 I'm the future tense editorial director. I'm very excited for this conversation today and thank you so much for coming on such a beautiful fall day. This conversation is very much in keeping, I think, with the spirit of what we try to be about at future tense, which is to look ahead at where society is going and try to get people in Washington to think beyond the next budget cycle or the next election cycle or whether or not our president will be impeached the next six months, a little bit more forward-looking. And it's also very much in keeping, I should say, with New America. New America turns 20 this year. Jim Fallows has been a huge part in building this think tank, founded in the last year of the previous century and millennium to try to be a think tank that, again, was about big ideas and looking beyond today, beyond tomorrow to try to shape where society is headed. So this is just very exciting to have a book conversation around a book that's sort of a manual to get us to think about how we can be better ancestors, which I think is a really cool way of framing that same issue of long-term planning and how policymakers, people in business, people across society can try to make better decisions that aren't about short-term gratification or instant gratification and short-term gain. We're very sorry that Wajahat Ali has not been able to be here with us today. He was very excited for this event and for some compelling reasons, really, even though he tried, could not be here today. So we look forward to having him on other Future Tents events. For those of you who are not familiar with Future Tents, we are a partnership between New America, Arizona State University and Slate Magazine. We look at the impact of technology on society. Our tagline on Slate Magazine is a Citizen's Guide to the Future, which, again, I think could be an alternative title for being his book. This event is also brought to you by the New America Fellows Program, which I am a proud alumni of. And Aouista Ayub is here, is the director of New America's Fellows Program. Again, going on 20 years. Bina Venkatraman is an alumni of the Fellows Program, the National Fellows Program here in New America and is currently a Future Tents Fellow. Very excitingly, she is going to be the next editorial page editor at the Boston Globe. I think that's well known by now. And I've been teasing her that the owners of the Boston Globe make very smart hires if you happen to follow the English Premier League and you've seen what has become of Liverpool. So I'm very excited to see what Bina will do there in terms of taking this very important genre of journalism editorial pages and what she will do with that, I think, is very exciting. And I have a selfish interest in what happens to editorial pages having written for three different newspaper editorial pages. So I think, I was the boss of the Titanic of editorial pages, although the LA Times is now in a much better place. So that's gratifying too. But I started off in Pittsburgh with the Post, is that it? It's sort of a chagrande office. I was once the editor of US News and World Report. Well, yeah, we can commiserate later. But Bina will save the entire genre. So it's gonna be very, very exciting to see. Yes. So a somewhat rambling introduction probably needs to come to an end. What I have not done is any kind of formal introduction, but I feel like we're amongst friends here. But those of you who don't know, as I mentioned, Jim Fallows is on the board of New America. His latest book is Our Towns, and it's a great odyssey into the heart of America. And I feel like Jim's journalism throughout his career has also been in the spirit of informing us about the things that we should be mindful of and thinking about that are gonna shape where the world is gonna be five, 10, 25 years from now, not just the latest DC obsession, which is remarkable, because you've been in DC for a long time. But you didn't catch the fever. So I'm gonna hand this off to Jim, who's a fantastic moderator. Beena, I've bragged about her New America connection. I probably should also say that she has a life beyond the confines of these walls. She's at MIT at the Broad Center, or she, you're the director. A policy initiative at the Broad Institute. Thank you, the Broad Institute. And also served in the Obama White House, where she had first hand experience trying to get government to think about these long-term challenges, particularly on climate change. There will be copies of the Optimist Telescope for sale right after the event and Beena will be more than happy to linger and sign one for you. And again, thanks a lot for coming, Jim. Thanks very much, Andres. Thank you all for coming here. Thanks to New America and Peter Tentz and Beena. I'm really looking forward to this conversation, as is my wife Deb, who is sitting there, a New America staffer herself right now and eating some of the New America lunch. I think that this, Beena's book, which I had not read until it came out recently, but I've read it since it came out, is a really wonderful compliment to the work that New America is doing, that Peter Tentz is doing, that Americans and global citizens should be doing. And it probably is timely to be having this right on the heels of the UN global climate initiatives or discussions and all the rest. And the plans for the next while is I will ask Beena some questions, sort of talk show style, probably from the next 25 or 30 minutes. Then it'll be time to have all of you ask questions and we'll call on you with microphones. And by one o'clock we will wrap up and Beena will stay here for further conversation for signing books and all the rest. Let me say just one word about what the book is about and why I think it's worth reading and you'll know things you didn't know before reading it. I think it is a, everybody in this room and everybody watching online is familiar with the analysis of life that says short term ism is our doom. Whether we're talking about personal health, should I have that extra doughnut. Whether we're talking about public health, should I get exercise, talking about climate issues, talking about deficit issues, almost anything you can diagnose as a problem in modern life, there is this time horizon issue. We can't do today what we wish 10 years from now we would have done today. And so that, I think the diagnosis of short term ism as a problem is well understood. What's fascinating about Beena's book is she goes looking for solutions in a realm of activities from business to governance to sustainability in different realms to philosophy to other ways. She says, how have people been able to reconfigure themselves and their institutions and their incentives and their work so that they can get past the things that are most