Because if you go back to most indigenous cultures, everyone slept together, and this happened for thousands of years, and the kids did... In a big pile?Yeah, or in one big room or in a longhouse.Like piglets?Huh?Like piglets.
I don't know if they were like piglets, but they definitely all slept together.And look, everyone can... Look, I'm gonna say this in a non-judgmental way, but it's gonna sound very judgmental.
I walk down the street sometimes and I see kids in strollers being pushed by a seemingly healthy adult, right?The kid is detached and they're in this kind of this buggy, which comes from 17th, 18th century England.
But if you look at most cultures around the world for thousands of years, what they did was they wore their babies for what we call the fourth trimester, usually the mother.So a bunch of patriarchal reasons for that.
But they literally would have a wrap on and the baby would be wrapped and be held very close to them.
Well, the baby Bjorn, you put the baby in front of you, but it's facing out.When you really wrap them with like a 20-yard wrap, it's skin to skin, right?And look, and there's a reason, like everything, there's a reason for everything, you know.
For a human baby to come out of the mother as cognitively, intellectually, and physically ready as a baby chimpanzee would take 18 months of gestation, but we only do nine.You know why. right?
We do it because our brains got so big because of all that protein, because Ari and Andy were hunting together using our prospection earlier on this story, that the baby has to come out at nine months because when we went from walking on all fours to being bipedal, the female pelvis closes and there's only so much room for that baby to come out, so they come out early.
Yeah, if the brain had completed development internally, you'd have only stillborn.I mean, presumably there was a branch of our earlier version of species that many mothers and babies died in childbirth.Because of this, they were deselected.
But that's not the proper term.
And so we found the optimal balance of nine months, roughly, right?But what that means is the baby has to be attached and close to the mother because it's totally helpless.The point is that so much of what we do, we don't critically examine.
So you're talking about the breakdown of the family structure.I would argue that breakdown isn't happening now.That breakdown happened when we started to move from
you know, tribes and clans of raising children and move into a Victorian-era mindset where we take the grandparent, you know, there's very few species on planet Earth that after the female goes through menopause, they still live.
Basically, elephants, whales, and humans, right?Why?Because those are the species where you need elders to help care for the young because of the aforementioned early birthing.
But maybe it's also the propagation of story, as you said earlier, that can inform better decisions.So we need new stories.Wisdom is like spoken cave paintings basically.
Yeah.And so we need – so those stories about what does it mean to have a proper family structure as – whether it's a nuclear family of four or five or 20 aunts and uncles and around,
Look, we did pretty well for the first couple hundred thousand years, and then there was all these things that religion disrupted, right?Taking the children away from the mom.These all come from puritanical beliefs.
Now we're at this point in this intertidal moment where we have to critically examine, why is it we do what we do?What are the things that we want to keep?And what are the things we want to let go of?And how do we move forward?
And your question was, well, Why do they want to do that?What's the incentive structure?
And I'm arguing that the incentive structure for us to do that, because we actually care about where we take our species, where we move forward in the universe, given the fact that so much had to go right to get us to this point.
I'm often asked this question, you know, God, how did we get so messed up and what is it gonna look like?
Wait, are we so messed up because you said we're about a third of the way through or things are better than ever?
Yeah, so I get the question, like, how is it that we messed up?And I always say we didn't mess up, we're actually doing much better.
Look, I walk into my daughter's room and I look at their bookshelf, 15-year-old twin daughters, and every piece of fiction that takes place somewhat in the future is dystopian.
All the futures they know are the Hunger Games, are the 100, are the Maze Runner, a world that has gone bad.I understand the, we talked about this earlier, there's a negativity bias.People are going to be attracted to reading about those things.
Kids read that stuff now?
Oh my, those are the best sellers.The best sellers are all these dystopian, there's always a love interest and a teenage thing, but it's always the backdrop
is always dystopia and we're attracted to that in the same way we're attracted to a dumpster fire because we want to see the things that dystopias can act as a dystopian stories can act as an early warning system if you keep doing this one thing that you're doing and extrapolate out a few decades it'll look like this
What we're missing, and you just hit the nail on the head, are the stories about what if we get it right, what we call protopia.So utopia is this perfect world that always collapses on itself.It's really dystopian in size.
