Ep144 "How do things last?" Part 2: Millennia with Alexander Rose

What is a 10,000 year clock? What is the Y10k bug? What allows some organizations to last a millennium? What do ancient ceramics have to do with ball bearings in satellites? What does any of this have to do with bristlecone pine trees, cymbals, or an extant hotel that launched in the sixth century? Join today for thinking about ourselves on a 10,000 year timescale with guest Alexander Rose.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
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

(00:27):
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

(00:48):
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.

(01:23):
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,

(01:46):
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

(02:09):
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

(02:30):
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

(02:56):
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

(03:16):
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.

(03:37):
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

(04:00):
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,

(04:22):
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

(04:44):
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

(05:05):
the long Now Foundation and what the thinking there is.

Speaker 2 (05:09):
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

(05:30):
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.

(05:53):
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.

Speaker 1 (06:12):
And the idea is a clock that would last ten
thousand years exactly.

Speaker 2 (06:16):
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.

Speaker 1 (06:28):
And things like once a century it would ding R
and once a millennium.

Speaker 3 (06:34):
Yeah, I think that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:35):
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.

Speaker 3 (06:48):
So I signed on to that project.

Speaker 2 (06:49):
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.

Speaker 3 (07:09):
It's it's not that hard.

Speaker 2 (07:11):
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.

Speaker 1 (07:27):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:46):
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

(08:08):
papyrus that are that have lasted just because they were.

Speaker 3 (08:10):
In the right environment.

Speaker 2 (08:12):
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

(08:35):
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.

Speaker 3 (08:44):
You want to change the way.

Speaker 2 (08:45):
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

(09:06):
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.

Speaker 3 (09:16):
And that was what really attracted me to the project.

Speaker 1 (09:18):
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?

Speaker 2 (09:36):
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

(09:58):
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

(10:19):
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

(10:41):
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.

(11:03):
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.

Speaker 3 (11:24):
There's there's no metallic bearings at all.

Speaker 2 (11:27):
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.

Speaker 1 (11:33):
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.

Speaker 2 (11:44):
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

(12:05):
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.

Speaker 3 (12:19):
That we that we don't really anticipate.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
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

(12:43):
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

(13:06):
wind it locally.

Speaker 1 (13:07):
Oh, I see, And so it is now a daily chime,
is that right?

Speaker 2 (13:11):
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

(13:31):
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

(13:55):
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.

Speaker 1 (14:12):
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.

Speaker 2 (14:19):
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,

(14:41):
not the one in Florida, but the Texas site. The
mountain range right behind that launch site is the Sierra
Diablo Mountains and.

Speaker 3 (14:49):
That's where the site is.

Speaker 2 (14:51):
And we built it into a mountain, and we actually
developed special diamond chainsaws and things.

Speaker 3 (14:58):
Like this to work under ground.

Speaker 2 (15:00):
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.

Speaker 1 (15:12):
And were those cut by Was that robotic? This yair cutting?

Speaker 2 (15:15):
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

(15:35):
robot that was like twenty six thousand pounds.

Speaker 3 (15:38):
It had a reach of like.

Speaker 2 (15:39):
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.

Speaker 1 (15:53):
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.

Speaker 2 (16:01):
Yeah, So we cut the initial cylinder itself with a
mining tool.

Speaker 3 (16:06):
That already exists called a raise boar. It's like a.

Speaker 2 (16:08):
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

(16:29):
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.

Speaker 1 (16:53):
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.

Speaker 3 (17:00):
Well, it's not at the bottom, it's through the entire bore.

Speaker 2 (17:02):
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

(17:23):
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

(17:45):
correct itself. Now a human could also do that correction,
but this is a way it can do that with
just solar alignment.

Speaker 1 (18:06):
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.

Speaker 2 (18:17):
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.

Speaker 1 (18:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (18:55):
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.

Speaker 3 (19:16):
Designed for a thousand years.

Speaker 2 (19:18):
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.

Speaker 1 (19:34):
Once I cantanded, how do you design a site like that?
It's just thick cement.

Speaker 2 (19:39):
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

(19:59):
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

(20:20):
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

(20:41):
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

(21:01):
towards the future.

Speaker 1 (21:02):
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.

Speaker 2 (21:13):
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

(21:35):
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.

Speaker 1 (21:43):
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?

Speaker 3 (21:55):
Yeah, so I started looking at this, and.

Speaker 2 (21:58):
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

(22:19):
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.

Speaker 1 (22:43):
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,

(23:05):
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.

Speaker 2 (23:19):
Yeah, there are definitely older religions, but they don't have
like an institution necessarily that it has consistent management through it.

Speaker 1 (23:27):
The Vaticans what you're referring to.

Speaker 2 (23:29):
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.

(23:50):
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.

Speaker 3 (24:01):
So I went to Japan and.

Speaker 2 (24:04):
Interviewed the people that are managing the oldest hotel in
the world.

Speaker 3 (24:07):
It was started in seven eighteen.

Speaker 2 (24:10):
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.

Speaker 1 (24:19):
And just to make clear, it's seven eighteen, that's seventeen eighteen.

Speaker 2 (24:22):
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

(24:44):
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

(25:06):
has been kept there burning is has never gone out
for three thousand years.

Speaker 1 (25:10):
Oh my gosh.

Speaker 3 (25:11):
And so those people like you come there.

Speaker 2 (25:13):
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

(25:33):
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

(25:56):
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

(26:17):
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.

Speaker 1 (26:37):
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.

