Future You

Who will you be in 10 years? In 20 years? Envisioning how you will evolve is very hard. This hour, TED speakers share ideas on how to better plan for the future, while allowing for the unexpected. Original broadcast date: June 16, 2023 TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at plus.npr.org/ted http://plus.npr.org/ted. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Manoush Zomorodi?

  This episode's sponsor is HubSpot, which offers the following message: What if instead of updating your CRM, your CRM updated you? HubSpot's self-updating CRM keeps your customer context current so you can win more deals. Learn more at hubspot.com. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Our job now is to dream big.

• 0:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  Delivered at TED conferences.

• 0:27Speaker 02

  To bring about the future we want to see.

• 0:29Manoush Zomorodi?

  Around the world.

• 0:30Speaker 03

  To understand who we are.

• 0:32Manoush Zomorodi?

  From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

• 0:37Speaker 04

  You just don't know what you're gonna find.

• 0:39Manoush Zomorodi?

  Challenge you.

• 0:40Speaker 05

  We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?

• 0:42Manoush Zomorodi?

  And even change you.

• 0:43Speaker 06

  I literally feel like I'm a different person.

• 0:45Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR, I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And today's show is about you, the future you, the one who will someday reap the benefits or pay the price for what you do today. And the question is, why is it so hard, at least for some of us, to be kind to our future selves?

• 1:15Speaker 07

  It sounds like a relatively simple question, but it turns out to be a huge can of worms.

• 1:20Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is psychologist Hal Hirschfield. He's a professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management, and he has devoted his career to studying people's relationship to their future. It all started for Hal in grad school when he was wondering why people struggled to do the things they said they wanted to do, like save money.

• 1:42Speaker 07

  And we started thinking about, what are some of the psychological reasons why people say that they want to save, but they don't? And so that really got me on this path of trying to figure out, how do people sort of move through time and think about these much older versions of themselves? Since ultimately, those are the people who are affected by any of the choices that we make.

• 2:03Manoush Zomorodi?

  He started looking into the neurological research about our perceptions of ourselves. And there wasn't much there. But another finding really struck him.

• 2:14Speaker 07

  I had come across this early, what they call social neuroscience article that basically made this interesting claim that in the brain, the self can be distinguished from other people. It turns out that there's part of the brain or region of networks, the cortical midline structures, that show more activity when we're thinking about ourselves right now compared to when we're thinking about another person right now.

• 2:41Manoush Zomorodi?

  In other words, different parts of the brain are activated if you're thinking about yourself or another person. So Hal wanted to know, would those same parts be activated if you're thinking about yourself now or yourself in the future?

• 2:58Speaker 07

  And I had this sort of connect the dots moment, which is, well, you know, if the brain can distinguish between me and someone else, what would happen in the brain when we ask people to think about themselves now and themselves later?

• 3:17Manoush Zomorodi?

  Basically, would your brain identify your future self as a different person? So in 2007, Hal devised a test.

• 3:29Speaker 07

  So we thought, all right, let's ask people to think about their future selves and to think about other people while we scan them.

• 3:38Manoush Zomorodi?

  As participants lay down in an MRI machine, the researchers would ask them questions about who they are right now.

• 3:47Speaker 07

  You know, are you funny? Are you smart? Are you sarcastic? Are you quiet? These sorts of like trait questions.

• 3:55Manoush Zomorodi?

  Then they'd ask them the same questions about two people they probably didn't know personally, but who they could picture in their minds.

• 4:03Speaker 07

  Matt Damon and Natalie Portman.

• 4:08Manoush Zomorodi?

  So, OK, wait. So you're saying that you would ask them, is Matt Damon funny? Is Natalie Portman funny or smart?

• 4:15Speaker 07

  Yeah, so you'd be either making a judgment about Matt Damon or Natalie Portman.

• 4:21Manoush Zomorodi?

  So one section of the brain lit up when people were asked about themselves, and a different part lit up when they were asked about Matt Damon or Natalie Portman, just as previous research had shown. But then, things got really interesting because Hal asked the participants to picture themselves in the future and ask the same questions.

• 4:45Speaker 07

  Are you funny? Are you smart? Are you sarcastic? Are you quiet?

• 4:50Manoush Zomorodi?

  And the same region of the brain lit up as when people were thinking about Matt or Natalie, meaning...

• 4:57Speaker 07

  In the brain, the future self looks like another person.

• 5:03Manoush Zomorodi?

  I mean, this was pretty groundbreaking when you figured this out, right? That you scientifically proved that in our brain, we think about our future self as someone separate from who we are right now.

• 5:16Speaker 07

  That's exactly right. I mean, I have to say, it was a surprising finding to us. In fact, we actually ran the whole thing again to make sure this was right. And again, we found the same results. And so, we started thinking in the same way. There could be a version of myself in the future who I really don't feel all that emotionally connected to or invested in. And if that's the case, I am probably going to live much more for today than tomorrow.

