Bina Venkataraman on Effectively Thinking Ahead

our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep them selves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.

Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is being a Venkataraman, an American journalist, author, and science policy expert. Bena is currently the editorial page editor of the Boston Globe Today. Eric and Beana discussed her new book, The Optimist Telescope, Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age, which was named a top business book by the Financial Times and a best book of the Year by Amazon, Science Friday and National Public Radio. Hi, Bina, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me. Your book is called The Optimists Telescope, Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age, and we're going to get into it and talk about it in a moment. But let's start like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandmother who's talking with her grandson and she says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness, bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things

like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it, and he looks up at his grandmother says, well, grandmother, which one wins? And the grandmother says, the one you feed. So I would like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that

you do. Well. It's a beautiful parable, Eric, So thank you for introducing me to it, and I think for a lot of my life, I've felt that there's a need to feed the good wolf, or you want to be the good wolf, right, you want to to nourish it. But it's not always easy to do that. And I think about it in the context of short term and long term thinking too, because there are often reasons to

do things in the short term. You feel a sense of nourishment and being fed by pursuing instant gratification, whether it's actually literally like eating the donuts that are on the counter, or whether it's pursuing you know, social media likes or retweets. I'm a journalist, I'm an editor at the Boston Globe of the editorial page, and you know, you could pursue just getting that gratification, getting that like quick snack candy. But often that food isn't really food

for the good wolf. It's it's food for that wolf that seeks sort of fame or approval or affirmation. But that's not always aligned with what's actually courageous, what's actually meaningful, what leads to a life where you can look back on it and you can feel like you've done something that matters, and that's actually left for the next generation.

So for my own moral compass, and this is not true for everyone, but for my own moral compass, I feel that it's important to think about what I'm doing that's going to endure past my own life, what am I contributing to in society or in communities. And it's really hard to feed that wolf on a normal basis um with the sort of feedback we get from society because of the reinforcement of get that quarterly profit, get

that good grade on that next test. It's always about the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, and some of that real building, right Like imagine you wanted to plant a forest in a community. You plant the seeds, you watch them grow to saplings. Eventually they grow into slightly bigger trees, but it's a very slow process. And to actually have a thriving forest that's an ecosystem for animals, that's a place where people recreate, actually takes a lot

of time. And so there might not be that much short term affirmation readily accessible food for that kind of work and that kind of way of being in the world and your community. But the good thing is, and I would say these are the insights from my book The Optimist Telescope, And part of the reason I wrote the book is to sort of share what I learned about how you actually can feed those long term aspirations, how you can become what I call an heirloom keeper,

a keeper of shared collective heirlooms. And one of the things that's really important is community and environment and culture. So surrounding yourself with other people who will reinforce that building that thing together, doing that thing together is really important. Even if it's not immediately gratifying, there's still a nourishment from understanding you're doing something that is culturally reinforced by

those around you, by your peers, by others. There are also other ways to give yourself little rewards on the way to getting to that long term goal, and we can talk more about that, but I would say in general, I found that it's it's sometimes hard to feed the good wolf, but it's really important to do it. Yeah, and your book is really all about that basic idea of how do we make decisions about the future in

a good way right? How do we make decisions that don't only prioritize where we sit right this minute, but are able to look out further, whether that further be five hours, five years, you know, five hundred years, you know, and you really examine that through both individual lens, through the lens of our businesses, our institutions, and then really

society and community as a whole. We're going to spend a lot of our time in this conversation on that first part sort of individual, but as you so eloquently said,

it all ties together. And if there's one thing that behavior science has really taught us, one of the big things that's taught us is how important our environment is in our ability to make the changes we want to make in our lives, and that a big part of that is who we're surrounded with, our culture, our norms, all that stuff drives a lot of who we are. And so the more we can align what's important to us and make our culture reinforcements line up, the easier

that all becomes. It's so true, and that's really reinforced by the sort of untold story of the marshmallow test. If you want to go into that. Sure, you know a lot of people think of the marshmallow tests, which if for anyone who's listening who doesn't know what that is, it's a test that was given to toddlers since the nineteen sixties where they're told that they can have one treat right away or they can wait for an indefinite

period of time to be given to treats. And this was linked to later high achievement test scores, high achievement in career success at the game of life when kids

could wait for that second marshmallow delaying gratification. Well, there's a much richer picture than just that story that was told originally about those original studies, and as more and more studies of the marshmallow tests have been done across different cultures, across different groups, it's been found that what actually helps kids pass the marshmallow test is having cultural

