Speaker 1: What is a ten thousand year clock and what is
Speaker 1: the Y ten k bug? What do ancient ceramics have
Speaker 1: to do with the way that we build ball bearings
Speaker 1: and satellites. Have we entered a digital dark age where
Speaker 1: we're losing more knowledge than we're preserving. Why do some
Speaker 1: organizations last millennium? What does this have to do with
Speaker 1: bristle cone pine trees, or symbols in drum sets, or
Speaker 1: a hotel that's still running that started in the sixth century.
Speaker 1: If humanity disappeared tomorrow, what from our era would still
Speaker 1: be legible thousands of years from now? Join me today
Speaker 1: for thinking about ourselves on a ten thousand year timescale
Speaker 1: with guest Alexander Rose. Welcome to Intercosmos with me David Eagleman.
Speaker 1: I'm a neuroscientist and an author at Stanford and in
Speaker 1: these episodes we dive deeply into our three pound universe
Speaker 1: to uncover some of the most surprising aspects of our lives.
Speaker 1: Today's episode springboards from last week's episode on the topic
Speaker 1: of persistence about things lasting through time. Last episode, we
Speaker 1: talked about why things last, and we saw that some
Speaker 1: do because they are optimized, like the body plan for sharks.
Speaker 1: Other things endure because they constantly repair themselves, like Roman concrete,
Speaker 1: which self heals when it gets cracks. Some things endure
Speaker 1: because they are memorable or they seem explanatory, like urban legends.
Speaker 1: And some things persist because they're fragile but infinitely copyable,
Speaker 1: like paper or DNA. But this week I want to
Speaker 1: turn to much longer time scales, specifically millennia. So today
Speaker 1: we're going to do something that's a little unusual for
Speaker 1: a species that thinks in election cycles or fiscal quarters
Speaker 1: and all of our short term deadlines. We're going to
Speaker 1: step into deep time, beyond decades, beyond centuries. We're going
Speaker 1: to stand on the long arc of civilization where the
Speaker 1: unit of measurement is millennia. Now here's the puzzle we're
Speaker 1: going to tackle today. Human beings keep trying to pass
Speaker 1: things forward, whether that's knowledge or culture or technology, but
Speaker 1: most of what we produce vanishes almost immediately. Our digital lives,
Speaker 1: in particular, are surprisingly fragile. Hard drives fail, formats get
Speaker 1: quickly outdated, servers go bad. A surprisingly large portion of
Speaker 1: the twenty first century will be archaeologically invisible. But Roman
Speaker 1: concrete still holds and a bristle cone pine tree standing
Speaker 1: on a mountain ridge is still alive in counting rings
Speaker 1: after five millennium. So today we're going to launch off
Speaker 1: the question that we started last week, which is what
Speaker 1: actually lasts? And this week we're going to ask can
Speaker 1: we learn to build things like institutions or organizations that
Speaker 1: don't disintegrate as soon as we stop paying attention to them.
Speaker 1: To explore this, I'm joined today by Alexander Rose, who
Speaker 1: goes by Xander. He's the former executive director of the
Speaker 1: Long Now Foundation and organization that I love and I
Speaker 1: sit on the board for for over twenty years. Xander
Speaker 1: has been immersed in projects that stretch our time imagination,
Speaker 1: like the ten thousand year clock that he's been with
Speaker 1: Danny hillis. If you don't know what that is, hangtight,
Speaker 1: because we're going to talk about that today. Xander is
Speaker 1: also involved in the Rosetta disc which acts like a
Speaker 1: linguistic time capsule, and in long bets, which force us
Speaker 1: to put our predictions on the public record. Xander is
Speaker 1: one of the most talented machinists and engineers that I know,
Speaker 1: but also one of the best long term thinkers, and
Speaker 1: by long term I mean millennia. He has spent his
Speaker 1: career asking what it takes for knowledge to persist, what
Speaker 1: makes institutions survive across generations, and how we can design
Speaker 1: for a future that we will never personally inhabit. So
Speaker 1: let's step into the long now and see what it
Speaker 1: takes for anything to endure. Xander, So, you and I
Speaker 1: originally met because you, for twenty six years worked with
Speaker 1: the Long Now Foundation. You ended up as the executive
Speaker 1: director of that for a long time. Tell us about
Speaker 1: the long Now Foundation and what the thinking there is.
Speaker 2: Well, the long Now Foundation was started by Stuart Brand,
Speaker 2: who had started the Whole Earth Catalog. Danny Hillis who
Speaker 2: had developed some of the fastest supercomputers back in the eighties,
Speaker 2: originally with his company Thinking Machines, and other people Brian,
Speaker 2: you know, Kevin Kelly, a lot of kind of early
Speaker 2: digital illuminaries, and they I think they saw, maybe earlier
Speaker 2: on than others, that we were as a society kind
Speaker 2: of really fetishizing speed and only thinking that the things
Speaker 2: that happened fast were the things that mattered. But obviously
Speaker 2: there are issues like climate change or hunger or you know,
Speaker 2: the education system that have returns on investment that are
Speaker 2: on much slower cycles and still need to be addressed.
Speaker 2: And if society was only doing things that could be
Speaker 2: done quickly, those things were not going to be addressed correctly.
Speaker 2: So they thought that some kind of balancing corrective was needed.
Speaker 2: And so Danny Hillis had this idea of a ten
Speaker 2: thousand year monument scale, all mechanical clock, and originally that
Speaker 2: was what I was hired to start working on.
Speaker 1: And the idea is a clock that would last ten
Speaker 1: thousand years exactly.
Speaker 2: It would last the design life was ten thousand years,
Speaker 2: and it would have you know, it wouldn't have like
Speaker 2: a twelve hour dial. It would have all these kind
Speaker 2: of dials that matter over ten thousand years, things like
Speaker 2: astronomic cycles and and things like that.
Speaker 1: And things like once a century it would ding R
Speaker 1: and once a millennium.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that. Yeah.
Speaker 2: The original kind of poetic version of the clock that
Speaker 2: Danny wrote about this is like a nineteen ninety five
Speaker 2: Wired essay, was that it would you know, tick once
Speaker 2: a year, it would bong once a century, and a
Speaker 2: cuckoo would come out once a millennium.
Speaker 3: So I signed on to that project.
Speaker 2: My background is an industrial design, But Stuart Brand was
Speaker 2: the one who's like, well, you need an institution alongside this,
Speaker 2: and that's in a way, one of the most difficult
Speaker 2: problems of making something last is not you know, you
Speaker 2: can make an object, especially one that maybe doesn't need
Speaker 2: to be interacting with humans very much, last for that long.
Speaker 3: It's it's not that hard.
Speaker 2: But if you want to make something that's that is
Speaker 2: relevant and is changing the way people think about time,
Speaker 2: you actually need the institution that's alongside it. And so
Speaker 2: they became these kind of two parallel projects. One is
Speaker 2: the engineering project and the other one is the institutional side.
Speaker 1: So I want to zoom in on the clock for
Speaker 1: a minute, because you said something extraordinary there, which is
Speaker 1: it's not so hard to make an object a machine
Speaker 1: that lasts ten thousand years, but no one has ever
Speaker 1: done that or anything like it. So you, having worked
Speaker 1: on it for so many years, you feel like, maybe
Speaker 1: it's not so hard. But tell us about that thinking, well, I.
