 It has been observed that, although humans are time travelers, we seem to be stuck in first gear on a very straight road. Many people wish they could stop for a bit to enjoy the scenery, or even better, go and reverse. Others are eager to speed up to see what lies in store for us over the horizon. The future. It's coming, but never quite arrives. Like heated bread becoming toast, the future changes as it draws near, becoming the past by way of a brief and tumultuous stop through the present. For millennia, soothsayers, fortune tellers, and stock market analysts have made a decent, if somewhat perverse living, by predicting what the future has in store. Unfortunately, we can't know what's coming before it's occurring, and even then, we're pretty bad at figuring out what the heck just happened. But what if the future could send messages back to us, and would we be prepared to receive its communications without descending into madness? Start video stream. No computer. Start video. You know what? Never mind. I'll just do it myself. Okay. We're live. Hey, Graham and Ashconn here. Hello. We hope you've all been enjoying your float conference so far. If our appearance looks a bit surprising to you, it's because we're from the future. After Zoom declared itself an independent nation state, they had the resources to advance their video conferencing technology to the point that we can now do cross-temporal video streaming. It's free to use as long as you include an advertisement to get people excited about products that don't exist yet. Pretemporal marketing became all the rage in the business world after Facebook merged with Ancestry.com. Which reminds me, tired of all that antimatter giving you a space rash every time you go to the Bezosphere to pick up your groceries? Well, with anti-antimatter cream, you're guaranteed to kiss those little body craters goodbye. Made, of course, by the friendliest household name in space-related body care, Auntie Jane. Auntie's anti-antimatter cream because your matter matters. Remember to pick your tube as soon as it's invented near you. Okay. Great. That's done. So we're broadcasting from the future because, well, we know that things are hard right now in the year 2020 and we wanted to send a message of hope to let you know how things turn out. I mean, as you can see, things are actually going pretty well. We live in a futuristic spaceship traveling through futuristic space while wearing these futuristic space clothes. Do you mind passing me my futuristic space water? Oh, yeah. Which one is yours? It's on the futuristic side table. There. Yeah. There you go. We just landed here at the float conference headquarters on the 47th moon of Saturn. Yeah. The first 46 moons were already taken, but, you know, we're not out with those schlubs past the 60th moon, so it's pretty worse. Well, we thought we'd start our futuristic space presentation by catching you guys up on some of the most important things that have happened since your time. Yeah. Let's see here. Scientists decided that peanuts are actually a nut, not just a legume. It turns out, giraffes were just three zebras wearing a trench coat. Pants are now called leg sweaters. A dog was voted in as president, and politics have really calmed down since then. Yeah. He's a really good boy. We've also transitioned to a fully tennis ball based economy, surprisingly not at all related to last point. Oh, the color green. It doesn't exist anymore. And the earth now has a planetary anthem, which is the theme song to Space Jam. Pluto is a planet again, but Neptune has mysteriously gone missing. But at some point we also just kind of lost track of whether we're in reality, reality or virtual reality. Pizza still exists. That's it. I just didn't want to worry you guys. And segues. Super cool for the first time. So as you can see, the future can be quite unpredictable. It's really hard to know what's coming just around the bend. I mean, the pandemic you're all living through right now is really a prime example of that, but it's tempting to think that it's just an anomaly. Even in so-called normal times though, the future is still incredibly wily and hard to figure out. Right. It may seem like as humans we've developed this good sense of how the world works and that we're totally able to exert our will on it. But the truth is that none of us really have any idea what lies ahead. And we can see countless examples of this from the world around us, from unexpected tragedies like the Titanic, the Hindenburg and the space Titanic, to the surprising delights of life, like when people win the lottery or when scientists discovered that Tom Hanks is a gene that makes him immortal. And we can see this fundamental unpredictability on the large scale as well. Think about how much human time and energy, how many human lives are spent trying to predict and control the future of governments and nations. But if you talk to someone 300 years ago, none of them would have said that some of the wealthiest countries in the world right now are wealthy because there just happened to be a bunch of liquid called oil sitting under their land. This was, of course, before we discovered that used epsom salt was a more efficient source of fuel rendering oil completely obsolete. Or think about stock market investors. Their entire profession is built around the idea that with enough knowledge, they can consistently choose stocks that will beat the market. But study after study has shown that most financial firms can't choose stocks that will grow faster than just the average rate that the whole stock market increases. And this is people who are like, that's their job. They're trying to make as much money as possible. And even though that is what they're hired to do, they might outperform the market some years, they can't do it reliably. And on a long enough timeline, they seem to grossly underperform. In fact, in 2008, Warren Buffett, probably the person best known for