Becoming a Better Ancestor | Roman Krznaric

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] hello i'm alexander rose the executive director here at long now i'm joining you today from the interval in san francisco and our speaker today roman kuznerick will be joining us live from london where he'll also stay on to do questions afterwards roman is one of the research fellows here at the long now foundation and he's been writing about issues of long-term thinking for many years his newest book the good ancestor is possibly one of the most long now aligned books since stuart brand wrote clock of the long now today he's coalesced several of the principles of that book into kind of practical ways of thinking and doing long-term thinking and he's going to share several of those with us today welcome roman kuznerick a few years ago i was sitting in a log cabin in the austrian alps reading a book that set my mind on fire and this is the book the salt summaries seminars on long-term thinking published by the long now foundation in fact this book was so good that i read it twice and it contains these incredibly pithy summaries of the long now seminars going back to the year 2003 with extraordinary insights from thinkers ranging from geologists and astronomers to environmental historians and reading this book made me understand that long-term thinking is of extraordinary importance for the future of human civilization but while reading it i also recognize something else which is that in society at large we are facing a conceptual emergency of long-term thinking you can pick up a newspaper and see all sorts of people talking about the problem of short-termism and the need for long-term thinking ranging from medical doctors and politicians to tech ceos and designers but there is very little clear discussion about what long-term thinking really means whether there are different kinds of long-term thinking whether it's always good for us how to make it a social norm whether you can get better at it and that's exactly what i decided to explore in my book the good ancestor which tries to create a mental framework for thinking about long-term thinking and it comes out with these six different ways that we can think long term six different ways to become a good ancestor and i want to share some of those with you today but before doing that i want to just pinpoint exactly why long-term thinking matters it's clear that we live in an age of pathological short-termism our politicians can barely see past the next election or even the latest tweet businesses can't see past the next quarterly report markets spike then crash in speculative bubbles nations sit around international conference tables focused on their near-term interests while the planet burns and species disappear and as individuals where constantly answering the latest text and clicking the buy now button this is the age of the tyranny of the now and it's obvious i think that we need long-term thinking to deal with this tyranny of the now we need it to do long-term planning and public health care to get ready for the next pandemic that might be on the horizon we need it to tackle racial injustice that gets passed on from generation to generation embedded in criminal justice systems and cultural institutions more broadly we need it to prepare us for technological risks such as the risks from ai controlled lethal autonomous weapons and of course we need long-term thinking to help us confront the challenge of the climate crisis biodiversity loss soil degradation our addiction to fossil fuels and there's a kind of paradox here which is that the need for long-term thinking is incredibly urgent we need it right here right now and the way i think about this is that i believe that humankind has colonized the future we treat the future like a distant colonial outpost where we can freely dump ecological degradation and technological risk as if there was nobody there and it's a bit like the way when britain colonized australia in the 18th and 19th century they drew on a legal doctrine now known as terra nullius nobody's land they treated the continent as if there were no indigenous people of course they were and i think today what we've also got alongside terenalis is tempus nullius the future is seen as nobody's time an uninhabited territory that is ours for the taking and the tragedy is that tomorrow's generations aren't here to challenge this pillaging of their inheritance they can't leap in front of the king's horse like a suffragette or stay just sit in like a civil rights activist or go an assault march to defy their colonial oppressors like mahatma gandhi the grant had no political rights or representation they have no influence at the marketplace the great silent majority of future generations is rendered powerless but it can be very difficult to grasp the scale of this injustice so look at it this way there are 7.7 billion people alive today now over the past 50 000 years an estimated 100 billion people have been born and died but both of these are far outweighed by the nearly 7 trillion people who will be born over the next 50 000 years assuming current birth rates stabilize so there in that giant orange circle are all your grandchildren and their grandchildren and the friends and communities on whom they'll depend and i think the question that really matters is how are those future generations going to judge us for what we did or didn't do when we had the chance and somebody who really thought about this problem was the immunologist jonah sulk who together with his team in 1955 developed the first polio vaccine later in life he said there's one question that really matters and it's this are we being good ancestors in other words how are we going to be remembered by future generations and sulk believed that if we were going to tackle the great problems of the century such as the nuclear threat or our destruction of the living world then we would need to expand our time horizons and instead of thinking on a scale of seconds minutes and hours we need to think on a scale of decades centuries and millennia and in many ways i have good news which is that a global movement of time rebels has started to emerge absolutely committed to this kind of long-term thinking and intergenerational justice and we see their work in lots of different areas in the scientific world for example there's the svalbard global seed vault which is collecting millions of seeds in an indestructible rock bunker in the arctic circle that's designed to last a thousand years and preserve the planet's plant biodiversity or there are iconic project projects like the long now foundation's 10 000 year clock which is a slow time clock being built as we speak in the texas desert which is going to stay accurate for 10 000 years and become almost a secular altarpiece for a long-term thinking civilization helping us take responsibility for the generations to come and for the planet itself but there's a question here really which is how do we actually get better at long-term thinking and are we even actually capable of it well i believe that in order to become a better ancestor in long-term thinking we need to begin on a journey which starts in the human mind in fact in the human brain we know that there is a constant struggle going on in our minds between the drivers of short-termism and long-termism we experience it all the time do we party today or save for our pensions for tomorrow do we upgrade to the latest iphone or plant a seed in the ground for posterity and in fact these two different sides of short-term and long-term thinking brain and dilemma is actually mirrored in two different parts of the brain itself the short-term part of the brain is this i call it the marshmallow brain it's our neural wiring that we share with rats going back nearly 80 million years and this is the part of our brain that focuses on instant rewards and short-term gratification but the marshmallow brain of course is named after the famous marshmallow test a psychology text from the 1960s where a marshmallow was placed in front of children and if they could resist eating it for 15 minutes then they were rewarded with a second marshmallow and of course it turned out the majority of kids couldn't resist and snatched the snack and gobbled it up but the marshmallow brain is only part of the story of who we are because we have another part of our brains and here it is it's the acorn brain the acorn brain is the part that focuses on long-term thinking and planning and strategizing it's about planting seeds in the ground projects and ideals and policies that may not come to fruition and mature for years or even decades and we've all got one it lives here in the frontal lobe above the eyes particularly in a park called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex it's a new part of the brain it's only a couple of million years old but it's better developed in humans than most other animals so a chimpanzee for example plans for the future they might get a stick off a tree and strip off the leaves to turn it into a tool to poke into a termite hole but they will never make a dozen of these tools and set them aside for next week but that is precisely what a human being will do we are long-term planners extraordinaire we plan for our children's educations and save for them we make plans of song lists for our own funerals it's the acorn brain in action it's the acorn brain which helped us build the great wall of china and voyaged into space so what we need to do is learn to switch on our acorn brains so we can win this struggle going on with the marshmallow brain that's the beginning of becoming a long-term thinker to recognize that by nature we have this acorn brain built into us the