distracting now, now, now, now. So as to look through what will be more valuable 10 years from now or 100 years from now, how to be a good ancestor and then have people look back positively on you. So let me start just by asking you the general question. You began this book, I would assume, when you were coming out of the Obama White House where you've been working on climate issues. You had seen firsthand the tensions between the long now and the immediate now. What was the connection between the work you had done and the study you wanted to do for this book that led to the result we see here? Yeah, so a lot of my work in the White House was focused on meeting with community leaders, mayors, and business leaders, corporate Fortune 500 executives and trying to share with them the science of climate change and really the predictions of the future that we could expect under a changing climate, including droughts, wildfires, floods. And I found that people's aspirations or their concern about these issues of the future was often mismatched to what they were actually felt capable of doing or what they were willing to do and one particular moment or interaction with the food company executives who will remain nameless kind of sparked a lot of my both frustration and eventually curiosity to write this book because he sat across a conference table at the White House for me and he said, look, I have children, I actually have grandchildren, I care a lot about climate change. This problem seems really urgent to me, but my board and my shareholders are not evaluating me based on preparing for future risks down the road. They're looking at how I'm doing by the quarter, how I'm making those numbers within years from stock prices. So my hands are tied here. I can't really do much when it comes to the future. And that was sort of, I think, an emblematic reaction that I would have and some people would be less honest about it, right? They would say, yeah, sure, we'll think about this and then go on with business as usual. And of course, there were certain examples of mayors of business leaders who were really trying to do and were doing more on behalf of the future, but this was a fundamentally frustrating dynamic. It was like running into a roadblock, trying to set your direction and then finding that there's a roadblock sort of at every highway you try to take. And when I left government, I had been a former journalist and now a future journalist again. And the sort of basic assumption that I had and people have that this short-sightedness is just human nature and we're just replicating it in capital markets, in companies, in society, right? We're just echoing what is a curse of human nature that we're only gonna be focused on the short term. I really started to interrogate that. I got curious about whether that's actually the fact and some of the tensions in that assumption that we can just observe, right? We put humans on the moon and we put robots on Mars. We built civilizations, there have been cathedrals and grand pyramids built by our species, by our societies. And so how is it that we as a species, when we say we're wired for short-term gratification, have done a number of enterprises, everything from farming to building the Great Wall, and what has allowed that to happen? And is there something we can learn about that that can help us meet this current moment of political and planetary despair where we need foresight more than ever? And I'm gonna jump ahead to a conclusion question, also using it to set up the discussion. And this is by analogy with a question that Deb and I often discuss when we're traveling around seeing what we've seen in smaller town America. And our argument has been at this moment of maximum crisis at the national level, there's a quite impressive renewal and flourishing and civic purpose city by city in America. And the question is, does it make you optimistic or pessimistic? And we have a kind of conditional optimism, not that things will get better, but they could get better if people applied, if they thought clearly about that the task ahead and that these best examples are replicated. So having spent years seeing what you've seen in business, in sustainability, in science, in technology, what is your, how do you describe your degree of optimism at this moment? So I think I share something in common with you and Deb in that sense, in that, so being in communities where I've reported on examples of how they've prevented reckless ill-estate developments or, you know, I tell, the book has really arranged around stories of people who show the art of the possible in thinking long-term. And then the science and all of the sort of rigorous research that comes in along the fringes. But I do, the basis for my optimism is knowing that we have a choice and that this is not the sort of curse of human nature. It's not an immutable trait that we're unable to change. The basis of my optimism is not looking around and saying, well, great, what Boris Johnson is doing right now seems really swell. And what the president just announced at the UN in the last couple of hours is really hopeful. It's not that kind of armchair hope seeing the world as it is and saying, this is just getting inexorably better. It's actually knowing that there's a choice and I do open the book with quote from James Baldwin, that not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until it is faced. And I think the opportunity that I saw was to share these examples and research to prove that we can actually face this challenge and it's a choice we're making inadvertently anyway. So your book is arranged, as you say, by story and there are different categories of activity with business and science and the rest. And I'd like to take you through a few categories where short termism seems most obvious and most destructive and see if you can give a few examples of where you have seen solutions or possibilities for rearranging these incentives. First on the list of course would be climate where the tension in the US, in the UN, every place is between a profit today and disaster tomorrow or five years from now or a century from now. You have some very interesting on scene descriptions in sustainable fisheries and sustainable agriculture but tell us how you would think what are the most important or promising illustrations of rearranging the time horizon on climate issues? Well I think we're seeing it unfold this very week. So we saw Greta Thunberg who's been at the UN at the UN Climate Summit which you mentioned at the beginning testifying, basically calling on global leaders and saying, look, this is a crisis. I don't rely on me to give you hope. I'm here to give you a message from the future. She represents, she's just the tip of the