00:00:42 · Roman Krznaric, Cameron McLain
[00:00:42] S1: Okay, so if you think about it, we all have ancestors going into the past. But we too are the ancestors of the generations to come. So there's a question about how those future generations are going to remember us for what we did or didn't do at this crucial moment in the human story. Are they going to remember us as good ancestors, bad ancestors, indifferent ancestors? That's really the question. So the idea of being a good ancestor, I actually kind of like it better than the idea of thinking about future generations, because future generations is quite a abstract concept. But being a good ancestor is about me. It's about my responsibilities. So it's much more kind of personal and visceral and emotional. [00:01:27] S0: Okay. You say kind of making it more visceral than thinking about future generations. You do, though, have quite good uh numbers on kind of the living, the dead, the living, and the future. Put us that into context a little bit, because I think that's quite useful.
00:01:27 · Cameron McLain, Roman Krznaric
[00:01:27] S0: Okay. You say kind of making it more visceral than thinking about future generations. You do, though, have quite good uh numbers on kind of the living, the dead, the living, and the future. Put us that into context a little bit, because I think that's quite useful. [00:01:41] S1: Okay, I think one way of thinking about our responsibilities to the future is to think about it, yeah, just in terms of the numbers. Yeah. Right. And you can play around with numbers, of course, but one way to think about it is this. Look, there are about 8 billion of us around today. Now, if you go back really long term, say back 50,000 years, an estimated 100 billion people have been born and died. Okay. But if you go forward 50,000 years, assuming this century's birth rates level off and stabilize, nearly 7 trillion people will be born. So, like if today's population is the size of a pea, you know, then you know the population that that seven trillion, you know, is a you know gigantic, I don't know, whatever, some gigantic big round thing. I can't even think of anything big enough that you know extends beyond the size of the room that you're listening to this in. And so there in that sort of big giant circle of seven trillion future generations, uh all your children and grandchildren, if you have them, and their grandchildren and their grandchildren, and all the networks and families and friends and communities on whom they will depend. So it's just a little bit of perspective taking that can just help us flip our minds into a different perspective.
00:02:55 · Cameron McLain
[00:02:55] S0: And this might sound obvious, but obviously the the kind of implication of the title, The Good Ancestor, is perhaps we're not being such good ancestors. Is that your view that you know we are now worse ancestors than we were before? Or what how are we doing as a as a group of the living at the moment in terms of being good or bad ancestors?
00:03:11 · Roman Krznaric
[00:03:11] S1: That's a great question. We're doing terribly. Okay. I think. I wouldn't, I mean, I wrote a book called The Good Ancestor, How to Think Long Term and a Short-Term World Badly, because I looked around at the world and maybe also at myself and thought there is so much more that we could be doing for the generations to come and the world they live on. And it's partly because I think never before in human history have our actions had such potentially damaging consequences for the generations to come. Now you might say, well, the moment the first atomic test happened on June 16th, 1945, the moment we were able to annihilate the future, that was a moment of pretty bad ancestry, potentially. But even since then, it's been getting worse because of the impacts we've been imposing on future generations, whether it's the carbon we're pumping into the sky, the technological risks we're dumping on future generations. The way I think about it is that we've kind of colonized the future. Like we treat the future like this distant colonial outpost devoid of people, where we can freely dump ecological degradations and technological risks, as if there was nobody there. Yet, of course, it's full of my children and their children and so on. So who are we to be dumping these problems on the future? And yeah, I think there's a whole load of ways in which we're failing to pass on a world that's better than the one we inherited. There's all these kind of long-term things we're failing to do. We're not planning for the next pandemic that might be on the horizon. We're not thinking about how wealth inequality or racial injustice gets passed on from generation to generation, embedded in education and judicial systems. We're not thinking about the tech risks of, I don't know, synthetic biology, and of course, around the whole ecological crisis. You know, I was looking at some stats the other day saying that with a warming world, um, which we all know is happening, although some places by 2100 will be able to grow crops that couldn't grow them before, overall the amount of space for global food production will fall by one-third at current projections. And if you just think about that for a moment, like what are we doing to the future?
00:05:13 · Cameron McLain
[00:05:13] S0: Yeah. And why are we so bad at this? There's a kind of obvious answer is that you know, peop humans are selfish, and they're kind of that's part of the worst aspects of us as human beings. But tell me a little bit about how you think about the human brain.
00:05:27 · Roman Krznaric
[00:05:27] S1: So I have pretty good news about the human brain, actually. Um, I think if you look inside our heads, neuroscientists will tell us. I mean, this is more my terminology, that we have inside our brains both a marshmallow brain and an acorn brain. Okay, so the marshmallow brain is the part of our neuroanatomy, which is all about short-term thinking and instant gratification, immediate rewards, and it lives right at the front of our heads in the a bit called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. And I call it the marshmallow brain because it's named after this famous psychology experiment you know may have heard of from the 1960s called the marshmallow test, where kids had a marshmallow put in front of them. And if they could resist eating it for 15 minutes, they were rewarded with a second marshmallow. And of course, the famous finding was the majority of kids couldn't resist the snack and snatched it up. But that is not the whole story of who we are, because we also have another part of our brain, which I call the acorn brain, which is all about uh long-term thinking and planning and strategizing. Did I say the marshmallow brain lives in the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex? No, that's the way the acorn brain is, right at the front of our heads. Um, and that's about this longer view that we have this capacity where we we've evolved with this. And it's a newer part of our brain. It's only a couple of million years old, unlike the marshmallow brain, which is about 80 million years old, and we share that with rats and other creatures. Um and so there's always a struggle going on between the marshmallow and the acorn, right? Do we upgrade to the latest iPhone or do we plant a seed in the ground for posterity? You know, do we go out for a gourmet meal tonight or save for our pensions for tomorrow? And that's quite normal. I think there's this struggle going on. The good news bit really is not just that we've got the acorn brain, but actually it's pretty well developed in human beings compared to other creatures. So a chimpanzee might get a stick, strip off the leaves, and turn it into a tool to put into a termite hole. But they'll never make a dozen of those tools and set them aside for next week. And that's an amazing thing about human beings.