question it really is how are we going to switch it on and i think to do that we need to recognize that in society at large there is what i think of as a tug of war for time going on between six drivers of short-termism and six ways to think long-term the six drivers of short-termism are dragging us over the edge of civilizational breakdown the six ways to think long-term are taking us towards a long-term future for people and planet and we need to draw on the six ways to think long this cognitive toolkit for long-term thinking that i mentioned before in order to really switch on our acorn brain and become better ancestors now if you look at the six drivers of short-termism some of them are quite familiar like digital distraction or political presentism you know the short-term electoral cycles some of them are deeper such as the tyranny of the clock because the invention of the clock in the medieval period is a key moment in shortening our time horizons time started being measured and sped up it's been going on for 500 years by 1700 most clocks had minute hands by 1800 they had second hands and the clock became the key instrument of the industrial revolution keeping those assembly lines moving faster and faster today of course we've got nanosecond speed share trading going on which has brought the future closer and closer to the present but each of those drivers of six short termism is matched by a form of long-term thinking and now what i'd love to do is talk about each of these different ways to think long term because i think we need all of them we need to cultivate all of them to become better ancestors so the first kind is the idea of deep time humility this is to recognize that humankind that has only been around for a couple of hundred thousand years is just an eye blink in the cosmic story in fact deep time is quite a new idea it only really emerged in the late 18th century when geologists started discovering the evidence that the earth was far older than the 6 000 years that the bible was telling western culture but was in fact hundreds of thousands millions maybe billions of years old and that we were just a tiny moment in this long history of the planet and the universe itself but it can be quite difficult to really grasp that huge temporal scale and the writer john mcphee who invented the term deep time came up with a beautiful metaphor to try and help us grasp its meaning he said consider the earth's history as the old measure of the english yard the distance from the king's nose to the tip of his outstretched hand one stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases human history that's short we've only been around for that very eye blink but let's remember too that deep time doesn't just go far into the past it goes long into the future in six billion years any creatures that will be around to see al sun die will be as different from us as we are from the first single celled bacteria so this is what this humility of deep time is all about recognizing there's so much time before us so much time to come and who are we to break the great chain of life without ecological destruction and dangerous technologies what kind of arrogance is that that's what i get out of deep time and it helps me think to myself okay let me try and get in touch with that longer sense of time that ecological choreography of the planet the long cycles that we've lost touch with i'm not saying this is easy but we can make the effort you know i was recently on summer vacation with my children and we went to a beach on the south coast of england and in our hands we held belamites a fossil squid-like creature that was 195 million years old no human being had ever set its eyes on this fossil that we'd hunted hours to find but that gave us a sense of the wonder of deep time or you can go and visit your local ancient tree probably within some miles or a short bicycle ride from where you live you there might be a tree that's over a thousand years old maybe it's a californian bristlecone pine which is four thousand years old not far from me there's a yew tree which is maybe 1200 years old and you can sit underneath it and follow the advice of the vietnamese monk titana han who said don't just do something sit there in other words don't take a selfie of yourself but try and absorb that sense of deep time now a second form of long-term thinking is what's known as cathedral thinking this is the idea of embarking on projects with very long time horizons decades and centuries ahead even beyond the scale of our own lifetimes themselves and of course the idea of cathedral thinking relates to medieval cathedral builders who started building their religious edifices knowing they'd never necessarily be finished within their own lifetimes and many people say well these are just you know rare occasions of medieval european cathedral humans don't really have this capacity for long-term thinking well in fact if you look over the last five 000 years of human history there is ample evidence of our capacity to embark on these cathedral thinking projects there you can see 45 different kinds of cathedral thinking that i've gathered that appear in my book the good ancestor religious buildings infrastructure urban design scientific endeavors and i'd like to say something about just a few of them you can see there an image of alm minster a lutheran church in southwest germany this is a classic example of cathedral thinking in 1377 the good citizens of alm decided they wanted to have their own church they'd finance it themselves and well it wasn't finished for more than 500 years until 1890 probably the world's longest crowdfunding project but they embarked on it anyway knowing they'd never see it finished within their time social movements too are engaged in cathedral thinking the first suffragette organization emerged in manchester in 1867 they didn't achieve their aims of votes for women for more than half a century and that's typically the case with major social movements in issues like civil rights or indigenous rights these struggles go on for decades and many of them are still ongoing but this is all a kind of cathedral thinking in the realm of social change and then you can also see there a photograph from victorian london these are the great sewers of london which were built following the great stink of 1858 in the decades leading up to then raw sewage was being dumped in the thames river tens of thousands of people would die each year from diseases such as cholera but in the hot summer of 1858 the stench from the thames was so bad that it even wafted into the houses of parliament right on its bank and members of parliament couldn't stand it that they had to put masks over their faces and this finally prompted them to pass the legislation to build london's first public sewage system it was masterminded by sir joseph baseljet the chief engineer he worked with 22 000 workers 318 million bricks and over 19 years they built a sewer system twice as big as it needed to be at the time and that's why it is still in use today that was exemplary cathedral thinking now these kinds of examples are incredibly inspiring but cathedral thinking is not always good for us it can be directed to very narrow and self-serving ends and can can be incredibly destructive just think that hitler wanted to have an a thousand year reich that was a kind of cathedral thinking the political regime in north korea wants to pass on power from generation to generation preserving its privileges through the ages that's cathedral thinking just think how much concrete has been poured by humankind if you put together all the concrete that has been poured by our species it would create a spherical coffin covering the whole earth even all of the oceans two millimeters thick and we know that concrete is responsible for about eight percent of the world's carbon emissions and then think of cathedral thinking in the corporate world too a former head of goldman sachs gus levy once said we're greedy but long-term greedy not short-term greedy well i'm not an advocate of that kind of cathedral thinking and that's why we need to join the long horizons of cathedral thinking with something else which is a third approach to being a good ancestor which is the idea of intergenerational justice which is caring about the welfare and the interests of the generations to come now groucho marx allegedly said why should i care about future generations what have they ever done for me and i think a lot of us intuitively feel that i've got a lot enough problems in my life right here right now to start thinking about those future generations decades even centuries ahead why should i do that well i think if you think back to that big orange circle all those billions upon billions of people will be born even in the next couple of centuries alone we have a moral obligation towards them because our actions affect their lives probably more than at any moment in history so we can have that thought with our minds but i think we can also develop an impetus for intergenerational justice by drawing on indigenous cultures for example the native american idea of seventh generation decision making practiced in many communities iroquois communities lakota communities a well-known chief in the iroquois confederacy chief orrin lyons once said we are looking ahead as is one of the first mandates given us as chiefs to make sure every decision that we make relates to the welfare and well-being of the seventh generation to come and that is the basis by which we make decisions in council will this be to the benefit of the seventh generation and this kind of idea which is a form of ecological stewardship is expressed around the world in the malaccas islands in indonesia village