Speaker 2: Mean often we think that, you know, maybe it's a
Speaker 2: material science problem, but really it's actually it's a it's
Speaker 2: an environment problem. So you know, we have we have
Speaker 2: leather shoes that are five thousand years old, were found
Speaker 2: just in the right kind of pH of soil. Right,
Speaker 2: We've got the Dead Sea scrolls that are on the
Speaker 2: order of you know, many thousand made out of paper
Speaker 2: papyrus that are that have lasted just because they were.
Speaker 3: In the right environment.
Speaker 2: And an early when I was working on this project,
Speaker 2: early on, a material scientist told me that the best
Speaker 2: way to think about this is that basically everything is burning,
Speaker 2: and meaning everything is oxidizing, right, and it's just at
Speaker 2: a different rate. And so you can choose your rate
Speaker 2: at which things are going to oxidize and and and
Speaker 2: mostly you do that by by sealing something in a
Speaker 2: way that it won't oxidize. And the problem with that
Speaker 2: is if you're trying to make an object that or
Speaker 2: in a machine especially that needs that humans want to
Speaker 2: interact with it.
Speaker 3: You want to change the way.
Speaker 2: You know, have this experience of walking through you know
Speaker 2: that this monument scale thing where you're walking through the gears,
Speaker 2: and it really inspires you through the whole experience to
Speaker 2: come out the other end and go, wow, you know,
Speaker 2: time is big, but I have a relevant in it,
Speaker 2: and I want to change maybe some of the ways
Speaker 2: that I operate in the world and that I think
Speaker 2: about the world. To do that, you really need to
Speaker 2: think about material science and human interaction design in a
Speaker 2: way that I think very few people ever have.
Speaker 3: And that was what really attracted me to the project.
Speaker 1: So what does that look like? I mean, how do
Speaker 1: you think about building a machine? And this isn't like
Speaker 1: shoes buried in the right pH this is a thing
Speaker 1: that's turning and moving. All our buildings that we make,
Speaker 1: we say, hey, these are stable, and these will be
Speaker 1: here for a long time. But by long time we
Speaker 1: mean whatever a few hundred years or something. How do
Speaker 1: you think about doing something at a ten thousand year scale?
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, so we have some things that are
Speaker 2: like you know in Turkey that have lasted on this
Speaker 2: scale that we're man made kind of foundations, and Jericho
Speaker 2: has eight thousand year foundations. We have the Pyramids and
Speaker 2: stonehandjet five thousand years forty five hundred years. So we
Speaker 2: you know, we've built some buildings, but like you're right
Speaker 2: in saying that, a machine is a different thing like
Speaker 2: that has working parts and and this was a this
Speaker 2: was an early problem that we really looked at, which
Speaker 2: was how do you, for instance, have bearings that last
Speaker 2: for ten thousand years, right, And when I started on
Speaker 2: this project in the late nineties, I found the right technology,
Speaker 2: which was basically a ceramic on ceramic bearings, and they
Speaker 2: were developed for satellites that could operate in space with
Speaker 2: no lubrication, and so they're near diamond hard ceramics. And
Speaker 2: the other thing that they do, which is really great
Speaker 2: for in our case, is that since they're non metallic,
Speaker 2: they also separate dissimilar metals from each other, and so
Speaker 2: dissimilar metals in any situation basically cause corrosion and they'll
Speaker 2: build weld shut because of oxidization. They attract what's called
Speaker 2: galvanic corrosion by having a different kind of electrical potential,
Speaker 2: and so by these bearings solved all those problems. But
Speaker 2: at the time, in like nineteen ninety eight when I
Speaker 2: found them, they were made in very sparing sizes, forced
Speaker 2: out of lights, and they cost fifty thousand dollars each.
Speaker 2: But over the course of this project they have they're
Speaker 2: now in fidget spinners and they cost like five dollars, right,
Speaker 2: so you can get them, you know, their roller blades
Speaker 2: and you know, bicycle bearings and all this stuff. So
Speaker 2: we got very very lucky in the timing around when
Speaker 2: we were developing this project. So the clock itself uses
Speaker 2: all ceramic bearings throughout the entire thing.
Speaker 3: There's there's no metallic bearings at all.
Speaker 2: And that was really one of the kind of key
Speaker 2: things that is different about this than any other large
Speaker 2: machine that's ever been built.
Speaker 1: But a fidget spinner, if somebody builds it, they're not
Speaker 1: intending to last a long time. So how do they know.
Speaker 1: I mean, no one really knows if a ceramic bearing
Speaker 1: will last ten thousand years, right.
Speaker 2: I mean we know that, yes, these modern ceramic bearings
Speaker 2: have not been around for that long, but we do
Speaker 2: know ceramics have been around for We have ceramics for
Speaker 2: many tens of thousands of years, right, so just low
Speaker 2: quality ceramics that we found in places or on the
Speaker 2: order of forty thousand years old, so very high quality
Speaker 2: modern ceramics. There's no reason to think that they wouldn't
Speaker 2: last this long. And but but to your point, I
Speaker 2: think there are unknown unknowns when you do this kind
Speaker 2: of project, and I suspect, you know, there will be
Speaker 2: things that cause problems in the clock.
Speaker 3: That we that we don't really anticipate.
Speaker 2: And it could be something as simple as like something
Speaker 2: building a nest in the workings of it. Right, we've
Speaker 2: already like at the we have the site we're building
Speaker 2: the clock, and we've already had to deal with rodents
Speaker 2: and things like that because you know that the whole
Speaker 2: thing isn't sealed up perfectly during construction times and all that,
Speaker 2: so there will be things. And one of the things
Speaker 2: that we we did design into the clock is that
Speaker 2: it is designed for maintenance and it is designed to
Speaker 2: be changed over time. There's most of the clock actually
Speaker 2: sits quite still while nobody's there, and so you can
Speaker 2: do maintenance on it even while it's working. And then
Speaker 2: it's only when people wind it that a lot of
Speaker 2: the things that operate every day, something like the chimes
Speaker 2: or the dials, update only when someone is there to
Speaker 2: wind it locally.
Speaker 1: Oh, I see, And so it is now a daily chime,
Speaker 1: is that right?
Speaker 2: It's sort of, it's a daily chime if someone is
Speaker 2: there to wind out. So basically it's a reward if
Speaker 2: the clock is gets its power from to keep track
Speaker 2: of the time, from the temperature difference from day tonight
Speaker 2: that's harvested up at the top of the mountain through
Speaker 2: just differential air tanks that are up there. And then
Speaker 2: but if what it doesn't do is it doesn't show
Speaker 2: you the time when you arrive, it shows you the
Speaker 2: time of the last people that were there. So when
Speaker 2: you get there, it could have been yesterday and you
Speaker 2: might have to wind it just a teeny bit. And
Speaker 2: but if it was one hundred years ago or a
Speaker 2: thousand years ago, you could be there for hours to
Speaker 2: days updating the dials by walking around this capstin and
Speaker 2: winding things up. And so you get two pieces of
Speaker 2: information how long it's been neglected as well as you
Speaker 2: also get rewarded by having these unique chimes that happened
Speaker 2: that Brian, you know, and Danny Hillis designed this kind
Speaker 2: of pattern of ten bells that could be rung in
Speaker 2: a different sequence each day for ten thousand years.
