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Welcome back to Giant Ideas.
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Today, we have the public philosopher, Roman Krznaric.
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And Roman fundamentally changed the way I think about the world when I came across him a couple of weeks ago at a gathering of leaders in the British countryside of all places.
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Roman's book, The Good Ancestor, teaches us to think long-term in a short-term world.
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I'm really excited to share his ideas on the podcast today with you, and maybe he will change the way you think as much as the way he changed our I think.
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Roman, welcome to Giant Ideas.
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Thanks for coming on the show.
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>> I'm looking forward to the adventure of our conversation. Let's see where we go. >> Let's do it.
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So, in a nutshell, what what is this concept of being a good ancestor? >> Okay.
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So, if you think about it, we all have ancestors going into the past.
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But, we too are the ancestors of the generations to come.
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So, there's a question about how those future generations are going to remember us.
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For what we did or didn't do at this crucial moment in the human story.
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Are they going to remember us as good ancestors, bad ancestors, indifferent ancestors?
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That's really the question.
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So, the idea of being a good ancestor I actually kind of like it better than the idea of thinking about future generations cuz future generations is quite a abstract concept.
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But, being a good ancestor is about me.
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It's about my responsibilities.
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So, it's much more kind of personal and visceral and emotional. >> Okay.
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You you say kind of make it more visceral than thinking about future generations.
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You do though have quite good numbers on kind of the living, the dead, the living, and the future.
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Put us that into context a little bit cuz I think that's quite useful. >> Okay.
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I think one way of thinking about our responsibilities to the future is to think about it yeah, just in terms of the numbers, yeah, right?
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And you can play around with numbers, of course, but one way to think about it is this.
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Look, there are about 8 billion of us around today.
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Now, if you go back really long-term, say back 50,000 years, an estimated 100 billion people have been born and died. >> Okay.
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>> But if you go forward 50,000 years, assuming this century's birth rates level off and stabilize, nearly 7 trillion people will be born.
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So, like if today's population is the size of a pea, you know, then, you know, the the population that that 7 trillion, you know, is a, you know, gigantic, I don't know, whatever, some gigantic big round thing.
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I can't even think of anything big enough, um, that, you know, extends beyond the size of the room that you're listening to this in.
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And so, there in that sort of big giant circle of 7 trillion future generations are all your children and grandchildren, if you have them, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren, and all the networks and families and friends and communities on whom they will depend.
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So, it's just a little bit of perspective taking that can just help us flip our minds into a different perspective.
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>> And this might sound obvious, but obviously the the kind of implication of of the title, The Good Ancestor, is is perhaps we're not being such good ancestors.
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Is Is that your view that, you know, we are now worse ancestors than we were before, or what How are we doing as a as a group of the living at the moment in terms of being good or bad ancestors?
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>> That's a great question.
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We're doing terribly, >> Okay. >> I think.
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I wouldn't I mean, I wrote a book called The Good Ancestor, How to Think Long-Term in a Short-Term World, partly because I looked around at the world, and maybe also at myself, and thought there is so much more that we could be doing for the generations to come and the world they live on.
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And it's partly because, I think, never before in human history have our actions had such potentially damaging consequences for the generations to come.
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Now, you might say, well, the moment that first atomic test happened on June 16th, 1945, the moment we were able to annihilate the future, that was a moment of pretty bad ancestry, potentially.
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But even since then, it's been getting worse because of the impacts we've been imposing on future generations, whether it's the carbon we're pumping into the sky, the technological risks we're dumping on future generations.
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The way I think about it is that we've kind of colonized the future.
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Like we treat the future like this distant colonial outpost devoid of people where we can freely dump ecological degradations and technological risks as if there was nobody there.
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Yet of course it's full of my children and their children and and so on.
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So who are we to be dumping these problems on on on the future?
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And yeah, I think there's a whole load of ways in which we're failing to pass on a world that's better than the one we inherited.
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There's all these kind of long-term things we're failing to do.
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We're not planning for the next pandemic that might be on the horizon.
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We're not thinking about how wealth inequality or racial injustice gets passed on from generation to generation embedded in education and judicial systems.
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We're not thinking about the tech risks of I don't know, synthetic biology.
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And of course around the whole ecological crisis.
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You know, I was looking at some stats the other day saying that with a warming world um which we all know is happening although some places by 2100 will be able to grow crops that couldn't grow them before, overall the amount of space for global food production will fall by 1/3 at current projections.
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Now if you just think about that for a moment, like what are we doing to the future? Yeah.