councils also do seventh generation decision making or in aotearoa in new zealand maori communities have a different concept which is called which is their idea of lineage the idea that we're part of a great chain of life stretching long into the past and far into the future and the light happens to be shining here and now and we need to shine it more broadly when we're making our decisions and thinking about our impacts on the generations to come but what really excites me is that ideas such as seventh generation thinking which might seem very distant from modern urban life are actually finding their place in radical change around intergenerational justice in japan for example there is an extraordinary movement called future design and it is directly inspired by the native american ideal of seventh generation decision making what happens in future design is that local residents are invited to draw up and discuss plans for the towns and cities where they live but they're divided into two groups half of them are told that their residents from the present day the other half are given these almost ceremonial robes to wear and told to imagine themselves as residents from the year 2060 well it turns out the residents from 2016 systematically advocate far more transformative city plans from healthcare investment to climate change action and this future design movement is spreading from small towns like yaha to major cities like kyoto and the method is even being used in japan's ministry of finance so i would like to see future design spreading to towns and progressive cities and communities worldwide to revitalize democratic decision-making and extend their vision far beyond the now but the idea of intergenerational justice is also finding its place in legal struggles in the u.s there is an extraordinary organization called our children's trust a public interest law firm which has filed a landmark case on behalf of 21 young people campaigning for the legal right to a safe climate and healthy atmosphere for both current and future generations this is an enormous shift in the history of human rights one of the most important since the french revolution rights for future people now they are engaged in a david vs goliath struggle at both the federal and state level but have already inspired landmark legal cases worldwide from colombia and uganda to the netherlands as well and their actions exist alongside the movement to grant legal personhood to nature so for example in aotearoa new zealand the wanganui river sacred to local maori people has been given legal personhood just like corporations have had legal personhood since the late 19th century so i think it's really important that we're behind these movements for intergenerational justice in the legal sphere in the political sphere in wales they have a future generations commissioner well why don't more countries have future generations commissioners this is part of the journey to a long now civilization now a fourth approach to long-term thinking is what i think of as developing a legacy mindset just like intergenerational justice a legacy mindset helps give direction to our long-term thinking and cathedral thinking now the idea of a legacy is very important because we are the inheritors of legacies too inheritors of extraordinary positive legacies from the past the gift of the agricultural revolution or medical discoveries we still benefit from or the cities we still live in but we are also the inheritors of destructive legacies legacies of slavery and colonialism and racism creating deep inequities that must now be repaired legacies of economies that are structurally addicted to endless growth and fossil fuels that must now be transformed so we need to think very hard about what kind of legacies we want to leave for future generations and the good news is that human beings die now why is that good news well basically by the time we reach midlife we start thinking about how we're going to be remembered when we are gone our mortality makes us jump our minds into the distant future but the thing is we tend to express our legacies in very different ways some people want to leave a egocentric form of legacy so they're remembered for their great glorious deeds for example a russian oligarch might want to have a football stadium or an art gallery wing named after them a second kind of legacy motivation is familial legacy that's where we want to pass on something to our own children but that is in itself is also a fairly narrow form of legacy within our own bloodline or our own personal relationships i believe a third kind of legacy is required to be a good ancestor and that's a universal kind of legacy where we care about the universal strangers of the future we care about the welfare of people we will never meet now it can be quite difficult to do that particularly in our self-obsessed egotistical hyper-individualistic consumer culture how do we start connecting with those generations two three seven generations ahead well to do that i think we need to go on a little bit of an imaginative journey and i'd like to take you through a short thought experiment which was developed by a long-term thinker called ella saltmash and the long time project so just close your eyes for a moment and imagine a child in your life who you really care about it could be a nephew or niece or one of your own children or grandchildren just picture their face and now with your eyes still closed imagine them 30 years in the future again picture their face think about the joys they might experience or the challenges they might be facing and now still with your eyes closed imagine them on their 90th birthday party and they're surrounded by family and friends and loved ones and old work colleagues go and have a look out the window what kind of world is it out there and now come back and look at their old and wrinkled face and then you see someone come over and put a tiny baby into their arms it's their first great grandchild and they look into that baby's eyes and ask themselves what will this child need to survive and thrive for the years and decades ahead just hold that thought for a moment and now open your eyes again and just think that tiny baby could be alive well into the 22nd century their future isn't science fiction it's an intimate family fact and certainly when i do that thought experiment i think about my 11 year old daughter as a 90 year old and i think about her great grandchild i recognize that my daughter and that great grandchild are not alone in the world they are part of a web of relationships a web of people a web of community and a web of the living world the air that they breathe the water they drink so if i care about their legacy i care about their future welfare i have to care not just about their life i have to care about all life in other words this kind of thought experiment is a bridge from a relatively narrow form of familial legacy to a much more broad universal sense of legacy of caring about those universal strangers of the future and there's some wonderful projects which try to tap into this kind of legacy thinking so for example the scottish artist katie patterson has started something called future library a 100 year art project where every year for a century a famous writer is donating a book which will remain completely secret and unread in the future library until the year 2114 when the 100 books will be printed on paper made from a thousand trees that have been planted in a forest outside oslo the first person to donate a book was margaret atwood elif shafak and many other famous writers have donated since but just think margaret atwood is never going to see that book printed in her lifetime she's never going to meet the readers this is a legacy gift to the future or another kind of legacy project is the green belt movement started in 1977 by the african activist who's the first african woman to win the nobel peace prize her ambition back in the late 70s was to create a movement which replanted trees all over kenya restoring the natural world but also taught agroforestry skills to women an empowering women project by the time she died in 2011 tens of thousands of women have been trained up in agroforestry skills more than 40 million trees have been planted and the green belt movement is still growing strong working with women in over 4 000 communities across africa what an extraordinary legacy given we can all ask ourselves what kind of legacies do we want to leave to the generations of the future now a fifth kind of long-term thinking is what i call holistic forecasting now forecasting goes back to ancient egyptian priests who would try to predict the size of the nile flood would it be too big too small or just right but then forecasting became very much a cold war affair after the second world war when it really started booming with topics such as scenario planning and then it became adopted by the corporate world but corporate forecasting these days tends to be in the realm of three five maybe ten years ahead but when i'm talking about holistic forecasting i'm talking about centuries ahead or at least decades ahead and thinking about not just the fate of a company or even a single country but the long-term forecast for human civilization itself this is long-term thinking that it's very important that we do because we must recognize an important truth which is that no civilization lasts forever the cambridge university researcher luke kemp did a really important study of ancient civilizations nearly 90 of them to find out the average age of an ancient civilization how long did they last for well he discovered that the average age for one of these civilizations whether it was the roman empire or or carthage the average