Dhru Purohit Show - How to Use Visualization and Mental Time Travel to Achieve Your Goals and Dreams with Hal Hershfield

Episode Date: June 29, 2023

This episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers Sleep Breakthrough, AirDoctor, and Paleovalley. Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with Hal Hershfield to discuss how to move closer to your goals and dreams using the power of visualization. Dhru and Hal talk about the roadblocks that get in the way and why setting a clear, distinct, and manageable timeline is essential to achieve your goals. Hal also shares tools like letter writing as a way to connect, communicate, and commit to your future self. Hal Hershfield is a Marketing, Behavioral Decision Making, and Psychology Professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. His research, which sits at the intersection of psychology and economics, examines how we can improve our long-term decisions. Hershfield publishes in top academic journals and contributes op-eds to The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, and other outlets.  Hal earned his Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University, has received numerous teaching awards, and was named one of “The 40 Most Outstanding B-School Profs Under 40 In The World” by the business education website Poets & Quants. His book, Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today, is out now.  In this episode, Dhru and Hal dive into: -What gets in the way of our goals and dreams (2:06) -Visualizing your future self (9:47) -The fundamentals of goal setting (23:57) -Ways to connect to your future self (35:13) -Why it’s important to pair visualization with conversation (40:37) -Addressing the nuances of climate change (51:00) -Is the future getting better or worse? (1:00:23) -The dangers of comparison (1:10:45) -Getting clear on your goals (1:20:13) -Writing a letter to your future self to determine the obstacles of your goals (1:29:06) -Hal’s highest hopes for the future and where to follow his work (1:39:11) For more on Hal Hershfield, follow him on Twitter @HalHershfield, LinkedIn @hal-hershfield, or through his website, halhershfield.com. Also mentioned in this episode: -Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today -Halhershfield.com Right now, you can get 10% off Sleep Breakthrough, and if you buy two or more, you’ll get a free bottle of Magnesium Breakthrough for a limited time. Head to sleepbreakthrough.com/dhru and use code dhru10.  AirDoctor is offering my community a special discount. Go to dhrupurohit.com/filter, and get access to the AirDoctor3000 for only $349. That's a $280 savings! Paleovalley is offering my listeners 15% off their first order. Head over to paleovalley.com/dhru to check out all their Paleo products and take advantage of this deal. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the things we've found is that if we show people what they'll look like and get people to better visualize the future, it can make it easier for them to follow through, whether it's on savings goals or health goals. These are the types of things that can really drive a sense of emotional connection and emotional vividness of the future. Welcome to the Drew Prod podcast. Each week we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Hal Herschfield. And on today's podcast, we're diving deep into the topic of future selfing and visualization to help you accomplish your goals and dreams in life. Now, a little bit more about how. Hal Herschfield is a professor of marketing, behavioral decision making, and psychology

at UCLA's Anderson School of Management. His research, which sits at the intersection of psychology and economics, examines the ways that we can improve our long-term decision-making skills. In addition to his faculty position at UCLA, Hal also publishes, in top academic journals and is a contributor to op-eds in the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, and many other outlets. He's also the recipient of numerous teaching awards. He was named one of the top 40 most outstanding business school professors under 40 in the

world by business education websites, poets and quants. Hal originally earned his PhD in psychology from Stanford University. He's been the recipient of numerous teaching awards, and he's been named one of the 40 most outstanding business school professors under 40 in the world. Howell's first book, which was launched in June, is titled, Your Future Self, How to Make Tomorrow Better Today, and it will be today's topic of discussion. Hal, welcome to the podcast. A pleasure to have you here. I want to jump right in. So the key around the new book and really your work is that the key to unlocking our goals and dreams,

whether it might be losing weight for somebody or saving money towards retirement or building a business if somebody wants to do that. The key to that is to help our brain truly connect to the future version of ourself. We're going to talk about that in a second. But I want to know what gets in the way of us connecting to that part of our brain. Yeah, I'll put it, I'll make it really simple, two words, the present, right? We, you know, we live in the present. And despite our best intentions to want to do things for the future, we want to be healthier, we want to save, we want to exercise, we want to start that business. The thing that gets in the way is all of the temptations, all of the emotions, everything that's happening right now in this moment. And that's so hard to

step out of because it's all that we see and it's all that we feel, even though we know there's this distant future. Of course, the thing that really pulls our attention is our emotions that are happening right in the here and now. Early in your career, you were asking yourself these questions. What makes some people good savers? What makes some people good at planning for the future? And so you got this idea to do a study. Talk about that original study that you were doing with MRI imaging. What were you looking for and what did you end up finding out? So part of what we were trying to figure out was how do people even think of their own future selves, right?

So that's kind of a strange question. How do I think of my future self? But here's the thing. If my future self seems like a different person, almost another person, then it can start to make sense. why I don't do the things that I say that I want to do, why I don't eat healthy, why I don't exercise, why I don't save money, whatever it may be. And so we started wondering, well, how can we even tell how people think of their future selves? Now here's what it turns out. It turns out in the brain, the brain knows what's me and what's not me. Of course, that makes

sense, right? So if I'm thinking about me, there's more activity in what's called the cortical midline structures compared to when I think of you or somebody else. So we were wondering, what happens in the brain when we think of our future selves, do you see a similar pattern? In other words, does that future self look more like another person? And so we brought people into our scanner. We had them lay down and they had them think about themselves now and themselves in the future and another person now and another person in the future. And what we found was that the brain activity that comes about when we think of our future

selves looks more like the brain activity that comes about when we think about another person. Which right there in itself, you know, because that was your original question. Do we think of our future selves like us or somebody else? And so that already, to see that in the brain, it's like, I'm sure that was an aha moment. Yeah, it was, it was funny because, you know, we went in sort of saying, well, this is, you know, the hypothesis. We found it. I'll never forget it because my like mentor who I was working with. I mean, this was years ago. It was like, we got to do this again, make sure this is real. And we, you know, we crank the, you know, we did the whole thing again. And sure enough, we see the same thing.

And it, I mean, it's wild to think about because on some level, I think it's suggestive that our future selves may seem like other people to us. It's an analogy, right? I mean, you know, like we eventually turn into our future selves. We don't turn into other people, right? Yeah, we'll chat more about that for sure. There's a whole bunch of philosophy in that. Totally, totally.

But it's a useful analogy. I think it really helps us understand our. decision making. Yeah, you know, and really as somebody who's listening to this podcast, they might be thinking, okay, I have a particular goal in my life, something that I want to do. And goals usually take some form of sacrifice, right? Everybody's heard of the marshmallow study with little kids, you know, you can have one marshmallow now or you can have like two marshmallows in the future if you don't eat it. And that sacrifice requires us to tap into some sense of imagination. Right. That imagination is imagining, well, what would our life look like?

at that time. But now you're seeing that some people who are good at that and some people who are not good at that actually have a really hard time imagining their future version of themselves. And it feels like a distant person. Sometimes the way that we think about somebody that we're not close to. That's right. It's exactly right. I think that's the way that you said that is a really good analogy to bring in because there's all different types of people in our lives. Right. And there's some people who are really close to our best friends, our partners, our kids, you know, and then there's other people, I know they exist. It's like a coworker I have, you know, I see them around. I'm not going to name names, but you know, I see them around. I

know who they are. But if they ask me to, I don't know, help them move this weekend or they asked me to, I don't know, make some sacrifice for them, it's not that I'm selfish, but I probably come up with reasons to not, to not do it. And if that's how we see our future selves. If they're kind of like that stranger and that's how I see my future self, then, man, it's going to be really hard to connect to them and, as you said, make sacrifices for their well-being and their benefit. This episode is brought to you by Buy Optimizer's Sleep breakthrough. Getting good sleep is super important when it comes to being healthy, but sometimes we struggle to get the right amount of deep quality, restful sleep we need. So what do we do when

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to clean up your home's air and feel better today. That's Drew, D-H-R-U-P-U-R-H-I-T dot com slash filter to feel better today. It sounds so basic, and yet it is the plight, and the challenge that everybody runs up against, right? I saw somebody included in a newsletter that I subscribed to this morning. I saw somebody took a photo of a Nike ad campaign. Yeah.

Right. And it was this big campaign, just black text and the Nike logo and the bottom right. And it said, you know, yesterday you said tomorrow. Right. That's great. I love that. It just goes back to this plight that so many people have had a goal. So many people want.

to make progress. So many people have read the literature and the scientific evidence on investing and compound interest. And they know that if they started today, their life is going to be better in the future. But as you mentioned, it's two words. It's the present moment that gets in the way. What is it about the present moment? Again, another very basic question, but I think it's worth addressing because this seems like the problem of humanity. What is it about the present moment that is so illustrious. Yeah. So there's a couple of things.

So one is that the emotions that we're feeling in the present, they seem more powerful to us. They seem more important. And almost on another level of magnitude than the emotions we expect to feel in the future. One of my favorite research studies, ask people, how happy do you think you'll be if you won the lottery today? I mean, this is like just an imaginary question, of course. you know, I don't know, one to 20, you know, something like this, right? Not the lottery. You call it,

you know, one, a hundred bucks. Okay, lottery is too easy. I'd say 20 out of 20, right? And then they ask people, these researchers ask a different group of people, how happy do you think you'd be if you won the lottery in six months a year or so on down the line in the future? Same amount of money. But now what you see is that people think that they won't feel the same amount of emotional satisfaction in the future, which is wild in a way because it's the same thing. But somehow I just feel like my emotions in the future are going to be muted relative to the emotions I'm feeling right now. Now, think about what that means.