norms and peer groups that reinforce waiting for the second treat. So, for example, there's a study that shows that when kids are in a peer group that all wears the same color T shirt and they're told that everyone in the red T shirt waits for the second treat, then they'll wait for the second treat if they're wearing a red T shirt because they feel an affinity, they feel like

they're part of the red team. Similarly, there have been studies that compare German toddlers to Cameroonian toddlers who are the kids of subsistence farmers, that have shown that the kids of these subsistence farmers wait at a much higher rate for a second treat. In that case, it's a puff puff, which is a local treat, not a marshmallow. And it's astounding to me that culture and environment can play such a big role on whether we can wait or whether we can do something uh that's more long

term oriented. And I think the myth that we're told is that it's all about us as individuals, that we have to just wait, We just have to have willpower and self control. And the reality is that often we can get reinforcement to do the right thing, we can get reinforcement to do the wrong thing too. We all know that. Anyone who's known a teenager or been one

knows that absolutely. And I think what you're pointing to is really important and it's I would say it's one of the main themes on this show that we talked about a lot, is that change is possible. Right that that study originally said, Okay, the kids who can delay a marshmallow turn out to be successful and the kids who couldn't don't. But one of the things they found even very early on is you could teach kids strategies, and if you taught them how, they were better at

resisting the marshmallow. And you know, as you're pointing out, there's a lot also follow onto that says, Yeah, your culture, who you're surrounded by, there's lots of ways to reinforce behavior. I was on a coaching call with somebody today who was just so identified with her failings, so identified as in that is who I am. A lot of the work I do is to break that and go, no, that's not who you are. You can change. There are

possibilities and and there's known ways to do it. You know, behavior science has taught us a lot about how we do that, and so you know, I really that in your book. The other thing that you say in the book is not only do we do this individually, do we say, oh, I'm just the kind of person who can't plan for the future. We do it collectively and we just go, well, humans can't plan for the future, thus we're just going to be left with bad decisions,

reckless decisions. There's nothing we can do about what's coming, and your book really refutes that absolutely, and I find that inspiring that that's the model used for your coaching, because I really do think that was one of the most surprising things in spending five years researching this book. I kind of went into it with the mindset that was sort of cynical, like people are too short term oriented. There's no way we can do things like solve the

climate crisis. There's no way that we can wait to make the right kind of investments to fix the education system some of these huge problems that we see. But the reality is that the research and countless examples from all over the world, from all different kinds of people show us that it is it possible to change. It's

quite possible to think long term. That people do it all the time, And it's so important to demonstrate the art of the possible, because I think we can get trapped in the mindset that we're just not good at this thing, that we're just not capable of long term thinking. But if even look at like the vast majority of Americans right now are wearing masks, making sacrifices in terms of social distancing, not seeing their relatives as much as they would like to. Certainly there's a certain faction of

the country that's having trouble with that. But a lot of people have been willing to make sacrifices in the short term for their own long term good for the greater long term good public health. And I think that's pretty inspiring. And it kind of hearkens back to World War Two when people were growing victory gardens, or you know, looking back at some of the sacrifices that people have made to contribute to the greater good over history, and

I think it doesn't always have to be sacrifice. Being oriented toward the long term can actually be fun, it can actually be exciting. But we're just not necessarily programmed to do it. And I think often when we think about the future, we are expecting bad news. We're kind of looking at it with dread or anxiety or feeling that there's doomsday coming. And a lot of it has to do I will take some responsibility for with the

news and sort of predictions of our future. We often predict the negative without offering a sense of agency or painting a picture what could actually make that future brighter, make it better, what kind of choices we have, But I think it leads a lot of people to turn the future off. So there have been surveys the show looking at people from many countries around the world that most people don't look past fifteen years in the future at most. The kind of the future goes dark in

their imagination. And I think a lot of that is because we don't really have the tools, right, A lot of people don't have the tools to think that far ahead in their lives, and it really takes a leap of imagination to be able to do it. Yeah, So let's talk about that, because that's a real key part of your book is that we can't see very far out right, but there are tools in way is that can allow us to see further than this fifteen years

that we're talking about. And so maybe talk through for an individual, what are some of the things individuals can do that allow them to make better decisions for the future and envision that future. Yes, so I think it's just important to say first of all, why it's so hard to think about the future, why this imagination gap exists, and that is because we can sense with our senses. We can smell, touch, and feel things that are in

the present, things that are in the past. We've actually already committed to our memories, so we have a sense of them being imprinted in our senses. But the future is purely imaginative. It is all conjured in our minds, and it's actually actually miraculous that human beings can conjure

in their minds something that's never happened before. And we rely on our episodic memory are sort of rearrangement of episodes of the past or movies we've seen, sort of putting together scenes to conjure up the future, and that takes cognitive effort. It is not easy to do, but we do it all the time we are as humans. Is it is a miracle that we can do this.