• 5:47Manoush Zomorodi?

  Who will you be this year? In five years? In 25 years? Predict all you like. But envisioning how you'll evolve over time is incredibly hard for many reasons. On this episode, we hear ideas about what we can do to better plan our lives while allowing for the unexpected from a neurological, philosophical, and historic perspective. Psychologist Hal Hirschfield says that when you think about future you, you might as well be thinking about a colleague who you kind of see around the office, but don't really know that well.

• 6:26Speaker 07

  You know they exist, but you don't really know much about them. And if they were to shoot you a message and say, hey, I have to move this weekend. Do you mind helping me out? It's not that you're selfish or mean, but you'd probably come up with a million reasons why you don't need to help them out. If our future selves look like that coworker who you you kind of know, but not really, and you're not particularly connected to, all of a sudden, it starts to make sense why it's often really hard for us to do things today that benefit us later.

• 7:04Speaker 07

  In other words, like, if you want to debate between eating a high calorie dinner versus the healthy salad, you know you should probably eat the salad because the steak and chocolate cake and extra glass of wine, that's going to be bad for your future health. But then you stop and say, well, is it my future health or just some other person? And when you start to think in those terms, in some ways, it's almost rational to live for today because these consequences are going to befall some other person.

• 7:41Manoush Zomorodi?

  I mean, and there's not every person like that, right? There are some people who are incredibly careful about what they eat and always thinking about their health in the future. What's the range of this sort of generosity or meagerness that we feel towards ourself in the future?

• 7:59Speaker 07

  The question you're asking is so good because I think what you quickly realize with this analogy of the future self as this coworker you don't know is that there are lots of people in our lives who we are empathetic toward, who we will drop our weekend plans to help move. You know, one of the things that we found is that people do vary in the sense of connection and the sense of similarity that they have to their future selves. But then you start asking, well, what's at the root of that? Now, to some extent, this is a big, open question, one that we're trying to figure out. But if I have that sense of closeness, well, then I'm probably going to be more likely to. Do things that might benefit me later, right?

• 8:42Manoush Zomorodi?

  And I guess I'm wondering, like, why is it so hard, do you think, for people to connect with their future selves? Like, is there something innately human that makes it tough?

• 8:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, we live in the present, right? So, you know, anytime you think about these back and forths between current self and future self, it's me right now who needs to make, quote unquote, sacrifices for that future person. And, you know, that future person is abstract. There's this great quote from Groucho Marx, which is, you know, "What have future generations ever done for us?"

• 9:16Speaker 07

  And, you know, you'd be forgiven for not really wanting to make all the sacrifice, to do all the pain right now for this sort of uncertain gain. The other thing is that all of the temptations happen right now. You know, being able to buy things with just like my face ID and like,

• 9:36Manoush Zomorodi?

  Right.

• 9:36Speaker 07

  Anything that I want, I can get it right now. Even when we say we want to do things for our future selves, it can still be really hard to follow through because I'm pulled by all the temptations that exist right now.

• 9:49Manoush Zomorodi?

  Here's Hal Hirschfield on the TED stage.

• 9:52Speaker 07

  We brought people back to the lab two weeks later, and we had them take part in a financial decision-making task, where they could basically decide between smaller amounts of money right now and larger amounts of money that they would have to wait for. And these were real choices. We actually paid them. And what we found was that the people who had the biggest difference in the brain between thoughts about the current self and thoughts about the future self were the worst at this task. In other words, the more the future self looked like another person on a neural level, the less likely people would be to save for that future self. Now, the question, of course, is, how can we get people to feel closer to their future selves and take better care of them?

• 10:34Speaker 07

  Okay, if we know that this future self is another person and we know that relationships matter, how can we make those relationships stronger? And at some point, I realized, you know what? This isn't like the first time somebody has asked this sort of question. Charities, they do a really good job at getting you to feel closer to charity recipients so that you'll end up forking some of your hard-earned dollars and cents over. They tell good stories, making the recipients vivid, and that makes them more emotional. And we know that emotions are the types of things that really sort of push the ball down the field in terms of behavior.

• 11:15Speaker 07

  So, you know, early on, one of the things we decided to do is try to actually use age progression technology to show people what they'd look like in the future. You know, sag the cheeks and add some age spots and...

• 11:30Manoush Zomorodi?

  There's a filter for this, right? Where you can see what you look like 20 years from now.

• 11:34Speaker 07

  Exactly. When I do it, it's crazy. I look just like my dad. And so, one of my favorite aspects of being, you know, in a business school is that I got to also work with companies. I'm trying to put some of these ideas into practice. And so, we have shown people images when they've been making sort of hypothetical decisions about saving and when they're exposed to these future selves, they're... They express a little more desire to save for the future. We worked with a bank and we had about 50,000 customers and half of them got access to these aged images and half of them didn't. They all got the same message that it's important to make a contribution to their retirement accounts. And the people who got exposed end up being about 16% more likely to make a contribution.