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>> And why are we so bad at this?
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There's a kind of obvious answer is that you know, humans are selfish and kind of that's part of the the worst aspects of us as human beings.
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But tell me a little bit about how you think about the human brain.
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>> So I have pretty good news about the human brain actually.
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Um I think if you look inside our heads, neuroscientists will tell us, I mean this is more my terminology, that we have inside our brains both a marshmallow brain and an acorn brain, okay?
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So the marshmallow brain is the part of our neuroanatomy which is all about short-term thinking and instant gratification, immediate rewards, and it lives right at the front of our heads in the a bit called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
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And I call it the marshmallow brain cuz it's named after this famous psychology experiment, you know, may have heard of in the 1960s called the marshmallow test where kids had a a marshmallow put in front of them, and if they could resist eating it for 15 minutes, they were rewarded with a second marshmallow.
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And of course, the famous finding was the majority of kids couldn't resist the snack and snatched it up.
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But, that is not the whole story of who we are because we also have another part of our brain which I call the acorn brain, which is all about uh long-term thinking and planning and and strategizing.
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Did I say the marshmallow brain lives in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex?
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No, that's the where the acorn brain is right at the front of our heads.
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Um and that's about this longer view that we have, this capacity where we we've evolved with this.
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And it's a newer part of our brain.
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It's only a couple of million years old, unlike the marshmallow brain which is about 80 million years old and we share that with rats and other other Um and so there's always a struggle going on between the marshmallow and the acorn, right?
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Do we upgrade to the latest iPhone or do we plant a seed in the ground for posterity?
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You know, do we go out for a gourmet meal tonight or save for our pensions for tomorrow? And that's quite normal.
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I think there's this struggle going on.
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The good news bit really is not just that we've got the acorn brain, but actually it's pretty well developed in human beings compared to other creatures.
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So, a chimpanzee might get a stick, strip off the leaves and turn them into a tool to put into a termite hole, but they'll never make a dozen of those tools and set them aside for next week.
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And that's an amazing thing about human beings.
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The acorn brain in action, we see it everywhere from building the Great Wall of China to the great cathedrals of medieval Europe where those who planted the first plantation the foundation stones knew that cathedral would probably would not be finished within their lifetimes.
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It's sometimes called cathedral thinking, as you probably know.
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Um and so, human beings are good at this stuff.
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And but we could be a lot better, and there's a whole lot of forces which of course drive us towards short-termism, too.
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>> Let's talk more about some of those amazing ideas from from the past, amazing examples of the past of cathedral thinking.
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Cuz you I think have studied quite a few of these examples where we have historically been very good at cathedral thinking.
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>> Yeah, I've been sort of gathering them for years and years in my obsessive way.
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So there are examples like the Great Wall of China, sort of infrastructure projects of the building of of canals and bridges, the Channel Tunnel, right?
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It's designed to last for, you know, 250 years.
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Um and I think as well as the sort of infrastructure and buildings and stuff, one one of my favorite examples actually is from the Victorian era.
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Um and these were the sewers that were built in London um starting in the late 1850s.
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So there was this famous event in 1858, sounds obscure, called the Great Stink. >> Okay.
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>> When there was a long hot summer that year and raw sewage was always being dumped in the River Thames at that time.
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Tens of thousands of people were dying of cholera and diphtheria every year.
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And the smell was so bad in 1858 that members of Parliament in the in the Palace of Westminster, right on the river, couldn't breathe.
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They had to wear masks and that's when they passed the emergency legislation to build the sewers. >> Okay.
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>> And the guy who was presiding over the building of the sewers, guy called Sir Joseph Bazalgette, who was the chief engineer, him and 22,000 workers under his control, they built the sewers over a period of 19 years.
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And what he did is he made the sewers twice as big as they needed to be for the population at the time.
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And he used very expensive bricks and this new kind of cement called Portland cement, also very expensive but long-lasting.
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And that's why those sewers are still in use today.
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So it's not really cathedral thinking, it's more like sewer thinking.
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But I think it gives you a sense of our potential to go beyond the here and now.
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We do it, you know, the James Webb Space Telescope took 30 years to build.
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I mean there's all sorts of examples of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which you may have heard of, but it's collecting millions of seeds in an indestructible rock bunker in the Arctic Circle.
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It's designed to last for a thousand years.
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So, we're pretty good at this stuff, even though we are prone to snatching the marshmallow.
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>> Are there more examples from from today where you do actually see this in action?
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So, the Svalbard one is fantastic, I think.
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It's been in the in the news recently and and there's a great television series about it actually as well.
