Ari Wallach
Appearances
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
below that metric of perfection, you start to feel terrible and you start to kind of ruminate over what, what you, you know, you lie in bed at night and you think, how could I have done that? How could I have done that? And you forget that you, you're only able to handle what you can at that time. And you can't hold yourself up to this idealized yardstick.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
Look, I dealt with this for, for a long time. We learned my father had stage four cancer. I was 18 years old. Um, And from when we learned to when he passed away was only four months. Four months. Four months. And for a lot of that time, I was kind of in denial, right? Like I wasn't actually there with him as much as I should have been. In fact, we won't go into this.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
I was actually with you that summer. We were working together that summer at a summer camp. Now, for years, I beat myself up. How could I have done that? I should have been home with him. It was only going to be four months. And then I realized, and this is the stealth compassion, like 18-year-old Ari was only at a place emotionally and psychologically to be able to do what I did.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
And you work with what you have, but you have to start there because so many times I work with people and I talk to people and they say, oh, I want to have empathy for the past and for the future, but they don't have it for themselves. So if you don't start there, it becomes very, very difficult to spread out. First, obviously going backwards.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
And then ultimately, the goal of my work is to get you to spread that out into the future.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
are feelings that you can feel and you want to bring if they're if they're feeling bad you want to bring some resolution to that if they're feeling good you can you can be there with them at a fundamental level this is you know mirror neurons and i'm connecting with you and you're connecting with me and there's a genetic adaptive fitness for that right we all want to kind of be in sync because the tribe that works together flourishes together and thrives together so it makes sense at that level
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
But when I'm feeling empathy for another, their state of being can be as important as my own state of being. Look, it can be taxing, don't get me wrong. But ultimately, that is what self-compassion can give you because it can give you a state of being where those around you, you are no longer fundamentally disconnected. And I think one of the
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
Health, infant mortality, even as we backslide in this country, being a woman, education. the kind of the calories that we get across the book. If you and I go outside and you stepped on a rusty nail 100 years ago, good chance you would die. Right now, we just go to the drugstore and put something on it. Or we even know that we don't even have to put anything on it.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
We can just put it underneath high-pressure water for 30 seconds, and that'll clean out because we now know germ theory, right? So net-net, this is the best time to be alive. All the markers, you can go to Gapminder if you want, and you can see that we are doing better. We are progressing. The issue is...
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
Most of the information we're attracted to is the negative negativity bias. You and I, we're going to go back to Ari and Andy 150,000 years ago. If we saw this beautiful tree aesthetically and we saw maybe a tree over here that was on fire, you and I would zoom in on the tree on fire and focus on the negative because negative things hurt and kill us.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
That being said, if you and I run a major media company, you and I both know that the more negative stories that we put out, the more hits we're going to get.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
But all the other way. I would argue some of your success comes from the fact that you don't wallow in the negativity and there's a real thirst and a hunger and desire to learn more about who we are and how we can make ourselves better. But that negativity bias is still part of us, right? I think one of the issues that...
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
we have to confront as a society is that there are parts of us, the prefrontal cortex parts of us that are amazing, that build microphones, that have conversations that stream across the internet. And then there are parts of us, you know, this is Jonathan's elephant in the rider.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
You know, my personal past on my father's side is I think some of the darkest moments in homo sapien behavior, and that was not that long ago. So if we want to move into a place that allows us to ask what I think is the fundamental question of our time, which is how do we become the great ancestors the future needs us to be?
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
Yeah. And then I follow up and, you know, we've done this and other people much smarter than me have done this study. We say, Jakob Tropp at NYU is the one who taught me this. How do you want them to feel? That's different, right? This is Damasio's – this is somatic marker hypothesis theory, right? Where if you really want something to happen, it's not just about visualizing it.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
Because that becomes an anchor, right? She's 100% correct. What it does is it places it. It's like a kedge anchor. So if you and I were sailors, which we're not, there's a thing called a kedge anchor. And a kedge anchor is this anchor that you throw, you know, 30, 40 meters off to the side. It hits the bottom and you use the rope to pull yourself there, right?
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
No, no, no, no. Emotions are there to help us make better decisions for the future. We are future oriented mammals and species. So what emotions do, it's not meant to be like, oh, you know, I had this like terrible breakup. I feel so terrible. And then I'm going to go to my therapist. I'm going to talk about all that stuff that happened in the past. That's one way of looking at it.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
The other way is your body is telling you in a very, very visceral way, whatever you just did that had you in that situation, don't do it again. Because if you do, you're going to feel a certain way. You know, they did this study where they... At a college campus, they found people who had just been in a kind of a quasi-long-term relationship that had gone through a breakup.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
It was about six months. Okay. And people who had gone through the breakup, they gave one group a placebo and another group actually just got acetaminophen, got Tylenol. And the group that got the acetaminophen actually felt better. Why? Because we actually feel emotions. We actually feel pain. Some of the same circuits are being tripped.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
And so that says to me that emotions are there to guide future action. So if we can have pro-social emotions, awe,
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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?
