How might we inspire humans to think on the time scale of civilization? What can we learn about long term thinking from the world's most enduring organizations? Long Now Foundation's Executive Director reflects on his learnings from 25 years in his role.
[INTRODUCTION]
"AR: There's going to be these global moments where we have a kind of existential crisis that we have to make it through. And we have to get better at doing it. We don't want to find ourselves 100 years from now just like we are from the last pandemic just as caught on our heels. We just want to effectively build the institution that can help people think about these things so that we don't keep thinking we're surprised by them.”
[00:00:29] JS: That's Alexander Rose, founding Executive Director of The Long Now Foundation. And this is the Denizen podcast. I'm your host and curator, Jenny Stefanotti. This week's episode is a fireside chat with Alexander from our archives. Exploring long-term thinking.
Just last month, Long Now Foundation announced that Alexander is transitioning after 26 years at The Long Now Foundation, where he served as its founding Executive Director.
Long Now Foundation was started in 1996 to foster long-term thinking. Their work encourages imagination at the time scale of civilization. Alexander and I discuss many of the initiatives The Long Now Foundation does in service of this work, including insights from his research on the world's oldest organizations. What they've learned about the heuristics that people use to make estimates on long-time horizons. And the monumental scale mechanical clock that he helped build inside a mountain to keep accurate time for the next millennia.
I want to release this conversation now to honor Alexander and his work. And I also think it's a great compliment to the long-term capitalism episode that we leased several weeks ago.
As always, you can find the show notes for this episode on our website, www.becomingdenizen.com. There you can also sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter where I send our latest content to your inbox alongside additional news from Denizen's partner organizations.
I hope you enjoy this conversation with Alexander.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:01:53] JS: We talked about some of the trends over the past several decades towards a quarterly focus based on growth in the finance industry in the 70s and 80s and the rise of money manager capitalism. But when we looked at what's happening currently around long-term capitalism, we talked about the long-term stock exchange, which is an opportunity to coordinate long-term thinking in the public markets.
But I want to take the opportunity to do today is to widen the lens on this question about long-term thinking. Because there are so many things that have been driving us to operate on shorter and shorter time horizons. Obviously, the design of our major institutions. Not just our economic institutions. But also, election cycles and how that incentivized politicians. But even human being themselves.
When we look at technology and what happens with our attention the way that we're currently engaging with social media, it's actually rewiring our brains to have a shorter attention span, which I think is terrifying and fascinating. And then I'm also really interested in the ways in which there are just fundamental quirks in the human psyche that limit our ability to think long-term.
In economics, there's a term called hyperbolic discounting, which basically is why you say that you're going to eat healthy and exercise this week but then wind up not doing that. Because we think differently about the present and the future. And other cognitive biases that might limit long-term thinking.
And I'm super curious about how is our long-term thinking inhibited just by virtue of the human lifespan and how you're thinking about that at Long Now. But what The Long Now Foundation does is it helps to provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common. And they have a number of mechanisms with which they do that. And Alexander will tell us about them. But I guess my first question for you, Alexander, is one of the things on the website, it says you hope to foster responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years. Why 10,000 years? Because that just feels impossibly long-term given the pace of social evolution. Isn't a thousand years sufficient or even a hundred years for that matter?
[00:03:57] AR: Yeah. Well, I mean, when our project began, really, that it started, inspired, by an idea of a computer scientist, Danny Hillis, who proposed this idea of a kind of multi-millennial clock that would be built at monument scale and be this inspiration towards long-term thinking. And as he started talking about that with the people who eventually became the founders of Long Now, people like Stewart Brand, who started the Whole Earth Catalog. Kevin Kelly, the founding editor at Wired. Brian Eno, a musician. It became this online conversation among people that were really interested in this idea of why we are increasingly not good at certain types of long-term thinking as well as how we could get better at it.