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Um but but they they seem kind of few and far between these projects. >> They are.
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You know, you find them partly in the environmental world, so like large-scale tree planting projects like the Green Belt Movement, which emerged in Kenya in the 1970s.
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Still going today and they've planted tens of millions of trees.
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Um you know, and of course a tree is the shade in effect is for future generations, right?
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You're not going to enjoy it yourself.
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I used to work as a gardener.
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I used to be an academic.
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Uh I was a political scientist, but I left that to become a gardener. Right.
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Um just to put my hands in the soil and switch my life a bit.
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And you know, when you plant trees, and I was working in an Oxford college garden being paid £6.
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31 an hour, not very lucrative, but it felt amazing.
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Planting seeds or saplings that you knew were going to still be there in a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years' time.
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Um and it isn't very, you know, common today because we do live in a world which is driven by short-termism in the sense that you know, of course, companies are looking at their quarterly reports, they're looking at their share prices.
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You know, politicians are looking at the opinion polls and the latest social media posts.
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We're looking at our phones, we're clicking the buy now button.
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But in fact, it's actually not such a new problem.
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This kind of short-term thinking. It actually goes back.
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You know, I love history and learning from history.
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And if you think about the invention of the clock, right?
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The mechanical clock, which was it's quite new, not much older than the printing press, like 13th century.
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And the first clocks used to to chime once an hour, or maybe every 15 minutes.
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It wasn't until 1600 that clocks had minute hour hands.
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It wasn't until 1800 they had minute hands.
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And basically over the centuries, time's been sliced up and sped up more and more and more and more.
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And the more we do that, you know, like with nanoseconds be share trading and so on, the more we're losing sight of the future.
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So, there's all these kind of forces which I think are taking us away from our acorn brain potential.
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>> Am I right in thinking the Egyptians had a a different type of hour depending on on the sun >> Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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The Egyptians are crazy or also brilliant, depending how you think about it.
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So, Egyptians split the day between dawn and dusk into 12 equal segments, 12 hours.
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And that idea spread across Europe, but particularly in northern Europe, as the winter days came in the and and the the days got shorter and shorter, then so did the hours.
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So, there was no standard hour.
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You couldn't you know, pay someone an hourly wage.
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Well, I guess you could, but it was going to change throughout the year.
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And it wasn't until those mechanical clocks in the 13th century that you had this idea of a standardized hour.
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And in a way, that was one of the key moments when humans started to dominate nature. Right?
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We said, right, we're going to leave this nature thing.
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We're not going to live by the movement of the sun and stars and and moon.
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Um we're going to live by something we've invented ourselves, hours, minutes, and seconds.
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>> Let's go back a little bit to that transition you made from from teaching at Oxford colleges to to to doing the gardening.
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What what was that like personally for you?
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>> I had a kind of romantic notion that it would be good to try and connect with nature.
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You know, clearly you know, this was in the early 2000s, so I was just becoming aware of the ecological crisis, which, you know, to my shame, I hadn't been earlier.
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My kids sometimes say like, "How come you were taking airplanes in the 1990s when you knew about the carbon emissions?"
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And I didn't start cutting down my flying till about 2005. And very rarely fly now.
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Um and but gradually I started becoming aware of this and I thought, "Right, I'm going to leave being a political scientist as I I used to be and I'm going to try and put my hands in the soil, try and grow things."
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Actually, one of the really interesting things that happened which I didn't expect, but I used to be working in this Oxford college garden on my hands and knees in the rain, you know, weeding and planting seeds and things like that, um mowing lawns and the college fellows and students would walk past and say nothing to me. Really? They just ignored me.
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And I didn't realize this would happen, but I started losing my sort of sense of self-respect.
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I kind of felt like, "Why don't you notice who I am?"
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And this is something that's really driven my life a lot that to try and understand how other people experience the world, people who are different from you.
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So, like also in the city of Oxford where I I live in the UK, I was once walking past this homeless guy.
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Um and I'd seen him for years walking up and down the street.
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Um and then kind of this kind of crazy guy who would always be walking with no shoes in the snow and have be wearing five different jackets and and I never thought I had anything in common with him.
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And one day I stopped to talk with him.
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And it turned out his name was Alan Human.
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He changed his name by deed poll from Alan Lewis to Alan Human cuz he wanted to be in contact and and feel solidarity with all of humanity.
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And it turned out this homeless guy had studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Oxford University just like I had.
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And we developed a friendship based on our mutual interest in Aristotle, Nietzsche, and pepperoni pizza. Right?