managing to make money off the stock market, placed a bet with a hedge fund to see which of them could make a higher return over the next 10 years. The hedge fund used all of its fancy hedge fund trickery, managing and adjusting their investment over the course of the decade to try to optimize their outcome. While Warren Buffett just put all of his money into an index fund, which is basically a way of just kind of blanket investing in the stock market as a whole. And he just ignored it for the entire time. At the end of those 10 years, Warren Buffett had made over three times more money doing absolutely no managing or any paying attention to his investment than the hedge fund had managed to make. Or another example, you can think about how at the end of the pandemic, the amount of sourdough starter in the world hit a critical mass and formed a collective hive mind, overthrowing the Canadian government and forming the first non-human hockey league. They're very good. In fact, the things that often have the largest impact on our lives and our world are the things that we don't see coming. Think back on the events or choices or random encounters that have had the biggest impact on your life. How many of those were planned? Or just think back to whatever made you decide to invest so much of your time into the world of floating. Back in high school, how many of you knew you wanted to be float center owners or float tank manufacturers or float researchers? We're really, really bad at predicting what we'll want in the future. And what opportunities will present themselves to us. For all of us, it's those things that we didn't know and couldn't predict that have the largest effect on our lives. Why should we think it's gonna be any different going forward? Why keep pretending like we have any idea what's going to happen? And we're not just here to tell you to accept the indisputable uncertainty of existence. But rather to embrace it. Give it a big futuristic hug. Uncertainty isn't necessarily a bad thing. Compared to certain doom, for example. Uncertain doom seems pretty okay. The problem is we tend to be overly worried about the negative impacts of uncertainty. And we undervalue the benefits that uncertainty brings to all of our lives. And it's human nature to fear the downsides of uncertainty more than we can appreciate the upsides. We even have names for this tendency, things like loss of version bias, zero risk bias, and the pseudo certainty effect. For example, in research that's been done, people tend to feel the pain of losing something about twice as much as they feel the pain or they feel the joy of gaining that same thing. So yeah, for an example, let's just say that someone gave you this nice new future vest that you really like. It's got all sorts of vesti pockets, including a fifth dimensional pocket that allows you to store your neoplasma safely. Now, let's say you're out taking a stroll with your shiny new vest on. And someone hovering next to you in the interplanetary transport tube looks at the vest and goes, wow, that's a really nice face vest. I'd pay you 40 tennis balls for it. You think for a moment and reply, nah, I wouldn't want to sell it for anything less than 50 TVs. The science says, were you two have instead just encountered this same exact vest in a clothing store, like Spacies, you'd probably only be willing to pay about 25 tennis balls tops to buy it. So with our brains being hardwired to fear loss and risk, it's important to remember that there's a lot of good things that come from uncertainty. And we even have a name for it. We call them opportunities. The chaos of the world allows us to have chance encounters, to be in the right place at the right time and to have unexpected experiences that introduce us to things that will become our passions. There have been countless numbers of accidental discoveries through human history that kind of illustrate our point here that have turned into inventions that have greatly benefited humanity. Superglue, penicillin, Viagra, X-rays, Play-Doh, pills that expand into full-size food, also a result of Viagra and LSD. Sometimes uncertainty allows you to follow your dreams. You didn't even know existed when you were younger. Sometimes uncertainty gets you a cool new job because you just happen to know someone who knows someone. Sometimes uncertainty is how we meet our loved ones. Sometimes uncertainty means you get a curly fry mixed in with your normal fries. So if there's so much good that can come from the unpredictability of the future, why the heck are we so frightened by it? Well, if you have plans and you want them to work out, uncertainty can really get in the way. Plans tend to be inflexible. And if you try to rigidly hold onto your plans by fighting the changing circumstances of life, life is going to win. And the more specific those plans are, the more likely the inherent uncertainty of the universe is going to get in your way. Sometimes you just flat out can't accomplish what you want. Sometimes your priorities shift. Sometimes the state of the world changes. And what seemed like an excellent decision a year ago now seems silly or risky. Nothing's inherently wrong with any of these outcomes. But if your happiness, like if your sense of worth and accomplishment is tied up in actually achieving that specific goal, all of these outcomes seem like failure. And we tend to be hard on ourselves as humans when we fail at things that we care about. Instead, when you think about what you want from life, think about it more thematically. Do you value calmness, security, silliness, novelty, knowledge acquisition? When you think about your pursuits as general themes as opposed to specific results, it's much easier to adapt with the uncertainty of what the future brings. Yeah, instead of working harder and harder to get to some destination that was set by your past self, you can make decisions in the moment that take into account your current situation