What it means is that everything I'm doing presently, it feels like the thing to do. Liz Dunn, she's a professor, a psych professor. She's this great quote where she says, the present acts as a magnifying glass for our emotions. And I think that makes so much sense. Yeah, I know that compound interest is really important. Sure, I know that if I got up today and exercised and be really important. But then at the same time, think about all the temptations I have in front of me. And we live in, I'm not going to make this some big societal comment, but we live in a society where there's so many different ways that we can satisfy our urges in this moment, whether it's credit cards or Apple Pay or watching another show.

there's all these things that will prevent us from doing the things that we say that we want to do. And it's a lot easier to do those things. I want to give a little teaser. We're going to go deep into this later on. But I feel like in the beginning when we really have the audience here, I want to give a teaser, which is that you found that there's a few simple ways to counteract this. Now, first, we really got to break down a little bit more of the science, some additional studies, and some of the concepts and philosophies around this.

But part of this teaser is that you found that if people could get better at imagining their future self, which part of that could be seeing an image of themselves even as the future version of himself, that actually led to people more likely to follow through with their future goals. Right. Can you talk about that just briefly? Yeah. So real brief, think about it this way. The future is abstract. Right. And abstract abstractions are hard to sort of connect to.

But vivid examples are easier to connect to and they're more emotional. And one of the things we've found, I know we'll go deeper on it, is that if we show people what they'll look like and get people to better visualize the future, it can make it easier for them to follow through, whether it's on savings goals or other researchers are found in terms of health goals. These are the types of things that can really drive a sense of emotional connection and emotional vividness of the future. Yeah, it's fascinating.

There's a lot there, but it reminds me, you know, just a few weeks ago we had on a neuroscientist on the podcast who was talking about the power of something that she calls a vision board. And it's this idea of, you know, well, actually she calls it an action board, but it's a vision board. It's like, what are the things that you want to do? And how can you sort of prime yourself at night to sort of get the brain starting to really be connected? And your work is similar in that, but you have a unique, you know, take on it. And I think all this builds up to this idea of if we want. to invite in our highest potential, the self-actualization,

the big goals that are not super straightforward. It's not, okay, I go from A to B to C, it's a little bit of a zigzag. You know, if you've ever seen those memes on Instagram about success isn't up into the right, it's kind of like up, down, left, right, you know, but over time you make your way towards your goal. Right. If we want those big, audacious goals, it is constantly requiring us to remember why we want to sacrifice things currently in the moment and to continuously put the future version of

ourself ahead of the present version of ourself. Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, it's, well, you know, it's interesting because I would add a wrinkle to that, which is that if we're constantly putting the future version of us ahead of our present self, that's not going to be that much fun, right? And, you know, one of my favorite insights about goal pursuit is that we think it needs to be painful, but it doesn't always have to be. There are ways that we can achieve those goals and make it, quote unquote, fun, make it quote unquote pleasurable at the same time. Right. So I think there's a

there's a balance. There's a sort of a give and take there that is useful to keep in mind, but you're right, at the end of the day, if we're constantly putting our present self before our future self, we'll never get there. And of course, if we reverse it and we always put our future self first, I mean, that's, I don't know, what sort of life is that like, right? So it's got to be some sort of balance between the two. Some sort of balance, but most people have the problem of putting a little bit of their future self ahead of their current self. Yeah. Or, oh, I would say most people have the problem of putting their future self. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, you have this great quote just to connect all the dots here, you know, that I pulled from the book. It's not until we

learn ways to close the gap between the current self and the future self that will start making better decisions for tomorrow. Yeah. So I just really invite everybody to think about anything that you want to make progress on anything you know even for a second if you just want to close your eyes hopefully you're not driving definitely don't close your eyes then what is something that you care about what is something that is a goal is a dream just even on a small level it could be for you could be for your family could be something that you wanted to make progress on and if you're like me because we've all been through this you've even talked about this in your own book you've probably tried and you failed a few times right i think that even you were mentioning that at one point in time you were feeling like wow

I even study this area and I should be saving more money for the future. That was an experience that you had. Yes. I mean, it's funny because it's in so many areas, right? Like I've had this with money. I've had it with procrastination, you know, where I say, I'm like, I mean, this is probably no secret for the people who know me and especially my wife, but I'm really bad at taking care of like administrative tasks.

And so it's like part of what happens is that things pile up. I know they're coming. I know I need to do them, but I always put them off for my future self. and it's unfair to him because it's not like that distant version of myself or even me next week is going to suddenly have the energy and inclination to do these things that I don't want to do right now. But that's another version of, I also have it with snacking, by the way, at night. And it's like, I say I don't need to do this. And yet I know I sleep better if I don't.

But, you know, nighttime rolls around and it's so tempting. Well, since you brought up snacking, you know, somebody that you connected with recently was recently on our podcast, Brian Johnson. Yeah. And he has this whole idea of Evening Brian. Right. And he had you recently on one of his live webinars, which is another way that I kind of connected the dots that you were in our orbit and our world and invite you on the podcast. So for those listeners that I heard that podcast, he sort of segments out all these different parts of himself. Right.

And one part of himself that he found that was running the show a lot was this guy, Evening Brian. And Evening Brian doesn't make the best choices. Just like Evening Howell, you were talking. about is snacking, is doing this, is doing that. Is that one way to help us connect more to the different parts that are sort of sabotaging our future? What do you think about that? Yeah. So, well, you know, it's funny because Jerry Seinfeld has this bit from, I think it's from the 90s where you, do you know this one? I don't think I've seen this one. It's, it's fantastic. He says, you know, it's a problem I think a lot of us have, especially with, for me, it's with Netflix or HBO. He says, you know,

I stay up late at night because I'm night guy. He says, you know, oh, what about getting up after five hours of sleep? Like, that's not my problem. That's morning guy's problem. And it's so, it's so smart. He actually has a solution, by the way. He says, the only thing morning guy can do is to try to oversleep often enough so that day guy loses his job and night guy has no money to go out anymore. So morning guy is sabotaging night guy? And it's like, it's perfect because it is, it is, I think instantly relatable. We've all had this experience. And it's, you know, and it's really interesting because you think about these different selves.

There's this version of me that, you know, wants to go to bed on time and doesn't want a snack and wants to take care of my, you know, the paperwork that's piling up. And there's this other version of me in the future that wants to look back and say, you did it. You went to bed early and you did all those things. And then there's that, that nighttime guy or that version of me that's going to mess it up. And I do think it's really useful to come back to your question. I do think it's really useful to consider ourselves as a collection of separate entities like this. Yeah, you know, asked this question in the beginning of the book and you're like, are you, let's presumably you're an adult now, you're like, are you the eight year old version of yourself? Right, right.

Because part of the premise that you're trying to establish is that before we even get to the solutions, a lot of people have some confounded view of themselves. Right. And they don't often know. we can say ourselves or our future selves, but we don't often even know what that means. And because for some people, it's really cloudy, we got to explore that a little bit to make sure we're on the same page, at least individually, about what is our future self and what not is our future self. So what are the questions you think that people have to explore or get clear on to at least have a better way to connect to their future version of themselves? Yeah, I mean, I think one thing to explore here is what's the timeline we're talking about, right?

And this can get tricky and I, you know, I don't want to overcomplicate it. But if we're thinking about I want to be healthy in five years, well, there's now, there's a future self in five years. Or if I want to maintain my health, I want to still be able to like wrestle on the ground with my son in five years, you know. And that's a five year future self. But what's interesting here is that there's a lot of little future selves along the way. There's the guy tomorrow who's got to wake up and work out. there's, you know, me next week, I know I'm going to dinner with a buddy and like, I want to make sure that I like don't overdo it at that particular dinner. Well, is that going to add up?

Is that dinner going to really matter in five years? No. But if I keep doing that, if I keep having high calorie, you know, dinners and drinking too much, whatever it might be, that does add up. Right. So to your question, I think one of the things that we need to first start thinking about is what's our timeline and what's our goal, right? And what's the goal area? Is it health? Is it finances, is it work in an entrepreneurial venture or whatever, whatever it is, we got to know what we're talking about. And we've got to know the timeline that we're sort of looking toward. Because otherwise, it's just so messy and so abstract. Would you say a lot of people, they shoot themselves in the foot because they might have some sense like, hey, I want to get wealthy. I want to get rich.

I want to get healthy. Right, right. But there's no specific goal. Yep. And there's no specific timeline. That's exactly right. And the problem with that is it stays at the level of abstraction. You know, what does wealth mean, right? And what does success mean? What does health mean? I mean, you know, we could go really deep on those things. But I would, you know, think it's really important to make sure that we define these in concrete, in concrete terms and make it, you know, somewhat rigid. You know, if I have a goal of being healthy and I say, well, okay, now I've defined this as being healthy means that I'm going to lose five pounds. or it means that I'm going to work out four days a week or whatever it is, then I need to start being rigid with the way that I reach that goal. Right, because if it's a rigid goal, which usually means it's clear versus abstract, then we can see are we progressing along the way. And we can also imagine it.

Imagine yourself healthy. Well, one day it might be one thing and another day you're exposed and you watch too much Kardashians and you see something else, right? That's a warped image of a goal that maybe not even, via goal that you actually have. I think that's such a good way to put it. I mean, and like another sort of angle on that is that we can sometimes end up creating these sort of like amalgamations of goals where it's like a little bit of this, a little bit of that. And before I know it, I've got this sort of mashup of a goal. And it's really unclear how I get there. Like how do I go

from point A to point B? But if we can sort of start more clearly imagining what that goal is and defining it, then as you said, it makes it a lot easier to see like what's our progress along the way. Yeah. You know, one of the things that often I feel gets in the way from people not even beginning with that. Because as we're talking about it, we're talking about like the fundamentals of goal setting. Yeah, absolutely. The fundamentals, the most basic aspect of goal setting. Set a specific goal. Yep. Right. And no, can you track and can you measure it? And you might be listening today and thinking, okay, duh, like I know that, but yet look around your life, look around at the people around you, how many people are missing even that basic step?