iceberg. On Friday, more than four million activists around the world including in Kabul and Islamabad and in the streets of Houston which were flooding under the storm that was in Malta were out in the streets demanding action on climate. So the level of, while the level of planetary warming is unprecedented and the level of extreme events, so is the political mobilization and the social mobilization around this issue. And what I see promising in particular about the youth activists and this also goes for what's known as the Sunrise Movement which was largely responsible for getting that CNN town hall a couple weeks ago which was seven hours of prime time television devoted to cable television, devoted to the Democratic presidential candidate's positions on climate change. That what I see is young people exercising a kind of moral authority and helping us those of us who are more than double their age in Greta's case to actually see the future and imagine the future because part of the challenge we have with the future is that it's a figment of our imagination that we can go on being concerned about what's happening in the present and not have accountability to the future not have the ability to really imagine what's gonna unfold. But through these young people we are actually being confronted with the choices we're making and how they're affecting the future. And I think a lot of these young activists are not just articulating what they're against but in the case of sunrise articulating a vision of society of how a society could actually address this problem why you want communities that are gonna be cleaner and greener and safer and how that's a vehicle for actually acting on climate change. And now I think what it's up to us all of us including the young people but certainly the older generations to take their cue and translate that into political action. So political power being exercised in this next election crucially in the United States we should be voting with this issue at the top at the forefront of our minds. But also I think there are numerous other ways in which we can exercise our power agency on this issue and the Amazon walkout recently is an example of that. So there was a planned protest walkout of Amazon employees because of their belief that the company was not doing enough on climate change and preemptively Jeff Bezos announced a more aggressive plan to move the company towards renewable energy and actual carbon neutrality by 2030 and 2040 respectively. So that all happened last week as a result of employees who had previously tried to get a shareholder resolution to make this happen. But in fact by putting their selves on the line and willing to make sort of a media sensation around this they were able to force the change more effectively. So having been around myself for even longer than this Thunberg I've seen times when this kind of mobilization of youth especially made a difference during the civil rights movement in 1960s and in the original Earth Day type movements in the early 1970s. Have you thought through the connection between four million young people protesting around the world and what happens practically in legislation or corporate governance that would again align interest in the longer view rather than the next quarters returns? Yes and I think my book is actually focused on more of that as opposed to the activism. I think the activism is promising and letting the young sort of lead us as sort of symbols of the future as advocates for the future is a way to jumpstart that. But yes, I mean I think part of this involves like how do we actually get community level and legislative action around preventing the harm of climate change. So certainly pricing carbon, putting restrictions on the way we develop federal lands and the fossil fuel infrastructure that now is being heavily subsidized in this country. Certainly it also involves reform of capital markets. In part I think what's happening in corporate America to a large extent is that the material risk of climate change is not being accounted for in a lot of companies. And so there are multiple angles at which we can go about this. One is through financial institutions which are currently underwriting a lot of this risk that's being taken on. And frankly it's putting all of us at risk because when a company, when a bank is willing to finance this infrastructure that is high risk and leads to climate impacts that are gonna threaten our economy that has consequences. So I think there are a number of instruments both regulatory and voluntary that can be taken in the investment sector and also by individual companies that can decide, look, some of our shareholders deserve more voting power. They're ones who hold on to their stock longer so that we're not being driven constantly by these short-term results. We can actually look at some of these long-term issues at risk. So I move to another sector or two which is related to what you just been discussing where short-termism is a obvious problem. That's public life, politics, national governance, where it seems that people in elective office, the next election is for the end of time as far as they're concerned, even though they're making decisions which will have impacts on their children and grandchildren. Are there, tell us about the signs you've seen in your work that the incentives of politics could be changed in a way that we didn't have this destructive yesterday-the-new cycle obsession that we have now? One of the stories I tell in the book is about a community in South Carolina in Richland County, South Carolina, which is where the capital of Columbia is. And in Richland County, there was a very, a kind of snow job that came in of a development, a billion-dollar city within the city that was being proposed in the highest-risk part of a floodplain, which is known as the regulatory floodway. So on the flood maps, this looks like a disaster. And it was deep-pocketed developers who had political connections on both the Republican and the Democratic side going up to the National Party, but certainly in South Carolina itself, who were pushing for this development to happen. And ultimately, the development did not happen. It was blocked. And the story I tell is one of the courage of local political leaders, one of making sort of unholy alliances, so some of the hunting hunters who were interested in protecting lands in the form that they were in were allied with environmentalists who didn't want this high-risk development to come to the floodplain and were allied with emergency responders who didn't want to see this development happen. But in the end, it did take courage on the part of one particular political leader who then was able to work with the rest of the county officials