and context. And when you know the thematic values that you want for your life, you can always make the decisions that help you get towards these goals. If happiness is your goal, for example, you can imagine many, many possible ways to be happy. But if happiness depends on achieving a specific end goal, you may never get there. Let's say, for example, you're a world-class surgeon. Your entire self-identity revolves around your famed surgical skills until one day you're in a horrible car accident that renders your hands useless. You spend months pursuing every avenue of Western medicine as to offer with no luck until eventually you come across someone who recovered from an accident even worse than your own. They tell you the answers you seek will be found at an ancient school located in the Himalayas. You travel to this school only to find the techniques they endorse, a shoe of the medical science that you have dedicated your life to, and instead rely on the art of mystics and multi-dimensional manipulation. You struggle against this paradigm shift, but slowly you start to accept the constructs of this new reality and even embrace the powers that they bring after finally relinquishing your previous self-imposed notion that the surgical precision of your hands was your crowning contribution to society. You realize that your true goal the whole time has just been to help humanity and that there are many different paths that allow you to fulfill this potential. Eventually you enter the dark dimension to fight Dormammu face-to-face, and despite him being an all-powerful universal force, you use your guile and manipulation of the fact that- It's the plot to Doctor Strange. Everyone knows that's the plot to Doctor Strange. That movie hasn't come out for them yet. They don't know that. It came out in 2016. They definitely know about it. Okay, anyway, the point still stands. You need generalizable goals, not specific ones. So if, for some reason, you listen to us and actually follow what advice you can take from us, you focus on general thematic goals related to things that you can control, does this mean that things will work out and you'll be happy? Who knows? You could decide you're gonna try it and immediately get hit by a comet on your way to work. But we can tell you that you're a lot less likely to get upset at life's inevitable curve balls when you're not fixated on a specific objective. And especially when your satisfaction isn't based on situations or people that are outside of your control. We can also say that when you're flexible about where you're going and even about what you want, you're a lot more likely to discover and take advantage of the amazing opportunities that surround you every day. And you're just more likely to have a good time during your brief stint here as a human time traveler. And with that, we'd like to bring this future broadcast to a close by answering a few questions from the audience. Let me just look at the historical logs of this broadcast. Ah, it looks like Matt Smith is just about to ask a question. His question is, hey, I'm no quantum physicist over here, but since you live in the future, don't you know how it turns out, thus undermining your message of uncertainty through the very premise of your talk? Great question. Thank you, Matt. The answer is no. Specifically for the sake of this talk, reality does not exist on a single timeline, but instead we live in a universe of multiple, perhaps infinite different timelines, akin to the Marvel multiverse. We only know what happens here, not what will happen in yours. Let's go on to the next question. Let's see. How far in the future are you actually calling from? Thanks for the question. Well, our futuristic space calendar is pretty different from what existed in your time, especially since we made the switch to dog years. Let me just do some quick calculations here. Yep, divide by seven. And okay, by your time system, we're talking to you from what would be called December 16th, 2020. Okay, let's see. Next question here is from Roy Vor. And he says, I give up. I thought I could give a better presentation than you guys, but I realize now that I am wrong and always have been. You two are in every way, my superior, with your youthful smiles and your heads full of hair. How could I have ever, oh my God! What's happening? Computer? Oh God! Computer, display on the viewing screen. No display on the viewing screen. They look angry. Damn flux in his self-replicating auto bots that started out as an innocent experiment to create an artificial collective consciousness but quickly got out of control resulting in the unintended formation of an army of super intelligent uncontrollable space invaders. It's a good thing we planned specifically for this situation. Initiate plan 257A, Fluxian evasive maneuvers. Activate the hydrocoil. Hydrocoil activated. Invert the parabolic perambulator. Okay, I got it. Set the thermopilons to three. Oh no, it's not enough. I'm gonna set them to four. The ship can't take it. Quick, purge the fluber fluid. Purge the fluber fluid. God, that's too fast. We can't shake them. I think this is it, my friend. Our sweet song of life has reached its final bar. Wait, look out there. What is that flying towards us? It's some sort of white rectangular prism with rivets and yes, yes, a hinged door. Oh my God, oh my God, we're saved. It's here. Quick, quick, enter the escape pod. And so time marches on. The merely possible becomes the certain. Hopes turn into reality. And this future broadcast comes to a dramatic, but ultimately family-friendly close. What further adventures lie in store for our heroes? As always, where the future is concerned, all we can do is wait and see. Tum, tum, tum, tum, tum. Little tum, tum, tum, tum. Little tum, tum, tum, tum. Tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum, tum. Tum, tum, tum, tum. Thank you all and remember, for space rash, use Auntie's anti-anti-antimatter cream.