Right. And it's like sometimes my favorite podcast that even I listen to on a subject that I'm trying to make progress in or I care about are ones where they are better explaining the back end or the science on something so fundamental that they get me to double down on the basics of life. I think that's a really good way to put it. And you know, it's funny because you're absolutely right. I think everybody knows, oh, yeah, I should be specific in my goal. But I would, I would like, you know, jump off of what you're saying there and say, well, let me push back a little bit and say, do you think you're actually being specific on your goals? Like, I feel like you could listen and say, yeah, I'm specific on my goals. Well, you know, let me challenge you and say,

like, are you actually, right? Because what does that really mean? And do you really have a clear image of the future self who exists on the other side of that goal? You know, this is, I do a lot of work in the sort of financial decision-making area. And one of the things I see, I talk to financial advisors all the time, one thing I see with them, and I'm curious if this might be true in the health space too, is that they talk to their clients about the future. They talk to them about, you know, retirement, so to speak. But then, you know, who's left out of that is like a clear image of the future self?

And what does that look like there? How are you spending your time? Who are you spending with all those sort of specific questions is sort of left out of the conversation? Yeah, it's like, here's all the things that we know. are important for retirement that nobody would argue, right? Like don't you want to have, you know, the money to be able to have in X, Y, and Z retirement account so that you can pay for, here's what your projected lifestyle

or bills would be at the time. Right. Okay. Where's the fun? Where's the story? Right. Where's the energy in that? Right.

Right. Where does that latch up to your goals and dreams in life that would get you enough to a mad, like connect you in such a way that you feel like, I feel like that is. me and I can see what that life looks like or you see the future of that and you're like, actually, I need to save even more for retirement or I need to go and make more money and get a better job or pursue other opportunities or change my goals. Yeah. So it's like if you can't visualize it, do you feel like a key part of this is really visualization?

Yeah. I think it's, I mean, it's visualization and injecting emotion. Yeah. You know, without that, it just is so abstract. even, you know, the health one. Like when I, you know, I've had this conversation with my wife a whole bunch of, you know, I want to be healthier or I want to maintain my health. And that's so abstract.

And then, you know, at some point, you know, look, I think we probably all have it. We have preventative health things we want to do, right? You know, I've got, you know, in my 40s now, there's certain things I need to take care of of and make sure I'm still healthy and whatnot. And at some point, she brought up to me. She was like, you know, if you don't go to the doctor for your annual checkup or whatever it is, that's not just you, right? That is also your ability to interact with the kids and do whatever it is you want to do with them.

And that also, now there's not only another person, but it's also vivid. It is emotional. That's not just like health, generally speaking. It is a picture of me doing things the way that I want to do them with my kids. And that's much more powerful than like the general idea of health. Yeah, you know, the general idea, I believe in the book, you have this section of like, what are the weakest forms of sort of commitments that we can make in our life? Right.

And I think the weakest form you mentioned is a psychological prompt. Right. Is that what you call it? Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So it's a psychological prompt. Could you explain what that is? Yeah.

So, you know, this is really the idea that I'm going to commit to doing something, some sort of action. but the only thing that is going to stop me is my own, you know, stated commitment to this thing. I'll make it specific, right? So let's say I have, you know, a goal of eating a certain amount of fruits and vegetables per day. I don't know. That sounds a little bit silly. But you know what I'm saying. Like eating healthy.

One of my friends at work actually did this where he, one day I'm eating lunch with him and I see him taking a picture of his food. And it's like this wasn't like a, you know, like a. incredible lunch. This was like a, like cafeteria lunch, right? And I was like, what are you doing? Why are taking a picture? He's like, I'm sending it to my nutritionist. And what was funny about this to me was, you know, first up, that he's taking the picture. But secondly, the reason he was doing that was so that he could stay true to his commitment to eat healthier lunches and not, you know, get the higher calorie meal and the stuff with the meat and cheese and all that stuff. He was sending these pictures to

was nutritionist who didn't even live in the United States, by the way. So, like, she has no power over him. But he knew he would let her down if he didn't, if he didn't do the thing that he said he wanted to do. And I think many of us have this feeling of wanting to be consistent. If I say I'm going to act a certain way and I don't, that goes against our own image of ourselves as consistent, reliable people. Nobody likes to feel that way. And if I told you, I'm going to show up at a certain time and I don't, or I'm going to eat healthy and I don't, then I've let you down. I've let myself down. And so this is like a really weak commitment.

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I made a promise to somebody. And then there's your future version of yourself that you're also looking after at the same time. Right. I mean, and what's great about this particular example is that you almost don't have to think super deeply about the future self because all you're really thinking about right here is I want to make sure that I'm sending this picture to my nutritionist so that I eat healthy. Hey, the side, you know, the side effect of this is that I am eating. healthy over time and that's adding up. But it's not like in the moment I necessarily have to conjure up my future self. I can really just say, I don't want to let this person down. I don't

want to let me down. And then like the benefit of that. That's a great distinction that you provided me on because in a way it takes a lot of energy to constantly thinking about your future self. That's why we don't do it. And if you look from probably an evolutionary biology lens, not that I have any sort of business sort of talking about that. But my guess would be so much of our evolutionary history was based on just survival. No, that's right. So we have to focus. And in fact, we tend to be a negative biased towards, you know, things that could get in

the way, which are often things in the present. That's right. I mean, you think about it, you know, you brought up evolution. And we don't, we don't have to go that far into that. But, I mean, consider that more years have been added to average life expectancy in the last century than in all of the previous millennia combined. So when you when you think about that, what that means is that in the blink of an eye, we're suddenly living so much longer. We didn't have to think that far into the future. And as you said, we're really concerned

with the present threats because there were so many of them. We live now, thankfully, many of us in a world in which there aren't these regular present moment threats all the time. And also, we can live longer and longer into the future. And so you put those things together and suddenly it makes sense that we're not well equipped to think that far down the line. And it's really hard to do that all the time, which is why I think the solution to these problems isn't always to try to bring up the future self because it's really difficult to do that.

It's difficult, but I also wonder, are there any benefits to not do it, not being great at that as a species, right? Are there any benefits? I just wonder also, too. Like, we know there's tradeoffs, right? You're too short-term oriented. You're too tribal. You're not thinking about everybody else around you, et cetera, which, fine, that might

play into the idea of, you know, the selfish gene idea. Right. But are there any benefits that are there to? Like, is it a good thing that we are not so future thinking? Because I guess the thing is that there's probably a lot of people throughout history who were maybe delusional individuals who had a vision of a future. that should have been right for everybody. And maybe it's a good idea that they couldn't sort of brainwash a bunch of people

to tap into that future too. Anyways, I'm just spitballing for a second. No, I mean, I think it's a really worthwhile question. I'll give you an analogy. Hopefully it's not too dumb. But you know, you get on a plane. And when they give you the little thing in the beginning to, you know, what happens if there's an emergency, the oxygen mask come down.

The first thing they say is put your oxygen mask on first and then the people around you, right? And you can see it. I feel like this is an analogy that's been, you know, used before. metaphor, you could think about the same thing with present and future selves, right? If I'm constantly putting the oxygen mask on my future self, I don't know if I'm spinning this out too much, but if I'm constantly thinking about my future self and taking care of their interests, then I've missed out on the opportunity to take care of myself right now. And that's a problem

because the future is uncertain. Right? So from the standpoint, you're, you know, bring up our evolutionary history, what not, from the standpoint of protecting ourselves now, it makes sense to do that because the future is so uncertain. So that if I am only oriented toward the future, what good is that if, you know,

there's a lion right around the corner? Totally. And in a way, we probably dealt with more instability in the past. And so the future was a lot more dynamic. Not that we aren't dealing with our own version of instability now, but a lot of the basics for the Western world are way more stable than the basics

for individuals that were our past ancestors. So I think that that plays a little bit into it too. But our genetics, you know, our genetics take millions and millions of years to evolve. We're still fundamentally the same human beings. Yeah, that's exactly. I mean, I think you put that really well. And, you know, this is something that's true in the developed world. And I think we need to recognize that if we're not sort of focused on, you know, only if we're not really focused on the future right now,

Now, maybe there is a reason for that. It's baked into us in a way. Let's go back to that experiment that you did, where you help people get better at connecting with their future versions of themselves. And I remember seeing, I went back to some of your old videos and I started a TED talk. Yeah, yeah. And you talked a little about this and there. And you were, I think it was like eight years ago.

You were doing like early Photoshop manipulation of people's faces. So what were you doing? What was that experiment and what did you find? Yeah. What we were doing there was first trying to ask ourselves, how do you even get people to connect to the future, to the future self, really? And, you know, it's sort of a difficult question. And then you start asking, well, how do you get people to connect to others in their lives?

Now, you don't have to reinvent the wheel here. Charities do this really well. And really, a lot of marketers do this really well. Here's what they don't do. They don't give you a whole bunch of statistics because that's kind of boring. And it's devoid of emotion. but what they do do is they tell you a good story or they show you a picture. And part of what we were trying to do early on was tell a good story and show a picture

of the future self. So I mean, early on, I got to tell you, it started from a different place. I had actually thought, wouldn't it be cool? I forget which musical artist it was. There was some musical artist that like appeared via hologram on some. I don't know if you remember this. Like back of the day, Tupac? Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I don't know what was that. There was like another version of this. There's a couple, there's been a couple versions of this. And I was like, how cool would it be if we could get people to like meet their future self via hologram? I was like, you know, just spinning out, having fun. And I mentioned this. And some friends were like, you know, maybe you can't do that. But there is this guy who studies virtual reality. This is when I was in grad school. You should talk to him. I bet there's something you can do. And, and I met with this guy Jeremy Balanson who's like a leader in the virtual reality space. And we said, well, let's just try to, you know, age progress people, make them look older. Now, when we first started working on this, I mean, the technology really wasn't there. We had to like, I hired a graphic artist. It was like a team of people. I would like take your photo and then I would like send it off and I would get people to age it. And like, I'd give you things to do for 45 minutes.

And then we'd throw you into this virtual reality environment and you would go and walk around and you'd have these goggles on. I mean, this is like old school VR. Right. early days. Early days, VR. And you would look at this virtual mirror and staring back at you would be an image of your future, you know, I don't know, a 70-year-old Drew looking at you in this virtual mirror. I mean, it was pretty wild.

