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

Huberman opens by placing the episode around a single question: how are we preparing this planet not just for our own children but for all people, and for generations we will never meet. He introduces Ari Wallach as an adjunct associate professor at Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs and host of the series "A Brief History of the Future," and locates Wallach's work under the banner of Longpath Labs, which he describes as long-term thinking and coordinated behavior at the individual, organizational and societal level. Huberman's framing is deliberately double: he calls the project aspirational but insists it is also "grounded in specific actions and logic" — a promise the rest of the conversation is asked to keep.

The scientific premise Huberman supplies is that the human brain can orient thought and memory toward the past, the present, the future, or some combination of the three. What makes the capacity interesting is not that it exists but what it is used for: setting goals, pursuing them, and the neurochemical machinery that underwrites that pursuit. Against this he sets a modern mismatch — we operate, he says, on short-timeframe reward schedules, with dopamine and other systems involved, where wanting something comes with fast routes to getting it, or at least fast information about how to get it. The genuine question he poses is how anyone is supposed to project present decision-making decades forward when most people are simply trying to get through the day without spiraling into anxiety or losing control of their health.

Wallach answers with an evolutionary story rather than a definition. He places two humans on the Serengeti roughly 150,000 years ago, notes that Homo sapiens is dated to about 200,000 years, and argues that the decisive shift came when groups began hunting larger game. Because a hunt is not deterministic — the animal may not do what you want — the group had to construct scenarios before acting, and the hippocampus began assembling different memories of past hunts, successful and unsuccessful, into candidate futures. His claim is pointed: mental time travel did not begin as philosophy. It began as a protein-acquisition strategy for feeding what he calls the super energy-intensive thing called the human brain.

We're working on 200,000, 300,000-year-old hardware. At the same time, we have a cultural substrate that is, for lack of better words, has hacked into that older part of us

The modern consequence, in Wallach's account, is that a phone notification interrupts his own drive to the studio and he reaches for it immediately — a reaction that recruits the same ancient system for a radically shortened purpose. His term for the result is presentism, and he is careful to distinguish it from contemplative presence: "I mean presentism as in a hall of mirrors. There is no past, there is no future. There's only this moment." The comparison he draws is with ancestors who, facing winter, debated where to move the family or clan. The capacity has not disappeared; the temporal horizon it is aimed at has collapsed.

Huberman supplies the historical contrast that gives the diagnosis a date. Through the 1980s, '90s and 2000s, the popular complaint was the opposite of presentism: "future tripping," people spending too much time worrying about what was coming. In his reading, that horizon has now pulled in, and the hall of mirrors is a state of constant stimulus and response. He also imports Jonathan Haidt's framing from "The Anxious Generation" and "The Coddling of the American Mind" — that something in the architecture of our technologies and habits is reshaping which temporal mode the brain defaults to. He explicitly disclaims a doom-and-gloom episode and promises solutions, which sets an expectation the later protocol material has to meet.

Wallach's response is a concession that strengthens his position rather than weakening it. He notes that full-time futurists like himself tend to be very anxious, precisely because they over-index on the future and are insufficiently present. If ninety percent of your day is spent dealing with what is directly in front of you, he says, that is fine. The intervention he proposes is additive, not a replacement: transgenerational empathy, which he unpacks as a sequence rather than a single act — empathy and compassion for yourself first, then empathy for those who came before, which in turn makes it possible to build empathy for future versions of yourself and then for future generations. The ordering is the argument.

Huberman then tries to decompose empathy into requirements. The first is presence: to appreciate a fern, a dog, a partner or a stranger, the mind cannot be elsewhere, and Wallach supplies the completion — "Can't be wandering." The second requirement is suppression, and Huberman grounds it in circuit logic: every neural circuit he knows has a push and a pull, getting A requires suppressing B, illustrated with flexors and extensors and with retinal neurons that respond to increments or decrements in light, whose difference is what lets us see borders at all. This is mechanistic analogy rather than direct evidence about empathy, but it does the work of explaining why attention has to be actively cleared before it can be given.

Empathy for self, Wallach says, is close to self-compassion: "It's recognizing you're doing the best you can with what you have." He identifies a specific failure mode — surrounding yourself with images, quotes and books about living your best life, and then measuring yourself against that standard of perfection, so that everything below the metric produces rumination in bed at night. He includes himself among the guilty, which matters because the concept could otherwise read as a slogan.

He then pays for the concept with a specific case. His father was diagnosed with stage four cancer when Wallach was eighteen, and died four months later. For much of that period, Wallach says, he was in denial and was not with his father as much as he should have been — he was working at a summer camp that summer, alongside Huberman. He beat himself up about it for years. The reframing he arrives at is not absolution but chronology: eighteen-year-old Ari was only emotionally and psychologically capable of what he did, and the regret belongs to a thirty- or forty-year-old version of himself who did not exist at the time.

It doesn't mean you let yourself off the hook. It doesn't mean you can go willy-nilly and treat people terribly.

Huberman receives this through two lenses. The first is a line from Sam Sheridan's "A Fighter's Heart": "You can't have your 20th birthday until you're 19" — obvious, he says, and profound, because the attention we spend trying to resemble others and satisfy external metrics makes us forget it. The second is a daily-unit practice he encountered through an Instagram account he does not name: distill the problem to one actionable step per day, and ask what you are going to do today to make today better rather than to be better than yesterday, since yesterday may itself have been an unusually good day. He ties the day as unit to circadian biology — twenty-four hours, non-negotiable — which makes the day the smallest honest unit of change.

Wallach extends empathy outward through a distinction between cognitive and felt empathy. We start with intellectual empathy, thinking about what someone feels; where he wants people to arrive is a state in which their feelings are feelings you can feel, and in which you want to bring resolution to the bad ones and share the good ones. This is where the transgenerational version gets its emotional charge rather than its intellectual one, and it explains why the sequence has to start with the mirror: he reports working with people who want empathy for the past and the future but have none for themselves, and says that without the first step the rest does not extend.

Huberman raises the objection that stalls most conversations about the future: people are not agreeing on first principles. He notes the tension between the claim that health, shelter and material outcomes are dramatically better than fifty years ago and the everyday observation that visible suffering seems to have increased, and offers the resolution that the suffering was elsewhere rather than absent. He then asks the narrower, checkable question — are humans better off in health and longevity than fifty years ago — and names the stakes: online debates about climate, health and longevity become overwhelming precisely because the baseline is contested.

Wallach answers in aggregate and concedes the local counter-case in the same breath. He lists health, infant mortality, education, and the calories available, and adds the qualification "even as we backslide in this country" on measures such as being a woman. His illustration is deliberately homely: a rusty nail a hundred years ago was a plausible death sentence; now it is a drugstore visit, or even thirty seconds under high-pressure water, because germ theory exists. He points listeners to Gapminder for the trend lines and concludes that net-net this is the best time to be alive as a Homo sapien on the planet — while noting that someone will immediately dispute it.

The interesting move is what he does with that optimism. Rather than using progress as reassurance, he converts it into urgency: we are at an inflection point, because what we do or do not do about climate change, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology will dictate not only the next few years and decades but potentially the next several centuries. Progress and responsibility are the same argument here, not opposing ones.