Speaker 1: And for listeners who aren't familiar with the clock, give
Speaker 1: us a size of the scale and how it's buried
Speaker 1: in a mountain.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So we started with prototypes that were smaller, like
Speaker 2: the first eight foot tall prototypes is at the Science
Speaker 2: Museum in London. There's some later prototypes at the Interval
Speaker 2: here in San Francisco, but in two thousand and five,
Speaker 2: we started working with Jeff Bezos, who funded the full
Speaker 2: scale version of it, which is kind of if you've
Speaker 2: ever seen a Blue Origin launch from their Texas site,
Speaker 2: not the one in Florida, but the Texas site. The
Speaker 2: mountain range right behind that launch site is the Sierra
Speaker 2: Diablo Mountains and.
Speaker 3: That's where the site is.
Speaker 2: And we built it into a mountain, and we actually
Speaker 2: developed special diamond chainsaws and things.
Speaker 3: Like this to work under ground.
Speaker 2: And we built over two thousand linear feet of tunnel
Speaker 2: and five hundred vertical feet of tunnel that the clock
Speaker 2: goes into and cut these special stairs that allow you
Speaker 2: to walk through the whole thing.
Speaker 1: And were those cut by Was that robotic? This yair cutting?
Speaker 2: Yeah, So we adapted a kind of these diamond chainsaws
Speaker 2: or belt saws that are used for cutting marble like
Speaker 2: in Coorra Italy, but they've never really been roboticized. So
Speaker 2: we built a special robot with these amazing folks up
Speaker 2: in Seattle that have been kind of roboticizing all things
Speaker 2: for stone cutting. But they helped us make this custom
Speaker 2: robot that was like twenty six thousand pounds.
Speaker 3: It had a reach of like.
Speaker 2: Thirty six feet and could cut through solid rock about
Speaker 2: as fast as you would expect a chainsaw to cut
Speaker 2: through rock, and it slowly over the course of two years,
Speaker 2: cut a spiral staircase that is over four hundred feet tall, and.
Speaker 1: So just so people can picture this, it's a tunnel
Speaker 1: that goes straight down and the stairs are running along
Speaker 1: the outside of the cylinder, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So we cut the initial cylinder itself with a
Speaker 2: mining tool.
Speaker 3: That already exists called a raise boar. It's like a.
Speaker 2: Tunnel boring machine that's pulled up through a mountain. So
Speaker 2: you drill a small hole through a small by meaning
Speaker 2: eighteen inches, and then you hook up the giant drill
Speaker 2: bit to the bottom and you pull that up and
Speaker 2: then you excavate all the stuff that falls down out
Speaker 2: of the bottom. And it's a very efficient way to
Speaker 2: make a very smooth bore. And usually it's used for
Speaker 2: like ventilation shafts for a mine or for a tunnel
Speaker 2: or something like that, but we used it as the
Speaker 2: main shaft that all the clockworks were going to go in.
Speaker 2: But in order to have the people be able to
Speaker 2: walk through all that, we needed to cut a staircase
Speaker 2: around it and we actually wanted that staircase to start
Speaker 2: wide and get narrower and narrower, and so every single
Speaker 2: cut of that staircase was different, and in order to
Speaker 2: do that, a robot was definitely the right piece of machinery.
Speaker 1: Cool So you've got this huge bore that goes down
Speaker 1: into the mountain and at the bottom you install the clock.
Speaker 1: And how large is that clock.
Speaker 3: Well, it's not at the bottom, it's through the entire bore.
Speaker 2: So that clock is stretched out from the very bottom
Speaker 2: of that five hundred feet all the way to the
Speaker 2: top where there's a cupola that harvests sunlight and does
Speaker 2: give us a solar synchronization event. So every year around
Speaker 2: the solstice time, if on any sunny day around the
Speaker 2: first about two weeks around the summer solstice, if we
Speaker 2: get a sunny day, sunlight is focused down in this
Speaker 2: very Indiana Jones moment where it goes down in one
Speaker 2: hundred and fifty feet down into the largest sapphire lens
Speaker 2: ever ground, and then that goes into a thing that
Speaker 2: basically hits a black piece of metal in a chamber
Speaker 2: that expands and says, this is solar noon. And so
Speaker 2: if the clock has been drifting over the year or
Speaker 2: so that it's been operating, it needs this moment to
Speaker 2: correct itself. Now a human could also do that correction,
Speaker 2: but this is a way it can do that with
Speaker 2: just solar alignment.
Speaker 1: And so you mentioned that the clock is made so
Speaker 1: that maintenance can be done on it, but in theory
Speaker 1: it could survive ten thousand years on its own and
Speaker 1: keep functioning. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2: We did everything we could possibly do in order to
Speaker 2: make the materials and test all the things that move
Speaker 2: way beyond their design life of number of cycles, and
Speaker 2: as far as we know in material science, that will
Speaker 2: last as long as it needs to.
Speaker 1: Okay, So this is a great segue to the question
Speaker 1: of institutions. Human institutions, not just machines that can last
Speaker 1: a long time. So we've got many examples of this
Speaker 1: sort of thing, which you have been researching for years
Speaker 1: and years. You've been finding what human things last and why,
Speaker 1: So tell us about that. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, I mean, as you might imagine, I kind of
Speaker 2: made a hobby of like figuring out things that have
Speaker 2: lasted on this timescale. And initially it was really about
Speaker 2: the objects, because that's what we're engineering. This clock or
Speaker 2: buildings and so you know, I went to this seed
Speaker 2: vault in Svallbard that was designed to last for a
Speaker 2: thousand years. I went to the Mormon genealogical vault in
Speaker 2: outside of Salt Lake, which also.
Speaker 3: Designed for a thousand years.
Speaker 2: I've been to historical sites, the pyramids, all these things,
Speaker 2: you know. The nuclear waste repository sites multiple the ones here,
Speaker 2: the ones in Oncolo designed for one hundred thousand years actually,
Speaker 2: and there's in both Finland and Sweden they have these
Speaker 2: sites that designed for one hundred thousand years.
Speaker 1: Once I cantanded, how do you design a site like that?
Speaker 1: It's just thick cement.
Speaker 2: Each one of those sites is uses very different principles,
Speaker 2: like the Yucca Mountain site in North America that we
Speaker 2: have designed for storing nuclear waste, which so far is
Speaker 2: currently shut down because of I think largely political reasons.
Speaker 2: But we've done an amazing amount of engineering and digging
Speaker 2: to build a site for a nuclear waste that we
Speaker 2: have not used, but that one is designed has actually
Speaker 2: has a it's a law on the books that it's
Speaker 2: a ten thousand year repository because I think it was
Speaker 2: because the problem the nuclear kind of waste problem was
Speaker 2: over a quarter million years, so they thought they'd be
Speaker 2: They're like, well, that's too long. So we'll say that
Speaker 2: we at least have to keep it safe for ten
Speaker 2: thousand years, which I think is interesting that it's exactly
Speaker 2: the same as this clock, which is, you know, about
Speaker 2: as long as you know. Also to just say a
Speaker 2: little bit about that timeframe, that it's not meant as
Speaker 2: a forever clock, which is, you know, you get into
Speaker 2: these kind of astronomic time scales or even geologic time scales,
Speaker 2: which are millions of years, but ten thousand years is
Speaker 2: about how long we've had agriculture and cities as humans.
