Ari Wallach Create Your Ideal Future Using Science-Based Protocols

High-Level Overview

Andrew Huberman sits down with Ari Wallach, a futurist, adjunct associate professor at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs, host of the TV series A Brief History of the Future, and a friend Huberman has known since they were kids. Their subject is time: how the human brain can travel mentally into the past and future, why modern technology has shrunk that horizon down to a constant stream of stimulus and response, and how ordinary people can widen it again. Wallach calls his framework Longpath, and he keeps returning to a single question he considers the defining one of our era: how do we become the great ancestors the future needs us to be?

The tone is warm, playful and reflective. The two old friends tease each other about nicknames, bouncing between colleges and flossing, but the conversation also goes to heavy places, including the Holocaust, the death of Wallach's father when Wallach was 18, and a guided death meditation. The conversation swings between evolutionary storytelling, neuroscience, philosophy of religion and very concrete daily practices, from an empty photo frame on a shelf to an aged selfie taped to a bathroom mirror.

The Discussion Explores:

• Mental time travel and presentism: why the hippocampus lets us imagine futures, and how phones and notifications have collapsed our time horizon into the present moment.
• Transgenerational empathy: empathy that starts with yourself, extends to those who came before, and finally reaches future generations.
• Emotion as a guide to the future: why feeling a desired future, not just listing it, pulls behavior toward it like a kedge anchor.
• Cathedral thinking and letting go of credit: planting trees whose shade you will never sit in, and the difference between egoic legacy and modeled behavior.
• Storytelling, social media and time capsules: cave paintings versus the hall of mirrors of likes and metrics.
• Purpose after the decline of religion: Wallach's three pillars of Longpath and the idea of a lost telos, or ultimate aim.
• Death and the denial of death: Ernest Becker's ideas, death doulas, and how facing mortality can free us to think longer.
• Practical protocols: the empty photo frame, the aged photo of yourself, a letter to your future self, asking whether you are being a great ancestor, and rewriting the stories you inherited.

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

Mental time travel in a world of notifications

Huberman opens by noting that the brain can orient to the past, present or future, yet modern life runs on very short reward schedules. Wallach answers with Martin Seligman's idea, from the book Homo Prospectus, that what separates humans from other species is our ability to mentally time travel toward different possible futures and then collaborate to make the ones we want happen. He places this ability largely in the hippocampus, which he describes as oddly lacking a timestamp: it takes snapshots of past episodes and reassembles them into possible future scenarios.

He illustrates with a picture of "Ari and Andy" on the savanna 150,000 years ago, needing to plan hunts for larger game to feed an energy-hungry brain. That planning ability, he argues, is now running on ancient hardware while a cultural layer has hacked into it. A ding on the phone pulls attention instantly, and the result is not Buddhist presence but what he calls presentism, a hall of mirrors with no past and no future. Huberman connects this to Jonathan Haidt's work and to his earlier guest James Hollis, who urged people to spend five to ten minutes a day with eyes closed, stepping out of stimulus-response mode to connect with their deeper wishes. Wallach is clear that most of the day should still be spent handling what is right in front of you; he is asking for a wider lens some of the time, not constant future-gazing.

Transgenerational empathy, starting with yourself

Wallach's central idea is transgenerational empathy, which unfolds in stages. It begins with self-compassion: recognizing that you are doing the best you can with what you have, rather than measuring yourself against idealized images of how to live your best life. He shares a painful example. His father was diagnosed with stage four cancer when Wallach was 18 and died four months later, and Wallach spent part of that summer away, working at a summer camp alongside Huberman. For years he berated himself, until he realized that 18-year-old Ari was only at a certain place emotionally and psychologically. Self-empathy, he stresses, does not mean letting yourself off the hook; it means recognizing that who you were even yesterday differs from who you are today.

Huberman links this to a line from Sam Sheridan's book The Fighter's Heart: "you can't have your 20th birthday until you're 19". He also shares a practice he picked up online: ask each morning what you can do today to make your day, and hopefully others' lives, better, because the 24-hour day is the unit our circadian biology actually runs on. From self-empathy, Wallach moves to empathy for others, which ideally goes beyond intellectual understanding to genuinely feeling another person's state. He argues that one of civilization's great errors of recent decades and centuries has been disconnection, from ourselves, from each other, and from nature and the planet. Huberman adds that empathy requires presence, and that like any neural circuit it involves suppressing competing demands before returning to our own concerns.

Better off than ever, but at an inflection point

Huberman asks whether we are actually better off than 50 years ago. Wallach says that in aggregate, "there's no better time to be alive as a homo sapient on planet earth than right now", pointing to health, infant mortality, education and calories, and to the fact that a rusty nail a century ago could kill you. The problem is that we are at an inflection point: what we do or don't do about climate change, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology may shape the next several decades or centuries.