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
This is how we become great, is by planting carob trees whose shade we will never know. And look, I can give you a bunch of – the Panama Canal, right? That was a great – another way that we think about this, we call this cathedral thinking. So now when we're in California, they'll put up a home in three or four days. But back in the day, it took a really long time to build great things.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
So you go back 200, 300 years ago. Or even further, and oftentimes the architect and the original stonemason who would plant the keystone would not be alive to see this cathedral or mosque fully built. That's cathedral thinking. It's doing things whose fruits you will not be around to take advantage of, to reap and to have as part of your life.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
That woe that you felt is what we call awe. Yeah. And that sense of awe at what they built is what I am advocating for us to build in the world today is so that when our descendants look back and they say, what did Ari, what did Andy do? They have awe. It's not because we necessarily built cathedrals.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
It's also a business model of academic science right now.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
Yeah, I'm sure it is.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
Great series of points and questions brought up. So part of what you're talking about is egoic legacy, right? So you mentioned a building. It could be any building at any major university. The name is put there on marble. You said 200 years.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
um being put in jail basically anything maybe that's still true but i don't think it is um but i can't tell you who sprawl is the question of legacy is very important so sprawl plaza let's say 250 years from now that name will probably it may or may not be there the plaza but p the name will maybe it was renamed by someone else um so for titans of industry that can put down several million dollars and put their name on the side of a building
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
For my wife, I know.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
It's an exciting and it's a scary thought. So what is going to impact the future? And by the way, if you want to keep giving money to put your name on the side of buildings, please do so.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
Please do that. I should just be very clear.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
Anything that I did egoically in terms of getting recognition, what's going to impact them, and we know this in many ways from across multiple disciplines, what's going to impact them is is going to be how I am with my children and my wife and my partner and the behaviors that I model, because those become the memes, right? Susan Blackmore has meme theory, right?
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
Not internet memes, where I watch a lot of those, but true memes, these cultural eunuchs that we... hand off both laterally and forward, you know, longitudinally to other generations, especially those closest to us. If you want to impact the future, there's a bunch of things you can do, right? Reduce your carbon footprint, give money, vote this. I want all of those to happen in a positive way.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
It depends on whether or not you read your book fully.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
But when we go back to that cave that I stood in where those drawings were from 40,000, 50,000 years ago, it was these are the animals that are here. Here's when they come by. This is going back to the very beginning of our conversation. This is a time of year you should expect to see these animals in this area. And it was what Nancy Bardocki calls horticultural time versus mechanical time.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
Because that's the way we used to think – From 40,000 years to the agricultural revolution 12,000, 10,000, 12,000 years ago to probably up until a couple hundred years ago, we didn't remember. The minute hand only existed on the analog clock starting about 200 years ago. Really? Yeah, we didn't think in minutes. We barely thought.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
Look, the clock as we know it, the mechanical clock as we know it, only comes about during the Industrial Revolution. And especially then when we start to have trains, remember the transcontinental- Is it all sundial then? It was Stonehenge. It was sundial. It was seasons, right? The way we would think about the future, right? When people say, oh, Ari, you're a futurist.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
Like this is people like you have always existed. No, the idea of the future- That is this thing out there that's going to roil over us is relatively new. Because up until a couple hundred years ago, Ari and Andy, we did exactly what our – probably what our fathers did. And our kids would do exactly what we did. There was no kind of evolution in social structure.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
This goes back to modeling behavior, right? The number one predictor if someone's going to read the newspaper is if their parents read the newspaper.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
Well, we can talk about that in a second, the attention part. And so – When I start answering your question about social media, I look at it as an anthropologist from Mars. That's how I go into every situation. I want to say, why is it that we're doing what we're doing? How did that come about? And how might we learn from that so that we can potentially go in a different direction if we choose?