• 12:19Speaker 07

  Now, the question is, does this work? You know, I don't want to overstate it, right? It's not like I download one of these apps and suddenly I'm living this austere life and doing everything for tomorrow, right? You know, these are relatively small effects, but as a social scientist, that excites me because anything we can do to move the needle that ends up compounding over time is really quite important. But you want to sort of pair those sorts of interventions with context where people can make a decision for some future self, whether it's saving more, signing up to work with a service that can allow you to plan an estate and will, these sorts of things, right? It's another way of making that future self...

• 13:03Speaker 07

  More vivid and more emotional.

• 13:07Manoush Zomorodi?

  In a minute, planning ahead, even if the future looks pretty bleak. On the show today, future you. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

• 13:30Manoush Zomorodi?

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• 13:48Speaker 05

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• 14:06Manoush Zomorodi?

  This message comes from Planet Visionaries. If you're looking for a dose of optimism, Planet Visionaries is the podcast you need. Host Alex Honnold sits down this season with extraordinary doers, creating real climate action. It's a lineup that proves hope isn't naive, it's fuel for change. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

• 14:33Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. On the show today, future you. We were just talking to psychologist Hal Hirschfield. His research focuses on our relationship with our future selves, which, as Hal just explained, our brains perceive as a different person. But is it getting harder for some people, especially younger people, to imagine their future selves at all?

• 15:03Manoush Zomorodi?

  I'm thinking of this 2022 study that found that young adults feel really pessimistic about what's going on in the world, whether it's, you know, coming out of a pandemic, the economy, climate change, and that 45% of people between the ages of 18 and 35 don't see a point in saving money as a result. They want to live in the now. And part of me says, well, how can you blame them? So how do you tell people who feel pretty hopeless about the future that they need to plan for it anyway?

• 15:37Speaker 07

  I don't blame them. This, to me, is one of the great sort of negative fallouts of all of the, you know, world-changing events that have happened over the last several years, you know, especially since I started doing this research originally. But this isn't the first moment in history where people are experiencing this high degree of existential terror and angst, right? So during the Cuban Missile Crisis, there was quite a bit of existential angst and terror. Now, one could say these are unprecedented events, and the confluence of them is particularly unprecedented. One thing that I would suggest there is

• 16:17Speaker 07

  that time marches on, time progresses regardless of how we feel about it. So if we want to bury our heads in the sand because the future feels so scary, we can, but that doesn't mean that the future won't come. It doesn't stop it from moving forward. One takeaway from this is that it's still worthwhile to deepen the conversations we have between now and later. I wonder, you know, is there a way to give a little bit more to the future, whether that comes in terms of saving or whatever sort of the flavor of the decision might be? It is a question of figuring out what's the allocation of resources between

• 17:02Speaker 07

  now and later, so that later doesn't become much worse than it is, or that we fear it's going to be.

• 17:09Manoush Zomorodi?

  And I suppose on a personal level, you're saying that you need to find a balance between smelling the roses, living in the moment, and making decisions that are kinder to your future self.

• 17:23Speaker 07

  I think harmony might be a better word. Balance implies that we're constantly trading off. You know, you're on the seesaw. You're either up or you're down. You know, harmony, you think about it in music. It implies that two voices can be singing at the same time at different levels and almost work together.

• 17:42Speaker 07

  I think the same could be said for our current and future selves. There are decisions we can make right now that aren't just for the future, but could be for now and for later as well. I can spend more time with family and away from work that could benefit me now. It'll benefit me later. There also may be times where working more right now is beneficial now and it's beneficial later, but I also need to figure out where I fit in the family and friends and sort of create a word that I like as a mosaic, where I'm sort of fitting the pieces in together all at once.

• 18:19Speaker 07

  But that sort of mindset shift, I hope, sort of takes away some of the constant conflict and tension between now and later and makes it possible that the two can kind of coexist.

• 18:31Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was psychologist Hal Hirschfield. He's a professor in the Anderson School of Management at UCLA and the author of the book, Your Future Self: How to Make Tomorrow Better Today. You can see his full talk at ted.com. So that's the neurological perspective. And now for something a bit more philosophical about who we'll grow up to be in the future. Because ask most kids about their plans for their future and they'll be pretty certain about everything they will accomplish. What do you want to be in the future? A doctor. Make all the sick people better. Using my telescope. Don't you mean stethoscope? Yeah.

• 19:15Manoush Zomorodi?

  I just want to be a queen. I want to wear a dress made of diamonds, and I'm serious. You're serious? Yes. These are voices from a popular web series called Recession Therapy, where they talk to kids about their lives, their advice for grownups, and the future. I think the future is going to be like my dream. What's your dream? Is to be a parent.