age was 336 years not very long and his point of course was that no matter how technologically advanced or militarily strong a civilization is it's not going to last forever all civilizations are born they flower and then they die and so too it is with our own civilization ours will not last forever let us not fall into that kind of mythological trap we have to get ready for our own demise and work out how are we going to slow down our civilizational decline as jared diamond and many others have identified in all their work or is it possible to jump onto a transformative pathway a new civilizational pathway and this takes me to my final form of long-term thinking the idea of pursuing a transcendent goal now the great astronomer carl sagan famously said that just as every individual needs a sacred goal to guide their life to give it meaning and purpose so too does every civilization and our species in itself the human species needs he said a telos which is the greek word for a goal or objective a load star to guide it that can guide in my view all the other forms of long-term thinking but what should that goal be for our species what should we be ultimately aspiring to well i think if you look broadly at public culture there are three different goals that have been identified as worthy of our long-term future one of them i call perpetual progress this is the idea of pursuing material improvement and endless economic growth this has been the de facto goal particularly of western countries since at least the end of the second world war possibly since the enlightenment i mean in the last 70 years most governments have prioritized the pursuit of constant gdp growth whether they have been keynesian or marxist or neoliberal but we now know that even though the pursuit of material progress and economic growth has brought us enormous benefits over the past couple of hundred years particularly since the industrial revolution it has come at a cost that is no longer supportable that cost is what's known as the great acceleration all those upswinging curves of carbon dioxide emissions ocean acidification deforestation which has pushed us over planetary boundaries into an unstable earth system shifting us from the period called the holocene where temperatures were stable and agricultural civilization developed into the new geological period of the anthropocene you know when my kids were little they learned the problem of progress that you can't keep blowing up a balloon forever because at some point it's going to pop so let's not think that we can keep growing at two percent or three percent or whatever we want year upon year nothing in nature grows forever whether it's an oak forest or your children's feet everything follows an s curve and eventually levels off and dies off so i think the idea of perpetual progress is a mythology we need to challenge and together with its ideas such as green growth or sustainable growth there is no evidence that we can decarbonize and dematerialize growing economies at anything like the pace and scale required to bring us within safe planetary boundaries particularly co2 emissions fast enough you know that is just a myth so we need to look at something else well a second possible goal for humankind a transcendent goal is the idea of what i think of as techno liberation the idea that technology can solve our problems and the prime contender here is the idea that we can escape to other worlds in fact if we're going to survive as a species for the long term as carl sagan really said we needed to people other worlds that's the only way to spread the risk in case we destroy this planet and the ultimate aim at least for the moment is let's get to mars let's colonize mars now i'm here a follower of people like the cosmologist martin reese who believes that colonizing mars should not be the ultimate aim of the human species that's partly because it's so difficult 30 million miles away temperatures minus 100 degrees nowhere as clement on mars as the bottom of antarctica or the top of everest and even if we could maybe terraform mars and there's no definite evidence that we can do it it might take hundreds maybe thousands of years it's not a solution to our urgent problems that we face but the other problem as martin reese pointed out is that the more we focus on colonizing mars and other planets as our ultimate species aim the less we're going to look after planet earth collateral damage will be too high we need to look after base camp earth as any mountaineer knows you don't climb a risky peak until you make sure your base camp is in order and at the moment we haven't learned to live within the boundaries of base camp earth so i don't think now is yet the time to start putting all our sights on going to mars or discovering other planetary homes and that's why i believe the third and primary goal for humankind should be what i think of as one planet thriving that's the idea of meeting the needs of all current and future people within the means of a flourishing planet this is the basic idea of ecological economics which has been around since hermann daly's writings of the 1970s at least and that's the idea that you know don't use resources faster than they can be naturally regenerated and don't create wastes faster they can be naturally absorbed by oceans and other carbon sinks it's not about endless growth it's about thriving in balance that is really i believe the only way we should be thinking when it comes to our priorities for our species as a whole to live within the means of one planet and someone who expressed this absolutely beautifully was the biomimicry designer and thinker janine benyas let me read you something that she said she wrote the answers we seek the secrets to a sustainable world are literally all around us if we choose to truly mimic life's genius the future i see would be beauty and abundance and certainly fewer regrets in the natural world the definition of success is the continuity of life you keep yourself alive and you keep your offspring alive that's success but it's not the offspring in this generation success is keeping your offspring alive for ten thousand generations and more that presents a conundrum because you're not going to be there to take care of your offspring ten thousand generations from now so what organisms have learned to do is to take care of the place that's going to take care of their offspring life has learned to create conditions conducive to life that's really the magic heart of it and that's also the design brief for us right now we have to learn how to do that now those words of janine bennez i think are perhaps the most profound words i've ever seen about long-term thinking because they tell us the secret of long-term thinking in a way which is that it's not just about time it's about place it's about caring for the place that will take care of our offspring the one and only planet we know that sustains life planet earth that is living within the ecological boundaries of the place in which we are embedded it's about not fouling the nest which of course is what humans have been doing with devastating effects at an ever-increasing pace and scale over the last century but how how do we take this idea of one planet thriving and put it into practice well for that i believe we need new economic models we need to shift into a post-growth mindset get off our addiction to endless growth and i think one of the most important models that we could start thinking about is what's known as the doughnut the donut of social and planetary boundaries developed by the british economist kate rayworth and the way the donut works is this there's two rings there is a social foundation things like water food basic health care and the aim we should be prioritizing is bringing people above that basic social foundation but we need to do it without pushing out ourselves beyond the ecological ceiling that's the outer ring of the donut and the ecological ceiling is made up of the nine planetary boundaries they're called which have been developed by earth system scientists like johann rockstrom and will stefan things like climate change and ocean acidification caring for our soils chemical pollution so this model is not about growing growing growing it's about thriving in balance it's about getting into the safe and just space for humanity that sweet spot that light green area there this is what i believe the goal for governments today should be to ensure our long-term future but can we actually live within the donut well let's have a look at where we are today on a global level this is our selfie and what a devastating one it is there's a shortfall on all of the social foundations on a global level people not able to meet their basic food or health and other requirements that's what those little red segments are and when it comes to the ecological sealing we're going over at least four planetary boundaries the ones for which we have good data already and this donut model has also been scaled down from the global level to the national level it's being used in cities such as amsterdam it's being used by progressive companies so i believe that this is the kind of economic thinking we absolutely need for a long-term future so there are six different ways to think long-term six different forms of approach to being a good ancestor ways of switching on our acorn brain but there's a lingering issue here because a lot of people say to me they say you know what's all this long-term thinking all about you know it's so difficult and governments are so hopeless why don't we just have benign dictators come along and sort it all out for us what we really need many people say are enlightened despots and there is a growing movement of people