Dystopia, we talked about, is a terrible, terrible world.A protopia, this idea put forth by Kevin Kelly, is a better tomorrow, not perfect, but one where we're making progress.
So it's unbelievably important, and this is how I'm answering your question from a few minutes ago,
that we start setting stories in protopias, in better tomorrows, in tomorrows where not everything is perfect, but where we have made significant progress.Now, it won't be perfect.There'll still be divorces and maybe murders and mayhem.
But if we start backdropping our future visions in worlds that are better than they are today, I would argue that will be the stories that start acting as a kedge to help pull us through this narrow moment of flux and chaos that is this intertidal.
how do we do it at scale?Because I think a lot of people listening to this will say, okay, that all sounds great.
Like I, for one say, you know, the shift from the notion of building a better future through self-sacrifice, rather you can make it a almost like pro-self and others endeavor, the way you've described it, empathy for self, empathy for others, getting some control over the, you know, contraction and dilation of your time window,
making sure that you take good care of yourself, but you take care of the future generations as well, like for that empty frame, the now empty frame.
And then moving from dystopia to protopia, that all sounds great, but I think a lot of people might think, okay, well, at best I could do that for myself and the people that,
that I know it's going to be hard to do that as a greater good for the greater good.And you could say, well, that does contribute to the greater good.
This is actually very similar to what we tell graduate students when they get their first round of data.You go, okay, well, the data oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes you say, oh, well, the data are cool.
Like if it continues this way, that'd be an interesting story.
And they get the sense and you already have the sense because you have the experience to know like the best case scenario is a nice solid paper that your three reviewers and maybe 20 other people will read.
And you're gonna spend the next five years of your life on this thing.Maybe three, but probably five years of your life.And you'll get your PhD.And there's always this question, like, do you ditch that project and go for something else?
Or do you stay with that project?In other words, what you're saying is you get to put your brick on the wall, It's a brick, whereas, you know, there are other projects and you go, whoa, like that's, you know, that's like one wing of the cathedral.
And it's a rare instance where that happens.And a lot of it's luck and it doesn't always work out anyway.
You know, what we're saying here is, you know, how hard people are willing to work is often related to what they feel the potential payoff will be.
If they can sense the payoff, and by the way, I love the protocols that you offer, the empty frame, the journaling to future self, this notion of time capsuling your present thinking into the future.
the aging of self, these are very actionable things, I plan to do them, and I think they're very valuable.
But if I understand correctly, you are interested in creating a movement of sorts where many, if not everybody, is thinking this way, because the other model is, okay, well, the Elons will take care of it for us, or the,
you know, or the system is so broken, like, there's nothing I can do, I'm just trying to make ends meet.
So how does one create like a reward system or a social media platform or, you know, how does one, you know, join up with other people who are trying to do this?
So the question you're getting at is, In a lot of the work that I've read and listened to on this podcast, oftentimes it's about how do we, obviously, how do we optimize the self?And I mean that in a good way, not in a selfish way.
How do we make ourselves better?That's where you have to start. I'm advocating for, how do we optimize society?How do we optimize civilization?
And this is a clear case where, unlike when we think of scale being, you know, make more widgets at a cheaper price, this is really a one plus one plus one plus one at infinity.
So at infinitum, if we think about, just for example, how many listeners and viewers there are of this podcast?Millions, right? And how many people they interact with within their within their closest sphere and you go out Right.
So right now that your listeners have the potential to live and act long pathion in this way where they're doing something for a greater they're thinking about their purpose in the world as nested within the larger
purpose of our species to allow for more mass flourishing in the future for generations to come.If you think about your listeners and how they interact and how they model behavior and their spheres, you're at 30, 40, 50 million people, right?
That's a very, very large number.And what we know about social and emotional contagion is that these things are contagious.They are memes.This is Susan Blackmore's work. That's how it scales.