• 19:38Speaker 05

  I'm gonna take care of my children and make sure they don't get lost in big spaces. I think it's gonna feel good. Start to vote. Do you think you would make a good president?

• 19:48Manoush Zomorodi?

  I don't think right now, but probably in the future.

• 19:53Manoush Zomorodi?

  I mean, doesn't that sound familiar? In the fourth grade, I said that I wanted to grow up to be an actress and that I was going to change my name to Hillary or Christina. At one point, my daughter told me she was going to be a neurologist and a baker at the same time. And if you asked journalist Shankar Vedantam when he was a child what the future held for him, he would have been just as sure of himself. When I was a small kid, I thought I was going to be a soccer star and I put all my hopes and energies into being a professional soccer player. But as is the case for most of us. That sadly did not come to pass because my talents did not match my enthusiasm when it came to soccer.

• 20:39Manoush Zomorodi?

  So in his 20s, Shankar thought he'd picked a more realistic path. I studied engineering in southern India. And after I finished my engineering college, or as I was nearing the end of it, I thought I was gonna get an MBA and follow a corporate track, which is very different from the world that I'm in today. Shankar says that most people don't think their hopes and dreams will change much over the years. But actually, we grow to be fundamentally different people who want different things. Here he is on the TED stage.

• 21:17Speaker 07

  When I was 22, I was a freshly minted electronics engineer in southern India. I had no idea that three decades later, I would be living in the United States, that I would be a journalist, and that I would be the host of a podcast called Hidden Brain. It's a show about human behavior and how to apply psychological science to our lives. Now, we didn't have podcasts when I graduated from college. We didn't walk around with smartphones in our pockets. So my future was not just unknown, it was unknowable.

• 21:49Speaker 07

  All of us have seen what this is like in the last three years as we slowly try and emerge from the COVID pandemic. If we think about the people we used to be, we can see how anxiety and isolation and upheavals in our lives and livelihoods, how this has changed us, changed our outlook, changed our perspective. But there is a paradox here, and the paradox is when we look backwards, we can see enormous changes in who we have become. But when we look forwards, we tend to imagine that we're going to be the same people in the future. Now, sure, we imagine the world is going to be different. We know that AI and climate change is going to mean for a very different world. But we don't imagine that we ourselves will have different perspectives, different views, different preferences. I call this

• 22:34Speaker 07

  the illusion of continuity. And I think one reason this happens is that when we look backwards, the contrast with our prior selves to who we are today is so clear. When we look forward, we can imagine ourselves being a little older, a little grayer. But we don't imagine fundamentally that we're going to be different people. And so those changes seem more amorphous.

• 22:57Manoush Zomorodi?

  The illusion of continuity. I mean, I can think of very sort of mundane ways that's happened to me. I never really liked spicy food. And if you had told me, oh, no, you're going to end up being a person who loves spicy food, I would not have believed you. Little did I know, pregnancy would change my taste buds. But you have demonstrated on your show that it's not just the little things, this inability or this, I guess it's a lack of imagination in some ways, that you will change. You will change who you fundamentally are and what you believe in. It can have huge ramifications. One of the stories that you tell is about a couple. I wonder if you could share that story?

• 23:40Manoush Zomorodi?

  Yeah, we featured the story of John and Stephanie Rinka, a wonderful story. They married when they were quite young, and then they traveled around the country. John became a basketball coach, and Stephanie became a nurse. And they were eventually living in a rural area, and Stephanie would pay house calls to To people who are very sick, sometimes people who had terminal illnesses. And she would come back from these visits really shaken. And she would tell John that if she ever was struck by a terminal illness, she didn't want him to do anything that would prolong her suffering unnecessarily. She would say, John, just shoot me. Don't ever let me get to that point. Just shoot me. I heard that I don't know how many times.

• 24:24Manoush Zomorodi?

  As fate would have it, Stephanie, in fact, did fall sick with Lou Gehrig's disease, or ALS, when she was in her 50s. And she went downhill relatively quickly. I was hanging my hat on. She knows what she's going to do. The most comfortable life until it's time to die. And then making sure she died with dignity. Dignity, peace, calm, they were all what I was working towards. And the day came when she was no longer able to breathe on her own. And John rushed her to the hospital where a nurse asked her, Mrs. Rinca, would you like us to put you on a ventilator? And she nodded yes.

• 25:06Manoush Zomorodi?

  And that's when my jaw dropped. Stephanie wanted to be put on life support. What?

• 25:14Manoush Zomorodi?

  No, I just want to say, no, she doesn't. No, she doesn't want that. She said, yes.

• 25:22Manoush Zomorodi?