Speaker 2: And so that was the idea that this is our
Speaker 2: human entropscene moment is ten thousand years in the past,
Speaker 2: and so we should be looking at least ten thousand
Speaker 2: years in the future. And if we think of ourselves
Speaker 2: more broadly as in the middle, at least in the
Speaker 2: middle of a twenty thousand year story, rather than at
Speaker 2: the end of a ten thousand year story, we might
Speaker 2: think about, you know, how we would be more responsible
Speaker 2: towards the future.
Speaker 1: And one second tangent, which is long now foundation uses
Speaker 1: when it marks years, it uses five digits instead of four,
Speaker 1: so you might say, oh, it's oh twenty twenty six, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Very early on, when when Danny Hillis and I were
Speaker 2: designing that the dials for the clock, we realized that
Speaker 2: the dials are going to have to read with an
Speaker 2: extra zero in order to read past the year, you know,
Speaker 2: ten thousand, and so that we kind of used that
Speaker 2: as a mechanism to show that how far ahead we
Speaker 2: were thinking. And one of the thing Danny Hillis quickly
Speaker 2: found that there's a bug in Microsoft Excel because he
Speaker 2: was using that for some of the clock gear calculations
Speaker 2: and it doesn't take five digit dates.
Speaker 1: Oh gosh, right, like the Y two K bug. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Y ten k b exactly. Oh goodness. Okay, So
Speaker 1: let's get back to institutions then, So you started looking
Speaker 1: at what lasts? Why? What did you find about human institutions?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I started looking at this, and.
Speaker 2: As was brought up early and on the project, that
Speaker 2: making an institution last on this timescale is the thing
Speaker 2: that truly has not happened. And so as I've been
Speaker 2: managing long now, for a long time, and I realized,
Speaker 2: I know it's going to have to be handed off
Speaker 2: at some point, and so I started doing research. You know,
Speaker 2: who are the experts, who are where are the books
Speaker 2: on this? And there's certainly some anthropological studies and things
Speaker 2: on tribal cultures, but there's nothing like a modern business
Speaker 2: book on how to hand off your multi generational institution
Speaker 2: and how to design one from the ground up to
Speaker 2: be multi generational and multi generational in the sense that
Speaker 2: it's not necessarily a family thing, but it will be
Speaker 2: handed off, you know, to the next management team or whatever.
Speaker 1: You got interested in this question because you're interested in
Speaker 1: how do we make the long now foundation? With your
Speaker 1: executive director, how do we make that last ten thousand years? Exactly? Okay?
Speaker 1: And so what did you find in terms of give
Speaker 1: us some examples of organization and by the way, does
Speaker 1: religion count as as something that last long time? And
Speaker 1: give us an example of that and other organizations so less? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I think as I started doing some of that research. Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: you know, the one that comes up often first is
Speaker 1: the Catholic Church, right, it is one of the longest
Speaker 1: term organizations we have on the planet. And just so curiously,
Speaker 1: what about older religions, Judaism, Buddhisms.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there are definitely older religions, but they don't have
Speaker 2: like an institution necessarily that it has consistent management through it.
Speaker 1: The Vaticans what you're referring to.
Speaker 2: Or what, Yeah, the Catholic Church as an as an
Speaker 2: actual institution that like that has top down control or
Speaker 2: at least top down kind of management and things like that,
Speaker 2: as an actual company or organization or something like that.
Speaker 2: But I also like even looking more broadly, so I
Speaker 2: think so far in my research, so I started this,
Speaker 2: I realized that there was basically a book in this.
Speaker 2: So I started thinking about this in terms of that,
Speaker 2: and as I started interviewing people around the world who
Speaker 2: are managing some of the longest lived organizations in their
Speaker 2: current generation.
Speaker 3: So I went to Japan and.
Speaker 2: Interviewed the people that are managing the oldest hotel in
Speaker 2: the world.
Speaker 3: It was started in seven eighteen.
Speaker 2: It's on its forty seventh generation right now, it's being
Speaker 2: handed off right now to the first time for a
Speaker 2: woman to a woman a granddaughter.
Speaker 1: And just to make clear, it's seven eighteen, that's seventeen eighteen.
Speaker 2: Seven eighteen, so it's nearly a fourteen hundred year old company.
Speaker 2: And that one's family owned. But even going older than that, Well,
Speaker 2: I went to India and you go to the what
Speaker 2: are called the gats where they burn bodies near rivers,
Speaker 2: and the oldest one of those in the world and
Speaker 2: in India is at Varanasi, and that has been managed
Speaker 2: by a interestingly illiterate cast of people that so there's
Speaker 2: no record of it, but we have record of it
Speaker 2: in like freezes and things that have been documented to
Speaker 2: over five thousand years. So we know that that institution
Speaker 2: and that way of doing that is over five thousand
Speaker 2: years old. And there's documentation that the fire itself that
Speaker 2: has been kept there burning is has never gone out
Speaker 2: for three thousand years.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3: And so those people like you come there.
Speaker 2: You can come there with the remains, you can even
Speaker 2: come there with like your ashes from America of you,
Speaker 2: of your dad who is from India. And you talk
Speaker 2: to them, and they are a human computer that knows
Speaker 2: all genealogy of all of India. And they while they
Speaker 2: don't write anything down, they are they're word of mouth
Speaker 2: only and they will tell you. You start telling them
Speaker 2: about your family and they they'll kind of figure out
Speaker 2: your entire family line. Right there, figure out the way
Speaker 2: that your descendant or your parent is supposed to be
Speaker 2: burned and all the right rights. And there's this person
Speaker 2: with a typewriter who types it up that that is literate,
Speaker 2: and it's like it has to be one of the
Speaker 2: most amazing kind of human computers I've ever witnessed. And
Speaker 2: it's all it's largely undocumented, so much story and talking
Speaker 2: to these people and and to me, it's there are
Speaker 2: things like the Catholic Church, but it's not like no
Speaker 2: one's going to create another one of those or a
Speaker 2: lot of them, right Like, So I'm more interested in
Speaker 2: like these kind of strange unicorns of long term organization
Speaker 2: that are small enough that we have that have lessons
Speaker 2: for us to learn from. If we if, like for instance,
Speaker 2: long Now, wanted to be a long term institution, what
Speaker 2: are the lessons that we can learn from various ones
Speaker 2: that are at a scale, that are that are useful
Speaker 2: to learn from and that are possible to reproduce.
Speaker 1: So let me make sure understandingly, what is the difference
Speaker 1: between let's say tradition. So at Vara Nasi, they say, look,
Speaker 1: this is what my father did. We kept this, We
Speaker 1: always stoke the fire and keep it going and so
Speaker 1: on versus an organization and institution.
Speaker 2: Well, I would qualify the Vara Nazi one as an organization.
Speaker 2: They take in money, they they have a service. It's
Speaker 2: just happens to be undocumented. So I mean, I think,
Speaker 2: you know, and most languages in the world are not
Speaker 2: written languages, right, so I think we shouldn't necessarily do
Speaker 2: it to that. But there are also just traditions, things
Speaker 2: like martial arts have lasted for many thousands of years.
Speaker 2: There are you know, there's other religions like Shinto that
Speaker 2: are thousands of years old, and animists other animist tribal
Speaker 2: religions that are this way or are. There are more
Speaker 2: belief systems than religions there, but they don't have an
Speaker 2: institution around them.
Speaker 1: And what qualifies in like, for example, Judaism is quite old,
Speaker 1: but does that you think that's an institution or that's
Speaker 1: a tradition Cary.