He explains why this progress feels invisible. Our negativity bias made us zoom in on the burning tree rather than the beautiful one, and media companies know negative stories get more hits. Borrowing Haidt's image of the elephant and the rider, he argues we have to work with both the impressive prefrontal parts of ourselves and the ancient parts below the surface, rather than either celebrating our cleverness or wallowing in the worst of human behavior.

Feeling the future: emotions as a kedge anchor

When Wallach asks people what they want the world to be like for their great-grandchildren in the 2080s, they usually give a list of external items such as shelter and healthcare. The more powerful question, which he credits to Yaacov Trope at NYU, is how you want them to feel. He ties this to the somatic marker hypothesis: to change behavior, you must connect a vision to its emotional sense. He compares emotion to a kedge anchor, which sailors throw 30 or 40 meters out and then use to pull the boat toward it. Emotions, he says, pull us toward the futures we feel.

Citing Seligman again, he argues that Freud got emotions backward by treating them mainly as residue of the past: "Emotions are there to help us make better decisions for the future." He describes a study in which people who had recently gone through a breakup of a roughly six-month relationship felt better after taking acetaminophen, suggesting that emotional pain shares circuitry with physical pain and exists to steer future behavior. Huberman connects this to Martha Beck's exercises, including her perfect day practice: first imagine something terrible and feel it in the body, then take a break and imagine a perfect day with no rules. He says small, realistic seeds pop out of the second exercise, and that the ones he wrote down have all borne out, despite his initial skepticism as a neuroscience professor. Paul Conti's point that the limbic system doesn't know or care about the clock or calendar is used to explain why this works.

Cathedral thinking and the problem with egoic legacy

Wallach's core philosophy comes from a Talmudic story about Honi, who meets an old man planting a carob tree that won't bear fruit for at least 40 years. The old man explains that he ate from carob trees planted by others when he was young, so it is his job to plant one now. Wallach calls this cathedral thinking: architects and stonemasons who laid foundations for cathedrals and mosques often didn't live to see them finished. Huberman recalls the awe he felt in the Blue Mosque and at the Sydney Opera House, yet admits he cannot name either architect, which leads them to the idea of giving up our need for credit.

Huberman notes that even in science, most discoverers are forgotten within about 20 years, a lesson his scientist father taught him, and that names on university buildings can be scraped off over time. Wallach distinguishes egoic legacy, like names in marble, from the far larger legacy of modeled behavior. With three children, he estimates he will have roughly 50,000 descendants in 250 years, and what shapes them will not be recognition but how he treats his wife, children, colleagues and even the barista. He invokes Susan Blackmore's idea of memes as cultural units passed laterally and down the generations, and says his kids overhear how he behaves on work calls. That, he says, is how he will meet his great-grandchildren even if he never meets them biologically.

Social media, casinos and real time capsules

Huberman lays out a theory that game shows were essentially commercials, reality TV followed, and social media is now a reality show we all cast ourselves in, one that rewards hyperbole and high-friction behavior over plain kindness. He compares it to a Las Vegas casino with no clocks or natural light, designed around random intermittent rewards, and relays an addiction counselor's view that gambling is the worst addiction because the next time really could change everything. He wonders whether any version of social media works as a time capsule, since even viral posts seem to fade within months.

Wallach reframes the question as one about storytelling. He describes visiting caves in the south of Spain where Neanderthal and Homo sapiens paintings sit side by side, recording which animals come by and when, knowledge meant to help the group flourish. He notes that the minute hand has existed on clocks only for about 200 years, and that for most of history people lived much as their parents had, so the idea of the future as something that rolls over us is new. Viewed like an anthropologist from Mars, today's feeds are a hall of mirrors, and he wonders what people 200 years from now will conclude when they see the metrics we use to judge ourselves.

Longpath's three pillars and the missing telos

Wallach describes Longpath as resting on three pillars. The first is transgenerational empathy. The second is futures thinking, plural, because the future is not a noun waiting out there but a verb, something we do. The third, and hardest, is telos: an ultimate aim or purpose. He says we all suffer from a lifespan bias, treating the stretch from birth to death as the most important unit of time, when in reality generations overlap culturally and emotionally.

He argues that for thousands of years religion supplied that larger purpose, and that scientific rationality did not so much kill God as undermine the institutions that stood between people and God. Science can tell us how we got here over 13.7 billion years, but neither science nor technology can tell us where we should be going. Huberman, who says he believes in God, pushes on this, and they agree that the essence of every major religion is love, while business models and power can distort religion and science alike. Wallach offers some perspective: most mammal species last about a million years, so humans are roughly in the first third of the game. On artificial intelligence and synthetic biology, he says "we don't need more smartness, we need more wisdom".