  John was so surprised by this that he asked her the next day. He said, you know, Steph, is that really what you want? And Stephanie said, yes. And the challenge here is that it's not that Stephanie was being inconsistent. I think it's really that Stephanie, at age 35, you know, imagining what her future self would be like, imagining what it would be like to have a terminal illness, was not really able to put herself in the shoes of Stephanie at age 59, you know, suffering from a terminal illness and gasping for air. I mean, what if Stephanie had been unconscious when her husband brought her to the hospital? What if she hadn't been able to advocate for her new thinking? I mean, the decision would have been made. Yes, the decision would have been made.

• 26:07Manoush Zomorodi?

  And Stephanie had written out an advance directive. The advance directive would have said, you know, please do not put me on a ventilator, you know, do not prolong my suffering. But of course, the advance directive is Stephanie at age 35 or age 40 making plans for her future self. But what if we don't actually know who our future selves are going to be? That's actually kind of a. Both an interesting thought, but also a terrifying thought. Because throughout our lives, Manoush, we are constantly making plans for our future selves. We invest money and save for retirement because we have an image of the kind of people we're going to be in retirement. We propose marriage and get married to people because we imagine that we know what we will want 25 years in the future when we are married to this person.

• 26:49Manoush Zomorodi?

  But if, in fact, we are different people in the future than we are today, we are making plans for a stranger, a stranger who might look back at us with bewilderment or even resentment and ask us, what made you think that that is what I would want? So I think there's a temptation here to quote the old bumper sticker, stuff happens, right? And shrug and be like, well, I don't know, what are you gonna do? This is life. But actually, in your talk, you share three ideas that you think can help us with our future self. Can we talk about that? The first piece of advice is accepting this idea that you are going to be different in 30 years' time. That's right.

• 27:31Manoush Zomorodi?

  So if you buy the idea that you're going to be a different person in the future than you are today, perhaps the important question to ask is, what are things about ourselves today that perhaps we might wish to see changed? Are there elements to our personality, to our being short-tempered or impatient or unempathetic? Are there things about ourselves that we would like to change? And one of the questions then becomes, if you allow for the fact that you're going to become a different person, how do you help construct that person that you're going to become? And I think, I like that idea very much because it suggests that we can be the authors of our future self, that we can actually construct this person we're going to become. The engine to do this is curiosity, which is that if we only are doing the things that

• 28:14Manoush Zomorodi?

  we're used to doing, if we're only talking to the people who are already in us, in our circle of friends and family, we're never going to expand our horizons to imagine the people we might become. The second piece of advice that I had is to exercise humility, especially when it comes to expressing our opinions on various things. Social media platforms have become vehicles for grandstanding and accusation and malevolence sometimes. And so much of that, I think, is based on a false certitude that the way I think today is going to be the way that I think tomorrow.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  And if we had a little bit more humility, if we actually said, I think the way I think today, because my circumstances, my environment, in some ways, has conspired to shape who I am today in powerful ways, my environment is going to shape me to be a different person tomorrow. I might have very different views one month from now, one year from now, or 10 years from now. I've given you a number of ways in which our future selves are going to be weaker and frailer than we are today. And that is true. That is part of the story. But our future selves are also going to have capacities and strengths and wisdom that we do not

• 29:30Speaker 01

  possess today. So when we confront opportunities and we hesitate, when I tell myself, I don't think I have it in me to quit my job and start my own company, or I tell myself, I don't have it in me to learn a musical instrument at the age of 52, or I tell myself, I don't have it in me to look after a disabled child. What we really should be saying is, I don't have the capacity to do those things today. That doesn't mean I won't have the capacity to do those things tomorrow. So lesson number three is to be brave.

• 30:11Manoush Zomorodi?

  That's my favorite one, Shankar. This idea that our future selves won't be weaker, won't be less able, and that maybe we need to trust that we will maybe change for the better. Tell me what you think about that. Is there an example that comes to mind for you in your own life?

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, I think all of us who are parents have some vision of this, right? So, you know, your six-year-old comes home in tears one day from school, and she thinks that, you know, her life has ended because she didn't get the part in her elementary school production of a play, and she's sort of heartbroken by it. And you understand, this is only a passing breeze, that this too shall pass. In some ways, we don't bring that same empathy and compassion to ourselves, right? So we should tell ourselves when we're going through tough times, we are going to look back on in 10 years' time, and it's possible that we will remember those tough times with a smile and not a tear. I'm not saying that bad things don't happen to people, and I'm not saying that those bad things

• 31:09Speaker 01

  don't stay with people for a long time. But I think the smart thing to do Is almost to treat ourselves the way we treat the children whom we love. And if you think about yourself that way, you can extend some of the same empathy you you extend to a crying child to your own self when you come home at the end of the day and you're heartbroken about something.

• 31:31Manoush Zomorodi?

  Part of me feels like it's, you know, maybe it's futile trying to plan your life when there are new emotions and new weird circumstances that you can never predict.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Yes, that's right.