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
so then if you take that at its at its at its truth what is social media right now but nothing but a kind of a hall of mirrors of our culture right now what will they say 200 years from now when they look at these posts with with the likes and things that um the metrics that we use to judge ourselves individually and say what what happened to this species
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
That's why there's no natural light in most casinos.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
This is a fundamental question of our time is what is the purpose of our species being here on earth? And for thousands of years, that was answered by religion. The idea about who we are and why we are here more often than not was answered in the afterlife. But then along came our friend rationality and logic and the renaissance and the enlightenment.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
And as Nietzsche said, I'll give you the full quote, God is dead and now we're basically screwed.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
Because I want to separate out what scientific rationality and the scientific method did is it didn't actually kill God. What it actually did was it killed the structures that arose to intermediate between us and God together. AKA the church. And this is not a conversation about theology. This is a conversation about structures and about power.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
And so what – I'm not saying God should be telling what we should be doing or spirituality.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
No. I'm not going to argue.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
No. Look, here – we started off by – we started off – so the work that I do, this mindset that I am advocating for I call long path. Long path sits on three pillars. These are the kind of – to use your nomenclature, there are three protocols. One, transgenerational empathy, empathy with yourself, empathy with the past, and then empathy with the future. You need those three.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
These are not distinct units. There's massive overlaps in terms of the culture, the emotional, the psychology of what I got from them, what I'm giving to my kids. But what ends up happening in a lifespan-biased society, the one that we exist in right now, is we have lost the telos. We have lost the ultimate aim or goal or purpose for ourselves. species, for our civilization on this planet.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
I'm not going to tell you what that is. What I am going to say is when you don't have that because God is no longer in the picture, religion is no longer in the picture, we flounder about and we're looking for metrics to judge. Am I doing the right thing? Do I matter? Will people know who I am 200 years from now? Is my sense of purpose connected to anything larger?
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
And without these larger religious structures that we had for thousands of years, the answer is no.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
Well, no, because there's other confusions that come from it, right? There's other religion as it's practiced in majority parts of the world, and this is where I'm going to get a lot of hate mail, is mostly about power and coercion and control. Not at its essence. Not at its essence.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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?
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
Like with anything. And so – But that's true of science too. I mean I know a lot about the business models. You referenced it earlier, right? Science, it's no longer like 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 – 100%. And that is part of where we are.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
What I'm asking for when we have a conversation about artelos 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. We're – in the first third of this ball game, right?
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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 know, you'll come over.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
That was a, you know. Wait, I don't know if I haven't invited you or you just, I don't know. We'll talk about it afterwards.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
That'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. It's blank. I have three kids. They're young.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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. There's all these complicated things. It's also a mantra.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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 the 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?
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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 going to impact that.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
That's as far back as we go.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
And seemingly young, right?
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
I don't think this is a name I gave to him.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
But let me say something. I will not probably meet them biologically. Like in the sense that this big lump of cells will probably not meet my great-grandchildren. 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?
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
You know, nothing confidential. And they'll hear, they'll hear in the background, they'll hear how I interact, how I am in the current human moment, right? 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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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 modeled behavior, that transmission.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
I think you 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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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 Hirschfeld, smart, great guy at UCLA. who does a lot of future you work. And so what he did was, and I'll do the short version of this, stuck a bunch of people into an fMRI, functional MRI, to see kind of where the flow is.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
And he asked them, he did a series of questions where he'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 they said, I want you to think about yourself 10 years from now. And guess what?
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
And he took a photo, ages them, and then puts them into a 3D virtual reality. And you're in a room. And at one point, 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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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 –
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
from the future my you know my future descendants i'm disconnected from my future self so what i've done and you you'll see this in the show it's 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 look a lot like my mom we've been we've been bagging on social media you 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 everybody laughs
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
So I took a screenshot and I proved what laughs as opposed to saying you look great.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
It's about also how do I take care – do I floss or not? You get it at the end of the night. You want to just brush your teeth and go to bed.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
You need to floss at night.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
It's unbelievably key.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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, 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. That's about having compassion for yourself.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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?
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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 Pillars 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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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 even old people That, you know, we put them in old age homes.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
It used to be we lived together, right, in these multi-generational homes because older people, I would argue, remind us of death, remind us of our own mortality.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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 going to 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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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 the time when we think of a doula, we think of someone helping birth a child into the world. What a death doula does is help us and help our loved ones exit this world. And she does something extraordinary.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
But at the end of the day, what we do extremely well, as far as we know, we're the only ones who do it, and I think this is part of the reasons why we're so good at what we do as a dominant species on this planet, is to project out into futures that we want. We know... where this comes from mostly. It's coming from the hippocampus, right?
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
But I went through a version of the death meditation, as you've alluded to, when I was 18 years old. Cause I literally am the one who picked up the phone from the hospital at two in the morning. I was home from college and I picked it up. I didn't even, I didn't even say hello. I picked up the phone. I said, this is his son. Cause who else was calling at two in the morning?
