# Future You  ## Episode metadata - Episode title: Future You - Show: TED Radio Hour - Owner / Host: NPR - Guests: [Bina Venkataraman](https://share.snipd.com/person/8a83f244-d677-4233-97aa-eadf93e8e2cd), [Shankar Vendantam](https://share.snipd.com/person/94d384d4-824c-4e4f-85c6-11215c6d20d9), [Hal Hirschfeld](https://share.snipd.com/person/bd7e97f1-fc05-4e1b-8c90-c23db9aeed22) - Episode publish date: 2025-10-10 - Episode AI description: Join Hal Hirschfeld, a psychologist who studies our connection with future selves, Bina Venkataraman, a columnist on long-term thinking, and Shankar Vedantam, a journalist exploring behavioral insights. They delve into why we often prioritize present needs over future ones and the brain's perception of our future selves as strangers. Hirschfeld shares eye-opening experiments on decision-making, while Vedantam discusses how to embrace change. Venkataraman highlights the importance of collective memory in planning for future risks, advocating for stewardship for the next generations. - Mentioned books: [The Good Ancestor, A Radical Prescription for Long-Term Thinking](https://share.snipd.com/book/f65594b7-288b-4911-8142-75117a46019f) by [Roman Kriznaric](https://share.snipd.com/person/ec435b53-69db-4ac8-b7ad-19040f1b0444), [Useful Delusions, The Power and Paradox of the Self-Deceiving Brain](https://share.snipd.com/book/6c9739ac-b981-46c7-962a-50f41d863986) by [Shankar Vedantam](https://share.snipd.com/person/4aacb16e-d80f-4dea-bb9d-088eeb2a6425), [Bill Messler](https://share.snipd.com/person/7438d188-6923-4098-8bc9-75e1943cb669), [Your Future Self, How to Make Tomorrow Better Today](https://share.snipd.com/book/ad2783d0-4306-4e62-81cd-e78ad1364d15) by [Hal Hirschfeld](https://share.snipd.com/person/bd7e97f1-fc05-4e1b-8c90-c23db9aeed22), [The Optimist's Telescope](https://share.snipd.com/book/ab22607f-dd7a-4ef3-b189-df43b6b606ce) by [Bina Venkataraman](https://share.snipd.com/person/8a83f244-d677-4233-97aa-eadf93e8e2cd) - Duration: 49:38 - Episode URL: [Open in Snipd](https://share.snipd.com/episode/07508ec0-f6b9-4e66-8b38-9bf70bf0cab0) - Show URL: [Open in Snipd](https://share.snipd.com/show/2d26da02-6242-46a8-8cb5-c29019cf6744) - Export date: 2026-02-17T23:20:52 ## Snips ### [Future Self Appears As Another Person](https://share.snipd.com/snip/f1fd6c6f-58ae-4f85-bccf-e9e71a2ac6b6) 🎧 02:06 - 05:06 (02:59) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/4148a682-032f-481c-ac2b-a52c54e579d5" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - The brain activates different regions for present-self and future-self, treating future-you like another person. - That neural separation helps explain why people favor present rewards over long-term benefits. #### 💬 Quote > The future self looks like another person. > — Hal Hirschfeld Hal Hirschfeld on neural evidence that we perceive future selves as others #### 📚 Transcript **Manoush Zomorodi:** started looking into the neurological research about our perceptions of ourselves. And there wasn't much there. But another finding really struck him. I **Hal Hirschfeld:** 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. In **Manoush Zomorodi:** 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 **Hal Hirschfeld:** future? And I had this sort of connect the dots moment, 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? Basically, **Manoush Zomorodi:** would your brain identify your future self as a different person? So in 2007, Hal devised a test. **Hal Hirschfeld:** 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. As **Manoush Zomorodi:** participants lay down in an MRI machine, the researchers would ask them questions about who they are right now. **Hal Hirschfeld:** You know, are you funny? Are you smart? Are you sarcastic? Are you quiet? These sorts of, like, trait questions. Then **Manoush Zomorodi:** they'd ask them the same questions about two people they probably didn't know personally, but who they could picture in their minds. **Hal Hirschfeld:** Matt Damon and Natalie Portman. **Manoush Zomorodi:** Okay, wait. So you're saying that you would ask them, is Matt Damon funny? Is Natalie Portman funny or smart? Yeah. **Hal Hirschfeld:** So you'd be either making a judgment about Matt Damon or Natalie Portman. So **Manoush Zomorodi:** 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 asked the same questions. Are **Hal Hirschfeld:** you funny? Are you smart? Are you sarcastic? Are you quiet? And **Manoush Zomorodi:** the same region of the brain lit up as when people were thinking about Matt or Natalie, meaning in **Hal Hirschfeld:** the brain, the self looks like another person. --- ### [Make Future You Visually Real](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6d348c3a-df35-4b9e-ad71-42548160e14b) 🎧 10:50 - 12:33 (01:43) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/b651f61d-9614-4d23-bcaa-a8520640aa0b" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Make your future self vivid to increase saving and planning behavior. - Hal Hirschfeld found age-progression images raised retirement contributions by about 16%. #### 💬 Quote > When they're exposed to these future selves, they express