believing this on both the left and right the green and the non-green well that's an interesting idea to think about isn't it is it actually true that authoritarian governments are better at delivering on long-term public policy goals and one might intuitively think yes or just look at china aren't they great at long-term green infrastructure investment or look at singapore aren't they fantastic at their long-term investment in housing and public health care so i thought about this and thought well let's look at the evidence and in my book the good ancestor i actually look empirically at whether dictatorships perform better than democracies when it comes to long-term thinking and the way it's done in the book is that i draw on a new index of intergenerational solidarity developed by a statistician called jamie mcquilkin this is i think the best long-term index in the world and it has 10 different indicators from three different areas which are put together so there are environmental indicators such as the amount of renewable energy in the system there are indicators of social matters such as uh investment in health care and then there are there are economic indicators such as inequality they're put together into a single number and then 122 countries are ranked and in the rankings you can see that the top performing countries in the world are places like iceland and sweden but also many non-wealthy countries such as nepal or sri lanka and of course you can't see china there china's down at number 25 the uk is 45 the united states is number 62. there's a lot of variability in terms of long-term policy performance but then there's the question of what how do these perform when it comes to democracy and dictatorship well have a look at this this scatter plot shows the intergenerational solidarity index on the bottom axis and on the y-axis going upwards is a measure of democracy called the v dem liberal democracy measure and what you see there is that the little dots of countries clustering the top right and the bottom left that means the more democratic you are the more long-term your public policy is going to be and the less democratic you are the less long-term your public policy is going to be in fact of the top 25 countries on the intergenerational solidarity index 21 of them are democracies of the 25 bottom scoring countries on the inter-generational solidarity index 21 of them were autocracies and i think this really puts an end in a way to that benign dictatorship argument there is no systematic empirical evidence that autocracies outperform democracies when it comes to long-term public policy in fact quite the opposite and this is not saying that democracies can rest easy they all need to deepen their democracy and inject more long-term thinking into their decision-making but certainly the idea that the dictatorship is going to solve all our problems is something that we have to i think leave to the dustbin of history so i really want to end by recognizing that we are at a moment of global crisis there's the crisis of the pandemic there's the ecological crisis and no doubt there are financial crises coming our way to in the months and maybe years ahead and historically i think we have to recognize too that crises are moments for change and opportunity milton friedman the economist famously said only a crisis real or perceived produces real change i think that's a pretty good historical rule of thumb go back to the end of the second world war out of the crisis of the war emerged extraordinary long-term institutions the world health organization the national health service in britain the european union and i believe that here we are at this moment of crisis in the early 21st century and we have the opportunity to become long-term thinkers to draw on those six different ways to switch on our acorn brains and i believe that if we rise to this challenge we truly can become the good ancestors that future generations deserve thank you very much thank you so much roman um that was fantastic um so we saw stuart there every second there you are welcome it's good to see you um yeah and i just wanted to say um actually the good ancestor which was supposed to be originally was going to be out right before this talk aired uh but uh is going to be out on november 3rd here in the united states holding the uk version now um so november 3rd is election day and you touched on politics there at the end and it might be a good place for us to start so anyway thank you and welcome to us from london um by the way we're doing this talk earlier than we would normally do it because uh we have uh roman here live from thank you very much for doing that by the way thank you welcome yeah you don't have to do the 2 a.m version of your of your talk uh and i wanted to start a little bit with the politics i mean i think um you know you touched on some of the kind of bad forms of long-term thinking and i think we've uh we've seen some of that in in politics here in the united states with things like the way redistricting has been the slow burn of kind of changing uh congressional districts to uh not to be necessarily fair but to be more tilted in in one way or another and the politics is just an area that is kind of rife with this when it comes to long-term thinking there hasn't been enough emphasis put on how we can in a way inject long-termism into the dna of democracy itself i think one particularly finds this in the environmental movement you know broadly a sort of an unwillingness to um really think about how we shift political institutions partly because it is so difficult to do that and so that's why my book i focus quite a lot actually on the politics i partly do that also because i used to be a political scientist and i was apparently an expert in democracy about two decades ago and to my shame during that time it never once occurred to me that we disenfranchise future generations in the same way that uh in some ways that you know women and slaves have been disenfranchised throughout history and that's still ongoing of course of course there are differences there but those future generations are not part of the political conversation and you know there are politicians of course who have always been trying to manipulate the systems for their short-term gains gerrymandering of various kinds it still tends to have quite short-term uh ambitions it's about winning the next election but sometimes it's about trying to embed uh that manipulation in there but where i really have faith where i'm excited i think is um to look at the citizen assembly movement rising around the world in countries like ireland in spain belgium iceland canada and other places there's been a kind of revival of participatory democracy i think in a way as a counter to the rise of far-right populism and the sense that our major parties are failing us when it comes to dealing with climate change or dealing with immigration issues or whatever it happens to be so that's why i love that example from japan where people are wearing those lovely robes because that's a kind of grassroots revival of the ancient greek idea of participatory democracy and i'd like to see a lot more of that i'd like to see britain's house of lords replaced by a a house of the future made up of uh everyday citizens right now chile i i understand is undergoing a process of reconfiguring their constitution i'd like to see it full of this kind of citizen assembly movements but i think in different countries different approaches will be needed you know in the us things like our children's trust legal battles are going to be important in the uk it might be more the citizen assembly approach and i think it was interesting to see the way you kind of made an index of how democracies actually do think longer term but i think we we do have the cyclical problem of democracies where you know if we have a if we have an election that's you know cycle that's four years or eight years but we have um policies that need to help people over generations um do you have any thoughts on how to kind of you know unwind some of that cyclical nature in democracies and help help a politician it's really difficult of course because politicians have their own life cycles their ministerial careers and you know i'm not saying that we ought to be getting rid of elections and having elections every 12 years or every 22 years um i just think that we need to layer on top of it um other kinds of long-term thinking and forecasting institutions and of course long-term institutions do exist in many political forms that's what public services are judiciaries are for example they can have their own problems by locking in certain kinds of political views for years and sometimes decades as we're seeing in the us at the moment um but i do believe that we need to have multiple voices as it were certainly democracies cannot rest easy even though 21 of the top 25 scores in that intergenerational solidarity index of democracies it doesn't mean they can just lay back every single democracy in the world could be deepening its democracy could be lengthening uh their their views you know in finland there's a parliamentary committee for the future which has been around since 1993. now wales has its future generations commissioner we so we need to bring those into our existing processes and of course there will always be struggles between short-term uh necessities dealing with immediate crises and the need to deal with very long-term issues but of course sometimes those overlap so if you look at wales the future generations commissioner there her name sophie howe she tries to focus on issues which benefit both current and future generations things like you know renewable energy you know changing the transport