to prevent this from happening. And part of it was her kind of forging independence from those campaign financiers that can get so involved and pushing us towards the short-term and pushing our leaders towards the short-term. So it felt it was important to tell that story because I really do see the connection between our campaign finance laws and these kinds of short-term actions that put us at risk for the impact of climate change for frankly a whole lot of other future risks. And the other part of this story has to do with the law. So there are ways in which laws and Supreme Court decisions can serve as precedents that allow communities to do the right thing for the future. And this is a story about that. The 1978 Supreme Court decision, which is known as Penn Central, is the decision where the Supreme Court essentially allowed the city of New York to use its historic landmarks law, landmarks law commission, to say that it didn't want a skyscraper built above Grand Central Terminal in the airspace above Grand Central Terminal. And the company at the time of the owned Grand Central, which was known as Penn Central, it's confusing, wanted to make that development happen and was arguing under the Fifth Amendment, the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment, that if the city of New York said they couldn't build a skyscraper over Grand Central, that they were depriving them of the rightful use of their property. And these takings cases happen all over the country and they have a chilling effect on communities when communities want to, say, do something less reckless. They don't want to put those houses right by a wildfire zone they don't want to put the development in the flood plain. And so ultimately that decision, what it did was it upheld the right of a community to take the long view, to do what was good, in this case historic preservation for the future trust for the four future generations by not sort of clouding and destroying the edifice of Grand Central with the skyscraper above it. But that precedent was actually used in this case in South Carolina that I described to protect that community and prevent it from having to pay like a 42 million dollar settlement to the developer that had wanted to put this real estate development in the city. Something that is really instructive about this book or at least that I enjoyed a lot is its practicality. You talk about lots of techniques, tricks, habits of mental discipline that individuals and organizations use to shift their focus further down the road. You talk about, for example, an aging app that lets people imagine what they're gonna look like when they're old and so they can say, well, gee, how do I wanna get between then and now? And that's- It was horrifying, by the way. And now there's a viral one that sort of may be being used surreptitiously to get more facial data. So I don't necessarily recommend the practice, but at the time I did it, it was not. You're breaking my heart on this front. So there's these, that app, there's ways you can use virtual reality to imagine what disasters might be like and how you can avoid them dashboards for different kinds of data. The structured, long now thinking of Stuart Brand and Denny Halissa and others, tell us a couple of these approaches that you found most interesting and extrapolatable of things that if people knew about them more, that you hope people will notice from your book and think, gee, how could that apply in our school district, in our congressional district, et cetera. Yeah, and I really felt it was important to build up from the individual because some of these practices that can be taken on at the individual level then create the possibility, right, for us to do this collectively and so I think of them as anchors to the future for the imagination and they range from these art projects, like for example, this church in Haberstadt, Germany that has an organ that is playing a John Cage piece at a pace that will last 637 years and the organ is being assembled and reassembled to strike note changes every two years and what that does, I mean you might say that's sort of a frivolous thing or this is just art or something like that, which is never something I would say because I think art has many purposes for us but I think also from a practical point of view what this does is invite our imaginations to inhabit time plans that we don't normally inhabit and if you look at surveys, there's one survey done of hundreds of people across 25 countries that found that people's imagination about the future goes dark after about 15 years and in this period of unprecedented change we really need to be able to imagine beyond that, think of how much longer we're living than our grandparents and we need to be able to imagine much longer than 15 years and so some of these exercises I think can really be a way of kind of summoning our own version of Scrooge's Ghost the ghost of Christmas yet to come helping us bring the future into the present. One of the tools that I really like that I think kind of transcends this individual to collective boundary is an effort called Dear Tomorrow which invites people to write letters to their future selves 50 years in the future to their future children or grandchildren and nieces or nephews and the practice of this which was designed by two behavioral economists is about basically taking the perspective of someone you care about whether it's yourself or someone else in the future and allowing that to help you describe that future world how you want that world to look how you wish that world wouldn't look and it helps clarify how your decisions of the present can actually lead to that outcome or influence that outcome in some way and I think these kinds of exercises so I would love to see everyone writing letters to the future the day before election day next year so that they're putting issues of the future at a higher priority when they think about going into making sort of major decisions that will have consequences for generations including who we elect but this is also important at the collective level to have this kind of imagination and I talk about for example in Fukushima and basically the way that the models that the Tokyo Electric Power Company was using to model risk to the nuclear power station in Fukushima were really kind of embedded a kind of collective amnesia they constrained the data so that it didn't actually go far back enough to show the risk of a tsunami to that nuclear power station but that there was an engineer who had designed a different nuclear power station in Onagawa that had been closer to the epicenter of the earthquake and that station actually was built in a much safer way with a higher sea wall farther back from the coast and it