• 31:42Manoush Zomorodi?

  What's the point?

• 31:43Speaker 01

  I think this is something that it's important for people of all ages, but I think especially young people to keep in mind, which is that, you know, we often freight ourselves with so many worries and we ask ourselves, am I doing the right thing? Am I making the right choice? Am I going to the right college? Have I picked the right course? And the truth is that all of these things are going to change in such profound ways in the next 10, 20, or 30 years that the individual choices you make are going to matter less and less. This is not to say that we shouldn't care about anything. We absolutely should care about what's right in front of us. But things are going to change in remarkable ways. We are going to change in remarkable ways. And we and the world are going to be very different tomorrow than who we are today.

• 32:24Manoush Zomorodi?

  That's Shankar Vedantam, host of the podcast Hidden Brain. His most recent book is called Useful Delusions: The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain. We also heard from John Rinca from an episode of Hidden Brain and Julian Shapiro Barnum, host of the web series Recess Therapy. You can see Shankar's full talk at ted.com. On the show today, future you. I'm Manoush Zomorodi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back.

• 33:06Speaker 06

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• 33:24Speaker 07

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• 33:43Speaker 06

  Comes from Planet Visionaries. If you're looking for a dose of optimism, Planet Visionaries is the podcast you need. Host Alex Honnold sits down this season with extraordinary doers, creating real climate action. It's a lineup that proves hope isn't naive, it's fuel for change. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

• 34:08Manoush Zomorodi?

  It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zomorodi. On the show today, future you. And so far, we've talked about our relationship to ourself, singular. But what about our collective connection to the future, to generations to come? How do we, as societies, form a relationship to people that we will never know?

• 34:32Speaker 06

  There's some sense that as long as you do your own future planning, perhaps you'll be OK and the people you know will be OK in the future. But it's not enough to just keep your family healthy and safe. There's something about using history and using our collective memory that's really important when it comes to collectively planning for the future.

• 34:54Manoush Zomorodi?

  This is Bina Venkateshaman.

• 34:56Speaker 06

  I'm a columnist at The Washington Post, and my book is The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age.

• 35:02Manoush Zomorodi?

  Before she wrote her book, Bina was working in the Obama administration as a science advisor, helping mayors, governors, corporate executives think through their planning for future disasters.

• 35:14Speaker 06

  There was a sense that this sounds really important, but at the moment, my board is basically focused on how we're going to do our quarterly earnings reports, what kind of stock dividends we're going to be paying, very short-term oriented metrics. People just couldn't seem to take these threats of the future that seriously.

• 35:38Manoush Zomorodi?

  This led Bina on a search to understand why some societies succeed and others fail to plan for their future. In 2017, she went to Fukushima, Japan.

• 35:51Speaker 06

  It was the sixth anniversary of the nuclear disaster there at Fukushima Daiichi, the nuclear plant, where the tsunamis had breached the seawall of the nuclear reactor. ... petering on what looks like a meltdown. After the quake and the tsunami, a blast at

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Fukushima. Its sheer power plain to see. Well, experts are warning that radiation levels now are rising at the Fukushima nuclear plant.

• 36:19Manoush Zomorodi?

  In 2011, a magnitude nine earthquake hit Japan, causing massive tsunamis, one of which flooded the nuclear plant in Fukushima. Chemical explosions damaged surrounding buildings, smoke was everywhere.

• 36:35Speaker 06

  And so this disaster led to a meltdown of the nuclear reactors and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

• 36:47Speaker 06

  And we could see cracks in the walls of the stairwells, still from the earthquake six years before. There were still more than 100,000 people in 2017, six years later, displaced by that nuclear disaster.

• 37:02Speaker 06

  One of the things that was so interesting to think about and learn was how the company that ran the nuclear power plant, TEPCO, how they had thought about planning for the future at the time.

• 37:15Manoush Zomorodi?

  TEPCO had done a risk analysis, but it hadn't looked far enough into the past.

• 37:20Speaker 06

  And what was interesting to learn was the high contrast between what happened in Fukushima and what happened in Onagawa, Japan in 2011. When I was there, I learned about the Onagawa Nuclear Power Station, which was even closer to the epicenter of that earthquake than the infamous Fukushima Daiichi that we all know about.

• 37:40Manoush Zomorodi?

  Here's Bina Venkateshaman on the TED stage.

• 37:43Speaker 06

  In Onagawa, people in the city actually fled to the nuclear power plant as a place of refuge. It was that safe. It was spared by the tsunamis.

• 37:55Speaker 06

  It was the foresight of just one engineer, Yanosuke Hirai, that made that happen.

• 38:02Speaker 06

  In the 1960s, he fought to build that power plant farther back from the coast, at higher elevation and with a higher seawall. He knew the story of his hometown shrine, which had flooded in the year 869 after a tsunami. It was his knowledge of history that allowed him to imagine what others could not.