Speaker 2: I think that has gone in and out of having
Speaker 2: both both institution tradition, and so it's had several bottlenecks
Speaker 2: through history, and amazingly things like the language have have
Speaker 2: lasted through that that are recognizable today that or you know,
Speaker 2: five thousand year old characters can be read today and
Speaker 2: get their meaning very directly, which is very and that's
Speaker 2: I think one of the more amazing things about Judaism.
Speaker 2: But its institution has been basically almost wiped off the
Speaker 2: face of the earth multiple times, and so it had
Speaker 2: to come back from that as through tradition.
Speaker 3: So I think it's a great example, but it's it's not.
Speaker 2: Like a continuous management system that you mean, because the Catholic.
Speaker 1: Church to have the pope and they say, okay, look
Speaker 1: I'm the guy in charge, and then I've got all
Speaker 1: these guys under me.
Speaker 2: Nice and that system never was was completely decimated and
Speaker 2: brought back.
Speaker 3: So we also places in Asia.
Speaker 2: In China, we have traditions that have been lasting for
Speaker 2: five thousand plus years, but because of the dynastics system,
Speaker 2: they were basically wiped out and rebuilt and so like
Speaker 2: they lost many technologies. Most interestingly to me was clockmaking,
Speaker 2: for instance. So for a long time ago, fourteen hundred
Speaker 2: years ago, they built a clock. This guy Sousung built
Speaker 2: a water clock that was more accurate than anything that
Speaker 2: has ever been built in the history of the world
Speaker 2: as far as we know, way more accurate than European cls,
Speaker 2: but because we only have record of it because of
Speaker 2: some records that he presented to the emperor, but most
Speaker 2: of that was wiped out.
Speaker 3: And so when Westerners showed up to their shores.
Speaker 2: With modern you know, what we thought were as modern clocks,
Speaker 2: they didn't realize that they had already invented something better
Speaker 2: than that hundreds of years before. I am thinking about
Speaker 2: institutions very broadly, and I think also there are lessons
Speaker 2: to be learned from even natural systems. And so, you know,
Speaker 2: one of the oldest living organisms of the world is
Speaker 2: a bristle cone pine. And my favorite definition of like
Speaker 2: why a bristolcone pine lives for a very long time
Speaker 2: is not that it lives for a very long time.
Speaker 2: It's just that it takes a very long time to die.
Speaker 2: And if you've ever seen one of these things, they're
Speaker 2: very gnarled up at the top of a mountain and
Speaker 2: there'll be one little teeny strip of bark and a
Speaker 2: bunch of needles.
Speaker 3: On that one thing.
Speaker 2: And their wood is so it's almost geologic, right, Like
Speaker 2: the wood is so dense, and you'll see at the
Speaker 2: root structure where limestone has received has been basically melting
Speaker 2: away for six thousand years up against the root structure
Speaker 2: of this, you know, five thousand year old tree, and
Speaker 2: that type of you know understanding. You know, it's often
Speaker 2: way more about how you survive the more difficult events
Speaker 2: and how you bounce back from that. I think is
Speaker 2: also comes up when I started looking at these institutions
Speaker 2: that have lasted for a very long time.
Speaker 1: So I'm glad you brought this up because I was
Speaker 1: thinking about this issue about the parallel between organizations and
Speaker 1: natural life. So let's go back to the Catholic Church.
Speaker 1: You've got the pope, you've got the bishops, You've got
Speaker 1: this thing, and it's like a biological organism in the
Speaker 1: sense that the cells keep dying and getting replaced, so
Speaker 1: the pope himself is always a new pope. All every
Speaker 1: piece of the organization is getting turned over like the
Speaker 1: ship of theseus, but the organization itself survives, just as
Speaker 1: happens in biology. The question is what is the difference
Speaker 1: that you see between organizations that are long lasting in
Speaker 1: those that die.
Speaker 2: Well, there's two things that have been emerging as I
Speaker 2: talk to people all over the world about this, and
Speaker 2: in all kinds of different businesses.
Speaker 3: One is a certain amount of flexibility and and I didn't.
Speaker 2: Expect to see so much of this, especially in Japan,
Speaker 2: which Japan has an inordinate number of the longest lived
Speaker 2: organizations and companies in the world, Like over sixty percent
Speaker 2: of the companies over three hundred years old are in Japan.
Speaker 2: For instance, whoa and when you got to tell us
Speaker 2: why what you're well? I mean, Japan has an amazing
Speaker 2: kind of deference to handing things down through families. That
Speaker 2: and it also never got like conquered in the way
Speaker 2: that wiped out that type of familial business. I mean,
Speaker 2: in World War Two, it did lose, but it was
Speaker 2: kind of rebuilt as well. It didn't it didn't wipe
Speaker 2: out these kind of cultural systems, but it has had
Speaker 2: It is a place that has had some some real challenges, right,
Speaker 2: It had tsunamis and earthquakes, so it was and it
Speaker 2: was an island culture, so it had to bring so
Speaker 2: much stuff in. But it tried to preserve its culture
Speaker 2: by holding off on a lot of that. So it's
Speaker 2: it was a it's a really just kind of singular
Speaker 2: place in terms of very long lived organizations. In looking there,
Speaker 2: I expected to find most of those to have very
Speaker 2: rigid systems. But actually, you know I'm talking to you know,
Speaker 2: like the people who run the hotel that is actually
Speaker 2: the oldest hot spring hotel in the world, and it
Speaker 2: was I think was seventeen generations old, and and and
Speaker 2: the person who's in charge of it now he said, yeah,
Speaker 2: when my dad handed it to me, he said this,
Speaker 2: you have to make this relevant to your time. I
Speaker 2: had to make it relevant to my time. And so
Speaker 2: there's there's a lot of flexibility that's been built into
Speaker 2: these systems. And the other thing that is unique to
Speaker 2: seems to be universal in some way is a storytelling culture.
Speaker 2: And and this one I really love. And I think
Speaker 2: sometimes it's like a janitor or somebody who maintains the
Speaker 2: building that's been there through all the different management things,
Speaker 2: but sometimes it's very official. So companies like Will's Fargo
Speaker 2: or Levi's right, like, they their history is so entrenched
Speaker 2: in their brand. They have whole history departments that that
Speaker 2: they maintain and and they think about their history because
Speaker 2: it's part of their marketing brand.
Speaker 1: Right, I hadn't read how old are Wells Fargo and
Speaker 1: Levi's Truss Well They're they're.
Speaker 2: On the order of like one hundred and fifty years old, right,
Speaker 2: so they're they're gold Rush kind of companies. So here
Speaker 2: in North America with modern Western companies, that's about as
Speaker 2: old as you get.
Speaker 3: In some cases, there's some things that have lasted longer
Speaker 3: than that.
Speaker 1: I'd forgot that by the way, see I'm worrying Levi jeans,
Speaker 1: But they write it was Levi's Trust came out here
Speaker 1: during the gold Rush in California to make Denham for
Speaker 1: people there.
Speaker 2: They were called the metal metal Genes because they had
Speaker 2: the metal gramets in corners that kept all the scenes
Speaker 2: from pulling apart. But yeah, so they're they're one of
Speaker 2: the oldest of like the modern American companies. But we
Speaker 2: do have things like I was just in Mexico City
Speaker 2: and where the central market there predates colonialism as it's older.