a little more desire to save for the future. > — Hal Hirschfeld Hal Hirschfeld on using aged images to nudge saving behavior #### 📚 Transcript **Hal Hirschfeld:** 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 things that really sort of push the ball down the field in terms of behavior. So 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. know, sag the cheeks and add some age spots. **Manoush Zomorodi:** There's a filter for this, right? Where you can see what you look like 20 years from now. **Hal Hirschfeld:** When 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 that I get 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 express a little more desire to save for the future. We worked with the 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. 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? --- ### [Aim For Harmony Between Nows](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ef8dbcb3-aa2d-4bb4-8768-b5c5769fc4ee) 🎧 17:51 - 18:40 (00:49) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/22e4d6b1-77fb-481a-845c-72a5afe0a1de" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Seek harmony between present and future needs by finding actions that serve both. - Hal Hirschfeld suggests prioritizing choices that benefit you now and later to reduce conflict between selves. #### 💬 Quote > Harmony implies that two voices can be singing at the same time at different levels and almost work together. > — Hal Hirschfeld Hal Hirschfeld on balancing current and future self interests #### 📚 Transcript **Hal Hirschfeld:** You know, you're on the seesaw, you're either up, 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. I think the same could be said for our current and future selves. There decisions we can make right now that aren't just for the future, but could be for now and for later as well. **Shankar Vedantam:** I **Hal Hirschfeld:** 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. --- ### [The Illusion Of Continuity](https://share.snipd.com/snip/674edef2-6ba7-4aaf-b69b-62bc7451b84b) 🎧 22:10 - 23:17 (01:07) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/e900bf52-9214-4050-bc4d-9856c11c6e5d" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - We remember large changes in the past but expect little change in ourselves going forward. - Shankar Vedantam calls this the "illusion of continuity." #### 💬 Quote > When we look forwards, we tend to imagine that we're going to be the same people in the future. > — Shankar Vedantam Shankar Vedantam on how people underestimate future personal change #### 📚 Transcript **Shankar Vedantam:** 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 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. --- ### [A Marriage, A Directive, And Changed Wishes](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ce254609-1dd0-4e87-a67e-32e485db89fb) 🎧 24:01 - 26:43 (02:41) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/09e5cdd4-2a82-4bf8-a0a2-dfc3a4e3d01c" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - John and Stephanie Rink married young and planned for end-of-life based on earlier wishes. - Stephanie later reversed her directives when ill, showing how past plans can mismatch future preferences. #### 💬 Quote > Stephanie wanted to be put on life support. > — Shankar Vedantam Shankar Vedantam telling the story of John and Stephanie Rink #### 📚 Transcript **Shankar Vedantam:** Yeah, we featured the story of John and Stephanie Rink, 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, Stephanie would pay house calls to people who were 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. As **Shankar Vedantam:** 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 **Shankar Vedantam:** 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. Rinker, would you like us to put you on a ventilator? And she nodded yes. And that's when my jaw dropped. **Shankar Vedantam:** Stephanie wanted to be put on life support. What? No. I just want to no, she doesn't. No, she doesn't want that. She said, yes. 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 **Manoush Zomorodi:** 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, **Shankar Vedantam:** the decision would have been made. And if 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 advanced directive is Stephanie at age 35 or age 40 making plans for her future self. --- ### [Design Who You Become](https://share.snipd.com/snip/128ddad6-203a-4d9d-9122-faf1dc35afe7) 🎧 27:46 - 30:28 (02:41) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/cd181b91-8c04-4504-ba91-465ced8b0aec" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Accept you will change and deliberately shape the person you want to become. - Use curiosity, humility, and bravery to build future capacities rather than assume fixed limits. #### 💬 Quote > The engine to do this is curiosity, which is that if we only are doing the things that we're used to doing, ... we're never going to expand our horizons. > — Shankar Vedantam Shankar Vedantam on actively constructing your future self #### 📚 Transcript **Manoush Zomorodi:** The first piece of advice is accepting this idea that you are going to be different in 30 years time. **Shankar Vedantam:** That's right. 