• 38:25Manoush Zomorodi?

  869?

• 38:27Speaker 06

  Yes, yeah, that's about a thousand years, more than a thousand years before, you have a tsunami that floods a shrine and the story gets carried forward, the Jogan earthquake of 869. So there was a marker in his hometown shrine, and there are actually markers in other areas of Japan that have survived from that particular earthquake. So there's a place called Murahama, where on the top of a particular hill, in 869, people had fled to the top of that hill, thinking that was a safe place during an earthquake, given the risk of tsunami, to flee. And in fact, it was one of the worst places you could go because two tsunamis, sort of two big waves, crested over the hill

• 39:11Speaker 06

  and killed the people who had fled to the top of this hill. And so the people who survived this disaster, who weren't on the top of the hill, decided to mark that place and to have that marker stay intact and the story of it taught to the local schoolchildren and sort of passed on through the generations.

• 39:31Manoush Zomorodi?

  So part of this future planning is taking the long view, backwards and forwards.

• 39:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, so one of the principles here is that when we're planning for the future, it's not helpful to only look at what's just happened. And it's very much in human psychology to respond to whatever risk or disaster has just befallen us. So for example, right after Fukushima, Japan actually cut a lot of its nuclear capacity in part over safety concerns. But the net effect of that was a turn to natural gas, LNG, and more fossil fuels, which as we know is contributing to climate change. And other countries of the world have similarly reacted to what happened in Fukushima and pulled back on nuclear power. And that is an example of, I think,

• 40:24Speaker 06

  sometimes how we can overreact to events that happen in recent historical memory.

• 40:30Manoush Zomorodi?

  Can we talk about another example of governments having to deal with figuring out our collective future for people who won't be alive when this finally does happen? And you talk about this a little bit in your book, nuclear waste, because this is, you know, where you dispose of this stuff. It doesn't go away, does it? Is that forcing certain political leaders to really think generations ahead?

• 40:52Speaker 06

  You know, nuclear waste is one of those challenges that is similar to the climate crisis in that the time horizon in which people today are implicated is far longer than we're used to contemplating and we're used to imagining. So we're actually obligated to those future generations that are going to live in a world that we have warmed with our decisions about how we use energy. And with nuclear waste, there have been a number of efforts to try to say, how should we imagine if we create a nuclear waste site, marking that for future generations, knowing that language has changed, that the oldest living languages are only a few thousand years old, and some of the time horizons of this waste often extends much farther into the future?

• 41:37Manoush Zomorodi?

  Can you share some of the ideas that came up? Some of them are really funny in your book.

• 41:41Speaker 06

  There have been really interesting cabals that have been brought together to think about the nuclear waste question. An example that I love to talk about in this realm is genetically engineering cats whose fur will turn green around nuclear waste sites. And the idea being that since cats were loved in ancient Egypt and are loved today, they'll probably be loved by future humans. And some of these ideas just really expose the futility of trying to really intimately know future generations. So even things like trying to make a signal, you would think, okay, we can mark this as a hazardous waste site and put a skull and crossbones there.

• 42:24Speaker 06

  Well, that could also mark like a pirate theme park. It doesn't have to be something that's hazardous, right? So we don't know what people 10,000 years from now are going to want or like or do. But what we can do is we can pass things on that are carried on by each generation to come and explain their importance, explain their value to that next generation, and hope that that next generation then adapts and brings that message forth, carrying the torch to the next one.

• 42:53Manoush Zomorodi?

  It sounds like what you're saying is to connect to our future collective selves, we have to see these new generations as real people and we need to see ourselves as future generations for previous generations in some way. We have to see ourselves as part of a continuum.

• 43:13Speaker 06

  Absolutely. I really believe in this way of thinking about ourselves. We all want to feel like we belong to something greater and what greater thing to belong to than the fabric of time?

• 43:27Speaker 06

  In the winter of 2012, I went to visit my grandmother's house in South India, a place, by the way, where the mosquitoes have a special taste for the blood of the American-born. No joke. When I was there, I got an unexpected gift. It was this antique instrument, made more than a century ago, hand carved from a rare wood, inlaid with pearls and with dozens of metal strings. It's a family heirloom, a link between my past, the country where my parents were born, and the future, the unknown places I'll take it. I didn't actually realize it at the time I got it, but it would later become

• 44:12Speaker 06

  a powerful metaphor for my work. It was custom-made for my great-grandfather. He was a well-known music and art critic in India in the early 20th century. My great-grandfather had the foresight to protect this instrument at a time when my great-grandmother was pawning off all their belongings, but that's another story. He protected it by giving it to the next generation, by giving it to my grandmother, and she gave it to me. When I first heard the sound of this instrument, it haunted me. It felt like hearing a wanderer in the Himalayan

• 44:56Speaker 06

  fog. It felt like hearing a voice from the past.