And so, this idea of this kind of monument to long-term thinking that would really change conversations. You can write a white paper about long-term thinking but it doesn't really – it's not enough of an intervention to change a conversation. We needed something that was kind of mythic in scale that was kind of like visiting the Grand Canyon. When you visit the Grand Canyon, you get this deep sense of geologic time, which is on the order of millions of years, which is highly dwarfing to the human experience. Or if you look through a telescope and you start realizing that you're seeing things millions of light years away, that's also stretches your time horizon. But is, again, dwarfing to the point where it just makes you feel insignificant.
But that conversation among who became the founding board really arrived at this idea of 10,000 years. If you look back to the last receding of the Ice Age, that was when cities began, agriculture began. It became when we started shaping the planet more than the planet was shaping us.
And so, the idea, actually, it's even worse than you say. It's not just 10,000 years. It's really 20,000 years. This idea that we not only should be able to look back ten thousand years. But also look forward 10,000 years and see ourselves in the middle of a 20,000-year story. Not just at the end of a 10,000-year one.
And I think we often have this apocalyptic feeling especially now that we're really at the end of a story. But if you look at all of the arc of human history, things fundamentally on the really long-term scales have been getting better for people. Not worse. And even though the populations have been increasing and the resources of getting scarcer, really, most qualities of life have been getting better over time.
And so, this idea that we're kind of ending the human moment I think is incorrect. And there's certainly a lot of things that we need to work on as you look in this long-term horizon. Things like climate change and all these other things that also fundamentally need to be worked on in long-term scales. We're not going to solve climate change in three years.
And so, we've basically taken these projects off the map because we can't solve them in one election horizon or a five-year plan. The idea is to just really inspire people to think on this civilizational scale. And, well, we still have deadlines. We still have to get things done in our lifetimes. We still have to be responsible to our daily lives. We should also hold things a little bit in perspective of how are we working in the larger arc of human civilization?
[00:07:01] JS: I find the climate example interesting because I almost feel the opposite. It is the dominant thing that I'm hearing, the climate situation. It's like there's urgency and we don't get it. And it really matters what we do in the next 10 years. And then if you look at the next 10 years, it's the next three. And it's actually the next 18 months. And so, actually, I'm always hearing the opposite from the climate space, which is we need to be more short-term-oriented in our action than we are long-term. I'm curious your thoughts on that.
[00:07:24] AR: Well, yeah. I mean, you're absolutely right. I mean, there's urgency. There's severe urgency. And the way you understand that urgency and the way that actually that we're arriving at that urgency is by looking at the long-term. And you look at it and you go, "Oh, wow. We're already cornering ourselves into basically mostly just building a world where we have to mitigate the effects. We don't even get to change the effects in our lifetimes now. And so, the less we think long term, the less we understand what to do in the moment with something like climate change.
[00:07:55] JS: That's interesting. Well, first, tell us about the status of the clock.
[00:08:00] AR: Yeah. The Clock project is what I was originally hired to work on. My background is in industrial design. And I started working with The Long Now Foundation way back in '97. I was the first employee. And I was pulled in by Stewart Brand. I've grown up in the South City State of Waterfront. And he lives in the South City Waterfront. And I'd grown up knowing him. And I quickly got bored of some of the digital projects that I was working at out of school. And he told me about this idea of building a 10,000-year clock. And I just couldn't get out of my head.
And eventually, I started working with them on it. And we built several prototypes early on. And now, since 2005, we've been working on the project funded by Jeff Bezos. And he donated a chunk of property in West Texas for us to build the monument scale version. It's fairly massive. And we built a 500-foot underground facility built into solid rock and developed giant robots to cut the rock for us with diamond chainsaws that spent two years cutting 300 vertical feet of stairs. And we've been working on the mechanism for over a decade now.
[00:09:03] JS: Tell us about the other things that you're doing to help us think long-term beyond the clock.