Death, urgency and freedom

Huberman asks whether losing his father young gave Wallach a sense of urgency. Wallach turns to Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death, which argues that humans uniquely realize early that they will die, and that much of culture is an effort to push that knowledge away. Huberman goes further, saying he believes every addiction is rooted in a fear of death and an attempt to shorten the time scale of rewards, and notes that Western societies push aging and dying out of sight. Wallach argues that truly thinking into the far future requires imagining a world where you no longer exist, which is why we avoid it.

In his show, Wallach sat with death doula Alua Arthur in the high desert outside Tucson and did a guided death meditation that moves from breathing to the cessation of breath to becoming one with the soil. He had faced a version of this at 18, when he answered a 2 a.m. call from a charge nurse and had to decide what to do as his father stopped responding to CPR. People who have come close to death, he says, often feel emancipated from society's pressures. He contrasts American efforts to extend quantity of life with cultures such as Japan, which he says is home to 90% of the world's companies over a thousand years old, and where respect for elders situates people in a longer chain.

Concrete protocols for thinking long

The conversation is packed with specific practices. Wallach keeps a shelf of family photos, from his grandparents, whose photos his father saved through the Holocaust, to his three children, followed by a blank frame representing future generations. When an argument or a short-term urge arises, he says the word "long path to himself and asks what he is really trying to do. Huberman shares the life in weeks chart, where you fill in squares for each week lived against an expected lifespan, though he admits such tools fade from awareness. Wallach's simpler in-the-moment question: Just ask yourself, am I being a great ancestor?"

Wallach also describes research by Hal Hershfield at UCLA, a member of his advisory board. In brain scans, thinking about yourself ten years from now lit up the same region as thinking about celebrities, meaning people treat their future selves almost as strangers. When participants saw an aged version of themselves in a virtual reality mirror, they later put more money into hypothetical retirement savings. Wallach printed an aged photo of himself and taped it to his bathroom mirror, and says "That's how I make better decisions today", including flossing, which Huberman heartily endorses.

His most-used tool is a letter to your future self, delivered five years later, which can be done through longpath.org or future-me websites. He notes that "the change occurs not when you receive the letter, but when you actually write it", because it forces you to ask who you want to become. Drawing on his high school relay coach, he explains that 4x100 races are won or lost in the baton handoff: life is not a 100-yard dash but "a relay and you're carrying a baton that was handed to you that you are now going to hand off."

Institutions, family, protopia and rewriting your stories

Huberman asks whether the fracturing of families and institutions has driven short-term thinking. Wallach agrees that eroding trust in institutions fuels short-term behavior, and argues that academia got good at saying what doesn't work but bad at describing what we want. He suggests the family breakdown began long ago, with Victorian practices like separate rooms for babies and strollers, contrasting them with cultures where families slept together and babies were worn skin to skin during what he calls the fourth trimester. He notes that human babies are born early because of the size of our brains and the narrowing of the pelvis with bipedalism, and that elephants, whales and humans are rare species that live well past menopause, because elders help care for the helpless young.

He observes that nearly every future his 15-year-old twin daughters read about is dystopian, and calls for stories set in protopia, Kevin Kelly's term for a better, though imperfect, tomorrow. Scale, he argues, comes from social and emotional contagion: millions of listeners modeling behavior across their circles, and even AI models learning from how we talk to one another now. His final protocol, labeled Why Tuesdays in the episode's timestamps, starts from a piece of trivia: Americans vote on Tuesdays, he explains, because it once allowed people to leave church on Sunday, ride to the city, vote, and return before Wednesday's market day. Like cognitive behavioral therapy, the practice is to examine the inherited stories behind your habits, keep what serves you, and write new ones, seeing yourself on spaceship Earth "not as a passenger but as crew on this vessel".

Conclusion

This episode turns an abstract ideal, caring about the far future, into something practical and personal. Ari Wallach argues that modern technology has shrunk our sense of time to the next notification, and that widening it again starts with compassion for ourselves, understanding of those who came before, and emotional connection to those who will come after. His Longpath framework asks us to treat the future as something we actively create, to look for purpose beyond our own lifespan, and to recognize that our most lasting legacy is the behavior we model rather than any name in marble. Andrew Huberman keeps pulling the discussion back to tools, and listeners come away with a clear set: an empty frame for future generations, an aged photo of yourself, a letter to your future self, the question of whether you are being a great ancestor, and the habit of asking why you do what you do. It's an optimistic, thoughtful conversation for anyone who wants their daily choices to add up to something beyond the moment.

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