was this engineer's knowledge of history and sort of span of history and imagination that allowed him to do that and there are more formal ways that groups can bring that kind of imagination to their practice I studied the war games used at the Pentagon and how something similar has been used by communities planning for sea level rise in Singapore and Rotterdam and in New England and then really kind of how do you create teams of people where multiple historical analogies and longer spans of history can come into play like they did in Onagawa, Japan which helped that nuclear power station which is to say that there are ways in which who you bring into the room and the diversity of their experiences can actually enrich the capacity to expand to imagine the future One of the techniques you mentioned is something we've employed a lot at the Atlantic because through most of its publishing history the Atlantic has not by definition been able to cover breaking news because we're a monthly magazine with a month's long lead time we've often featured these imagined future histories and before the Iraq war I wrote a sort of a future history of what it'd be like to invade Iraq the sort of punchline of which was don't do this it's gonna be a nightmare and we've done that in a variety of other realms and you do very interestingly show how this can work in organizations this is a personal question for you about things you've learned in the process and it's about personal short termism personal attention management on the one hand I think people are people over the eons when I was a kid adults were upset about transistor radios and they were gonna everybody's gonna live in their own little world with their earbuds and so people in one sense they're continuous over the millennia on the other hand there is something different now about the perfection of the attention machine that is modern life from phones to the internet to social media and you talk about how Las Vegas is perfecting some of the science of attention management what did you learn both for yourself and for the rest of us of directing attention away from this nanosecond and to longer horizons? So I love that you brought this up because I do think we're in a long trajectory of compressing our idea of what the moment is or what the instant is and each technology it's the microwave did the same thing the instant meal but that does have consequences because it affects our sense of relative time and Isaac Newton's formulation so our sense of time as it's passing we're more impatient because we feel like each moment we have to accomplish more and each moment is passing by for us more quickly so I'm not so great I'm not so great at this myself and so there were some selfish motives behind writing this book and I felt why not share yes we're concerned about climate change and some of the bigger issues in society but why not share some of the tools that can just help all of us in our lives in this book because I could use them myself and I did go to Las Vegas and spent some time with professional poker players and I found them so fascinating because here they were a group of people in particular that I spent time with who live in Las Vegas so they're constantly subjected to a commercial environment that is designed to make you indulge in your immediate whims and an instant gratification which is kind of I say that we're kind of carrying the casino with us in our pockets all the time now because that's sort of how our technologies are designed they're designed to keep us going back to keep looking for those likes and retweets and all of that and so how do you gain perspective on what's important in the long run and these professional poker players kind of have to do that because they have to manage short-term loss and not be impulsive so they can build basically a mass earnings that they can use later in the tournaments that they plan so they're kind of the opposite of your typical casino gambler just going up to the roulette wheel and putting it all on black so what I figured, what I learned from them were first some techniques for having advanced plans for the moment so before you go into a moment of temptation or indulgence having a sense of what you will do when you're faced with that temptation and it turns out there's a bunch of studies that support this method that they were doing sort of intuitively but you can call it an if then tactic so if I see a doughnut and I'm trying not to eat sugar for a week I will pretend it's a cloud floating away and instead of focusing on the sensory details of that doughnut that's just a very cursory example but the other thing that was interesting is realizing that we don't always have to do this alone I think we live in such an individual society and your endeavor work really speaks to this that we can do more easily in community with difficult for us to do alone I mean we don't regulate currency on our own we don't discourage violence and we do that through community norms and shared norms and this subculture of professional poker where there's actually kind of a virtue and admiration for what are known as the grinders the guys who spend so much time just making very incremental progress like they're sculptors in a renaissance studio or something until before they make their first big wins so they're spending all of this time putting in the patient work like that's actually something that's within some of these subcultures really respected and so I think we can create such islands or subcultures within modern life and temporary life and I know people for example who will have days that they spend with their families or with their friends or entire events where there are no devices or there are no rights or we spend a lot more time asking each other about the long-term projects in our lives right? I had friends who were holding me accountable for working on the book and not answering a bunch of emails every day. And so are there other rules, techniques or guidelines that you've applied in your life on the basis of this research? Yeah so one of the tools that I use now is something that Deborah Mitchell who was at Wharton in the 80s when she came up with this called Perspective Hindsight and it's often talked about as a pre-mortem that's a variant of it these days that Gary Klein brought up. The idea is that you imagine not just something that you want to happen. So one of the challenges that we have when we think about the future is that we will try to sanitize scenarios we don't want to happen or sometimes we'll focus on a doomsday scenario and decide we have no agency in figuring out whether or not we can influence it and we'll just say okay let's focus on the present that sounds too awful. Well what Perspective Hindsight invites