system air pollution all that kind of stuff helps today it helps the citizens of tomorrow right and i think the one of the interesting principles i think that we've been experimenting with that long now is this idea of of kind of trusting the future uh more than i think we often do this and and that we can we we do need to put blind trust into future generations that they they fundamentally know more about their presence than we can possibly predict about our future and this idea of increasing optionality and i think you kind of of making sure that they have as many choices as possible um and you kind of touched on that a little bit but i wonder if you could talk a little bit about kind of how much we trust that's a really fascinating question i guess the starting point for my thinking about this is to go back to those citizen assemblies one of the reasons i like them is because they come up with a multiplicity of different futures because you've got people from very different social backgrounds you're not getting the future that just a corporate ceo wants but you might be a future that somebody who's living on the social margins or has experienced deep racism in their life once and it's really important that we envisage and envision a multiplicity of futures i think one of the really uh important things about black lives matter for example is the way that it has spoken in in many respects the language of intergenerational justice and injustice so there's a very important book written by leila f called me and white supremacy and um on the first page of that book she talks about being a good ancestor why because as i understand it you know her view is that well the the racism and the the colonial inheritances uh and the slavery inheritances are being passed down from generation to generation over the long term embedded in cultural political economic institutions you know throughout society so i think that we need to in a way trust the citizens of the present to envisage multiple futures there isn't just one future out there as the futurist futurists like to tell us i think that's absolutely true but on the other side of that i think it's really important to point out that we are not simply living in a world of mass uncertainty i'm often at meetings with government for example where there are a lot of foresight experts and the language is all about oh it's also uncertain everything's so uncertain we're in these times of turbulence and that's true to a certain extent but we also know a lot about the future we know that we have pushed over planetary boundaries as we saw in that doughnut picture there we know about the great acceleration we don't know exactly how much sea levels are going to rise and how fast or exactly how much temperature is going to go up by 2100 but we have a pretty good idea and with that kind of certainty we can kind of work for what we knew no future generations are going to need ultimately air to breathe food to eat water to drink that gives us a pretty clear telos yeah there's definitely some individual inevitabilities of these things um so i'm gonna ask a few questions uh from our audience um that tuned in today and then we'll um we'll also be bringing in kevin kelly and stuart brandt uh pretty soon uh but uh ayori selassie uh asks um how can technology be more of an enabler of the good ancestor instead of the short-term uh soothing mechanism yeah i think they're really important questions about how technology can be transformed and used to expand our time horizons create a long now civilization because of course we do tend to think of technology particularly our phones as something which is drawing us into the here and the now we are clicking we are swiping we are we're scrolling i think there's some really interesting examples in the world of um uh virtual and augmented reality uh experiences you know i'm i once founded a museum that's still around called the empathy museum and what one of the exhibits we have is called a mile in my shoes it's a gigantic shoe box which travels around the world and you can actually go inside it it's the world's first empathy shoe shop you go in and you're fitted with a pair of shoes belonging to a stranger they could belong to a guy who's been in prison for 14 years or a syrian refugee or a brazilian sex worker and you can literally walk a mile in their shoes while listening to an audio narrative of them talking about their own life in their own words the problem though is how do you do that for future generations right when you cannot put on their shoes or have a conversation with them or look them in the eye and that's where i think virtual reality is going to be important um you know in stanford there's the virtual human interactions lab where you can go and experience what it's like to witness coral bleaching over the next 100 years um and that's an extraordinary thing to do and it in a way writes the future onto our skins by giving us the whole sensory experience but of course that kind of technology isn't well developed yet or at least it's not spread on a scale which is really has the power yet to shift society on a large scale but i'd love to see kind of new kinds of hacking inventions when it comes to technology i'd like to see instead of a buy now button a buy later button so when you go to buy something online you'll get a drop down menu yeah you can buy now but maybe you can buy in a week or buy in a month or buy in a year or borrow from a friend and if you press buy buy in a month well you get an email in a month's time saying well do you really want that third yoga mat if you do okay go ahead so i think there's a lot more work that can be done around that technology and challenging myopia nice and we'll bring in stuart brand after this i know uh today is is kind of the first day you guys have actually met uh in at least in real time um and we have a question from uh deep chowdhary uh and he asks can you offer some examples of nudges one could use to inject long-termism into more everyday life yeah the question of nudges is really important you know to be honest i am not a great believer uh in sort of nudge approaches that kind of behavioral psychology stuff i believe it's really fundamental to um inculcate new values in society it's about paradigm change at the deep level that's the work of donella meadows systems thinkers thomas kuhn and others but nudge thinking is important it does have a role so let me give an example to answer the question so here's something absolutely fascinating about the way people write their wills in the united kingdom most people in the uk on average six percent of people will leave a charitable bequest in their will in other words a gift for future generations for people or planet six percent but if they are asked while they're writing their will a simple question which is this would you like to leave a charitable request in your will it goes up from six percent to 12 percent and then if they happen to be asked this question this is more or less the wording if someone says to them a lot of people like leaving a gift to charity in their wills is there an issue that you are really passionate about well suddenly it jumps to 17 in other words these are behavioral nudges ways of switching on you know that acorn brain which i was mentioning earlier i'll take away the marshmallow you know so there there is there is a potential for no genomics uh in this realm certainly great we'll bring in uh stuart greetings hi there stuart um well first of all congratulations on the book and on this talk i love what you're doing and and the directions it's going and in terms of the directions it's going you finish the book some while ago the book is now out in england coming out the u.s and you're seeing response to you're seeing response to these talks and so i imagine you're starting to see things that are taking your ideas and thought further and that you might put some of them in an epilogue to the paperback edition that comes out in a year or so or something like that what have you been learning since you finished the book yeah that's really fascinating actually because when a book comes out as you know from your own books it's really hard to know exactly how people are going to respond so the first thing that really struck me was how many governments wanted to think about long-term thinking and they weren't only just interested in scenario planning trying to make kind of predictions for various futures that might be out there they're concerned about how do we get people to actually care about the future to care about those future generations to really buy into it so i was at a really fascinating meeting of british members of parliament recently where i was giving them a briefing on the book and we were in a way testing out different kinds of language that would work with uh politicians and kind of metaphors and things like that and what it turned out was certainly what i saw what the evidence suggested was that talking about the probability of bad things happening asteroids hitting us or or statistics about climate change didn't really connect with them what really connected was talking about their children and grandchildren going very personal so i've been really struck by um that that interest in government and in fact just next week i'm going to a meeting again in the uk about synthetic biology and what should be the government's long-term planning around this and i think it's just really interesting that they're even inviting me along and i think there's a there's something in the air in the eu canada other countries so that's really struck me and then the other thing i think is is um business you know the way that social enterprises even massive corporations are responding to