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.
00:07:20 · Roman Krznaric, Cameron McLain
The acorn brain in action, we see it everywhere from building the Great Wall of China to the great cathedrals of medieval Europe, where those who planted the first plantation that the foundation stones knew that cathedral probably would not be finished within their lifetimes. That's sometimes called cathedral thinking, as you probably know. Um, and so human beings are good at this stuff. And but we could be a lot better, and there's a whole load of forces which, of course, drive us towards short-termism, too. [00:07:46] S0: Let's talk more about some of those amazing ideas from the past, amazing examples of the past of cathedral thinking. Because it you, I think, have studied quite a few of these examples where we have historically been very good at cathedral thinking.
00:07:58 · Roman Krznaric
[00:07:58] S1: Yeah, I've been sort of gathering them for years and years in my obsessive way. Right. So there are examples like the Great Wall of China, sort of infrastructure projects or the building of canals and bridges, the Channel Tunnel, right? It's designed to last for you know 250 years. Um, and I think as well as the sort of infrastructure and buildings and stuff, one one of my favorite examples actually is from the Victorian era. Um, and these were the sewers that were built in London um starting in the late 1850s. So there was this famous event in 1858, sounds obscure, called the Great Stink. Okay. When there was a long, hot summer that year, and raw sewage was always being dumped in the River Thames at that time. Tens of thousands of people were dying of cholera and diphtheria every year. And the smell was so bad in 1858 that members of Parliament in the in the Palace of Westminster, right on the river, couldn't breathe, they had to wear masks, and that's when they passed the emergency legislation to build the sewers. Okay. And the guy who was presiding over the building of the sewers, a guy called Sir Joseph Bazalgette, who was the chief engineer, him and 22,000 workers under his control, um, they built the sewers over a period of 19 years, and what he did is he made the sewers twice as big as they needed to be for the population at the time, and he used very expensive bricks and this new kind of cement called Portland cement, also very expensive but long-lasting. And that's why those sewers are still in use today. So it's not really cathedral thinking, it's more like sewer thinking. But I think it gives you a sense of our potential to go beyond the here and now. And we do it, you know, the James Webb Space Telescope took 30 years to build. I mean, there's all sorts of examples of the Svalbard global seed vault, which you may not have heard of, but it's collecting millions of seeds in an indestructible rock bunker in the Arctic Circle. It's designed to last for a thousand years. So we're pretty good at this stuff, even though we are prone to snatching the marshmallow.