It actually is one of those things where you're not going to just add powder and it all of a sudden will create this optimal future for everyone because only one person does it.We all have a role to play in it.
What I would want is anyone who's listening or watching this when they're done doing it, to take a few minutes and think about what kind of futures do I want for myself, for my family, for the generations to come?
And what is my role in that great play?What do I have to do?And yes, you need the protocols to kind of bring you back into there, right?For me, it's easy, because I wrote the book, I did the show.I can just think, long path, I can do it.
For others, this is going to be the first time they're thinking about this, or maybe they've been thinking about it for years. even in their smallest interactions, they start doing it.
And this gets into kind of the Santa Fe Institute and complexity theory.This stuff starts to actually reverberate.That's how we do it.We don't need a march for long-termism, right?We don't need bumper stickers.
There will be no bumper stickers.
There will be no bumper stickers. It's about placing our very essence and our actions within the realm of possibility for the futures that we want and our role in that and then the purpose.
So I don't care if you're a barista, if you're a surfing instructor, if you're a brilliant podcaster, whatever it is that you do, do it with the intention and recognition that you are modeling.
a way of being in the world that has ramifications and reverberations beyond this current moment.And you said earlier, well, you know, who knows if anyone will listen to your podcast.
What I can tell you with certainty, because I'm sure it's probably already happened, is a large language model, an LLM, something we call AI right now, is already or will at some point ingest the Huberman Lab podcast?
Yeah, we have one.We have a Huberman Lab AI.There you go.We haven't advertised it very heavily, but it's there.You can ask me questions.It's pretty good.It sounds a bit like me.The jokes are dry.They're dry.And not funny.
I was gonna say mostly funny, but I'll give you some more. But eventually that will percolate out.
So at the speed of things are going three or four years from now, this very conversation, how we're modeled, what I learned in school, discourse ethics, how we talk to one another.
That is teaching these machines how to think and act and who and what we are and how to become the best of or the worst of ourselves.
What we put out there, the kind of the public facing content is going to become what these machines think of as how they should be and we're modeling it for them.And going back to the higher education example for a second, I think higher education
like many institutions, as AI, what we call that, fully comes online is going to radically, radically change.And it will be a Cambridge or an Oxford tutor in everyone's ear and higher education, this idea that you kind of come together
to receive information will start to dissipate from higher education.
But what higher education will start to do, and I think we'll need to focus on, is not just the intellectual and the cognitive, but also the psychological and the emotional core of who you are and helping you develop that.
Well, amen to that. was a former guest on this podcast, or there was a guest on this podcast previously, Dr. Wendy Suzuki's professor at NYU.I think now she's the Dean of Arts and Sciences, I think is the correct title.
And she's trying to bring some of her laboratory's data on the value of even very brief meditations to stress management in college.First, to help students manage the stress that is college and being in your early 20s.
But I think there's a larger theme there, which is to try and teach emotional development, to teach self-regulation, because many people don't get that.Or they get it, but then there are big gaps.And I love the way that you're describing this.
Basically, it's a lens, if I may, it's a lens into human experience that's very dynamic and is really in concert with the fact that The human brain has the capacity for this dynamic representation of time, like focus on, like solve for the now.
There will be parts of your day, no doubt today, where you just have to solve for the now.You're not thinking about the greater good.
And then the ability to dilate your consciousness in the temporal sense and to solve for things that are more long-term.Make these investments towards the future.I wonder though, how can we incentivize people to be good, to do good?
And how can we incentivize people to do this on a backdrop of a lot of short-term carrots and short-term horizons?
I think you've given us some answers and they're very powerful ones, such as the aging self-image exercise, journaling into the future, writing to future self, the empty frame exercise, linking up with our ancestors and thinking about where we're at now and where we want to go.
Is there anything else that, you wanna add, meaning, is there anything that we should all be doing?Should we all be reading more biography?If I look back through history, it's both dark and light.