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
And it was a charge nurse. And she goes, I want to bring you up to speed. He has really stage of cancer. Your father's 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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
But when you have come close to seeing what that looks and feels like, you all of a sudden become free from the burdens that society places on you in the 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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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 us. 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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
And then what I want to transmit to the next generation. That larger...
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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. I'll say, now, what I want you to do is I want you to write a letter to your future self. It's going to be delivered in five years from now.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
We did it. And so I'll let you in 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 going to 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 go,
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
To write, I 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 aged, at the very least, write a letter to your future self.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
Dear Andy, dear Ari, and then whatever you want to put in, right? This is a one-to-one private conversation with your future self. 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 know, you can't be it if you can't see it, right?
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
And I started off by doing, you know, 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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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. Right.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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 pains. So that's touching on the individual. Let's go up to that collective. We have to decide...
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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,
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
You can tell my bias here. I don't say human. 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... 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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
So the biographies give you, or you read their letters to their lovers or to their partners, and you're like, God, 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 going to happen overnight.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
If we make that decision that your life, what Andrew Huberman is doing is to 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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
It's not about balance, it's about harmony. How are we in harmony with the future? That is what I'm advocating for.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
We want to start hunting larger and larger game. We're no longer reactive. So we want to go after that game. It's not a foregone conclusion that when we go after something, it's going to do what we want it to do. We have to start thinking about different scenarios.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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 metanarrative based on rationality and logos and the ability to kind of understand the world by breaking it down into its component parts, that science.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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. So 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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
That's from the Victorian era, right, 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. In a big pile? Yeah. Or in one big room or in a longhouse. Like piglets? I don't know if they were like piglets, but they definitely all slept together.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
And look, everyone can – look, I'm going to say this in a nonjudgmental way, but it's going to 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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
Well, the baby Bjorn, you put the baby on 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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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?
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
Well, 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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
That breakdown happened when we decided 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?
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
Because those are the species where you need others, elders, to help care for the young because of the aforementioned early birthing.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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,
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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 of 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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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?
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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 going to look like?
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
All the futures they know are the Hunger Games, are the 100, are the Maze Runner, a world that has gone bad. I understand – we talked about this earlier. There's the negativity bias. People are going to be attracted to reading about those things.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
Oh, my. Those are the bestsellers. The bestsellers 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. Dystopians can act as a... So sad. Dystopian stories can act as an early warning system.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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 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 a dystopian aside. Dystopia, we talked about, is a terrible, terrible world.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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?
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
And this is a clear case where, unlike when we think of scale being make more widgets at a cheaper price, this is really a 1 plus 1 plus 1 plus 1 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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
So right now, your listeners have the potential to live and act long path 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 universe.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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. It's like literally what I would want is anyone who's listening or watching this,
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
And so it's becoming extremely difficult for us as individuals, as societies, as civilization to think about the long term in the way that you and I may have done 150,000 years ago, because winter was coming. And we would start thinking, where are we going to move our family and our tribe or our clan? And we would go to warmer climates. We don't even do that anymore, right?
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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 the 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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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. I don't care if you're a barista, if you're a surfing instructor, if you're a brilliant podcaster.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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. You said earlier, well, 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,
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
something we call AI right now, is already or will at some point ingest the Huberman Lab podcast.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
I was going to 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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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 for them um and going back to the higher education example for a second i think higher education
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
like many institutions, as AI, what we call that, fully comes online is going to radically, radically change. And it will be, you know, a Cambridge or an Oxford tutor in everyone's ear. And higher education, this idea that you kind of come together to receive information will start to dissipate from higher education.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
We're so in this moment that it's becoming extremely difficult for us to break out of this presentist moment.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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 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?
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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 who
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
how it is you got here, what really matters and where you want to contribute and help move us forward as a, as a species on spaceship earth, you know, as not as, not as a passenger, but as crew on this vessel and how we're going to move forward. So the stories have served us well, and they have not served us well. And to move forward and,
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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 intrapersonal. They may be interpersonal. They may be political. They may be business. They may be what you buy, what you consume.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
You need to manage the day to day. There are people like me who are full time futures. We tend to be very anxious because what we tend to do is think more in the future and aren't as present as we should be. That being said. If 90% of your day is going about your day dealing with what's right in front of you, that's great. What I'm advocating for is what I call kind of transgenerational empathy.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
It's a mouthful. So we know empathy. You've had guests on that. Transgenerational empathy first and foremost starts with empathy and compassion for yourself. Then we move into empathy for those who came before, which then allows us to build empathy for the future, future, future Ari, future, future Andy, but then future generations. And we can get into how to do that.
Huberman Lab
Ari Wallach: Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols
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 –