Speaker 2: It goes back as far as the Aztecs know in history,
Speaker 2: so that goes back thousands of years. And that's not
Speaker 2: really an institution, but it is a market, central market
Speaker 2: that's been there operating for thousands of years. And so
Speaker 2: all of these things have interesting lessons to me. I
Speaker 2: think one of my favorite ones more recently that I
Speaker 2: found out about was the symbol company.
Speaker 1: Which is symbol is in the big metal circles of yeah,
Speaker 1: well together.
Speaker 2: We're more often they're now on drum sets, right, So
Speaker 2: if you've ever seen a drum set with that Z logo,
Speaker 2: that's Zilgion.
Speaker 3: Yes, So that.
Speaker 2: Actually means symbol maker in early Turkish and that company
Speaker 2: was started in the Ottoman Empire four hundred years ago
Speaker 2: and by the Zilgian family. They were named Zilgion because
Speaker 2: there were symbol makers for the for the emperor. But
Speaker 2: that company one hundred years ago moved to the United
Speaker 2: States and is still operating as one of the highest
Speaker 2: end you know, kind of artisan. They're both artisan and
Speaker 2: commodity commodified, and that they're in all these drum sets
Speaker 2: and they're you know, they're their customers are rock stars,
Speaker 2: and they're they're still run by the Zilgian family, so
Speaker 2: they're they're small, but worldwide they're you know, they found
Speaker 2: a lot of these things like this in Japan with
Speaker 2: soy sauce companies and and in general. The other thing
Speaker 2: that you learn about these companies is almost all of them,
Speaker 2: you know, Zilgion notwithstanding, are in things that are basic
Speaker 2: human needs and maybe symbols. Music is a basic human need,
Speaker 2: I would say, but it's largely in hospitality. So things
Speaker 2: that have to do with breweries and wineries and hotels
Speaker 2: and things like that are some of the longest lasting
Speaker 2: companies we have.
Speaker 1: How do these families keep getting the next generation interested
Speaker 1: in doing this instead of going off to Hollywood or whatever.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well this has been a problem, certainly in the
Speaker 2: last couple generations. That's that's been the largest problem that
Speaker 2: it has ever been because people are you know, a
Speaker 2: generation can see the rest of the world that in
Speaker 2: ways they couldn't just one hundred years ago, right, and
Speaker 2: even just twenty five years ago. But you know, I
Speaker 2: visited this fourth generation sushi family that took us through
Speaker 2: the Tokyo market, and then we went and had sushi
Speaker 2: in his restaurant as only a sushi restaurant that it
Speaker 2: has like six seats, right, But they're considered national treasures
Speaker 2: in Japan. They when the royal families come, they're the
Speaker 2: ones who make sushi for them.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: And the Sun went to Stanford, we got a marketing
Speaker 2: degree and went off and he was like doing international
Speaker 2: ski guiding around the world.
Speaker 3: Did not think he was going to come back.
Speaker 2: But then I think the more he thought about it,
Speaker 2: he had grown up as though he was going to
Speaker 2: take over this sushi thing, and then he kind of
Speaker 2: rebelled and didn't. And he looked at it, He's like, well, actually,
Speaker 2: I could use my marketing degree from Stanford and I
Speaker 2: could rethink what it is to have us, you know,
Speaker 2: the one of the best sushi places on the planet
Speaker 2: in Japan, as that were, we are considered a national treasure.
Speaker 2: So that the client before me was Steph Curry and
Speaker 2: his wife and so they basically catered to a very
Speaker 2: high end, you know people, and they he totally has
Speaker 2: rethought it. So he went away and came back, and
Speaker 2: that is happening in some cases. But there are cases
Speaker 2: where kids are just like, no, I'm not taking this over.
Speaker 2: And so the oldest hotel in the world, for instance,
Speaker 2: the two sons were one didn't want to do it
Speaker 2: and the other one didn't seem really seem capable of
Speaker 2: doing it, and the father tried to get it to
Speaker 2: happen for years and years and years, but the granddaughter did.
Speaker 2: And in Japan it's very you know, there's a lot
Speaker 2: of entrenched sexism but eventually he has realized that, you know,
Speaker 2: after thirteen fourteen hundred years, that it was time to
Speaker 2: have a woman run the company. And by the way,
Speaker 2: she was already running it, but just not officially. But
Speaker 2: it was interesting to interview them both. And so is
Speaker 2: the eighty three year old man's kind of woman in
Speaker 2: her thirties breaking a tradition and allowing the flexibility for
Speaker 2: this to happen.
Speaker 1: So, you know, there's another biological analogy that I can't
Speaker 1: escape thinking about, which is if you you know, if
Speaker 1: you were a deity who invented these different species, you
Speaker 1: might say, gosh, how are we going to get these
Speaker 1: species to keep reproducing every generation? And the fact is
Speaker 1: that lots don't. There are lots of species that have
Speaker 1: died off and so on, and yet there are you know,
Speaker 1: it keeps going. And we are here as a testament
Speaker 1: to all to every single one of our ancestors being
Speaker 1: successful at matings. So so somehow, even though many many
Speaker 1: companies die, it is possible for companies to last or organs.
Speaker 1: I should say, what is what is the death knell
Speaker 1: for organizations that you see? What's the thing that where
Speaker 1: you think, wow, I'm looking at that and that's going downhill.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think there's there's many you know, there's
Speaker 2: there's a huge plurality of ways things can fail, right,
Speaker 2: But I would say that often and I think this
Speaker 2: is a great example for kind of especially modern Silicon
Speaker 2: Valley companies. This idea of growing or dying that if
Speaker 2: you're not growing or dying is is doesn't work if
Speaker 2: you're trying to make a long term company, right so
Speaker 2: even if you're one percent of year growth like that
Speaker 2: has a limit. Yeah, and you know, especially compounding, and
Speaker 2: so all these very old companies are kind of right
Speaker 2: sized companies.
Speaker 3: They're not growth companies, and they can have growth models.
Speaker 2: They have growth moments where like they become you know,
Speaker 2: like Exilgent wasn't you know, at first they were making
Speaker 2: symbols just for the emperor, but eventually they're now a
Speaker 2: worldwide commodity. But they they they put themselves in position
Speaker 2: that they're not overextended, they're not leveraged in a way
Speaker 2: that if some if something happens that they can't contract
Speaker 2: and they can't you know, the DNA of the company
Speaker 2: doesn't die, and that they are not so reliant on
Speaker 2: the growth that they will kill the host effectively, and
Speaker 2: that is something that I think is very much lost
Speaker 2: in modern kind of business. And we aren't building companies
Speaker 2: for right sizing right now, and it's not even it
Speaker 2: doesn't even seem like we're allowed to think about that.
Speaker 1: Gosh, to do one more biological analogy. You know, this
Speaker 1: happens all the time with yah Moose start growing larger
Speaker 1: and larger antlers because that's a useful thing for sexual selection,
Speaker 1: because the female really likes larger and larger antlers. But
Speaker 1: then they end up in a situation where they can't
Speaker 1: run away and get through the trees because their antlers
Speaker 1: are too large, and so they die out as a result.
Speaker 1: Right yeah, So okay, so companies have to be right sized.