• 45:09Speaker 06

  This instrument is in my home today, but it doesn't actually belong to me. It's my role to shepherd it in time. And that feels more meaningful to me than just owning it for today. This instrument positions me as both a descendant and an ancestor. It makes me feel part of a story bigger than my own. And this, I believe, is the single most powerful way we can reclaim foresight: by seeing ourselves as the good ancestors we long to be.

• 45:51Speaker 06

  Ancestors not just to our own children, but to all humanity. Whatever your heirloom is, however big or small, protect it. And know that its music can resonate for generations.

• 46:14Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was Bina Venkateshaman. Her book is called The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age. You can see her talk at TED.com. So what can we each do to future-proof, as Bina suggests, and become good ancestors? Author and philosopher Roman Krzynarik is leading what he says is a movement, a grand mind shift in how to think about a future that we will never experience ourselves. Here's Roman's 2020 TED Talk.

• 46:52Speaker 07

  It's time for humankind to recognize a disturbing truth. We have colonized the future. In wealthy countries especially, we treat it like a distant colonial outpost, where we can freely dump ecological damage and technological risk as if there was nobody there.

• 47:11Speaker 07

  The tragedy is that tomorrow’s generations aren’t here to challenge this pillaging of their inheritance. They can’t leap in front of the king’s horse like a suffragette, or stage a sit-in like a civil rights activist, or go on assault march to defy their colonial oppressors like Mahatma Gandhi. They’re granted no political rights or representation, they have no influence in the marketplace. The great silent majority of future generations is rendered powerless. In the next two centuries alone, tens of billions of people will be born. Amongst them, all your grandchildren, and their grandchildren, and the friends and communities on whom they’ll depend. How will all these future generations look back on us, and the legacy we’re leaving for them?

• 47:55Speaker 07

  How can we become the good ancestors that future generations deserve? Well, over the past decade, a global movement has started to emerge of people committed to extending our time horizons towards a longer now. I think of its pioneers as time rebels. They can be found at work in Japan’s visionary Future Design Movement, which aims to overcome the short-term cycles that dominate politics by drawing on the principle of seventh-generation decision-making practiced by many Native American communities. Future Design gathers together residents to draw up and discuss plans for the towns and cities where they live. Half the group are told they’re residents from the present day. The other half are given ceremonial robes to wear and told to imagine themselves as residents from the year 2060.

• 48:40Speaker 07

  Well, it turns out that the residents from 2060 systematically advocate far more transformative city plans, from healthcare investments to climate change action. And this innovative form of future citizens’ assembly is now spreading throughout Japan, from small towns like Yahaba to major cities like Kyoto. What if Future Design was adopted by towns and cities worldwide to revitalize democratic decision-making and extend their vision far beyond the now? Now, time rebels have also taken to courts of law to secure the rights of future people. The organization Our Children’s Trust has filed a landmark case against the US government on behalf of 21 young people campaigning for the legal right to a safe climate and

• 49:21Speaker 07

  healthy atmosphere for both current and future generations. Their David versus Goliath struggle has already inspired groundbreaking lawsuits worldwide from Colombia and Pakistan to Uganda and the Netherlands. So the time rebellion has begun. The rebels are rising to extend our time horizons from seconds and minutes to decades and far beyond. But how can we really think and plan on the scale of millennia? Well, the answer is perhaps the ultimate secret to being a time rebel, and it comes from the biomimicry designer Janine Benyaz, who suggests we learn from nature's 3.8 billion years of evolution.

• 50:03Speaker 07

  How is it that other species have learned to survive and thrive for 10,000 generations or more? Well, it's by taking care of the place that will take care of their offspring, by living within the ecosystem in which they're embedded, by knowing not to foul the nest, which is what humans have been doing with devastating effects at an ever-increasing pace and scale over the past century. So a profound starting point for time rebels everywhere is to focus not simply on lengthening time, but on regenerating place. We must restore and repair and care for the planetary home that will take care of our offspring, for our children and our children's children.

• 50:47Speaker 07

  Let us all become time rebels and be inspired by the beautiful Mohawk blessing spoken when a child is born. Thank you, Earth. You know the way.

• 51:01Manoush Zomorodi?

  That was philosopher Roman Krasnoryk. His book is called The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking. You can see his full talk at ted.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show this week about future you. This episode was produced by Andrea Gutierrez, Rachel Faulkner White, Lane Kaplan-Levenson, and Fiona Guerin. It was edited by Sanaz Meshkinpour and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Matthew Cloutier, James Delahoussaye, Harsha Nahada, and Katie Monteleone. Beth Donovan is our executive producer. Our audio engineer was Ted Mebane. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei.

• 51:45Manoush Zomorodi?

  Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Michelle Quint, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Balorozzo. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.