[00:09:07] AR: Well, and as some of you may know from the Bay Area or beyond, we do a series of lectures around long-term thinking. It was originally hosted by Stewart Brand and now increasingly by myself and Kevin Kelly. We probably produced over 250 talks on that. We've done projects around archiving languages. We've produced the largest or at least the broadest collection of linguistic materials in the world and micro etched them on to a disc that can last for thousands of years and was launched to a comet by the ESA's Rosetta Mission.
We have done a project called Long Bets, which allows you to bet on things of social and scientific consequence where then the money gets invested and then the winnings go to the winners, the charity of the winner's choice. The largest of which was done with Warren Buffett who paid up $2.2 million a couple years ago to a charity.
[00:09:55] JS: Can you help me understand what is the theory of change around the Long Bets? Just getting people thinking about it.
[00:10:02] AR: Yeah. Well, the idea was it's twofold. One is that keep going to these conferences where people prognosticate about the future. And you'd see people write op-eds and whatnot. But no one's ever really held accountable to those predictions.
And so, not only are they – are the people who we consider the future prognosticators. Actually, if you look at it really carefully, they're some of the most wrong people out there. But they're never really held accountable to it.
And so, we wanted to call attention to that. But also, more importantly, what we wanted to do was to call it, was to log these predictions. And as they're decided over time, that we get to understand the way people think about the future. Each prediction both sides writes out a very long argument as to why they think they're right.
And our take is really we don't care who's right or wrong in a given bet. So much as what we want to do is pull the heuristics out of the type of arguments that are right over time is really interesting to understand.
[00:11:03] JS: Absolutely.
[00:11:03] AR: And so, how people think about the future and get it right and get it wrong is something that we wanted to understand with that project. Our goal is the metadata of this project and not the data per se.
[00:11:13] JS: Yeah. That is absolutely fascinating. And I'm dying for you to tell me what you're learning.
[00:11:20] AR: Yeah. I mean, one of the main things that we're learning is that people who are famous prognosticators are the most wrong people out there. And if you follow the work of Philip Tetlock, he's followed this kind of idea of super forecasters that he mostly works in much more near-term predictions that are more measurable so that he can get more data fast.
But there's kind of certain types of thinkers that can be really good at things that they actually have no information about going in. And in fact, since they don't have a horse in the race, are generally better thinkers about certain things by doing some very basic types of research.
I think some of the earliest things we've learned is really the work that Tetlock has brought to it. The types of predictions we need to learn about, we're going to need to know, we're going to need to understand over decades. And we've only been running this project for one and a half decade at this point.
[00:12:04] JS: That's just so fascinating. They get to the point that I made at the top just about. I'm so curious about the cognitive biases that inhibit or foster the longer-term thinking. And these heuristics that you uncover will obviously inform that question.
[00:12:17] AR: Yeah. Fundamentally, long-term thinking, as you mentioned, is counter-intuitive in the sense that, from a deep perspective of human history, that, really, long-term thinking has not really been needed. But once we got to agriculture, you really needed to understand the year and the seasons. And then on some level, we started needing to understand things like climate change. Or at least we were starting to be really affected by it by – we've had whole civilizations that, as we look back through history, especially in South and Central America, that we now realize were – and North America, that were basically wiped out by climate change.
And so, not understanding these things that take generations to play out can have dire consequences, for sure. But in order to think long-term, you have to have things like food and shelter figured out. It's a luxury for a civilization to be able to have a set of people whose only thing they're thinking about is things centuries in advance.
Luckily, we're in a civilization that at least has part of it that can do that. And so, we're hoping to kind of engender that and make sure that that's always part of the conversation. It doesn't mean to say that everything has to be that way. There's always a place for art, and commerce and culture that's moving fast and is experimenting in the corners. But the idea is that we want to have at least one moment where we go, "Okay. Well, how does this affect things on a really long scale?" And how are we going to check that? And how are we going to put checks in the system to make sure that we don't do things wrong that spiral a lot of control? And I think climate change, again, it's just a really good example of one of those.