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>> [laughter] >> But it was a really good lesson about how we fail to or we we make assumptions about people.
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Uh we fail to step into the shoes and this has really informed my thinking about being a good ancestor cuz I'm also interested not just how do we step into the shoes of people like Alan Human, but how do we step into the shoes of future generations?
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>> And that's really hard, right?
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I mean, it's very hard to feel emotionally connected to future generations.
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>> It is really hard, but actually we've got a kind of way it into us.
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I mean, if you think about it, if you think about like the year your grandmother was born, right?
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Most people wouldn't might know that.
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And if you have children, or if you even if you don't, just imagine the year a grandchild you might have might die.
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Now, there is a span across five generations, two backwards, two forwards, and yourself, a span of maybe 200 years.
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So, we're just naturally, kind of anthropologically, embedded in multiple generations.
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And you know, I remember the moment my children were born, I got twins, okay?
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I remember seeing them both, um like in the in in the hospital, and kind of thinking, "My god, what a crazy thought to think that I'm just me as an an isolated individual."
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Well, immediately I saw them, I thought, "My god, I'm going to do anything for you to help you, sacrifice for you, whatever." It's a very human thing.
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So, we we we're sold this narrative, you know, if you study economics, about the idea of rational economic man, or this kind of thing.
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It's so mad, cuz it's so unlike who we are.
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I'm not saying we're not egoistic and selfish sometimes, and all that kind of stuff, but we're a mixture of both the serpent and the dove, you know, we're we're we're both self-interested, but we're also other-interested, and we're it's all intertwined.
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>> That that's the thing that I think reading your work and and listening to your talks struck me the most is that I think it is quite strange that we on the one hand, particularly with children, think so much and sacrifice so much for for children as they are today, but are so bad at thinking about the world that our children will live in, and what life will be like for them when they're 50, 70, 90.
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And and you don't even have to take it into future generations, which are harder to to empathize with, right?
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Because those people are not born yet, you never met them.
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But you have met your own kids, and yet we are really bad at thinking anything more than kind of 5 to 10 years out for our children.
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>> Yeah, we're bad at it, but we can switch on that capacity, that kind of acorn brain thinking, relatively easily.
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Like let me give you an example.
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So, in Japan, there's this really cool movement called future design.
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And it was founded by this kind of crazy economist, and he was very influenced by this Native American principle called the seventh generation principle, which is found amongst many indigenous communities around the world of basically making decisions based on the impact seven generations ahead, and sometimes honoring seven generations behind.
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And he took this idea to Japan, and he didn't exactly follow it to seven generations, but he had this idea where he started organizing these community meetings in small towns and cities where he'd invite people, a bit like a citizens assembly, invite people to discuss and draw up plans for the town or city where they live on an issue like, you know, the impacts of AI on employment or aging populations or climate change impacts.
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And basically, when they started doing it, they would split people into two groups.
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The first group were told to imagine themselves as residents in the present day.
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And the other group were given these kind of like ceremonial orange kimonos to wear and told to imagine themselves as residents from the year 2060.
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And there's systematic evidence showing that just by wearing that orange kimono robe thing, that the residents, the people who imagine themselves coming from 2060, advocated for far more transformative plans for their towns or cities cuz they knew that their children or grandchildren or people from their religious community or or neighbors would be living there in that future.
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They even would vote for higher taxes, like local water taxes to pay for water infrastructure.
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And this future design method is now used in local government across Japan.
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It's used by in big companies like Fujitsu for long-term planning, um by the Japanese Ministry of Finance.
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And it doesn't take much.
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It's just the human imagination.
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In a way, we've got this we're experts at the temporal pirouette.
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Our minds have a capacity to dance across time.
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Like, one moment you can be looking at your phone, but then you can be thinking about your children's future or your pension or whatever it happens to be.
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And we just need to learn to tap into that a bit more and make it normal.
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And you know, in a way, when it comes down to it, when I write my books, you know, my books are about trying to put ideas into the world that stay with people, that kind of shape your worldview.
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So, the idea of being a good ancestor is just that.
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It's like, wake up in the morning and look yourself in the mirror and say, you know, "What am I going to do today to be a good ancestor?"
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In a way, that's all I'm inviting people to to do.
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I'm not I don't want to tell you exactly how you should do it.
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Depends what you're doing in your life.
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You might be working in some in fintech.
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You might be a climate activist. Whatever.
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But ask yourself that question.
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>> Well, in part two, I am going to ask you to put this into people's minds and then be very didactic.