you to do is imagine a future outcome as if it's happened the way you want it or a way you don't want it. So to take a very simple formulation of that you've had a dinner party and the dinner party has gone really really well. So you imagine it as if it's already happened instead of saying I need to do everything to make this dinner party perfect you say it's already happened and then you ask yourself why and how. And that clarifies for you the pivotal choices that you have that can influence that outcome for the better. Maybe it doesn't matter how the weather is maybe it doesn't matter if Jim can make it it does matter if Jim can make it. But you know the key factors are the conversation really flows or people feel welcome and so that unveils for you what you can actually do in the present that's important to that and what's sort of meaningless. And it's important too because it involves it involves suspending that disbelief about what can happen and because you sort of put yourself in that imagine it's a frame of mind similar to how the war games do that. There's a heuristic similar to what you're describing that Dev and I applied flying our little single engine plane around doing our reporting it was sort of two mottoes. One was since weather is the main variable and safety is if there's doubt there's no doubt. You know if there's any discussion about the weather then there's no doubt you don't do it. The other is how would this look in the NTSB report? The NTSB report what happens after accidents you know the chain of decisions. So when they say oh the pilot was in a hurry and he didn't have any sleep last night. So yeah. That actually is what Kennedy's XCOM did during the Cuban Missile Crisis. So I think the Bay of Pigs experience kind of shaped how but looking back at Newstatt and May when they write about the XCOM at that point it had entered Kennedy's consciousness. How will we be remembered for this how we handled this standoff between with Khrushchev and Kennedy on the missiles that they placed in Cuba where we were really on the brink of potential nuclear Armageddon and the idea that you bring into the room people who are willing to play out those scenarios of how will we be remembered, right? And that's really the idea behind being better ancestors too. It's bringing that question to the table which is so often left out of the room. A related point I've been trying to make in print and online to members of the GOP Senate majority right now is how do they wanna be remembered for this time in history and that so far has gotten zero traction but I think it's applying your logic. Let me ask you one other question and we'll have time for a question from the audience. You have five, as we say, key takeaways at the end five sort of principles of how to operationally build a longer term perspective in the short term decision. Do you want me to read the five and have you give a sentence or two on each or do you wanna reel them off? So I'm looking forward just to tell our audience here are the five points and here's like a one or two sentence illustration of each, shall I serve them up here? Okay, number one, look beyond near term targets. We can avoid being distracted by short term noise and cultivate patience by measuring more than immediate results. So you've discussed that a million, lots of ways but what's one other illustration of what you mean there? So I really believe in supplanting near term targets or metrics with milestones. So real measures of progress. So for example in companies stop looking at the near term stock price if you're an investor look less at the near term stock price. Look at things like how is this growing market share what is the growth and invention or innovativeness that this company is putting forth? How's this company looking at long-term risk? So that's using additional and better metrics. Better measures of progress, yeah. Number two, stoke the imagination. We can boost our ability to envision the range of possibilities that lie ahead. Yeah, so I think the writing the letters to futures and example of that. Another example I write a lot about in the book are heirlooms, so personal family heirlooms as an anchor to the future but also within communities. Figuring out what are those irreplaceable resources to a community, to an organization, to a society that we can't just find enough money to replace in the future and figuring out a plan for how we steward them. Number three, create immediate rewards for future goals. We can find ways to make what's best for us over time pay off in the present. So the story in the book that speaks to that is a story of a farmer who's basically wed the need for short-term annual yields in agriculture for us to be able to feed people, for farmers to be able to keep surviving with the need to protect fertile topsoil. So it's an innovation basically that he's bred these perennial grain crops that try to do both. I think we had some Atlantic article about him a while ago, didn't we, the same, West Jackson? Yeah, yeah, that's great, I missed it, yeah. It was back in the 1980s, sometime when he was just sort of just getting this idea going. Yeah, he's over 80 now. Yeah, he's just sharp as ever, yeah. He's had the long-term view. Number four, direct attention away from immediate urges. We can reconfigure cultural and environmental cues that condition us for urgency and instant gratification. Yeah, so this is about shifting attention. So here, that's sort of more of a personal, I think, recommendation. And I think this whole formulation of this CODA part is more about giving you something to take away with you that the book is more story-oriented as opposed to prescriptive. And yes, I think a part of it is trying to create subcultures, using some of these tools that I talk about, like the if-then tactics, to put your attention on what you really care about in the future as opposed to in the present. And number five, again, with the proviso that this is a part different from the rest of the book, the rest of the book being stories, travels, surprises, inventions. Number five is demand and design better institutions. We can create practices, laws, and institutions that foster foresight. Yeah, so this is really about the use of our political power to demand things like action on climate change, to demand campaign finance reform, I think is like the gateway drug to almost all of these future issues. And to call on our institutions and leaders to hold them accountable for what they're doing for the long term and not just what results they've created in our economy today. So who has, if you have your hand for a question, yes, there's microphones here and if you could introduce yourself and then the other microphone will go to whoever is next up. Yes. At