It feels. It was cutting edge back then. It was cutting edge back then. There's, of course, versions of immersive virtual reality now where you're in a room and whatnot. But now, of course, I mean, there's the goggles that a lot of, you know, consumers can buy where it also feels very real. In those early days, what we were doing is comparing the experience of seeing your future self

with the experience of just seeing another digital version of yourself right now. And what we found there was that the people who are exposed to these future aged images are a little bit more likely to want to save for the future. And I say a little bit more because it's kind of a small effect and it's want to save. This is hypothetical. But since then, we've followed this up. But now the technology is a lot better. And I mean, anybody can do this.

You know, there's a bunch of apps, face app, Snapchat. I don't work with any of them. So this is just, you know, my own take on it. And it's wild. I don't know if you've ever tried it. Yeah, like the older version of you. Like, I forgot what the app is called. Like face app, I think when, but then people were worried there was a Russian trolling or something like that.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if that's true. I remember seeing that. It was like that was a couple years ago. Yeah. But they're wild. I mean, I've done it. And I mean, I end up looking a lot like my dad, which is probably, you know, accurate, I guess, right? And the goal isn't just to see an older version of you. The goal is to sort of combine that with a little bit of a narrative. Yeah,

exactly. Right. And how, so if somebody who's listening today is thinking like, whether that's through a guided meditation or visualization or they're using this app, and they're seeing a future version of themselves, what would be the guided experience or the series of questions they could be asking themselves, let's say if their goal was to make better decisions in their health so that they could have better longevity. Right. Okay, great. That's abstract.

Right. Right. We're missing the story. We're missing the emotions. We're missing the why. So how could you use some visualization, whether it's you visualizing, whether it's you looking at an app as an older version of you, how could you kind of connect the dots a little bit more? Yeah, I'm so glad you brought that up because it's not just about, you know, I've seen this image

and now suddenly I'm living a better life, right? Oh, I don't want to get old. Oh, yeah, right. There's the backfire effect too. Let me just eat French fries now and enjoy my youth. Exactly, exactly. So, you know, my recommendation would be to, as you said, pair the image itself or a strong visualization exercise with more of a conversation. And by conversation, what I mean is, is here's one way to start. Write a letter to your future self. Talk about the way you want things to go. Talk about what life is like right now. Talk about what you're hoping will happen in the future. But then write a letter back from your future self to yourself now. All address in the first person. So if you were writing, you'd say how you know, you're 83 years old. Yep.

And I want to acknowledge you for X, Y, and Z. And I might say, I hope. that you are doing this. I hope you're doing that. Whatever it may be, here's how I hope you're spending your time. And then I'll write a letter back. And I'll start from the perspective of, you know, 83 year old me, which is wild to think about it. Yeah. So how would that sound? Just so people can get an idea. Yeah. I would say something like, you know, here's how I spend my days. I've been, you know, really lucky to be, I'm still living in L.A. and, you know, I really like to go to the beach. And I also, I don't know, maybe I'll take a pickleball finally by then, right? And so I'll say, you know, now I'm playing pickle.

This is, this is so silly to say that. Yeah. But I would inject that letter with a conversation about how I'm spending my time, who I'm spending it with, what my values are. What's what you've accomplished? What I've accomplished, you know, am I going on vacation or not? Am I working some of the time? What am I doing that gives me purpose all of these things? But as you said, I would do it from the first person.

Yeah. And I'd be writing it back to me right now. And the combination of these things, seeing that image, but also having that conversation, that's the type of thing that takes me from a really abstract view to a much more concrete and vivid view and an emotional one of that future self. I can imagine that, you know, last year I turned 40. That's like kind of a big birthday for a lot of people. And I got serious about regularly strength training because I saw that even though I eat

healthy, even though I eat a pretty clean diet, I had. this big gap in my life, which sure, I'm active with sports, but now all that, all that the research is coming out about how important muscle and lean muscle mass is for preventing falls in the future, for protecting your bones. Right. You know, there's a version that I did of this where I was imagining myself in the future saying back to myself like, well, I'm so glad that I started then, even though I felt that that was late.

I'm looking around and so many of my friends around me are not fit and are struggling with the basics that they're on a day to day. And I remember doing that. I wasn't writing it, but I was kind of imagining it. Ever since I was young, I always sit down and I would imagine. I was really into like the Buddhist tradition, especially with my Hindu and Jane background. And so in the Buddhist tradition, they had all these different forms of meditation. There was even a form of, it's called Tibetan death meditation. Yeah. Where you imagine and you're sort of envisioning yourself in the future and you're on your deathbed. Right. Right. And how do you feel? Yeah. What comes up for you? Right. What are you getting connected to?

What are your regrets that are there? And I remember, you know, after those meditative experiences, feeling so in a way fired up in a grounded way, like not overly hyped to actually genuinely want to make progress on those things that I say that matter to me. Yeah. And I think what you just said there is so meaningful because part of the beauty of that exercise

is it does focus your attention, your attention on what does matter. Right? And because you're not seeing the sort of time unfold in a tunnel vision that way. But when you start at the end and look back, it can help. And this is actually some recent research that I've been working on with colleagues at UCLA. To start at the end and look back, it can help with seeing sort of the bird's eye view of time and seeing how the different pieces fit together and seeing how the things that I'm doing, how do they play back to the things

that matter to me right now? Like what's my, some of the researchers call it your big why. What's the big thing that's driving you, right? And I think if we start now and we just sort of focus on now and the road ahead, it's easy to get focused on the next hour and the next day and the next week and whatnot. But if you start at the end and look back, now I can sort of see how all the pieces fit together, which I think can help you start to figure out how do I want to prioritize things? How do I want to spend my time? I love, you know, the strength training example is a great concrete example of this. Because you're not doing strength training for the sake of strength training. You're doing it because of the research on preventing falls and the importance of lean

muscle mass and all the things that you're saying there, that connects up to this bigger picture of having better health and doing the things that you want to do later. Yeah, it's so true. Do you, when people think about this work, you know, or at least the way I see it is like, you're helping me understand why visualization works. And obviously it's not just visualization, but you're connecting the dots by even showing us that the key point is that the normal default mode network of the brain, and I might be connecting ideas that just really don't go together. So you study this space,

so you correct me. But your normal way of thinking about yourself is that you are just another person, no different than, hey, Drew is interviewing how right now. I'm me and you're you. Right. And sitting right next to you is the future version of me. Now I have to take that future version of me that's sitting next to you,

and I have to bring it right back into me over here. Right. And one way of doing that could be a letter. Right. Something. But all those things ultimately help you actively visualize that future version of you to yourself. So is it okay for me to think of it as like this is explaining how to actually use

visualization as a way to connect into the power of the brain to see our future self? Yeah. I think that the way that you put that makes sense. And I'll add a layer there, which is that it's okay to think of that future self as another person. Right. I want to be clear that part of what that visualization is doing is painting a clear picture of that person. It's not just that they have to suddenly become me, but I want them to be another person who's close to me. You know, my spouse, your spouse. Another version of you.

Yeah. Because if they're too close to you, then they're you. Exactly. We need some distance between them because they're another. The hope is to be, they're a better, more whole, more complete, more fulfilled version of ourselves. That's, I love that. That's an aha moment for me. Yeah. I get that. That's fantastic.

Because you know what would not be a good relationship with your kids or your spouse is to say, I want them to be exactly like me. By the way, there's a lot of parents that are out there that are doing that. Their kids are miserable and they're miserable. Exactly. You know, I mean, on a surface level, like I got upset the other day with my daughter started requesting her own music and it wasn't the stuff that I've been, you know, trying to feed her over the years.

But that's okay. You know, she's a separate person. Right, right. And you're a separate version. than your parents. Exactly. That's how life and humanity evolves. Yeah, exactly.

So that's really great. So your future version of you, there should be some distance, but not too much distance. Right. Too much distance. It's the Goldilocks rule. Too much distance. They're so far away. You can't even fathom who they are.

Right. So you can't connect to them and it's like, why sacrifice anything? Too close. You're actually just looking in the present moment and you're just focused on your life right now. Right. And you can't actually imagine something different. than yourself. And actually, there's a lot of people that have this problem. They can't imagine a better version of the future than what they're dealing with right now. Who's the type of person

or psychograph of somebody who gets caught up in that? Like, do you have you studied it at all? You know, that's an interesting question. So it's not in, you know, from a research standpoint, we haven't really looked at like who gets caught up in it like that. I love that question, though. It's almost like a little bit of like a pessimistic version. Yeah. Right. Well, you know, and there's let me let me go. There's like another. a layer here, which is used to sort of too close. I'll say like if it's, that future self is like totally me. Let me, let me draw another analogy. If I say to you, don't smoke because that's bad for your health. You know that. All right, fine. But if I said don't smoke because that's, that's bad for your

kids' health. That's bad for other people around you. Okay. You know what? It's bad for me to mess up my own health. I know that, but it's a risk I'm going to take. But if I say, look, the actions you're taking are impacting this other person, that's going to be more likely to get you to actually change your behavior. Right. And so I think the same sort of metaphor applies with our future selves. If they are framed as you, then it's like really hard to see it that way because then there's not that separation. Now there's not this person I want to take care of and be responsible for. But if I say, look, future Drew, that's someone you should have a sense of responsibility for, take care of. They're separate, but they're close.

Now I can do things. Now you can do things for his benefit. You know, in the book a little bit, I'd love to just explore this topic. And in some of the talks and things, and I think even in your NPR episode, which was fantastic on TED Radio Hour, you know, the topic of climate change came up a little bit, right? And, you know, climate change is one of those things that obviously fits into this conversation because we're thinking about, well, what do we have to look at as a society now to protect future generations? There's also the flip side of that, which is that we got so focused, at least in my perception, on the negative aspect of climate change. And there's a lot of layered

thoughts that I have and I look up to a lot of people who have very layered thoughts on this topic, not in terms of does climate change exist, but also, you know, I mean, there's so much to go into that topic, so I'll say that for a second. But this other aspect, which is we're bombarded by all this negative news about climate change. So much what I would say is probably people thinking that the way to motivate the public is to fearmonger them. And now when we look around, And I think you've even quoted some of these things in the book and some of your talks. Like so many young people have like debilitating climate anxiety. Right.