Is there anything else that you really encourage people to do to be the best version of themselves for this life and the ones that come next?
I've touched on this.We need to examine in ourselves, why is it we do and are the way that we are?Do you know why in this country we vote on Tuesday?I don't have any idea.So most advanced democracies vote over the weekend or a couple of weekends.
In America, we vote on Tuesday because that was the time that was necessary for someone to leave church on Sunday, ride on horseback into the big city, Vote on Tuesday and ride back before market day on Wednesday.
So glad you're going to tell me it's not because then people can still watch Monday Night Football.
No, this is long before Monday Night Football. And so I think why we vote on Tuesday, it's a metaphor for so much of who we are and have become as individuals and as a society.I'm a big fan of cognitive behavioral therapy, of CBT.
I think partially because what it does is it has us look at what are those negative stories that we tell ourselves, but then, because you can't just say stop doing something, you can't just extinguish a behavior, you have to add and put in a positive story.
What I've tried to do with some of our time here today, and what I want people to partially take away, more than partially, to really take away and bring in, is examine the why Tuesdays.What are those stories that you've inherited?
Some of them are going to be macro social. Like you are defined by the society by what you own, by the badge on your car that says how successful you are.That's a story.It's a story that's been fed to us.
There are other stories that are very personal.These are stories that can sometimes be very private and go back generations within a family.And then to understand some of those stories serve us, some of those stories don't serve us.
But after discerning that, we then have to write a new story.We have to write a new story for ourself.Who am I?Why am I here?Isn't going to be answered by a religion or a God or a book or a podcast or a futurist.
It's going to be answered by looking and searching inside of yourself about how it is you got here, what really matters, and where you want to contribute and help move us forward as a species on spaceship Earth.
You know, not as a passenger, but as crew on this vessel, and how we're going to move forward.So the stories have served us well, and they have not served us well.And to move forward,
It's okay now to say, I'm going to write these stories that serve me.I'm going to see the future, not as a noun, not as this thing that I'm heading towards or that's going to tumble over me, but that I'm going to create.
And those stories may be very intra-personal, they may be interpersonal, they may be political, they may be business, they may be what you buy, what you consume. But you have to have agency.
You have to instill a sense of hope into your own life and a sense of awe and a sense of really just empathy for who you are and where we are if we want to collectively move forward into the futures that will allow our descendants to look back on us and say, they were great ancestors.
I love it.And I also just want to highlight the importance of record keeping of putting things down on paper or maybe an electronic form, creating time capsules for the future generations.
Because I think a lot of what people probably are thinking or worried about a little bit is like, okay, I can do all this stuff to try and make things better.
even give up the desire for any kind of credit, but not feeling like it will be of any significance.
But what I've learned from you today is that it starts with the self and then it radiates out to the people we know and that maybe we cohabitate with.But even if we don't cohabitate with anybody, it radiates out from us.
that it is important to get a sort of time capsule going so that people can feel like they have some significance in the future that they may
not ever have immediate experience of, but to really like send those ripples forward and get the sense that those ripples are moving forward.
So for that reason, and especially given the nature of this podcast, for the reason that you gave these very concrete protocols, if you will, that we've highlighted in the timestamps, of course, as tools, as protocols, I really want to thank you because oftentimes discussions about past, present, and future
can get a bit abstract and a bit vague for people.And you've done us all a great service by making them very concrete and actionable.That's so much of what this podcast is about.It's one part information, one part option for action, right?
We don't tell people what to do, but we give them the option for action.I'm certainly going to adopt some of these protocols. And also for taking the time to come to talk with us today, share your wisdom and share what you're doing in many ways.
Well, it is not in many ways, it is absolutely part of what you're describing, which is putting your best self toward how things can be better now and in the future.
It's also a great pleasure to sit down with somebody I've known for so many years and learn from you.So it's a real honor and a privilege.And I know everyone else listening to and watching this feels the same way.So thank you so much.
Thank you for having me. Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Ari Wallach.To find links to his book, to his television show, and other resources related to Long Path, please see the show note captions.
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