Georgetown. And the program was communications, culture, and technology. So I wanna talk about the role of culture and encouraging people to be more optimistic and to think long term. And since you and Deb have spent so much time in China, I wanna frame it in that way. You talked about planetary despair, but if you go to China, there's a lot more optimism in the media, they're not worshiping rappers and rock stars and hockey players, it's all about engineers and astronauts. Have you looked at China, have you looked at other cultures where it just seems they're culturally more likely to think long term and to be a bit more optimistic and I'd love to hear Deb and Jim's answer later if they wanna talk about that. I did look at the question of culture and I found no simple answer to that question. So if you look at the Chinese government, which is autocratic and doesn't face the accountability measures of democracy on a regular basis, which I think are really important for both short and long term reasons. Yes, there's a lot of long term planning, there's a lot of sort of progress orientation, but if you look at the Chinese stock market, highly speculative, highly short term. So I think you can't paint these cultures with a broad brush. That said, cultural norms I think have a huge role and one of the things I look at in the book is the quintessential marshmallow test and how what that tells us about the connection between nature, culture, peer groups, environment and thinking ahead and the Cameroonian four year old toddlers of subsistence farmers in a study of some 200 toddlers comparing them to German toddlers way outperform the German toddlers at a rate of like 70%, they wait for the second marshmallow despite poverty and scarcity which we usually associate with being very short term oriented. And so what this indicates along with the wealth of other studies around the marshmallow test is that the peer norms and the cultural norms of a group can really change how we think about the future. So I think I was more interested in decoding what are those norms and how can they be adopted and what kinds of cultures, whether they're cultures of poker players or cultures of people within a society like the people who rebuild the Shinto shrine in Issei in Japan on a regular routine basis. That's a cultural tradition. But I didn't find a lot of evidence for sort of the idea that entire countries could be painted with the words they're doing this much better. And that said systems of government that might be more oriented towards the long term like the Chinese government. I don't think the cost of that is necessarily worth it. We can talk later. Yes. Yes. Hi, my name is Rebecca McKinnon. I direct the ranking digital rights project here at New America. And my question, I'm trying very hard to resist kind of getting into a long argument with Mike about the fact that, you know, jailing millions of Uighurs is a short-term response to the Chinese government's need to stay in power, ignoring long-term benefits for society, but I'll stop there and go to the question I was really gonna ask, which has to do with the business round table and the statement that they issued recently that just sort of acknowledging that the purpose of corporations should no longer just be shareholder value and needs to be around delivering value to all stakeholders, which includes environment, worker rights, you know, all kinds of human rights issues as well. So I'm curious about your opinion of what you think the impact of that kind of reframing is, how meaningful it is, and what people might be able to do with it. Yeah. And I just ended up piling on to my friend, Rebecca's question here. So a couple years or maybe three years ago, I did a big story for the Atlantic about Al Gore's generation investment company in London and their view that actually doing sustainable business was better business. And if you understood capitalism more correctly, you'd see that the payoffs are longer term. The response to him was, well, this is better business people will be doing it anyway, et cetera, et cetera, which I guess has been part of the pushback to the business round table too. How does, you know, there are longstanding arguments that cleaner business is better business and then there's the countervailing argument, well, why isn't everybody doing it then? So how do these fit into your make up? Well, part of it is the time horizon question, right? If you are holding, it's the average holding time for a stock used to be something like six years and now it's less than six months. So on a certain time horizon, right? If you're day trading, on the material risk of some of these long-term problems for you as a shareholder doesn't really manifest if you're just constantly switching over stock. And I think one of the questions here and the sort of business round table in stating that they wanna reduce the role of shareholder primacy because they feel that they've been driven by these shareholders to do things that aren't for the long-term good of society or the company. One of the tensions there is that, well, yes, that might be true, but there's a difference between a short-term shareholder that just wants to take as much as they can from a company right away and is encouraging these share buybacks and some of these practices that just sort of deplete the value of a company and prevent them from being able to invest in research and development and in workers or in growing into a new market. And shareholders who stay for a longer time. And some companies have actually organized themselves, whatever you think of Google and Alphabet, an example of that where there's a tiered voting power. So the shareholders that hold onto the stock longer have more voting power for the corporation so that the shareholders who are just interested in that near-term value can't have as much influence over the company's decisions. And that, so the business round table announcement, I think, you know, I am not cynical enough to say that this is meaningless, which is what some observers are saying right now. I think it's speaking to the moment we're in where a lot of people, shareholders and talent, right, look at how many people at Amazon are willing to walk out because they feel and protest their, you know, and sort of have that scrutiny on them because they don't think that the company they work for is doing enough on a social problem like climate change. And so I think that these companies in the business round table who are saying a company, a corporation means more than just briefing short-term profit for a shareholder are smart in that they're responding to the zeitgeist, they're responding to the pressure from some investors, from some workers, and from society at large and probably