So a lot gets in the way of actually being able to imagine, forget imagining accurately the future, but imagine future scenarios and put ourselves in those scenarios so that we can make decisions. Now that affect is for a future and a great example of that is, you know, thinking about old age. So for me, as I was writing this book in my mid thirties, it was very hard for me to think about getting older. I'm sort

of terrible. It's saving for my own future, making decisions, thinking about what I'll think when I'm older, trying to decide whether to have a kid, whether how I would feel an old age about that. And I was doing this research for the book, and I was fascinated to find that there were people studying. A guy named hal Hirshfield, an economist at u c l A, studying basically techniques

for helping people imagine themselves an old age. So he did this experiment with college students where he gave them virtual reality avatars of themselves, so it was if they were looking in a mirror and an old ver and of themselves gestured back at them and sort of mimic their moves. And he found stupping that comparing it to students who were just exposed to sort of information about

aging or getting older. These are college students, so you know, giving them data or even just pictures of random old people, that this experience of seeing their sort of selves as in this imagined future actually activated them to be more willing to save for their future, more oriented towards the future and their decisions. So that's kind of cool high tech way of doing that. Another tool that I stumbled upon researching the book is a technique of writing a

letter to your future self. And this is something I actually used and multiple points, uh making life decisions over the past few years, because I find it really effective. And what you do is you kind of empathize with that future self, Imagine the scene that that person is in, what they might be thinking, what regrets they might have, and try to reason or explain your decisions to your future self. Some people do this with their kids or

their grandkids. They imagine writing to someone fifty years in the future, maybe not their their own self, depending on the age. And it's a way of kind of uh. I call it imaginative empathy, a way of kind of bringing yourself into the future in a way that allows you to understand how your decisions today might affect that. Otherwise, you're very likely to kind of just think, Okay, I can make that decision later. I can make that decision later. When we all know that we make pivotal decisions now

that affect us for the rest of our lives. Whether it's about how much we exercise, whether it's about the education we decide to get, whether it's about the job moves we make, whether we decide to have children. All those things do matter in the long run, and there's no perfect life, there's no life without regrets. But there is a way to at least help yourself imagine what might matter to me in the future and what are

the trade offs. And I think it just leads to more contentment, more wisdom in making decisions to be able to do that. Yeah, I think that imagining the future self is a is a really helpful exercise. How can we inhabit the person? You start the book off with a quote that I always love and I always think it's funny from Homer Simpson where he says that's a problem for future Homer Man, I don't envy that guy, and I think we can all relate with that that.

You know, a lot of times we're just we're just putting things off that we know the bill is going to come new sooner or later on. But it's a way of being there that makes it more visceral. And that's the problem with as you said earlier, a lot of planning is that short term things are very visceral.

They're like, oh, I want that doughnut and I can smell it, and and long term not so visceral, it's sort of very abstract, and so these exercises are ways of making the future less abstract, right, And you know, it's important to think about also not just imagining negative futures. So some people are very anxious and they have the tendency to go to the dark side of their imaginations.

If that's your nature, that's your nature. But I tell people, if they're inclined to imagine only positive futures, if they're the kind of people who believe that everything will turn out fine, it's really important to add some negative futures. Imagine some negative futures as well, and possible decision points that could lead to that. And if you're the kind of person who turns to the dark scenarios of the future, try to imagine some positive scenarios and imagine how they

could come about and what choices you could make. There's a technique that I write about in the book which is used by an investment firm that I profile in the book that does some incredible work with long term investing. It's a multibillion dollar investment firm that uses this technique called, let's say perspective Hindsight is what one academic has called it.

You could call it a pre mortem. There are many ways of thinking about this, And what you do is you imagine a scenario in the future as if it's already happened. So you pretend it's already happened. And the example I like to use is I pretend I've hosted a dinner party and it's gone really well. And in pandemic times, this is like a sad scenario that I hope is going to happen in the future, but I

don't know when. So I'm imagining the dinner party and I imagine and first that it's gone really, really well, and then I start to list all the reasons why it went well and how it went well, and so I might come up with things like, oh, you know, the people were just incredible. The mix of people invited were just wonderful people, interesting people. They had a lot to contribute. I might also come up with, you know, the conversation really flowed throughout the night. It didn't seem