Speaker 2 (26:50):
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

(27:11):
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.

Speaker 1 (27:32):
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.

Speaker 2 (27:40):
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

(28:01):
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.

Speaker 3 (28:13):
So I think it's a great example, but it's it's not.

Speaker 2 (28:16):
Like a continuous management system that you mean, because the Catholic.

Speaker 1 (28:21):
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.

Speaker 2 (28:25):
Nice and that system never was was completely decimated and
brought back.

Speaker 3 (28:31):
So we also places in Asia.

Speaker 2 (28:33):
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

(28:54):
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.

Speaker 3 (29:07):
And so when Westerners showed up to their shores.

Speaker 2 (29:10):
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

(29:33):
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.

Speaker 3 (29:47):
On that one thing.

Speaker 2 (29:48):
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

(30:10):
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.

Speaker 1 (30:24):
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

(30:46):
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.

Speaker 2 (31:00):
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.

Speaker 3 (31:07):
One is a certain amount of flexibility and and I didn't.

Speaker 2 (31:12):
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

(31:36):
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,

(31:58):
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

(32:21):
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

(32:44):
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

(33:06):
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.

Speaker 1 (33:26):
Right, I hadn't read how old are Wells Fargo and
Levi's Truss Well They're they're.

Speaker 2 (33:30):
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.

Speaker 3 (33:39):
In some cases, there's some things that have lasted longer
than that.

Speaker 1 (33:41):
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.

Speaker 2 (33:50):
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,

(34:13):
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.

Speaker 1 (34:32):
Which is symbol is in the big metal circles of yeah,
well together.

Speaker 2 (34:36):
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.

Speaker 3 (34:43):
Yes, So that.

Speaker 2 (34:43):
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

(35:03):
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

(35:25):
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

(35:50):
and things like that are some of the longest lasting
companies we have.

Speaker 1 (35:54):
How do these families keep getting the next generation interested
in doing this instead of going off to Hollywood or whatever.

Speaker 2 (36:00):
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

(36:22):
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.

Speaker 1 (36:36):
Right.

Speaker 2 (36:38):
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.

Speaker 3 (36:46):
Did not think he was going to come back.

Speaker 2 (36:47):
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.

(37:09):
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

(37:32):
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

(37:53):
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.

Speaker 1 (38:11):
So, you know, there's another biological analogy that I can't
escape thinking about, which is if you you know, if

(38:32):
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

(38:56):
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.

Speaker 2 (39:10):
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

(39:31):
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.

Speaker 3 (39:45):
They're not growth companies, and they can have growth models.

Speaker 2 (39:48):
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

(40:10):
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

(40:30):
doesn't even seem like we're allowed to think about that.

Speaker 1 (40:32):
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.

Speaker 2 (40:56):
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

(41:18):
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.

(41:40):
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

(42:03):
actual title, I think is much more important than we
give it credit for.

Speaker 1 (42:08):
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

(42:29):
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

(42:49):
that were written and song. So how do you think
about what will last from this digital era?

Speaker 2 (42:57):
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

(43:18):
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

(43:39):
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

(44:01):
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.

Speaker 3 (44:20):
To write them in order to reread them.

Speaker 2 (44:23):
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.

(44:44):
I didn't realize until I was starting it was as
forty three percent of the world's websites are on WordPress.

Speaker 3 (44:48):
Right.

Speaker 2 (44:49):
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.

Speaker 3 (45:11):
That's already happened.

Speaker 2 (45:12):
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.

Speaker 3 (45:32):
And you know, then we have political issues that we're
having right now.

Speaker 2 (45:35):
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

(45:58):
makes that easier to do.

Speaker 1 (46:00):
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

(46:21):
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.

Speaker 2 (46:29):
Actually there's many fires to that. Oh really, it was
like eight times that it burned down.

Speaker 1 (46:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (46:44):
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

(47:06):
can be and I think in the modern AI age
also knowing the true source of things is very difficult.

Speaker 3 (47:15):
Right, so you can where AI might you know, look
at a whole bunch of sources.

Speaker 2 (47:20):
And then give you a kind of an interpreted feedback
of what that means.

Speaker 3 (47:25):
That can be altered.

Speaker 2 (47:26):
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

(47:48):
so many great uses of it, but I think this
is a place where we need to be very careful.

Speaker 1 (47:53):
Does all your work thinking about long time make you
more optimistic or pessimistic about humanity's future?

Speaker 3 (48:00):
I think about this a lot.

Speaker 2 (48:02):
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

(48:25):
ten years?

Speaker 3 (48:25):
Am I doing it for one hundred years? Am I
doing it for a generation?

Speaker 2 (48:29):
And this is also the case just with any all
objects and things around me.

Speaker 3 (48:34):
I think that has really changed the way.

Speaker 2 (48:37):
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

(48:57):
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.

Speaker 1 (49:17):
So the question is how does it make you feel
about the next Yeah, So I would.

Speaker 2 (49:23):
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

(49:44):
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.

(50:07):
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

(50:29):
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.

Speaker 3 (50:43):
And I think the.

Speaker 2 (50:44):
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

(51:05):
not just making my kid's life better, but making all
kids of my kid's age better, than I think we.

Speaker 3 (51:12):
Have a shot.

Speaker 1 (51:17):
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,

(51:38):
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.

(52:01):
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

(52:23):
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

(52:47):
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.

(53:10):
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

(53:33):
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

(53:56):
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

(54:20):
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

(54:44):
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

(55:07):
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

(55:29):
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.