reading the tea leaves if there's a political key change in this country, which I hope is happening, that there could be sort of strong backlash against their practices which have been unfettered and have been too focused on the quarter, among other things. So I think it's promising that they did this in part because the public announcement then creates the opportunity for accountability if journalists and regulators and others follow and ask, what are you actually doing? How are you actually, like it's fine to declare that the shareholder is no longer king, that this is about societal value, but what are you gonna actually do to make that happen? So I remain open to the idea that this will lead to real change in these companies and I do think that we need more examples of how it's done. They're very isolated examples now. Yes. Hi, thank you. I'm Adam Cap from the Sierra Club and our digital product management team. I'm interested in how we, in some ways, right? Speaking about Greta Thunberg and the UN summit. So in some ways we need to shift to a model of long-term thinking, but we need to make that shift happen rapidly. So there's a bit of a paradox there that I'm curious about and specifically I'm thinking about an article I read. I think it was New York Times, but forgive me. This morning about the area in Scranton in Pennsylvania, which is kind of a swing area within a swing state and how there are a wide swath of that population is not politically engaged because they're more focused on day-to-day needs, like how am I gonna pay my rent this month? So how can we, you know, how do we help people who are dealing with immediate pressing, kind of physical security needs, understand that voting, being engaged, at least casting a vote in the next election, hopefully based on climate, is something that they need to be concerned about. Yeah, I don't think the two are usually exclusive. So we can be urgently addressing the needs of people in our society that are struggling, who are struggling, while also addressing issues of the long-term and I do think the strategy of creating urgency around climate issues, which Benberg and others are creating, is important to get us into the gate of thinking about these problems, but they also are going to require sustained action and sustained change. So unless we are able to orient ourselves and our institutions and organizations to think long-term, we'll just slap a quick fix on it or we'll say we've invented this technology and then we'll think we're done with solving the problem of climate change. So I am interested in the long game of how we continue to address this, which is the reason for all the tools in the book. And I think the issue of scarcity is very real, so I did draw on the work of Cyndale and Malinathan and Elder Shafir who've written a book called Scarcity in my own book because of how they point out that scarcity of time or money or bandwidth can lead people to focus much more on the immediate, can encourage that and sort of it's like the idea that you'll take your family heirloom to the pawn shop if you need to put food on the table. And so that is very real and material. At the same time, there is a whole lot of abundance in this country and I think that's where I'm calling on the greatest amount of courage and the greatest amount of change for people to be thinking long-term and to help reconcile these issues for the people who are really struggling. One sense on politics before, last question back here. If you look historically, the Democrats who have won the presidency have done so with a combination of urgency and optimism at some time. There's some kind of sonniness that goes with successful Democratic candidates and essentially all successful Republicans except Trump and Nixon. That having a sense and awareness of urgency but a sense of possibility is the personal courage that a successful presidential has. And so yes, we have problems but we can deal with them. I want to spread about some stuff too because I wanted to study what made social and political movements successful and it is not just resisting the present problem but having an imagined future that can drive people to say that's the future I really want. It's the future where people can ride the same bus and see parts of the bus and sit at the same lunch counters and go to the same schools and I do think that that has been really needed and it's starting to be created with ideas around a better climate future in this country now. My name is Mike Gholash. I want to know if you believe that the social system that's in place limits our ability of making long-term changes basically. We have a capitalist system that certain goals and objectives as opposed to a more collective socialist type system. Does one limit the future choices we plan? Yes, so I did look at examples of I guess more not necessarily socialist systems at a macro scale but economies that are working more like I would call it heirloom economies where there's collective cooperatives at the local level so I looked at this fishery set of communities in Mexico on the Pacific coast of Baja, California who are managing in the form of cooperatives that are organized across nine communities a lobster fishery in a way that they're passing on to future generations and very carefully managing their catch, their self-policing, they have sort of trust and continuity among these communities that's allowing that to happen and I do think that is a model that makes it easier to orient towards the long-term. That said, there are examples even from our system today of the ways that institutions can orient towards the long-term and create shared heirlooms the national park system is sort of the quintessential example of that where we decide something is valuable to us as a society and we create law, we create policy, we create funding and in fact there's a cultural status that we attribute to this and each generation uses these parks and makes them meaningful and sort of passes on that meaning to the next generation and so I don't think that it's inherently incompatible with the system we have today to do this kind of thinking and that's why I wanted to highlight examples of that throughout the book because I don't think it's necessary while there might be other reasons to try to reform the system in a variety of ways including to sort of bring back some of the abuses of the system today that this is actually something that's possible it's in some ways agnostic of system I wanted to show that this is possible across all different kinds of societies and systems. Long-term thinking, read and learn from this book medium-term thinking, buy the book five minutes from now immediate term, join me in thanking me now. Thank you all, thanks for your attention.