like anyone was interrupted. And I might say at least one of the dishes turned out well, and people complimented how well, how how good it was, and it kind of puts a little bit of focus on the decisions in the present that actually matter to get the outcome you want. So often when I've thrown dinner parties in the past, I've spent time thinking about what's the weather going to be like, and what will happen if people

arrive at different times? How will I orchestrate that. I will fixate on things that don't actually matter that much for the outcome that going really well, and they're not in my control. Often it's not in my control whether the weather is good, and so why focus on those things when there are actual points of agency and decision that I can have that influence the future outcome I want. So then I can also do the opposite, which is imagine the dinner party goes horribly wrong, and so I

describe how is it wrong? Why did it go wrong? And I come up with tons of different ways, and that helps me also plan for Maybe I don't want to invite that person I'm just planning to invite out of obligation who's like a real drag at a dinner table. Or maybe I don't want to try for the elaborate Julia Child recipe for the first time on the day

that I'm having eight people over for dinner. Maybe I just want to try something really simple, because what matters is being present to help facilitate the conversation and get help people get to know each other. So it just helps clarify. And obviously I'm describing a very simple scenario of having dinner. But this is a kind of technique

that can be used to make investment decisions. It can be used by country trees, by leadership in countries, and it actually is increasingly being utilized by government to look at scenarios. What if we actually don't have a vaccine, what will have happened to make that scenario carry out? What are the failure modes we could have. What if we do successfully get a vaccine by early what has to happen in order for that to happen. And some of those factors are in the control of decision makers,

some are not. But again it's the same technique. As I listen to this, I think a little bit about and you mentioned it. You know, some people have a tendency just to always inhabit the future in a negative way, and we don't always want to be forecasting decisions. We don't always want to be living in this like, oh my god, what's going to happen? How do I control it? How do I make it come out? How do you

balance that in your own life? Knowing how important future planning is, but realizing that most of the joy in life comes from sort of being here. Now. I don't think these are incompatible at all. So people have asked me this question a lot, and I really think that being present in the moment and being oriented towards what

matters in the long term are entirely compatible. The place where it's tricky is living in constant anticipation of the next moment, that next reward, that next thing that you want to get, or that next thing you want to avoid. That anticipation is a source of anxiety. It's a locking on the incremental. It's very much about the immediate future, and it's where a lot of our culture reinforces and a lot of our economic factors reinforce us to live in.

It's in that space, in anticipation of the next hit, the immediate future, the next like on your Facebook post that a lot of our media culture are social culture, our political culture reinforces us to kind of inhabit that space. And I think when you have a sense of what really matters to you over the long term, you can

turn down some of that noise. Actually, you can stop thinking so much about how much it matters that you send emails today, or how much it matters that you sit down and just watch your kid at the dinner table eat their food with joy, uh, or just take that moment to look out at the landscape, look at the skies the sun is rising, or setting a few moments to do that maybe isn't so bad if it's a trade off with something very immediate that is just

checking off something on the checklist. So I actually think there's a way to reconcile being in the present moment in a really beautiful way with understanding that we all have a limited time on this earth and what we want to do with it in the end should be guiding as much of our daily actions as we can.

So I think we often have to carve out specific time in our days and our weeks to be thinking about our long term goals, thinking about what we want for the future, otherwise we'll get so consumed in this intermediate immediate future space. Yeah, I really like that idea that where we get lost. Is that intermediate space, the space that in a lot of ways doesn't matter so much, Like now kind of matters. What I'm doing, where I'm at, where my attention is, and the way my decisions impact

things long term really matter. But a lot of the very small things that we get consumed with, like the traffic, don't matter. One of the questions I love to ask myself is will this matter in five hours, five days, five months, five years. Use whatever time increments you want. But it's a really great way of just for me eliminating a lot of stuff that I go not gonna matter. It's gonna matter in five days. No, it's not even five hours. I'm going to have completely forgotten this even occurred.

Why am I so upset? I love that perspective. I'm going to steal that for the future in my life, I really do. I think that's a great way of thinking of it. Asking yourself the question over what timeline does this really matter? It can make also your problems seem smaller and perspective totally. Yeah. Yeah, But I like the way you say that I hadn't really thought of that.