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 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. You know, 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. 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, 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 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. --- ### [History Extends Our Planning Horizon](https://share.snipd.com/snip/b9eeb368-061c-42a1-b2c3-5f2bfa1553a1) 🎧 35:11 - 40:37 (05:26) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/239b6ef6-d31b-4e40-a3f1-a347161f1a66" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - Long-term planning benefits when societies preserve historical memory of risks. - Bina Venkataraman shows Onagawa used a 1,000-year-old tsunami story to build safer infrastructure. #### 💬 Quote > He knew the story of his hometown shrine, which had flooded in the year 869 after a tsunami. > — Bina Venkataraman Bina Venkataraman on how historical memory informed safer plant placement in Onagawa #### 📚 Transcript **Manoush Zomorodi:** But what about our collective connection to the future, to generations to come? How do we as societies form **Bina Venkataraman:** a relationship to people that **Manoush Zomorodi:** we will never know? There's **Bina Venkataraman:** some sense that as long as you do your own future planning, perhaps you'll be okay and the people you know will be okay 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. **Manoush Zomorodi:** This is Bina Venkatraman. I'm **Bina Venkataraman:** a columnist at the Washington Post and my book is The Optimist Telescope, Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age. **Manoush 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. There **Bina Venkataraman:** 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 report, 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. This led Bina **Manoush Zomorodi:** on a search to understand why some societies succeed and others fail to plan for their future. In 2017, she went to Fukushima, Japan. It **Bina Venkataraman:** 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. **Manoush Zomorodi:** Featuring on what looks like a meltdown. After the quake and the tsunami, a blast at the Deichi nuclear power plant in Fukushima. Its sheer power plain to see. Experts are warning that radiation levels now are rising at the Fukushima nuclear plant. In **Manoush Zomorodi:** 2011, a magnitude 9 earthquake hit Japan, causing massive tsunamis, one of which flooded the nuclear plant in Fukushima. **Bina Venkataraman:** Chemical **Manoush Zomorodi:** explosions, damage surrounding buildings, smoke was everywhere. And **Bina Venkataraman:** so this disaster led to a meltdown of the nuclear reactors and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. 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. 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. TEPCO **Manoush Zomorodi:** had done a risk analysis, but it hadn't looked far enough into the past. **Bina Venkataraman:** 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. Here's **Manoush Zomorodi:** Bina Venkatraman on the TED stage. In **Bina Venkataraman:** 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. It was the foresight of just one engineer, Yanosuke Hirai, that made that happen. 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. 869. Yes, yeah. That's 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. 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 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 local school children and sort of passed on through the generations. So **Manoush Zomorodi:** part of this future planning is taking the long view backwards and forwards. Yeah. **Bina Venkataraman:** 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. --- ### [Mark The Future, Then Teach It Forward](https://share.snipd.com/snip/93e72ac2-61fb-4790-a7b7-3a18a8346c49) 🎧 41:30 - 43:27 (01:56) <iframe src="https://share.snipd.com/embed/obsidian-player/snip/042c823a-a53e-4ae6-b084-45cd537f5bd2" width="100%" height="100" style="border: none; border-radius: 12px;" sandbox="allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-forms allow-popups allow-clipboard-write" ></iframe> - When planning for distant futures, accept language and symbols may lose meaning and involve future generations in interpretation. - Use intergenerational transmission rather than rely on fixed warnings alone. #### 💬 Quote > 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... > — Bina Venkataraman Bina Venkataraman on communicating hazards across millennia #### 📚 Transcript **Manoush Zomorodi:** 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? **Bina Venkataraman:** 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. Can **Manoush Zomorodi:** you share some of the ideas that came up? Some of them are really funny in your book. There **Bina Venkataraman:** 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. 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. --- Created with [Snipd](https://www.snipd.com) | Highlight & Take Notes from Podcasts