People feel like what's the point of saving money for the future? Right. Especially a lot of young people because, hey, the world's going to explode anyway. And the media, and I would say like the mainstream sort of narrative around it is that it's so bad and it's not being fixed and we're so doomed. Right. Right. How does that sort of probably well-intentioned originally idea completely missed the mark when it comes to getting people to take action on this topic? Right.

So, I mean, I think you brought up so many important points here. One of which is that I do think it's probably well-intentioned, right? It's like we've got to warn people about this thing that's going to happen. I mean, this has started 40, 50 years ago, right? The problem is it's really easy to put our blinders on when we say. see that sort of, you know, negative information over and over. I mean, like, you can think about, remember those old Sarah McLaughlin ads, the, you know, it's for, for animal welfare. Do you know, do you know what I've seen those? Yes. So, so sad, right? And so negative. And that doesn't

move the needle because people see that. And what's my first response? Like, I got to go change, I got to go watch something else, right? This is too much, right? And so part of what we know is that negative framing, negative information, that can be useful to a certain degree. But if I go too far, now people are going to not pay attention. The better thing to do is to have some of the negative framing, but also show the ways that it can be resolved. Right. So if it's just doom and gloom, then it's depressing. It's anxiety provoking. I don't want to do anything about it. But if I then talk about how do we move from where we are now to a better state, that's, maybe something that can get people to do more of the things that we want them to do with,

whatever the domain is. But your point is also bigger because like you said, you know, I can imagine like younger generations, younger people could be forgiven for saying, I don't want to do any of this stuff. What is what does it matter? Why should I say? Why should I do anything when like the world is ending? Because it certainly can sometimes feel that way with the way that things are portrayed. That said, the problem here is that, you know, the world isn't necessarily ending. Right. How many of the climate predictions that were like five years ago, and listen, I'm not throwing shade to anybody, but like in the fact that she is trying to raise awareness, Greta Thornberg had a tweet, you know, like five years ago exactly pretty much,

saying that based on the predictions, like most of the world is going to be basically in flames type situation, right? And it's not against her. It's just that a lot of people have felt like they've seen maybe predictions that have not come together. They know it's an important topic. I think a lot of My audience especially feels like they think about the environmental aspect more than that. You know, like they do think about climate change, but they're also like, hey, like, let's also clean up the environment. And as a byproduct of that, a lot of those methods of doing that is also going to benefit climate change too.

Right. Right. And so it's like connecting to those emotional parts. But I think this also brings up a larger point. And you feel free to take this anyway you want to, is that we have to sort of protect ourselves from the messaging that's out there, especially if we have a big audacious goal or we want to make our life better because if we're constantly being exposed to the news or certain narratives, we can end up being so disconnected from our future self that we end up throwing our hands in the air.

And like you mentioned before, it has the backward effect that the individuals are intending it to have. Right. I think that's exactly right. So let me say a couple things. So, you know, one is that some of that messaging and some of the reason we want to throw our hands up is because it's really hard to grasp what's even being said. We're really bad at sort of probabilistic reasoning. You know, if you think about the world's going to be in flames, part of what's, you know, the machinery under that is, you know, there's such and such percentage chance that a catastrophic environmental event will happen in the next, you know, two to 100 years or right now. That's really hard to grasp. Those are staff that are really hard to grasp for like anyone who has anything else on their mind,

right? Now, is it true that there is that chance? Yes, right? But then it becomes really hard to understand what to do with that because I don't see it happening right in front of me that, you know, what might be more useful, of course, is, and where we see some of the more effective environmental message going is to say, not what could happen in 10, 20, 50, 100 years, but literally what's happening right now? What do you see in front of you? Because I can feel that. Going back to vividness, vividness doesn't have to just be in the future. That can be right now as well. But then there's another way to put this, which is that if we think about responding to framing. There's the one, on the one hand, it's the totally negative framing,

doom and gloom, look at all that's happening. Then there's the other version, which is like, I'm going to completely ignore it and just focus on the positive. I think that's problematic too, because I'm ignoring the very real chance that there's something I could be doing. And then there's the sort of middle ground of pairing negative information alongside the positive. Give people a buffer of positive information so that they almost have this, I don't know, psychological resource to go back on so that they can incorporate and cope with and grapple with and deal with the negative information better. The positive gives you more of a, well, buffer to really think about it. And so how do you put that into practice with environmental messaging? That's, I think, well, to be fair, it's a

tricky nut to crack. It's a tricky nut to crack. And, you know, the reality is there's so many layers inside of the things that contribute to it. My only sort of a little bit of beef with the how it's been portrayed is that it makes it feel, and these are just my feelings, right? The little bit of the messaging around it makes it feel like, hey, there's these people that are out there, whether it's government or business, that could solve the situation. And if they just got their act together, everything would be fine. So a lot of young people feel that why aren't these people doing it. Oh, it's very simple. It's just all profit. Right. It's all corporate greed. Right. There's so many more layers to it. There's just like America has exported through Hollywood,

the idea of everybody having their own big house and car. There's all these other countries around the world that want the sort of American life. They want modernism. They want that. And they're going to fight for their right for energy and other things like that. And then throughout history, I find the thing that gives me a little bit of solace is that it's always been innovation that's taken us out of a problem. And we need both. We do need government regulation, right? We need healthy regulation. We also need healthy aspects of the government promoting innovation. And then, of course, there's personal responsibility when people think about how they're getting a chance to play in and that, you know, people are less likely to often sacrifice the things that they,

you know, contribute to the situation. Right. Right. So it's got to be an inclusion of all of that, right? I just don't want the argument to be like one-sided that there's somebody out there that could fix it. And if only they fixed it, everything would happen. And it's just not the case. I think, you know, you raise a really important point, which is that there's nuance here, right? And that, you know, we want, we want things to be black and white. We want there to be one solution. And there's just not, I mean, this is not, this is not just a case for environmentalism. Every subject.

Every subject. And I think, but, you know, in particular with this subject, you brought up personal responsibility. This one becomes even harder because now I'm thinking about my own personal actions as they relate to the collective. And that's a really difficult thing to do. If I think about health, I have personal responsibility for whose health from my And yeah, that impacts other people. It impacts my family and my social network, but not in the way, or, you know, not in the same degree as the things that I'm doing now have a relationship to, well, my community and society as a whole and so on and so on when it comes to environmental decisions. And that's really difficult to grasp because I can't necessarily make the translation there. It's so hard to do that. It's true. It's so true. Do you think previous, you know, that every general

has a romanticized version of their generation compared to the next generation, right? I fundamentally feel like we've all been the same human beings. And if we lived at that time, we'd be going through those things. We'd have those impressions. But is there this idea that past generations or our ancestors were better at this than we are? What are your thoughts on that? This is such an interesting question. There's a related bit of research. It came out last week. It's by Adam Maserani and Dan Gilbert is a paper published in nature. And I only mention that to say, this is a big deal paper. And they look at data from around the world over several years about moral breakdown.

This isn't quite the same as what you're asking. But it's about this question of like, are generations now, are times that we're living in worse than the times in the past? And what they find is that generation after generation or year after year, people say things are worse now. Yeah, which is funny because it can't really be. but they point this really interesting explanation for why that happens. And it's twofold. One is we have what's known as the availability bias. We pay attention to information that's available to us.

And we've been circling around it. You even said it. What's available to us when it comes to the news is negative information. So that colors our perceptions of the present, all these negative things happening. And there is more news now than ever before. Oh, and there's more news now. And that's just continued. But then there's this other element of it, which is that our memories are also fallible.

We have biased memories. And what I mean by that is that the negative in our memories fades faster than the positive does. So we end up remembering the past through a biased positive lens. And we see the present through a biased negative lens. And you put those things together, as they say in their work, the only conclusion that we can come to is that things were worse. Now, things are worse now than they were in the past. That somehow the past was better. And it's an illusion.

Yeah. No, it's super important because I think that, I mean, there's been a bunch of great TED talks on this. Like, it doesn't mean that there's negativity, there's not negativity in the world. It doesn't mean that there's real problems and that there's not real problems in the world. Doesn't mean that everything's perfect. But largely, we are living in the safest time in human history. Right. The most abundant time in human history.

Right. You know, there's a gentleman. I have a couple of his books over here. His name is Matt Ridley. And he has a book called Innovators, the innovation something. We'll find it. And one of the quotes that that's inside of the book is that I actually wrote it down over here. Innovation is the most important fact about the modern world, but one of the least well understood. And the whole point of the book is that generation after generation, you study history over and over and over, right? even back to like the gilded ages, medieval times.

It's been the innovation that humanity has brought that has bettered our life. Modern plumbing, other things like that. Like our lives are so much better. Yes. Are people, does,

do people seem more anxious? Is there more mental health? Is there more obesity? Okay, yeah, those things are there. But compared to what was going on in the past that of lifespan and pure safety and other things, you know,

we're so much, our circumstances, are so much better. Right. Now, I'm sure there's plenty of people that would argue, are we happier? Are we this? Are we that? That's a whole, probably three other podcasts.