That being present now and thinking longer term, those are two useful modalities, but the one that most of us inhabit is worrying about what's right next and resisting what's happening right, you know, an hour from now, where it's

a really interesting perspective. The other thing that you said that I thought was really good was I'm always a fan of the middle way, and you were like, you know what, if you only think about positive in the future, you probably want to introduce the fact that not everything turns out the way you want. And if you only think about the negative, you might want to assume something

could go right. And you know, I used to see this in I was in software development for years and we're always looking at projects, and I got to know over time that people would work with. I'd be like that guy, he's gonna tell me it's going to take three hours, but it always takes thirty hours. So I just know him. He's an optimist. He always thinks it's going to happen like that. And that other guy, he's a pessimist. He just always thinks the worst thing is

going to happen. So I've got to take that with you know, as you work with people and you realize like, okay, and so I think it's really helpful in our own lives. That's a really good thing to do. Which side am I on there? And let me if I want to be more accurate in my looking at what might happen, I need to know where my biases are and adjust for them exactly. Yeah, and adjusting to your colleagues or your friends, your family is another great way that we

can support each other. Right to be counterbalances and having different imaginations, different visions of the future we can introduce to each other. And I do love it just to go back for a moment to your idea of asking, you know, will this matter in five years, will this matter in five days or is this just kind of a five hour or five minute kind of problem to

help you decide triage what's most important to do. And you know, sometimes you're gonna have to do those things that are important in the immediate depending on your line of work. I'm on a deadline driven work schedule at the moment we put out a daily paper. But at the same time, it requires I think extra care to

make sure that you carve out time. And I have found that because there's a sort of self fulfilling cycle of instant accomplishment right whether it's getting all those emails cleared, whether it's uh, you know, kind of um getting the instant feedback from doing something right away, because that's sort of addictive, and you then you're like, what's the next thing I can do? What's the next thing I can check off that. It's nice to start a day, to

actually open a day. Sometimes it's using the day, but finding a way to sort of brack it off, either a time of the week or a time of the day that you dedicate to thinking about your long term goals. It is definitely an area. As I was reading the book, I just was like, I could do way better at thinking longer, longer term. A little history about me that you don't know listeners most of them know. I mean, I used to be a heroin attic. You can't have a much more my opic short term view of the

world than that. You know, constant destruction. You know, I've evolved way past that, and I'm pretty good at going like, Okay, I know exercise helps my mental and emotional health. I know that not using does this, I know that meditating does this, But I don't think I've taken quite that next step to really inhabiting the longer term view. I think I've gotten away from the short and immediate gratification,

but not necessarily taken that next step right. And you know, there's not a need to do it for every moment of your life, for every aspect of your life. I think that's the other aspect of this is that maybe long term thinking isn't the right solution for every line of work or problem in your family, or things that you are trying to accomplish exercise wise, but it's obviously something we need more of in our culture and a society.

We're not doing enough on the long real long term problems, whether it's climate change, whether it's personal health and wellness, saving for the future. You can really look across the population and see that there's a pattern of people forsaking

the future for the short term. So I think my my idea and goal is just to show people that they actually can do it, so that when it comes to things that they want to do they want to be long term oriented because they want to learn a new language, or they want to be able to save for some amazing trip when we can travel again, that they are able to do that using the insights of the optimist telescope. That's not to say that long term thinking is always going to be better. So I think

that's important and important distinction. And I will say in terms of addiction, I think it's really interesting that there are neuroscientists who call some of our technologies that we have that I'm very addicted to electronic cocaine. Right. So there's an aspect, at least metaphorically right of of how we behave with our devices, with that text message notification, with social media that makes us all kind of behave

right like that we're focused on the next fix. And so I think in a way we all should be empathizing more with addicts and with um recovered addicts, because we all have an element of that in our personalities. There definitely is something to modern technology that has that addictive flavor to it, no doubt about that. I wanted to talk a little bit about the fact that we're more inclined to make bad decisions when we are facing some sort of scarcity, right, whether that be time, whether

that be we're tired, whether that be we're OK. Right like that, the scarcity of different types introduces the tendency to make very short term decisions, and I'd like to talk about like, well, in some cases that's probably the appropriate response, right, Like if you don't know how you're going to get dinner tonight and to feed your family, that's got to take priority, right, But what are some ways for those of us that are not in that

threadbare of a circumstance. But we face other scarcities time scarcity, you know, tired scarcity. How can we continue to not let those things drive us into immediate gratification all the time. I'm so glad you brought this up, because you're right. I sort of used the example of going to the pawn shop when you need to buy food, right for the groceries for the week. It's obvious that you might sell off an heirloom, a family heirloom if you need to just feed your family or get the homework done.