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Um so, so get ready for that, Roman.
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But, um maybe just uh to pick up on what you were just saying there about you are someone who comes up with ideas.
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Our our show is called Giant Ideas.
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And and lots of the people we interview are leaders who have a giant idea and then they try to enact it through a company that they start or organization that they lead.
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You're you're different in that you are an ideas man, basically.
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And and you come up with these ideas, you write about them, you talk about them.
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With this idea, with with the idea of a good ancestor, what's your hope for for how you can kind of enact it in the world?
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Is your job to to do things like this and and just talk about the idea, write these books which have a lot of people reading them?
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Or how much do you think, "I've got to to really make this count.
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I've got to go there to Japan and kind of get these mayors using this.
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I've got to go to Brazil and get the mayors there using this idea."
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>> That's a really brilliant question.
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Um you know, I think when you write a book or you try to put an idea into the world, you can't predict how it's going to be adopted or used.
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You just have to have kind of faith in the power of ideas.
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Well, that's what I try to do as a writer.
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So, after my book The Good Ancestor came out, suddenly I discovered that like in Pakistan, there was a Supreme Court ruling against the expansion of the cement industry because of its terrible environmental impacts.
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And they quoted my book The Good Ancestor in a TED Talk I did called How to Be a Good Ancestor.
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They quoted it in the ruling. >> Amazing.
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>> Um and I like I had never planned that.
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I could never have planned that.
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I couldn't It would have made no sense to go to Pakistan and try and influence Supreme Court judges in case they might do that.
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Or another example, like the former vice president um of the of the European Union who was developing the European Union's Green Deal, guy called Frans Timmermans, a Dutch politician. He read my book.
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He started framing the Green Deal um the sort of policy uh position in the EU framing in terms of this is about being a good ancestor.
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Again, I I wasn't trying to get him to do that.
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I mean so you kind of you never really know.
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Or you know, companies that have, you know, adopted this idea.
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So I know quite a lot of companies that have not just cuz of my ideas, but also just the the good ancestry that's in the air have done things like um for example, given a place on their boards to future generations or to nature.
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And they've made it a legal part of how their company is organized.
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So future generations have a legal place on the board and so they have a fiduciary or a duty, you know, to not just make money, but to look after future generations and and the world that they live in.
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Um and I love that stuff because in a way, yeah, I'm not in the world of of business and investment and technology, but I am in the world of innovation.
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But I'm interested in kind of social innovation rather than technological innovation.
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Like trying to offer ideas to the world that help people rethink how they organize a school, society, a judicial system, a political system, a company, whatever it is. >> Love that.
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This all sounds fantastic, but how do we, if we're challenging it, say, you know, this sounds great in in theory, but how does this practically you know, it's going to change the world?
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How do the political leaders, company leaders, how do they grasp this and actually use it to to drive change?
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>> Yeah, it's a really important question cuz firstly, I wouldn't think like long-term thinking by itself is a good thing.
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You know, Hitler wanted in a thousand year Reich. Okay?
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So, and a former head of Goldman Sachs, a guy called Gus Levy, once said, "We're greedy, but long-term greedy, not short-term greedy."
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Now, that's not the kind of good ancestry I'm interested in.
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So, it has to be connected with ethics.
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But, there are real tensions.
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You know, for example, like should a government be putting their money into you know, keeping Putin, you know, not coming over your borders today, or thinking about long-term investment in a tidal power scheme, you know, that might benefit people in 50 or 100 years, more than they would would today?
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And there's often a tension there.
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And in fact, I I once went and asked um someone who was has the the great political position of being the future generations commissioner of Wales.
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So, Wales um has this amazing public position.
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The future generations commissioner, which is a non-party political position where their job is to look at the impact of public policy in all areas, employment, education, health care, up to 30 years in the future.
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So, not seven generations, but still pretty far in political terms.
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And the future generations commissioner, Derek Walker, was saying, "Look, if you design policy right, you help people both today and tomorrow.
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Um so, you for example, invest in um renewable energy, you know, which brings down energy prices today, but it also reduces carbon emissions over the long term.
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So, I think that's the kind of thing we should be trying to sort of deal with the tensions, but think, "What can we do today which is yeah, satisfies our our challenges today, but also is going to be good for future generations." >> I just love it.
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It's a very simple idea, but it's very profound.
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And so, what we're going to do in part two is get on to how this can change the behavior of all the people listening and watching to this.
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So, stay tuned for part two, but thanks so much for sharing part one of your giant idea.
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>> It has been a great pleasure.