this book and i think they're not just responding to my book in particular but just that importance of trying to think long term so even you know i've been approached by some of the world's biggest mining companies who to me certainly don't seem to have a very long term vision but even they are trying to think how do we become regenerative how do we lower our carbon emissions how do we become circular so there is really something in the air and i think this is what the long now foundation has been kind of generating over the last you know 20 years of work at least actually changing the public conversation but what are you what have you been noticing about uh the the the way that long-term thinking has been talked about in recent months and years uh just the fact that you know your book is out there and there are other things that you refer to are out there is becoming a subject in my own case i'm pursuing the concept of maintenance as an important thing to take on and i'll be quoting your book a lot in the chapter on civilization that'll be in there but one follow-up question i'm curious when you're talking with the government about synthetic biology and biotech in general and which then extends into tech in general i can't completely predict how you're going to come out on that you might be what i regard as overly cautious don't try things unless you know exactly what's happening or you might say look there's so much good that can be done by these technologies let's check out what they can do for us where do you come out on that i wish i knew i really feel pulled in different directions a lot of these things i am by nature a technological skeptic um you know probably unlike maybe many people in this audience and you know that's just where i'm coming from so i've tried to make a huge effort to engage with technology thinkers and writers and companies and i've visited nuclear fusion projects and all sorts of stuff like that and i think synthetic biology you know is one of those really really interesting ones because on the one hand i'm moving towards the idea that we are definitely going to need synthetic foods to feed 10 billion people by 2050. i can hardly see that there's any way that we can uh avoid that um you know even if we were all switching you know to vegetarian diets um or even vegan diets um so there's that angle but on the other hand i can see that the uh corporate world is trying to buy out a lot of you know synthetic biology and you know if we're talking about using it to meet basic human needs there's a really important conversation to have with government about how to regulate uh those industries so you know i'm still sort of in a way finding my uh way uh you know on that and i don't pretend to be an expert in any of these kinds of areas but i like the fact that i'm changing my views on a lot of these things i recently came across a really fantastic talk by the danish architect um bjarke ingles um actually a ted talk where he was talking about mars colonization and pointing out that the technology required to live on mars like to have a non-fossil fuel based energy system or to live with very little water is exactly what we need to learn to do on earth so there's a kind of a confluence there and that was sort of been challenging my thinking too yeah and we saw that with the photograph of the earth from space the space program was fought by every environmentalist i know except jacques cousteau um so you know sometimes the other the unexpected the unexpected uh consequences are beneficial and you can push for that well and i love john maynard keynes who said when the facts change i changed my mind what do you do sir right thank you so much stuart it's great to have you uh yeah i think that's it's an interesting case of you know you you point out these ideas of these transcendent goals and in some cases those transcendent goals can inspire people to you know hyper develop a technology you know if we can decarbonize mars we could really decarbonize our planet uh you know it's all co2 atmosphere basically there so if if we can figure out how to sync all of that i think we'd be we'd be doing very well to terraform our own planet uh very easily so um so i think that's that's well worth doing and we'll bring in um we'll bring in kevin kelly after this question from michelle cappin um he asks uh how do we create institutions that incentivize people to cooperate with investing in long-term thinking versus defecting uh to their own short-term benefit and it's kind of i guess the institutional question of where where do we get this where do we get these types of institutions i think that's a really difficult uh and interesting question um i think it depends what realm that you are envisaging so let's have a look at the political realm firstly go back to that example of japan now when people put on their uh their robes and imagine themselves in 2016 something really interesting happens they are become willing to sacrifice um for future generations so there's a famous case in japan as part of this movement where the citizens of a town were asked if they were willing to pay higher water rates higher water taxes in order to repair the decrepit water infrastructure in order to help their children or grandchildren 50 years 70 years from now and in fact using this future design method literally by imagining themselves in the year 2060 they were willing to accept a six percent rise in their water taxes it's a very small example but i think it's really significant because it it shows that in a way i think those people didn't see it as a sacrifice they saw it as an intergenerational gift right but they were only able to see it that way when they had gone on this imaginative time travel become a resident of the future temporarily by by dressing themselves up in effect so i think that's one behavioral way that we can incentivize people by taking them on imaginative journeys using the extraordinary capacity of the human mind to pirouette across time scales you know to to move between thinking on a scale of seconds and minutes and hours to decades centuries and even millennia and then i think in the economic world it's uh there are complexities there as well we've seen you know really interesting shifts of behavioral uh structures so the company unilever for example one of the world's biggest you know uh food stuff consumer companies well when paul pullman became ceo about 10 or 11 years ago he abolished quarterly reporting on the day that he took over uh he he famously said that you know that he thought that they couldn't even fire him on the first day that's why he did it and he bought a battle right he fought a battle to make that company more sustainable very strict long-term uh goals on sustainability and sourcing around their suppliers but he was in a struggle why because the company was owned by shareholders right he was subject to hostile takeover bids from kraft heinz uh and others so even though you may have your purpose may embody long-term thinking if your ownership and finance uh is still based on short-term incentive structures you are always going to struggle you know you're always going to struggle and that's why i'm you know particularly uh impressed by companies which are trying to shift away from those models so in britain the one of the biggest renewable energy suppliers good energy is 60 owned by its customers and that in a way ties it to longer term sustainable principles or the dutch bank triodos which is spreading rapidly around the world well their shares are all held in a trust a kind of foundation and they have their own platform for trading their shares and it protects the principles of long-termism and sustainability around their investments so there's all sorts of structures we could be using i think we're going to need to use and invent a whole load of different kinds for different realms and different countries nice and we'll uh we'll bring in kevin kelly welcome kevin hey roman hey i thought i agree with what alexander says which is i think this is probably the most long nowish talk that we've ever had and it's the talk that i will point people to when i have to explain what long now thinking is about so i think one of the things that your book and talk tries to do that's one of the most difficult things to do is to um describe a future that we want to aim for to have this one thriving planet in in the future but i have to say that when you take away this kind of perpetual growth model it's on first appearance a future that seems stagnant that seems to have no future in itself it's like well we arrive there and then is it utopia is it the same what changes what happens over time what is growing and of course growing in english is where they have two meanings when we can grow in size and get fat or we can grow up get better and so um there's developmental growth which is the kind of growth that we've been having and then there's evolutionary growth so we kind of want a world that keeps getting better that grows in some dimension perpetually so can you is there kind of a metric or quantity or measurement or evidence that you would say in a hundred years this shows we've been good we've become good ancestors what would that how could we prove or what evidence would we have that in a hundred years during a thousand years we were good ancestors and then in a thousand years after that we were even better ancestors so i guess i'm interested in not just good ancestors but better ancestors how do we keep getting better and what is that dimension so sort of in response to the first part i think when i'm talking about one planet thriving this is not a stagnant state this is not a state of stability think of the amazon rainforest okay which has reached a