Yeah. But I think that it's important to remember that because I feel like that changes how we think about our future self. Yeah. You know, that's interesting. The question is always, do we see the future as getting better or worse? And I do think from polling that I've seen, the highest percentage of people think of the future, especially young kids, which is very scary for me.

they think the future is going to be worse off than past polling that we have during those times. What are your thoughts about that? It makes sense that you think that. Because that's the media that everybody's being fed. And I mean, I think, and, you know, we look around and look, it also makes sense when you think about literally what's been happening over the last couple of years. I mean, this is, you know, a collective, you think about COVID and various, you know, social justice movements and all the things that have happened and what we're paying attention

to. And this isn't, I don't think this is just media that, you know, framing, I think this is very real. It makes sense that we've sort of collectively gone through some sort of, you know, trauma to consider these things. And that's what our attention is being focused on. It certainly does seem negative. And then we have not just the sort of availability bias, but the recency bias, where we pay attention to the things that have just happened and project them out into the future. So if I see the very recent past as having been marked by a lot of negative components, then it makes sense that I would think it may continue that way, right, and get even worse. Now, what I would wonder is, what's the intersection between that level of collective projection and our own projections about ourselves?

Because on an individual level, we like to think about ourselves as getting better over time. Yeah. And there's an irony there, right? If we all think we're getting better on an individual level, but collectively things are getting worse. Well, how do I square those things, right? Yeah, like people don't like Congress, but generally their favorability of their local congressperson is higher. There you go. Or people don't like the medical industrial complex, but generally people are very favorable

towards their own doctor. Their own doctor. I think that's a great example. But, you know, it does raise, it raises deeper questions of, I think, how do you then motivate someone who has that negative perception? How do you motivate, say, a member of a younger generation who's thinking ahead? I don't think the thing to do is to spit facts at them, right? And I don't think the thing to do is to say, you know, things will change for the better.

This is what's happening. This is where social norms and social proof works really well. And there's great evidence from psychology that innovation, I think, aside, this is a great, I think a great solution that you're bringing up to. But also, if we want to affect change, it may make sense to do it from within. Betsy Pollock, who's a psych professor at Princeton, has fantastic work on changing bullying in schools. And it's not from teachers telling kids to stop bullying. It's to figure out what the social network structure is and figure out who are the influential people in those social networks.

Influencers in the kids group. The literal influencers and get them to portray messages of anti-bullying and that work. works, you know? Yeah, no, that's super important. I'll give you one other solution, which I really love. This is from Chris Brian, who's a business school professor at Texas, and he was working with schools to try to get kids to eat healthier. And for one classroom, you do the standard thing you think will work.

Let me explain to you why it's good for you to eat healthy, right? And then for the other classroom in this particular research study, they give kids a brochure and they say, you know, who's trying to get you to eat on healthy? It's the man. And it's basically a picture of a middle-aged, older guy. And, you know, they're the ones who are trying to get you on healthy. And then they look and they look at what kids choose to eat, you know, after these classroom sessions. They've got a, you know, choice of snacks. And the kids for whom healthy eating is framed as rebellion, they're the ones who are actually likely to eat healthier. Right. And so this kind of, it's circling around interesting things because, you know, we've been talking about media framing and message framing. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, if there's one thing generation by generation that young generations always want to do, what is it? It's Rebell. Yeah. Well, it's funny because we had Professor Galloway on the podcast. Oh, yeah. He used to his office just way next to mine when I was in NYU. Yeah. And he had this whole quote that we clip for social media. He says, you know, I tell young people today, especially young men. He likes to work with, you know, get really that we have this crisis of men that's going on, young boys. Yep. Yep. And young adult men.

And, you know, largely when you look at all the numbers, they're being not left behind intentionally, but their women are graduating college at much better rates. And not in a comparison standpoint. It's just that, hey, you know, like, I think two, like twice as women are graduating as doctors as young men. Yeah. Young boys are more likely to convince, can have acts of violence, right, conducted on other people. So if we're leaving these young boys behind.

they're going to get to all this nonsense in the world and that's going to cause a lot of challenges. So he says when I talk to young boys, I always tell them like, you want to rebel against somebody, rebel against everybody who doesn't believe in you. Rebell against sort of the fake health food that's out there and everybody trying to sell something to you. Like get fit, get strong. You know, that's going to make you more attractive. Yep. Right. It's going to make you look good. And by the way, you're also going to be better at protecting the people around you. You're going to feel good. Your mental health is going to be better. I feel like that's kind of like the messaging that like young people need to hear. They need to hear it at their level. You know, and I'll, you know, to connect some of the dots,

one of the reasons that I love that is that it's not trying to get young people to do something because it's good for the future. Right. That's so hard to think about it. It's so tough. When you're young, you think you're going to live forever and you are like zero percent interested in anything in the future. Right. And like when I say the future for a young person, like I had this experience. I did, I did like, I taught an undergrad class at UCLA, like a little small class. And I did this exercise where I said, I want you to talk to an older relative, you know, to it was supposed to like get them to help connect to their own future selves. I didn't say what I meant by older relative, but I had somebody in mine, you know.

And half of them come back to me and they said, yeah, I talked to my cousin. He's 25. And I was like, no, no, no, no. That's not older. And you think it's that hard to connect to that future. The example you just brought up what Galloway's talking. about it's making the present easier, right? It's making the sacrifices in the present easier. We still have to meet the needs of people's present. Yes, exactly. Exactly. But we're

helping them connect that into what matters to them and in a narrative in a way that actually genuinely connects. And if that accidentally helps me in the future, that's fantastic. Yeah. How dangerous is comparison and constant exposure of comparison of other people's journeys, which I feel it's like so around us on social media, any insights that you have, even if you don't have data, how could that get in the way of future selfing? That's a great question. So I remember back when I was in graduate school when I was doing work and I remember I'd go into the office and my office mate, he was always, it looked like he was always working

and he was always making progress. And I thought, man, I'm never going to make it. Like, look at this guy. And I remember saying this to a mentor. And he said, don't like, you know, social comparison is the enemy of progress. And it's going to kill you because you can always find somebody who's doing better than you in these contexts. Right. And so one of the, you know, the lessons there was to make intrapersonal comparisons.

You know, what I mean by interpersonal is make a comparison within my own self. Where was I last week? Where am I going? And how might that impact my progress moving forward? Now, the question of whether social comparison will impact sort of these future self-pursuits. I think this is a deep one. There's actually some data that looked at, this was in the financial space. So I think we'd have to look at this in the health space, too.

That's a question mark. But you'd say, oh, let me show you what other important. employees are saving. Yeah. The motivation there, it's well-intentioned. I'm going to try to get you to save more. Well, the problem is, if I'm far below the mean, that doesn't make me want to catch up. It makes me want to just stop because I say, I'll never get there.

And it backfires in a way, right? Recent work came out with doctors. This is not their own health, but looking at their, what do you, what do you call it, efficacy with patients and efficiency with patients. again the study was looking at doctors performance compared to others and getting these sorts of messages backfired it caused doctors to not even want to do the things they're supposed to be doing like your colleague is way better at delivering care than you are well they wouldn't say quite like that but they would show you you know where do you stand you know and and that's really

demotivating right and so I think there's open questions here to say like what's the better way to do it. Yeah. But you can quickly end up giving up. Yeah, it feels like one of those Goldilocks things too. I tend to find that comparison for people where you get their highlight reel on social media and you don't know them very well and you don't know all the ups and downs they got to.

Right. It's easy to say, well, look at them. They got this thing. That relationship, that dream job. They've got that house. You don't know their journey. And maybe they're even portraying it. way where it could even not be real for them. There's a lot of that too. I find that that

constant exposure to that makes people feel like everybody's got to figure it out but me. And so there's fundamentally something wrong. And then there's the other side, which is, I have a men's group that meets every week. And we meet on Thursday morning. We call it man morning. And we hike around here in L.A. We go to Will Rogers. Hike is generous. We go on a walk. We walk by the beach. And one thing I've seen, we've been meeting for about almost eight years now. Wow. When somebody in the group, and these are deep bonds that we have that are here, somebody in the group makes progress in an area in their life.

They do something innovative in their business and they take it to the next level. And they're sharing genuinely because part of our two questions in the group are, tell us something you're celebrating this week and tell us something you're navigating, something sticky that's not working out. Guys are not usually good about opening up about either. They're not usually great about patting themselves on the back, right? Even though there seems like there's all this bravado, they're not really good at that. and they're not good at opening up about what they're dealing with challenges.

So when somebody opens up and says, you know what, I just want to share, like I've been working on this thing for a little while and I finally got it. I got that book deal. You know, there's an author in the group. That gives, and because people are there, they understand how much effort, there's that story, that connection. They can imagine themselves in that person's shoes. They can imagine all the steps they took to get there.

And now it feels more possible to them. Even one day, just on my own, not in like a super Excel form. format, I was just looking at like the income bumps inside of the group because we're all open and honest about that. I was like, wow, when one person does really well, it kind of lifts the group up. And other people see what's possible inside of it. So I see that as like the double-edged sword of comparison, which feels like it fits into your work.

Yeah. Well, what's interesting about that? You know what? This is, I think this is fascinating. And it calls back to this isn't actually my work, but other work by a guy named Tom Gillivich. And he and his collaborators talk about what they call the headwinds, tailwinds asymmetry. And I mean, you think about being on a plane, you know, you know when you're going to a destination, you get the tailwinds, you get there faster.

When you land, you say, oh, that was great. I'm glad I got there so fast. But you don't really give it much other thought. But in the opposite direction, when they say, oh, it's going to take us, you know, an hour and a half longer because there's tailwinds. You focus on that because it's salient. It's prevalent. You know what's happening. Think about that.

The same thing happens with our own progress, right? Like we have tailwinds that push us along that help us make progress, whatever that may be. social network and whatnot. But what's really obvious to us is our own headwinds, the things that are obstacles that are pushing against us making progress. But what's interesting about this to me is that we don't see other people's headwinds, right? What we see is their progress. We see them, oh, wow, it looks like they got that book deal. That's awesome. That could be looked at as tailwinds. But in your case, what I love about that anecdote is that you're making both the tailwinds and the headwind's transparent, which I think makes the social comparison not one of jealousy and a desire

to give up, but rather let me see how I can apply that to my own life and also recognize everyone's facing headwind. Everyone also hopefully benefits from the occasional tailwind. And how can I then bring that back to me? Yeah. And I think that just goes back to the idea of the more you can surround yourself with people that are genuinely headed. in a direction of supporting kind of the things that are important to you and growing that, right? Like, yeah. And they have transparent conversation with them, like growth-minded people who are working towards something in their life, the more you're constantly reminded about the idea that

you're not alone. You're not the person who only deals with, you know, a headwind that derails you a little bit. Right. Right. Other people deal with it too. And you still have the support to be able to talk it out. And it's still worthwhile to continue to pursue that goal.