Speaker 2: And that storytelling thing is is just to come back
Speaker 2: to it, I think it's it's I don't think it
Speaker 2: can be overstated, and I think there's if there's one
Speaker 2: of the lessons that I really want to point out
Speaker 2: in this book is that we should be probably more
Speaker 2: explicit about this who is telling the stories of our institutions.
Speaker 2: And you know that I mentioned that Levi's and the
Speaker 2: Wells Farrigo examples, they're doing it just fine. But you know,
Speaker 2: there's these ones that have much more unofficial ones. And
Speaker 2: so one of my favorite examples that I found is
Speaker 2: in the cathedrals in England have a person that and
Speaker 2: their title is It varies, but my favorite version of
Speaker 2: the title is the keeper of the fabric, and that
Speaker 2: person is basically they're they're the they tell the architectural story.
Speaker 2: They're in charge of the architectural plans of the building,
Speaker 2: but they can tell the basic each change of the architecture,
Speaker 2: every edition was done because you know a different you know,
Speaker 2: bishop or whatever gave them money and they had so
Speaker 2: he's that person is able to tell that story through
Speaker 2: the architectural plans, and that that idea of a keeper
Speaker 2: of the fabric or a storyteller in charge as at
Speaker 2: actual title, I think is much more important than we
Speaker 2: give it credit for.
Speaker 1: Oh lovely, Okay, there is something else I wanted to
Speaker 1: ask you that I know you and I both wondered
Speaker 1: about this individually, which is we are in an era
Speaker 1: now digital era, where it seems like great, you can
Speaker 1: reproduce digital documents and so everything can last forever, and
Speaker 1: yet we've all noticed that it's much easier to lose
Speaker 1: things in this digital era, as in my computer from
Speaker 1: twenty years ago. You know, there's like a hard drive.
Speaker 1: I don't even know if I can access the hard
Speaker 1: drive now. Well, there's so much stuff that's gone. My
Speaker 1: emails from twenty five or thirty years ago, we're on
Speaker 1: some other institutional server that's gone. I can't get those anymore.
Speaker 1: And yet we have very old documents and I on
Speaker 1: my bookshelves, I have things from my grandfather and things
Speaker 1: that were written and song. So how do you think
Speaker 1: about what will last from this digital era?
Speaker 2: Well, this was a topic that came up very early
Speaker 2: on with the Long Now foundations. One of the very
Speaker 2: first conferences we did was with Getty Conservation Institutes on
Speaker 2: this in nineteen ninety eight. It was called Time in Bits,
Speaker 2: And actually Danny Hillis had a great kind of description
Speaker 2: of this is that, you know, thousands of years ago
Speaker 2: we wrote on substances like rocks that can last for
Speaker 2: thousands of years. Hundreds of years ago we let we
Speaker 2: wrote on things like paper that could last for hundreds
Speaker 2: of years. But now we're writing on digital means that
Speaker 2: can last for kind of five years or like zero,
Speaker 2: whichever comes first. Really it can kind of depend on
Speaker 2: it so dependent, and especially before the broad use of
Speaker 2: the Internet, where we weren't doing we had, it was
Speaker 2: much more difficult to do ubiquitous copying. And there was
Speaker 2: a lot of early file formats that were abandoned, you know,
Speaker 2: like word perfect, for instance, would be very difficult to
Speaker 2: get something out of. And so he called that the
Speaker 2: digital dark dark Age that we've already lost a lot
Speaker 2: of stuff. And you may have heard some of these
Speaker 2: stories about the early Apollo tapes like kind of required
Speaker 2: heroic efforts to be saved because they were they were
Speaker 2: literally the first computer formats, and they were written by
Speaker 2: people that were making up computer formats and that had retired.
Speaker 2: And then the digital tapes were like sitting, you know,
Speaker 2: on in places that were not very well preserved, and
Speaker 2: they had to rebuild these one of a kind machines
Speaker 2: that were even built.
Speaker 3: To write them in order to reread them.
Speaker 2: And so we actually, so there's we and that's that's
Speaker 2: the case where we had enough effort and we saved
Speaker 2: it at just the right time. But there's many many
Speaker 2: cases where we've lost tons of early digital history and
Speaker 2: we continued to lose that. And so and my job
Speaker 2: now at automatic and word press, which WordPress strangely has.
Speaker 2: I didn't realize until I was starting it was as
Speaker 2: forty three percent of the world's websites are on WordPress.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: But that's the idea of something lasting for a very
Speaker 2: long time in the web world, especially now, is very
Speaker 2: very difficult because you know, those those books that even
Speaker 2: the electronic books that you think you're buying, you're not.
Speaker 2: You buy a license to that book, and so publishers aren't.
Speaker 2: You don't own that book anymore, and so they can
Speaker 2: change that book, they can take away that book.
Speaker 3: That's already happened.
Speaker 2: And ironically, I think that it was nineteen eighty four
Speaker 2: that was the first one that got retracted off of
Speaker 2: the digital publishing platform because of a copyright dispute. So
Speaker 2: we increasingly live in a world of like where we
Speaker 2: own kind of the stream of the information that's coming
Speaker 2: at us.
Speaker 3: And you know, then we have political issues that we're
Speaker 3: having right now.
Speaker 2: So you know, I was looking trying to look up
Speaker 2: at the Supreme Court rulings on the use of the
Speaker 2: auto pen. All of those previous things have been taken
Speaker 2: offline in the United States, so the only way I
Speaker 2: got them was from the Internet Archive. So we're destroying
Speaker 2: our institutions right now in the United States that have
Speaker 2: that have information, and the digital born digital information just
Speaker 2: makes that easier to do.
Speaker 1: Mike, God, you know that the irony for all of
Speaker 1: us is that we thought, with the advent of computers
Speaker 1: and the Internet, that we finally have a way of
Speaker 1: retaining information. You look at let's say, the burning of
Speaker 1: the Library of Alexandria, and it's so tragic, all these manuscripts.
Speaker 1: You know, the Alexandrians would take all the sailors would
Speaker 1: come into the dock, they would force them to give
Speaker 1: up their books so they could make a copy and
Speaker 1: then give it back to the sailors and something. And
Speaker 1: they had this huge repository which all burned down in
Speaker 1: one one day in the fire.
Speaker 2: Actually there's many fires to that. Oh really, it was
Speaker 2: like eight times that it burned down.
Speaker 1: But then then there was the big fire, yes, and
Speaker 1: so then it was all lost. And so when the
Speaker 1: Internet came along, I just felt such joy that that
Speaker 1: wouldn't happen anymore. But anyway, there's the irony. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So I mean, the great thing is that allows us
Speaker 2: to make many copies and I am hoping and luckily
Speaker 2: we have it stations like the Internet Archive that are
Speaker 2: doing backups, and I'm and other you know, there's other
Speaker 2: libraries and backups and I'm hoping that we don't lose
Speaker 2: things now. But the downside of digital things is that
Speaker 2: they can be they can disappear very fast, and they
Speaker 2: can be and I think in the modern AI age
Speaker 2: also knowing the true source of things is very difficult.
Speaker 3: Right, so you can where AI might you know, look
Speaker 3: at a whole bunch of sources.
Speaker 2: And then give you a kind of an interpreted feedback
Speaker 2: of what that means.
Speaker 3: That can be altered.