kind of well before it started being chopped down a kind of stability but it is not stagnant right it's not growing growing growing outwards but it's in perpetual motion in many ways circular is it going anywhere is there a direction is there a teals to the rain forest well i i don't think there is a kind of tea loss except that it's a regenerative system it's moving around a lot and in the same way as if you think of that donor economics model when you're in that light green space above the social foundation and within the uh ecological ceiling you know there came can well be movement going on your economy might be growing you know at some point but then it might not be growing in numerical terms in others so for example you might put huge investment into uh solar energy for example now that is going to increase your gdp just you know but mathematically it's going to do that but then over the long term you're not you're not going to be spending money uh on all of that kind of infrastructure yet your economy may be developing in all sorts of interesting and important ways so i think that going anywhere is there anything that's getting better over time well all sorts of things can be getting over time culturally for example you know here i am holding up kim stanley robinson's book the ministry for the future you know there's all sorts of realms where we will be excelling ourselves but i think what we need to stop doing is thinking that the way to advance that the meaning of progress has to be reduced to uh material progress you know and and that's why you know one could use language of well-being of cultural development all sorts of different ways to you know you know i think that in a way that's what people like bertrand russell love that idea that we'd be working four hours a day and have the rest of the day free to you know do all sorts of things be artists scientists whatever we want so i certainly don't see this kind of telos as a as a stagnant state but i definitely do think it's one about um in terms of herman daly's sort of idea of staying within kind of boundaries and we we stay in boundaries all the time we're used to one boundary in the last couple of hundred years that we don't own slaves right and and we put certain restrictions on ourselves and when we operate within those so in this difficult task of trying to imagine this future i think it would be useful to have some kind of of measurements or evidence that would prove that we had succeeded um so you mentioned kim stanley robinson or i know maybe there would be more science fiction stories or better science fiction stories what what is that thing that would be evidence that we could use to to prove that this is working so so do you do you have things that you could say well there's um less of this or there's more of this and that in a thousand years after that there'd be even more or is this something that alexander's idea that we don't even actually know and we shouldn't even try and make those criteria and we should let the future generations decide this is this kind of trusting in the future versus dumping the problems on them maybe we should equip the future generations to solve the problems rather than we're going to solve the problems or tell you what problems to solve we're just going to try to equip you to solve our problems in the future i i you know so do you have a picture of what that would look like in a hundred years if we became good ancestors well i certainly think that there are sensible metrics that we can adopt i mean the you know global footprint network you know has a measure of how many planet earths that are we using each year in terms of our resource you know use in carbon footprints at the moment it's about 1.6 it's gone down slightly because of covert 19. and and so there's this thing as you know called earth overshoot day um the day beyond which we're using more resources than the planet can naturally regenerate and can naturally absorb and it's probably something like about august to something this this year and we need to shift it back to december 31st now that's a very obvious metric but within that well the sky's the limit once you've learned to do that that's how i kind of think about the mars exploration idea you know once we've learned to live within one planet well take as many trips to mars as you like you know fantastic you know there's incredible freedoms once we are in that realm so i mean i do think though that that intergenerational solidarity index i mentioned is is useful i think at least on the governmental level to have them something to aim at something you can hold them to account on year on year on long-term policy performance otherwise you know it's quite hard to um actually sort of yeah hold them to account ultimately thank you thank you thank you kevin um so we're going to be wrapping up the questions here uh in just a moment but um i did want to ask um one of the questions from from online from rafael ciccaros um at what point during someone's life should long-term thinking begin to be taught like how do should this be should this be taught to young people in schools our our young are how young a mind can really think uh long term and this is something that we work on that long now but i'd love to get your take on that yeah so i've done a lot of research on empathy and the capacity to put ourselves in someone else's shoes and what's really interesting about empathy is that you can teach it like riding a bike or driving a car so there's a project in canada called roots of empathy where they bring a baby into the classroom the kids sit around the baby they start talking about the baby why is the baby crying or laughing why is she suddenly looking over at their mother or father they're trying to step into the baby's shoes they use that then as a jumping off point for talking about well what's it like to be a bullet kid bullied in the playground or a family living on the streets of calcutta so kids learn this capacity to step into the shoes of others in fact even by the age of three or four and in that roots of empathy project they also have an element where they try and get the kids to imagine what's this baby's life going to be like in 10 years 20 years what responsibilities might we have towards them so i absolutely believe that this kind of long-term thinking should be mainstreamed in education i mean certainly in elementary school and and afterwards as well because kids get this idea of making imaginative journeys they can do this right that is the power of the human mind i mean it's an extraordinary um you know machine extraordinary tool i mean of course when human beings reach mid-life um that's when they tend to start thinking about their legacies for when they're gone how am i going to keep the fire of my own life still burning and in psychology there's this whole field called generativity um this idea of generativity that idea that we need to find we will seek we we tend to seek ways to keep ourselves alive when we're go when we're gone we tend to think about it in terms of leaving a legacy for our children but i believe we need to do something bigger than that but if we can start early um not just thinking uh teaching futures thinking but also about the the moral aspects of long-term thinking we will be doing a service to current and future generations yeah indeed i think i'm always struck by how easily um children empathize with uh you know dinosaurs for instance a 60 something 65 million years before they were born they're fascinated by dinosaurs or space aliens uh and space in itself is kind of a long-term uh endeavor and both of those things do seem to capture imaginations of children so i think that's a it's a great space to play in uh and before we close i wanted to ask you know i know that you're kind of starting in a way your book tour and and now that you're you're just now launching this book uh whatever book tours are these days uh but uh what do you have new projects that you're working on uh new areas of research that you're thinking about you know normally i have my next book ready to go when i finish one but this is proving different partly in relation to what stuart was asking about the kind of public response to this book and you know other people who are also writing you know books about long-term thinking in deep time there is something in the air and so i've decided to dedicate at least the next five years to trying to roll out the ideas in different ways whether it's working with government whether it's trying to invent new art projects like that empathy museum stepping into someone else's shoes i'd love to crack that one of how to step into the shoes of future generations how to invent that app which is the bide by later button instead of the buy now button so i'm looking to work with all sorts of organizations to try and um stretch these ideas out into the future and then i'll also be doing it in my own family too during the last uk general election um my partner and i decided to give our votes to our 11 year old twins and we sat around the kitchen table debated the party manifestos and they told us where to put that x on the ballot sheet and i hope to be doing that a lot as well so having conversations at home about long-termism too nice well if uh long now foundation can work with you on any of your endeavors over the next five years uh uh please consider us uh your close ally as always and we look forward to seeing and hearing more from you in the future thank you very much thank you for the conversation really enjoyed it thank you you

Channel: Long Now Foundation

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Id: HMll7vMi8to

Length: 83min 25sec (5005 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2020