[00:13:52] JS: Yeah. I mean, you read about how climate just is a nightmare of a problem when it comes to all the ways that we're inhibited in our ability to think clearly. I'm curious then, what's your take on the long-term stock exchange? For those that aren't familiar with it, it's a stock exchange, and what companies have to do is they have to adhere to its principles around what it means to be a long-term company. Part of that is around how they serve their stakeholders. But also, like how their strategy, and compensation and board engagement is around longer time horizons. That still feels like unbelievably incremental relative to the time horizons that Long Now Foundation is interested in. I'm super curious about how you're thinking about the marginal extensions that are feasible versus the longer-term thinking that you would consider optimal.
[00:14:36] AR: Well, I mean, I think it's – all steps towards long-term thinking are incremental in some way. And so, I think this is extremely important. And, literally, the write-ups that Stewart that you kind of started to quote us at the beginning here that talks about this, this idea that next quarter thinking has been infused.
And now that we have quarterly report-driven companies driving so much of culture as we see with things like social media, the idea that those things are the things that are driving culture are kind of devastating. And so, I think anything that is a corrective to that type of thinking that encourages that.
And as Eric points out, nobody in these companies thinks it's a good idea to be working in this way. But they've been caught in the system. And we've just built the system around ourselves. And we've just built a prison around ourselves of thinking that we can't get past.
And the way he describes it, which I love, it's like he describes it as like it's just like gravity. That when you talk about it at a company, they talk about it as like a law of physics. This is the way it is. And it's not. We built the system around ourselves. We can unbuild it. We can incentivize things that are more useful for ourselves. And he's trying to point that out. I think it's very, very important. And he does it in a way that is kind of impossible to not recognize. And the question of how long it will take to unwind the thing that we have built around ourselves is a good one. But I think his effort is a huge step in that direction.
[00:16:07] JS: And I also think a lot of this. In the capital markets, there's this coordination failure associated with the connections between the companies and sources of capital. And obviously, as an exchange, he can play that intermediate role in defining what that paradigm looks like. And I think they're doing it incredibly thoughtfully and carefully.
Because we were just talking about how the current mode of raising capital and, really, managing your org to the story that you need to tell at the next round of financing inhibits long-term thinking in early stages. I don't know if you have anything, any thoughts on that.
[00:16:43] AR: You're certainly getting out of my area of expertise. But I would say that the way that capital markets work and the way that, especially VC funding works, is how it discourages funders from being a part of the company for long periods. There's just so many parts of it that just de-incentivize someone to build something that's worth it for their own lifetime as a company builder, much less that it's a company that's being designed to be flipped not to provide societal value.
Right now, all the kind of systems are broken in the long-term thinking and the true value creation. I mean, when you talk about just micro trading, there's no way that any decision that any algorithm makes about a stock being purchased and sold within – I think the average half-life, I think, he mentioned of a stock in terms of a buy and a cell is on the order of a few seconds.
And so, there's no way that any of those companies are doing things that matter for value to make a decision for that. They cannot. And so, we keep buying into that system and doubling down on it is because we get a short-term reward out of it is clearly going to break at some point.
[00:17:53] JS: Yeah.
[00:17:54] AR: And so we can either wait for it to break or we can get ahead of it and try and fix it.
[00:17:57] JS: Yeah, for sure. And I don't think that evergreen structures – I would love to see more thinking around that for funds in particular. So the capitals just recycle instead of they're structured around 10 years. Like you need this some sort of an exit in 10 years typically, right?
What is on your mind these days? I know you've been telling me about what you've been working on. I want you to tell everybody else about it.
[00:18:18] AR: Yeah. Well, I mean, a few things. One is obviously Long Now as an institution has had the pivot in the middle of the pandemic. We moved – everything moved on to online like so many people. And we're trying to not only do that, but also do it in a really great way.
And our talks that used to be these talking heads of people standing on stages are now turning into basically these mini documentaries of people's ideas that hopefully are these kind of pieces of evergreen content that live on into the future around ideas but are deeper dives in something like a TED Talk of 17 minutes. These are 45 minutes to an hour. That's one of the things that we're working on.
