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 Hard drives fail, formats get quickly outdated, servers go bad.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