You know, it's a great point. When I was working on the book, one of the things that I talk about in the book is that when we are trying to think about our own futures, one thing that we do is we simulate. You know, I think about what things are going to be like. We're really bad at that, it turns out. There's a lot of mistakes we make. It may be more useful to engage in what's known as surrogation, which is to look at other people's experiences and use them. to make a prediction about our own lives, especially people who've gone through something similar. Now, we're biased to not do that because we want to think of ourselves as unique.

Yeah. Right? We want to think of ourselves. I'm the only one. That's dealing with this. Who's dealing with this. The reality is, I mean, you don't have to look far, right? You even set it with your group.

You could probably figure out a bunch of guys in that group. We're going through the same thing you're going through, whatever it is, good or bad. But we don't tend to think that way. but if we open ourselves up to recognizing that, it can make it a lot easier to see what paths should I take? What should be my decision be? Let me look at others who've gone through something similar. Once I first recognize that I'm not so unique.

It's sort of like you're taking yourself out of your body for a second. Putting yourself in somebody else's body and then seeing kind of just like the big picture pillars. Hey, you know, I have a cousin that wants to go to medical school, right? And he's like, oh my gosh, it's going to be so hard and this. and like I'm going to have a study for this thing and that thing. You're like super in the details. Yes, those things exist.

But then he's looking at somebody else's life who he admires. Let's say my brother-in-law who's a cardiologist. He's like, okay, he did it. And okay, this was tough for him, but he still made it. And then he got to this point. And then this point it got a little easier. Right. And so you're sort of taking yourself out of you and imagining that, hey, just with some

hard work, it'll be tough, but it's worthwhile on the other end because look what they showed is possible. Yeah, I think that's right. And I love, you know, that example. too, it's really useful to think about no one goes from wanting to go to med school to waking up the next day and you're a cardiologist. Right. Right. And there's all those steps along the way. And it can be really hard to remember those, you know, as the person is on the other side of it. But if we can talk to folks and get them to to think back to what those steps are and talk to people who kind of represent the intermediary. Right.

Right. That can be one way to say, well, how do I go from A to B and connect the dots there? Let's share some more practical examples here as we're, you know, have our later half of the interview. What are some examples of ways that people can go from that psychological commitment to a more solid commitment that sort of really binds them in? So the earlier example that you shared, right? So going back, you have a goal, you have a dream, you want something to work on. Step number one, make it clear. It has to be definable. and attach some sort of time range to it.

Right. Right. The more clarity, the better so you can actually see if you're headed in the right direction. So now that you've made that first aspect of clarity and you want to ensure one aspect could be working with a coach. And sometimes people say, well, you know, coaches are expensive. There's a lot of different solutions that are there online and companies have provided that.

Another version of that that's low cost that all just toss in is even a buddy system. Right, right, right. You can have a buddy and you keep them accountable to something and they keep you. you accountable to something and you check in on a regular basis. So accountability partner, buddy system, it's a great idea. It works for, I think that works really well. Let me add, let me add a wrinkle to it. New research has come out that looks at not just the buddy system, but literally how are we

approaching those goals. We sort of circled around before we're talking about rigid goals. The opposite of a rigid goal is a flexible goal. And what I mean by this, I'll get specific here. It's about how I pursue that goal. So if I have a goal of, let's say I have a goal of having three healthy meals for dinner, three healthy dinners a week. That's a specific goal.

That's great. But I can attack that in a rigid or flexible way. So here's a rigid version of it. Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday, I will have a healthy meal. On Saturday, it's going to be with my friend, a friend, call it. And the other nights, that's open. I can do whatever. The flexible version of that is three nights a week, I'll eat healthy.

I don't know which one each week I'll figure it out. Now, when it comes to recommending goal pursuit for others, people naturally recommend rigid systems. They know that that works. But when it comes to our own goal pursuit, we tell ourselves, you know, I can do it. I'll be flexible about it. But the flexibility doesn't work for us, right? Because if I say three nights a week, I'll eat healthy. Well, each night's going to roll around.

I'll do it. Tomorrow would be a great night to do that, right? So it's not just the buddy system, but also thinking about how do I implement that? That would be, I would say, sort of the next practical step. Thinking about making sure that the literal implementation of these goals is rigid so that we don't stray from it in pursuing that goal. I'll give you another sort of practical tip, which is, I don't know if folks on your show before, I've talked about implementation intentions.

But implementation intentions, I think, are a brilliant way. to make sure you do the thing that you're setting out to do. And again, this is getting specific. It's not me saying that next week I will work out or next week I will take care of the paperwork. It's saying on Wednesday at 1130 a.m. I'm going to log in to the portal I have at work or whatever it is to file the receipt. I mean, this is, you know, a boring administrative thing. Or next Wednesday at 545 p.m., I've signed myself up to go to this class, you know, at the gym, whatever it is. What I like about that is now I have an intention, I have an implementation for how I'm going to actually put this goal into practice, right?

It's really specific that way. And it's harder to go back on that once I've set that out and maybe even better to do when I've told somebody about it. So like that specific commitment at a date, a time. Yeah. That's there on your calendar is going to be a much better way. So if somebody was saying that healthy meals example, or like in our community a lot,

you know, I have a newsletter. I write about different sort of tips based on the people who come in here. So we've had multiple people come up and talk about how protein, especially first thing in the morning, regardless of how people eat, whether they're plant-based or they're not, is very satiating. It's one of the most satiating things that you can eat.

And especially getting, 30 grams of protein in particular, based on some of the research that some of our guests have done, first thing in the morning is a good way to kind of set the tone of the day. Right. Right. And so if that's your goal, you may say, okay, four days a week, if you're not doing it, you know, automatically right now, and it's part of your lifestyle, you might say, okay, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I'm going to start the morning off with protein. And here's a few list of recipes that I like, and I'm just going to sign one to each day and then have the groceries around

and I'll make that thing that day. Obviously, you could take it a next step further. People can do meal prep. A lot of people do that. And it's like you're knowing that that specific thing is happening on that specific day. Which also brings up the larger point,

which is some people set, they get very fired up. They hear new information. They hear this podcast. And they're working on a lot of goals at the same time. Do you have any thoughts on that? Yeah. Well, hold on.

I do. but I want to add one layer to the thing you just said because I think, so, you know, the four mornings a week, the 30 grams of protein, there's two other things I'd add to that. One is, you know, we can get more specific and say like, what is it? You know, what's the recipe? The meal prep, that's great. Okay. But here's another one that I really like, which is research that's done by, led by Marissa Sharif

at Wharton, she talks about what's called goal reserves. And so think about this way. Let's say I have a goal of having, you know, starting off my, day with protein. It's going to be four days a week. I do it this week. Awesome. I'm feeling good. Next week, I set out to do it, but I only hit three days. We have two responses there. One is to push harder next week. And the other is to kind of engage in a little bit of the what the hell effect and just give up because I retreat. Retreat. So she's suggested something called goal reserve. So let's say four weeks in the month, you know, roughly speaking. And I say I'm going to

hit that protein target four days a week. But I'm going to give myself one week, maybe two weeks to tap into my goal reserves. So let's say I don't hit the four days in week two. I'm going to like take one from my imaginary stash and say, you know what, I did it this week. I've got to, you know, I'll make up for it in the future. But that'll keep me on track. You know, duolingo does this really well with, you know, if you're trying to learn a new language and you get your streaks, you say, okay, I've been practicing Spanish for six, you know, whatever it is, 164 days straight. And then one day goes by and I've just like forgotten to log in. Well, it's really defeating to be like now I'm back to zero. But what do they do? They say, hey, do you want to retroactively put a freeze on your streak?

And what's amazing about this is it's just a little trick. But it's a lot easier to maintain my momentum if I think that I haven't failed and I continue on there. Right. So this idea of goal reserves, I think is so good. And there's one other thing I'll do. And then we'll get back to the many goals question, but have a range. So you could say four days a week, or I could say somewhere between three days and five days. What's great about that is I'm going to strive for the five. Right.

If I fail to meet it, well, I can look back and say, I did get three. And that's really good. Or how about let's start by getting three. Now that I've checked that off, I want to keep going. I want to get my five days. but if I don't get it, well, at least I know that I fall back on the three days, right? So the goal ranges can be even better than a single point range or so a single point estimate, I should say, for goals.

Yeah, a little bit of room inside of there. Yeah, exactly. And if you wanted to layer on top of that, some of the work that you've done with like the letter, right? How would you write the letter in the beginning? Right. Let's take a more audacious goal that somebody has, right? There's a lot of people here, which in itself has to be broken down into the nuances,

but like people say, I want to lose weight, right? Many guests on my podcast have come in and said, first of all, obviously it's your right to lose weight. If you want to improve your body composition, are great. Everybody should be able to do that if that's something that you want to do, right? Generally, for a lot of people, if they're going to lose a little weight, you know, especially if they're severely overweight, that's going to be better off for their help. Right. That being said, obviously there's many ways to lose weight. The question is always, are you losing actual fat? You know, the hope is that you're not losing muscle mass. That gets into some of the specifics and usually working with a coach or somebody in the fitness space or nutritionists can help you break.

that down because you could lose weight, but it may not be the right type of way that you want to lose, right? So setting all that aside, let's say somebody wants to lose weight and they wanted to take advantage of this idea of the letter, right? Would that be something that they just do in the beginning? Do they revisit it? Do they reread those letters over a period of time? What are the best practical aspects of that that you might want to share with the audience? Yeah, it's a really good question. So some of this, I will freely admit, like we don't know yet. And I think I just need to sort of caveat that because I think that also means that there's a lot of room for experimentation here. Right.