And the generational shift at Long Now from people like Stewart to generations like mine. And we've added board members like Patrick Collison and younger ones that are, hopefully, the people that are going to be shifting or shaping culture for the next generation just like Stewart, and Brian and Kevin were for the last.
But the project that I'm working on is kind of part of that generational shift. I realized, when I started doing research, into understanding how organizations last over at least centuries, is that there's no field of study in this space. And that there's almost no research into it.
And so, I started actually doing this research. And we got some funding to work on that. I'm starting to interview people who are running the companies that have lasted for centuries. And not just companies, but institutions that go back to the 1100s or earlier.
And especially when you get to Japan, they've lived through the Black Plague. They lived through not just the 1918 flu but all of these kind of amazing trials of the last several thousand years and starting to understand how did they do that? How did they make the generational shifts? How did they handle the fact that they had to shrink in certain times and then grow back? How did they handle the fact that they – fundamentally, any organization that's around for more than a century or so, their goal cannot be growth. Their goal has to be finding the right size and staying there, at least staying close to there. If their goal is even 1% growth a year over a century, they would consume everything, right? That compound growth thing, it doesn't really work.
And we found ourselves right now I think facing the coming century where we know that human population is going to peak in the next century. And it's already peaking in almost every developed country in the world. And we don't want what's happened in Japan where every single economy just starts getting devastated as the population drops.
We're going to be facing a world of decreasing population. In some cases, increasing wealth and resources but not necessarily always. And so, how do we build a world that can thrive as population starts to decrease? How do we build institutions that can hand themselves off hundreds of times through the next several thousand years?
And there's going to be more of these. The next one isn't going to be a pandemic. It's going to be – it'll be a massive tsunami. And then one of the ocean basins or an asteroid impact. Or one of these trials. And there could be very positive ones. Like we could get contacted by intelligent alien race or something. But there's going to be these global moments where we have a kind of existential crisis that we have to make it through. And we have to get better at doing it. We don't want to find ourselves 100 years from now just like we are from the last pandemic just as caught on our heels. We just want to effectively build the institution that can help people think about these things, so that we don't keep thinking we're surprised by them.
[00:21:55] JS: Yeah. No. I mean, I think one of the things that has been on my mind since the pandemic is resiliency. And how do you establish resiliency? Because you looked at how brittle the economy was based on how it's optimized for such a simple objective function.
And I remembered some of the research around Steward ownership models that there was a lot more resilience during economic shocks with those kinds of models. Do you have any insights yet from that research around what might create resiliency?
[00:22:24] AR: I think, fundamentally, there's actually just kind of a culture in certain companies that as I talked to – and again, I keep saying companies. But I mean, really, organizations. It includes universities, religions, everything. There's a culture that as you start talking to the leaders of these companies where they've prepared everyone for the time that's coming because they have the cultural institutional memory of those times.
I'll never forget when I talked with Jeff Bezos about – I was like, "How did you get Amazon to survive through 2001?" And if you remember, like it was on the cover of Time as .bomb. Right? And no one thought that they were going to survive. And he said that at every single all-hands meeting, as they were ascending through – and their stock prices were doubling every quarter or more, he told them all. He said, "You're not twice as smart as you were last quarter. We did not create a twice as good company as you did last quarter. This is going to end. This is going to go down. And when it starts going down, you will not be twice as dumb as you were last quarter. And our company will not be twice as worthless as it was last quarter as long as we build on all the fundamentals of what a real company should do."
And that prepared the people at Amazon. So that when it started going down and their stock prices just started tumbling, that they just didn't throw their hands up and walk away. They were ready for it. And I think this is a kind of a universal thing that you start talking to people in companies that have lasted for a long time. That they ready for it.