We often neglect that there's scarcity of bandwidth, sort of our our mental bandwidth, uh, scarcity of time, and that these functional lot like scarcity of money or scarcity of resources in terms of people making short term decisions. And

I write about in the book Doctors. You know, some of the most trained, highly educated members of our society who are prescribing antibiotics, and situations where they've been seeing patients all day long, they're tired, their mental bandwidth is reduced, and they're getting pressured by patients to just give them an antibiotic. And this is a major contributor to antibiotic resistance. And these superbugs we know of which are you know, like the next pandemic hiding around the corner. Not to

be too scary here. So those decisions happen in moments. Often there are studies that show that doctors are more likely to make incorrect, inappropriate let's say, prescriptions of antibiotics when they're fatigued and then when they've had back to back patients, they haven't had any rest or haven't had

any breaks. So in a way, the things that you need to do to take care of yourself are the things that can help you be better at avoiding impulsive short term decisions, so having breaks, taking time to recover for a lot of physicians and nurse practitioners in that moment.

I talk about impulse buffers in the book, so there are ways for them too in those moments be interrupted when they try to prescribe that antibiotics, Something in their electronic health record will pop up saying why exactly are you prescribing this and ask them to give a justification, which might stop them and make them think, oh, maybe we should make sure that this patient actually has the bacteria that can be killed by this drug before we

prescribe it. When teachers are really tired and having lunch, some studies show that they're more likely to discipline their students. And there's a problem with this because we know that there is implicit bias, racial bias in the ways the patterns that teachers discipline students, and so a lot of black and brown students, particularly males, get sent to the principle's office more. And when they get sent to the

principle's office more, they're more likely to be suspended. When they're more likely to be suspended, they're more likely to

end up incarcerated. Did so there's a whole what they call the school to prison pipeline that kind of starts with decisions that teachers make in front of kids in their classroom when the teachers are overworked, have skipped lunch, are tired, or have a student that is just acting up, and so one of the things that you can do are One of the things that teachers who have found some success and controlling the impulse to discipline students sort of rashly have done is that they can do things

as simple as dropping a pencil or having these strategies that Peter Goldwitzer at n YU calls if then strategies, which means you anticipate the situations we're gonna act impulsively, and you come up with a plan in advance, and you say to yourself, Okay, if I get into the classroom and I'm really tired and I've skipped lunch, and if you know, Roger speaks up at a turn, I will take three deep breaths before I say anything, or I will ring a bell, or I will drop my

pencil and count ten. And you make up plans for kind of situations you might face in the future where you're going to act impulsively in your normal way of being, and you kind of set up then an action you stayed affirmatively what you'll do to fix that problem, and you can do it for something like going to the gym.

You know, I'm not going to the gym these days, but I'm still exercising, and if I want to make sure that I don't let the weather stop me from getting out for a bike ride, I could make up an if then strategy. I could say, Okay, if it's raining, then I will put on some really great music about rainstorms, I will suit up in my favorite rain jacket, and I will go out anyway. It's sort of like setting yourself up for the scenarios that you might face in the future that might lead you to make sort of

decisions against your long term goals. The term that you introduced in the book around these teachers in these moments I absolutely love, which is vulnerable decision points. And you know, I think again, this is an area as addicts with lots of experience that we get very good at because, you know, one of the first things you learn in like a twelve step program, they say don't get too hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, right, because then those things mimic wanting to drink.

If you're too hungry, if you're too angry, if you're too tired, you're gonna want to drink. You've got to plan ahead to avoid those scenarios, you know, and we do a lot of if then's too you know, if I go to this event and I feel this way, then I will implementation intentions is what they're called. I use them in the coaching all the time, you know, and I think it's really important to think about, like

you said, to kind of know like question. I often will ask a client, like, what could go wrong with this plan? And if then, if that happens, then I'll do this if that happens, you know. And I love that idea of impulse barriers also, right, This is why it's like very common sense, like if you don't want to eat junk food, don't have it in the house.

Not having it in the house is the impulse barrier, right, because you have to get in your car and drive, and it gives you time to go, hang on a second, maybe I don't really want that brownie, you know, but if it's sitting right there on the counter. So you just said so many great things in there that I just kind of wanted to re emphasize. Absolutely, I'm glad to hear that you use the if then strategies and what the behavioral science shows on this, which is pretty comprehensive.

It's not just one or two studies. It's stead these of people across all different contexts, and you think it sounds sort of like elementary or too basic, or the kind of thing that wouldn't work if you were a serious addict or if you had serious mental health problems. But it turns out it works even better among people who are schizophrenic, people who are recovering, people who have

different kinds of mental health problems mental illness. And it's not clear why that's the case, but I think what's so interesting is that it also gets at this point about agency and choice and focusing on the decision points. So when you make an if and statement or an implementation intention, as you nicely pointed out, you are stating something that you will do affirmatively in the future. You're not just kind of passively like ruminating on a plan

what's going to happen in the future. You're actually saying, if this contingency happens, if this wild card gets thrown down, this is how I'm going to handle it. And it's really affirming to be able to do that and then to remember that you did that, and it turns out to help people more than if they just you know, have a vague sense of what they would do, but they don't make that very specific. I will do this statement. That's right. It does sound very elementary, but it's not.