Speaker 2: That's an algorithmic thing, right, And and we start not
Speaker 2: really understanding what facts are and if we can, if
Speaker 2: we don't have the original things that were unchangeable, that
Speaker 2: were written on paper or in some kind of write
Speaker 2: once media, it might be hard to ever know what
Speaker 2: true facts are going into the future with AI, which
Speaker 2: I think is I love AI, and I think there's
Speaker 2: so many great uses of it, but I think this
Speaker 2: is a place where we need to be very careful.
Speaker 1: Does all your work thinking about long time make you
Speaker 1: more optimistic or pessimistic about humanity's future?
Speaker 3: I think about this a lot.
Speaker 2: I mean, there's there's two things that I think have
Speaker 2: changed in me in making kind of long term thinking
Speaker 2: so much a part of what I do. And one
Speaker 2: is it changes the way that that I think about
Speaker 2: even simple things like if I'm doing something to my
Speaker 2: home that's an upgrade, like am I doing it for
Speaker 2: ten years?
Speaker 3: Am I doing it for one hundred years? Am I
Speaker 3: doing it for a generation?
Speaker 2: And this is also the case just with any all
Speaker 2: objects and things around me.
Speaker 3: I think that has really changed the way.
Speaker 2: And I think there's always a case for things that
Speaker 2: are very ephemeral. And I think that you know, there's
Speaker 2: art and some parts of communication, design and things like
Speaker 2: that that should be very frenetic. We should be experimenting.
Speaker 2: They should go that we should burn through them. They
Speaker 2: should go fast. And I know, and I always I
Speaker 2: always try and be careful to you know, it's like
Speaker 2: not everything should last for a long time. There's not
Speaker 2: a lot of companies should last for a long time, right,
Speaker 2: There's some that should that's and some that shouldn't. But
Speaker 2: having the conversation and thinking about the things that that
Speaker 2: we do care about that should last is something that
Speaker 2: I that states with me through this through all of
Speaker 2: these projects.
Speaker 1: So the question is how does it make you feel
Speaker 1: about the next Yeah, So I would.
Speaker 2: Say fundamentally, I am very optimistic. You know, if you
Speaker 2: look at history in the last ten thousand years or
Speaker 2: even the last hundred years, like, there is nobody that
Speaker 2: would go back one hundred years and want to live
Speaker 2: in that world, especially if you're not a white male,
Speaker 2: right and so they but even that, like, you don't
Speaker 2: want a world of no antibiotics and bad dentistry, right, like,
Speaker 2: you do not want to live in this world, right like.
Speaker 2: So this this good old day's thought, I think is
Speaker 2: always misplaced. And I think that you know, the pendulum
Speaker 2: of justice does back and forth so far, it always
Speaker 2: keeps going further in the direction that I think is good.
Speaker 2: And our lives have always been getting better. There's never
Speaker 2: a time that they haven't been and they do approximately
Speaker 2: like maybe during a war, twenty years, a depression something
Speaker 2: like that does get worse, but overall, you would not
Speaker 2: trade your life for that of your parents almost ever.
Speaker 2: And I think that when you see that kind of
Speaker 2: progress through time, you know, I think it's fundamentally because
Speaker 2: there's never been a generation, there's never been a parent
Speaker 2: who wants a worse world for their kid, right, So,
Speaker 2: I think this has had a ratcheting effect throughout human history.
Speaker 3: And I think the.
Speaker 2: Only danger in that is that if you are only
Speaker 2: thinking about your kid as your kid and not the
Speaker 2: generation of the world's kids, which we now are operating
Speaker 2: and changing the world at a global scale, we need
Speaker 2: to think about that in a little bit different ways.
Speaker 2: And if we can think about the next generation as
Speaker 2: not just making my kid's life better, but making all
Speaker 2: kids of my kid's age better, than I think we.
Speaker 3: Have a shot.
Speaker 1: That was my conversation with Alexander Rose. I've always found
Speaker 1: this project of the ten thousand year clock so spectacular
Speaker 1: because it is so impossible to extrapolate that far. What
Speaker 1: I mean is, when all of us consider where AI
Speaker 1: and biotechnology are going to be in three years from now,
Speaker 1: it's very difficult to make an accurate guess. So where's
Speaker 1: the human race going to be one hundred years from
Speaker 1: now or a thousand years from now. Taking on a
Speaker 1: project with a ten thousand year timescale is so extraordinary
Speaker 1: because we really have no idea who will be maintaining
Speaker 1: that in ten thousand years. Will it even be a human.
Speaker 1: Will it be a robot, will it be some strange
Speaker 1: cyborg hybrid. There's no way to know this in advance,
Speaker 1: and that's part of what makes it an amazing project.
Speaker 1: As we wrap up today's conversation, I'm struck by how
Speaker 1: strange and how rare it is to think on the
Speaker 1: kind of time scales that Xander works. In. Most of
Speaker 1: our systems, from technology to politics to finance, they're optimized
Speaker 1: for immediacy. We build for the next version or the
Speaker 1: next quarter, but we can't escape deep time. Civilizations rise
Speaker 1: and crumble. Knowledge survives or disappears based on the fragility
Speaker 1: of its containers and the continuity of the people who
Speaker 1: care enough to carry it forward. So today's conversation reminds
Speaker 1: me how rarely we pause to consider the sheer improbability
Speaker 1: of anything surviving across time. Most of what humans create,
Speaker 1: files or institutions or cultures, this all flickers briefly and disappears.
Speaker 1: The default state of the universe is forgetting. Entropy always
Speaker 1: wins unless someone push us back, And what Xander stands
Speaker 1: for is that pushback. We can choose to build clocks
Speaker 1: that will still be ticking long after our languages aren't
Speaker 1: spoken anymore. We can choose to preserve thousands of human
Speaker 1: languages on a disc that might outlast continents. We can
Speaker 1: place public bets on the future that force us to
Speaker 1: confront the long arcs of our predictions. These are all
Speaker 1: acts of civic memory. These are small but meaningful counterforces
Speaker 1: to the great forgetting, And all these acts of building
Speaker 1: for the long term. These remind us that beyond our
Speaker 1: own short stories, we are inhabiting a chapter in something
Speaker 1: much larger. Every generation inherits a library of solutions and
Speaker 1: mistakes and technologies and myths, and then decides consciously or
Speaker 1: not what to pass along and what to drop. We
Speaker 1: can do that with intention or simply let chance decide
Speaker 1: what remains. And many of us as start that we
Speaker 1: owe it to our descendants to take the intentional stance.
Speaker 1: So when this podcast ends and you return to the
Speaker 1: quick tempo of everyday life, try to hold on to
Speaker 1: this larger frame. Think of the bristle cone pine on
Speaker 1: the mountain side, assiduously marking its five thousand ring. Think
Speaker 1: of the vanished knowledge that we can no longer reconstruct.
Speaker 1: Think about who or what is going to be looking
Speaker 1: at that clock ten thousand year years from now, and
Speaker 1: think of the countless decisions, large and small that accumulate
Speaker 1: into the shape of a civilization, and ask yourself, what
Speaker 1: might you contribute to that that deserves to last. Thank
Speaker 1: you for sharing with me this very brief moment in
Speaker 1: the very long now. Go to eagleman dot com slash
Speaker 1: podcast for more information and to find further reading. Join
Speaker 1: the weekly discussions on my substack, and check out and
Speaker 1: subscribe to Inner Cosmos on YouTube for videos of each
Speaker 1: episode and to leave comments. Until next time. I'm David Eagleman,
Speaker 1: and this is Inner Cosmos.