Now, I think that it's probably really difficult to maintain a constant conversation with my future self, right? If it's like every time I'm about to be faced with a higher calorie, starchy meal versus something that's more protein-based and healthy, I'm saying, what would future me say? Like, that's going to get old real fast. That letter, that conversation, the exchange between me now and me and the future in the beginning, I suspect that could be a good strategy to kind of get over the hump and start to take some action. But then there's this open question of how often do I revisit that letter? Is it going to be

like at milestones? Maybe, you know, after a month, do I say, okay, so where am I at? How am I doing in my progress along the way to get into this version of myself I want to be? And does it make sense somehow to rewrite the letter or change my goals along the way? Because maybe I realize, I was too lofty or maybe I wasn't lofty enough. I think that's a great space to sort of revisit there. But I would say your intuition is absolutely right that this is a great thing to do at the beginning and to tie the ideal future self back to where I am right now and figure out what's the contrast. What's the contrast between me now and that ideal version of me?

And also, and this is a concept research is called mental contrasting, figure out the contrast. What's the difference between me now and me later? And what are the overcomable obstacles that stand in the way? I would hate to see somebody say, you know, set out a version of their future self that's just totally unattainable. You know, there's no world in which I am going to become a pro basketball player next year. And it's like for a variety of reasons. And I might start that letter and say, wait, this is, I need to scrap this. That's not real, you know, but what is a, what is a realistic version?

And what are the things that stay in the way and how can I take take care of them? Yeah. So make it realistic. And then again, if it's a clear goal that can be measured, you're tracking your progress towards it. You're checking in every so often. And it could even be that that letter is something that you just frame on the wall, right? And you see it every so often.

And it reminds you what's there for you. You could combine that with a vision board like I was saying previously and just have some images that are inspirational to you. The gym that I work out at, they're very big on sort of transforming your body in a very short period of time. And all over the gym, they have genuine people that are like case studies and testimonials that have worked through and work with their coaches on their method. and it's a reminder of what's possible, you know, the before and after. You know, when I was working on the book, I got a random email from a kid up in Northern California, like an 18-year-old kid. And he said when COVID hit, he, you know, like a lot of people,

pretty depressed. And he said he started eating like a diet that solely consisted of it. I think it was like, I want to say chick-fil-a and cereal. You know, it was something like that. I'm blanking on the details. He said he gained 30 pounds. And this is like not the version of himself he wanted to be. He was like doing like Zoom classes and all the stuff.

You can imagine this well. Yeah. He said he'd come across in my work and he decided to print out a sort of ideal image of his future self that was like at his ideal weight and shape. And I'm not saying this will work for everybody, right? But in this particular case, he printed out, he put it in his bathroom mirror and he put it on his fridge. And he said, anytime he would late night go down to like get an ice cream bar, I guess that was the third food category, he would see that image and it was sort of remind him of what his goals were.

Now, I mean, I think for him that that worked. He told me, this is anecdotal, that he ended up losing the 30 pounds. It wasn't just from not eating healthy, but from starting to exercise as well. Of course, we know this. But what was nice about that, for him, that worked for other people, you know, I could imagine that if I'm constantly seeing the image, I might eventually ignore it, right? So is there a way that I could make it so that the letter that's frame? I'm not seeing it every time I open up, you know, my dresser or whatever it is.

Is there somewhere I could put it where I'll come back to it occasionally, but not every day? Because what we don't want is for people to, you know, quote unquote, habituate and become sort of, you know. So used to it that it doesn't feel fresh. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, what I'm really hearing from this is that, you know, you know, you. You are primarily trying to highlight to individuals that, hey, look, there's this part of the brain. And this part of the brain thinks of the future version of you as distant, kind of like you think of somebody else. And we need to bring it a little closer to you because if you care about that future version of you and you want to make change now towards that, the closer, but not the same.

The closer it is, the more likely you are to make those sacrifices and feel motivated. And that's often visual, storytelling, letter writing, that emotional component that weaves us. Here's a few experiments you've run, seeing a future older version of you and imagining what your life is like, seeing maybe a before and after version of you that's out there, writing a letter that's a compare and contrast and hearing from your future version of yourself and you communicating them. These are all the different tools that are out there. Now, we may not know all the different ways to combine them together to make change. for your life, but you should know that they're there because if you don't, it's just going to be that much harder to make progress in the things that you want to accomplish in your own life. I think that's exactly right. And I would almost go even further and say, think about that future

you as not you. It's another person, right? But it's another person that we may want to have a sense of responsibility, a sense of caring for, compassion, love, whatever it may be. But I want to also make sure that we don't frame it just as, you know, you sacrificing now for, for that future you, that future self. But also, how can I sort of weave together my interest now and future me as interests? You know, a financial advisor I talked to, Paul Fenner, he said, it's not balance, it's harmony. And I love that, I love that concept because it's not just me saying, let me, you know, sometime pay attention to my present self, sometimes to pay attention to my future self.

But how can I think about both of their interests sort of coexisting? They're fully integrated. Fully. Yeah, you said it really well. They're fully integrated. I think that a lot of that, I had a mentor who would say,

you know, before we really throw the axe and try to like slice the wood, let's sharpen the axe a little bit and really make sure that the axe is in a good place to like strike the wood. And how we compare that to goals is one of my favorite books on this topic is a book called The One Thing by Gary Keller.

And it's all about choosing the right goal for you. Yeah. Right. How do you choose the right goal? And he asked this question. It's called the focusing question. What's the most important thing for me to focus on? And it could be in a couple areas of life such that by focusing on it, everything else in my life will be for that goal that I'm working on.

Let's say in your fitness or whatever will become easier, unnecessary or, you know, more impactful. Right. Right. And I think that choosing that right goal is really that alignment of the, the current and the future self. Yep. And to make sure that you're not just sacrificing the now, you actually find a little bit of joy in the discipline of.

Right. Right. You find the joy and the discipline. So sometimes somebody might move to a new city and feel like, hey, I don't know that many people. And also, I want to make progress in my health. Okay, great. Well, maybe a gym that focuses on good accountability

and group workouts and has some camaraderie is not only a way to ensure that you're making progress towards your future version of yourself that cares about that longevity. And well, thank you for that. But also that you have this deep camaraderie and you're meeting a group of people where the primary way of connecting is not through alcohol and something else. It's through working out and having good conversations together. And what's great about that, there's research that backs us up, right? And so Katie Milkman at Wharton talks about temptation bundling. And the idea there, you can just call it bundling, but it's combining two things together. Right. And so there's the, you know, in her research,

search, one of the things she did is say, I'm going to encourage college students to work out at the gym. But also, let's find out like a tempting audio book they want to listen to. You know, it's like the hunger games or something like this, right? And when you go to the gym, you can listen to the next chapter on a, you know, whatever audio device. But you can only listen to that next chapter if you go to the gym, right? Which is, there's a beauty there because now I'm saying I'm combining these two things. I'm working out and I'm getting this pleasurable thing together. Your example was I'm doing some sort of healthy activity and meeting people at the same time. The bundling there, it, I mean, really interestingly, it furthers both goals.

If I have a goal of being more social and a goal of being healthy, now I can do both at the same time. And I'm probably more likely to do both because they're combined together. Yeah. How, what's your highest hope for this, you know? I mean, it seems like we live in an age where there's so many aspects of technology that could better people's lives. You know, if you think about the future implications of this, what would be your highest hope for people who want to make progress on anything?

You know, the basics like saving and eating healthy, you know, what would be your hope that would happen after this work and putting it out there in the world? I love that question. You know, my hope is that more people after being, you know, exposed to this work and thinking about these topics, more people are more satisfied with their decisions when they look back on them. And more people feel like the gap between the things that they intend to do and the things that they actually do, they feel like that gap has closed over time. I am, I'm not here to say, you know, my hope is that more people get more sleep and eat healthier and save more

money because it's like, that's all individually determined. Like, oh, I just got to pick their own goals. You got to pick your own goals and you got to even pick your own ranges. Where I sort of get worried is when people say, I want to do this thing, but I can't do it. I just keep not doing it. There's this gap there. So my hope is that, you know, we really start closing that gap with this. So people say, I'm, I'm happy with the things that I'm doing because I'm doing them. I'm getting there. It's such a straightforward concept and idea. That's why I think that, you know, all the people that I've sent your previous talks to or episodes to or your book to, they're like, oh, I get it. And yet it's still something that I'm struggling with.

Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's such a basic idea, but it's the meditation on the work and understanding the implications of it that unlocks what's really possible in your life. And I feel like these conversations are a big part of it. So I want to acknowledge you and thank you for doing your work and coming on the podcast to be able to share the vision of what's possible in people's lives.

Any final words? And, you know, the book is out there, your future self, how to make tomorrow better today. Any final words? And how can people follow you on your job? journey. Okay, I'll give you one final word, which is you got to celebrate the present too, right? It's not all about the future, but you got to give in some times and enjoy the present because that's ultimately going to create memories that the future self looks back on. That reminds me a lot of the work of like other behavioral scientists that have shared that if you don't celebrate and acknowledge,

even a little bit, there's part of you that's going to resent you in the future. Yeah, exactly. Right. Exactly. And it doesn't have to be a big celebration. It could be a tiny acknowledgement, a little pat on the back. That's right. A little bit of a, and it could be a piece of dark, dark chocolate, right? Or you're doing something. Yeah. But you have to acknowledge yourself. And we're many people, especially a lot of high, high achievers, are not good at acknowledging themselves. Right. Exactly. And that's very sad. That's very sad. But I hope it, I hope it changes. Yeah. So yeah, I think that's that. And then if, you know, want to follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn, my website, at halhersfield.com. Awesome. Well, if you're listening and you implement this in your life,

please tweet at Hal. Let them know what you did with this. Hal, this has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This has been awesome. Thanks, Drew. Hi, everyone. Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share it with a friend. share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on

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