And I agree with you. I think it's even as somebody who wrestles with depression, I know it's so critical for them because one of the things that seems to happen with depression is that my ability to decide make decisions is sort of gone. It's like the part of my brain that I need the most isn't there when I need it the most, which is why it's so

helpful to have decided ahead of time. The example I always give, it's a really simplistic example, though, but it's a really good one, is that I know music helps. But if I feel depressed and I go, oh, let me go look at music, I just look. I just scroll the no, no, no, none of it sounds good. So I've already got a playlist built and all I do is go hit that playlist, turn it up. Okay, it works, you know, because I just know in that moment,

my decision making isn't there. I love that. I'm going to steal that, because yeah, you can feel so despondent sometimes that you don't have any ability to even summon up the tools that will help you. So it's doing something on behalf of your future self, right, it's kind of baking in that solution and advance. Yeah. I think people who deal with mental health, well, often they figure out how to sort of patch together an emotional first aid kit, right, so they just sort of know when

these things happen. Here's what I'll do. Often talk about this with addicts. It's the problem is that the part of your brain that can think clearly about why you don't want to use is the part of your brain that goes offline when you get really stressed. You know, you're stressed in your flight and fight system is activated. The parts of your brain that are rational are just

less active. But that's when you need them because you're going, well, wait a second, why don't I want to Well, I don't know, and knowing having predecided written it out, you know, it just it helps with all that stuff. It's really fascinating. Yeah, it's a great connection to this work that I hadn't fully wrapped my head around. But I'm glad to be

talking about this. There's another quote you have in the book that is both really true and strikes me as very funny at the same time, which is time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils, which I just think is is so good but true. Like, you know, we can't only count on time to teach us. We run out. You know. That's why it's so helpful to learn from other people's mistakes. Well, yeah, that's Hector BerliOS. And I think that the challenge there is what do

we remember? What gets steered in our memory and what gets passed down? And we can often be trapped by the past, I think, you know. I tell this story in the book about the Munich Olympic Games and this guy who was hired to anticipate scenarios of what could go wrong at the games, and this is sort of a cautionary tale about relying too much on scenario planning.

And he came up with all these scenarios of what could go wrong at the nineteen seventy two Munich Olympics, and one of the scenarios he came up with was so handily what ended up happening at the games. He envisioned a group of terrorists climbing the Olympic fence at dawn, capturing Israeli athletes, holding them hostage, and some very simple, inexpensive precautions like having armed guards around the perimeter of the Olympic village or not housing the athletes by nationality.

Knowing that there were Palestinian athletes who really wanted to come to the games, because Palestine is not recognized as a country, you know, by the Olympic Committee, were not able to come to the Games, and so there were groups that were reacting to that. So he was ignored, and he was handily ignored, in part because of the intention of the Olympic organizers of the seventy two Olympics

to correct for the past. So they were holding onto this memory of the ninety six Olympics, which was the last time Germany had hosted the Olympics in Berlin, which Hitler had presided over, and so they were trying to correct their reputation. Basically, they were trying trying to make these games de hydro in spilo, which means like the

care free Games, the cheerful games. They had this cute little docks and that was their mass got and they were just so intent on doing that that they neglected the risk, they neglected to think and take seriously these negative scenarios that they were presented with by someone who

is actually a pretty good future thinker, future planner. And it relates to our own lives, and that I think sometimes our most steering visceral memories right becomes sort of traps for how we think about what's possible in the future, instead of being able to imagine a fuller range of possibilities. And we kind of need to need ways to break

out of just relying on our past. And because I mentioned that the ability to imagine the future really relies upon our episodic memory, we are kind of projecting the

past onto our future all the time. And so one of the things we need to do, I think, to enrich our sense of what can happen in the future, to play with more futures, play with more scenarios, is to you know, read books, watch films, talk to people who are not like us, all the things, you know, getting engaged in novels about worlds and societies that you don't know well that can sort of populate your mind

with different kinds of possibilities. I love that idea. What you're pointing to with that is that we can't really imagine something that we haven't experienced in some way, even if it's not directly like we're combining things, but it's the input of all these different things that go in, like you say, movies, books, films, our own background. It's so amazing to me. So often as I'm populating any future scenario, I am stunned by how often the geography