Whereas, I remember just being in the culture of the Bay Area around the late 90s. And you go to that Christmas party for some of these companies. And the way they talked about their ascendancy and their inevitability, no one in those companies was prepared mentally for what was going to happen next.
And so, I think so much of it is about company culture and how you let people know that you need to build fundamentals, you need to build real kind of business logic into what's going on. And you can't just do it on hype.
[00:24:31] JS: Yeah. I mean, that's a fascinating channel for The Long Now Foundation to extract those insights. And then how can you propagate that in corporate culture through your work?
[00:24:43] AR: Yeah, that's our goal. Fundamentally, I mean, I think we're the first customer. I mean, if we're going to last for 10,000 years and there's 25 years of generation when we're at right at the cusp of our first one. We've got 399 more of these generations to go. And these hand-me-downs of one culture to next. How do you put the right DNA in place so that you're handing something off to the next generation that's useful but not too encumbering? We have to trust the future. They know more about their present than we can project about our future.
[00:25:11] JS: Exactly. Yeah, of course.
[00:25:12] AR: And so, you need to trust those generations and know that they have fundamentally more and better information than you have. But at the same time, you need to give them the right amount of kind of resources and just basic kind of deep DNA of what you're doing so that it moves on in a good way.
[00:25:30] JS: Yeah. And I thought a lot about – as I've thought about changing corporate behaviors and structures and how companies show up in the world, I think there's a real opportunity for Long Now especially, because you have such deep roots in the tech industry. I just feel like the tech industry is so – just big in the economy. These are the biggest companies in the world. But also, just so influential in terms of corporate culture. I think there's a real leverage point in starting with imbuing those sorts of sensibilities into companies here and then having that spill over into the economy more broadly.
[00:26:02] AR: Yeah. I mean, I would go more broadly than that, is that, strangely, their corporate culture is now affecting our cultural closer. And because that corporate culture – when you have a corporate culture of something that is so deeply ingrained in modern culture like a social media company, it starts to just become what culture is. And that's why we're seeing huge backlashes in places like Europe and around the world that were really our cultural centers before. And now, every time they open up their new Mac, it says designed in California by Apple. And realizing that all culture is being mediated by these companies from a very small corner of the world that really didn't have a background in mediating culture before, like parts of Europe, or Japan, or places like this would have. I think it's very frustrating to them, I know. And we're seeing backlash around it as these lawsuits kind of around the way these companies are invading daily life.
But I think it's important to recognize that so many of these companies really just don't have a good grounding in how they might manage culture. But all of a sudden, we have people who are young CEOs affecting the choice of whether or not some really bad information gets propagated into the world.
[00:27:17] JS: Yeah. I really love this provocation. How might we integrate long-term thinking into our lives? I'm just curious what your thoughts are.
[00:27:25] AR: Yeah, there's a lot in this space certainly. And I think it was one of the reasons why I kind of bounced off of the industrial design education that I had that was much more about how to build the next plastic toaster. And rather, I'm much more interested in how do you build a toaster that lasts for the rest of your life?
You can, right now, buy a toaster made 60 years ago that is totally working fine.
[00:27:46] JS: Well, that's a great – yeah. I mean, I love provocation for companies as well, right? I mean, we didn't even talk about the trend towards fast consumption cycles in fast fashion and how horrific that is. I love the provocation around extending that. Because a lot of these things, they're counter to the profit motive. But they're very much aligned with the way that we might want capitalism to shift.
Alexander, this has been amazing and so thought-provoking. You're so thoughtful. I'm so grateful to have you come and just share your knowledge. I really appreciate just the opportunity to broaden the lens and think more deeply about long-term as a whole instead of just as it pertains to companies and the way that we structure our VC funds.
[00:28:34] AR: Thank you for having me.
[OUTRO]
[00:28:36] JS: Thank you so much for listening. And thanks to Scott Hansen, also known as Tycho, for our musical signature. In addition to this podcast, you can find resources for each episode on our website, www.becomingdenizen.com, including transcripts and background materials.
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[END]