of my childhood is almost always present. It's like, you know, I'm thinking about something in a building, and it's a building from when I was a kid, or it's a trees or a field, or it's just like it's it all is, it's all shaped by that. As I'm reading a novel, it's like you're you're sort of visualized in

the worlds, but it's almost always something I've seen before. Yeah, And I think, know there's a way in which the past can be really helpful to us for the future because of that too, right, Because there are there are ways in which we can rely on the past to help us, but we're often not looking far enough back too. So that's the reason for that quote. You know, history

teach people what it kills. His pupils will we could actually have learned, you know, from the nineteen eighteen flu pandemic, for the pandemic we're living through right now, we could have learned from you know, thousands of years ago tsunamis before the tsunami in Japan in eleven and in fact, there were a couple of villages in Japan that actually had markers that warned them against fleeing to particular sites

or against building below particular lines. And they were really affective because they made specific warnings to the future and they were carried over generations, the lesson to not flee to this particular place or to not build the lowest certain line. So I think one thing we can also do as thinking about being alive today, like what is

it to be alive today? And what do we want to leave to the future, or is to think about what lessons are useful for the future to know from us right Like what do we want people to know about this incredible time we're living through, Like we're wearing masks when we go outside. We're living in a time of incredible you know, kind of transformation and consciousness about racial justice and protests, Like there's so many interesting things happening in our world today, some of which are really

hard for a lot of people. But there's a way of looking at them sort of in a longer span of time and asking the question of what do we want to warn the future about? What do we want to tell them? And we may not be able to put it in uh, you know, message in a bottle and a time capsule and have anyone actually pick it up, But the methods that seem to work in terms of carrying warnings to the future are treated more like heirlooms.

When people actually passed down knowledge generation to generation, they passed down the value placed on that and still the

meaning in each generation. Yeah, we're near the end of our time, and I want to circle around here and talk about something that I thought was really interesting and useful in the book, and it ties to what you just said a minute ago talking about the social justice movements that are happening right now, and you describe in the book sociologist Martial Gands talking about why certain social

movements endure over time. And I was wondering if we could just close with you know, what is it that makes certain social movements able to endure long enough to make real change. So Ganz told me about social movements having imagined visions of the future that were positive. So imagining a world or society in which kids of every race can go to school together, play together, people can thrive at every level of society, no matter they're race.

So really concrete visions of the future that drove the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties, concrete ideas that helped the farm workers movements that he worked as

part of. So imagining a better future, whether it's for you or your kids, or your nieces or nephews or god kids or the next generation, is a way to get yourself passed right, the hardship and the blowback you get in the short term when you're trying to make big systemic change, when you're trying to make social change, political change, And I think anchoring ourselves to these vivid, positive visions of how we want to make society better is kind of how we can keep going, how people

can keep going at almost everything they do. But certainly in the current social justice movements, I think it's worthwhile to think about the success of those in the past and how they really didn't just offer sort of a resistance to something. It wasn't just not this, It wasn't just you know today, it's not just not Trump. But what does it look like? What does it what does

the society you want look like? That's a big part of what worries me about the progressive agenda right now is there's an awful lot of not this, you know, and and not as much I think what we do want. The other thing that was in that section that Gans talked about was how these movements characterized setbacks, right that they actually think through like, yeah, we're gonna have setbacks,

and how we respond to those. And I think that's the other pieces realizing, you know, to tie this back to the personal I'm working with clients, I'm always like, well, you're going to get off track, Like it's inevitable that you're going to be doing well and then you're gonna get off track. What matters is how you respond to

that exactly. And I think there's a real analogy there to kind of the growth mindset, which is that, you know, the successful social movements of the past have often had leaders who when there's a major setback, they characterize it as a moment of learning and growth for the movement instead of characterizing it as they got us and you know, now we've got to rebuild from this whole thing. It's about saying that we've learned something and we're going to

be better as a result of this. And I think that can be something that applies to leaders in any real whether you're leading a social movement, or you're leading a company or a neighborhood association or a family. And I think it's just something really important to hang onto because if you really think about it from a long view, a lot of if you think about your past failures from a decade ago or fifteen years ago, right almost certainly taught you something. So I think the metaphor works

well whether it's the individual or it's the grand political movement. YEA, Well, we are at the end of our time. But thank you so much for coming on. I really did enjoy the book. I thought it was really really well written, and I really enjoyed reading it. And this has been a lovely conversation, So thank you so much. I've loved it. To thank you, Eric. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to

support the one you Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support now. We are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level and become a member of

the one you Feed community. Go to when you feed dot net slash Join the One you Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show.