The Brain and The Now | David Eagleman

All right. We are finally at the last portion of this evening. I think we've had over 30 speakers today plus the un-conference plus great art by Alex Eben. And so I hope you have been able to experience as much of it as possible. We've also been taping as much of it as possible. Thanks to Will and Margaret Hearst for funding the media part of this along with FORA.tv as well as Ignite and Wood's upcoming movie that is, when is your movie coming out?

January. "Real Artist," coming out in January. So thank you all.

And so we will be able to point to all the media that came out of today's talks. I have wanted to have David Eagleman do this talk ever since I saw it at this small, super-geeky conference about time in Pasadena several years ago. And I noticed that not too long ago, he published the work. Originally it was the very early part of the experimental data on this and now it's been published. So I'm really excited that we can get an update on it. David Eagleman is one of the more recent board members that we have and he just recently moved from the Baylor School of Medicine, right? Yes. And to here, he's now working at Stanford, as well as some of his own projects. He's now local to the Bay Area. So hopefully we'll rope him into even more things. But he had a talk in Colorado yesterday and flew back special to make sure that he could make this. We have a lot of chairs up here because actually there's two other phases of the talk tonight. David's going to give his talk on the way the brain builds its "now" and what some of those implications are. Then Danny Hillis and Stewart Brand are going to join him, you guys three in the center there, for a discussion on how we kind of extrapolate that out and maybe some of the ramifications around the "long now." And then I will interrupt them at some point. And there'll also be question cards going around. You guys are welcome to do question cards and those will come up to Stewart to keep that discussion going. And then we're going to welcome all the board members that are present here. And please keep those questions going. That's going to be an AMA. So we have, you know, if there's any one board member that you want to ask a question to or to the group about what's going on with Long Now, we really encourage you to send those questions up to us. And to introduce David more fully, I'm just going to run this movie.

This is the story of how your life shapes your brain and how your brain shapes your life.

For the past 20 years I've been trying to understand how what happens in three pounds of Jello-like material somehow becomes us.

What we feel, what matters to us, our beliefs and our hopes. Everything we are happens in here.

There are 100 billion neurons in the human brain.

And each one of these is sending tens or hundreds of electrical pulses to thousands of other neurons every second of your life.

And somehow, all of this activity produces your sense of reality.

Imagine taking your laptop and tearing out half the motherboard and expecting it to still function. It would never work with a computer, but it can work with a young brain.

The brain doesn't forget how to move the arm, even though it hasn't moved it in 10 years. Hand grasp.

What happens when we encounter something unexpected? Orange, green, blue, red, blue.

That was amazing.

We're not fixed. From cradle to grave, we are works in progress.

How many of you, by a show of hands, have had a life-threatening situation where things seemed to take a very long time? Okay, so almost 80% of you, that's amazing. So this happened to me when I was younger. I was climbing around on a rooftop of a house under construction and there was tar paper at the edge and I didn't realize that was the edge because it was sticking out. So I stepped on that and I fell off of the roof. And I fell all the way to the ground below. And the thing that struck me is that it took a very long time. It seemed to take a very long time. So I was thinking about all my different options. I was thinking about how I might be able to grab for the tar paper as I was falling, and then I realized that was too late. So I was looking down at the ground and I had a total calmness and I was watching the brick floor come towards me and what I was thinking about was Alice in Wonderland and how this must have been what it was like for her to fall down the rabbit hole. And so the thing that struck me before the ground struck me was how long the whole thing seemed to take. So then what happened is I grew up more, I was 8 years old at the time that happened, and I took high school physics and I learned D=1/2AT squared and I calculated how long that fall actually took. And I was surprised that the whole thing took 0.8 of a second. The whole fall from top to bottom was less than a second. And that really surprised me because it seemed like the whole thing had lasted much longer. So I grew up and I became a neuroscientist so that I could try to figure out what was going on here. And I've devoted a large part of my career to trying to figure out these sorts of experiences and what's happening with time. And essentially, what I realized along the way is that all of our perceptual experience is pushed through this filter of the way that we perceive reality. And it doesn't necessarily map onto what reality actually is. And what I've found is that time is not something that is passively tracked by the brain, but it's actively constructed by it. And so that's the thing I want to tell you about today.

So time is the most common noun in the English language and we worry about whether we have enough of it and how we spend it, and on a day like today, we invest it, we covet it, we trade it, we equate it to money. So it's one of the most important elements in our lives, but it's also one of the least understood because you can't touch it or taste it or feel it. And so what I realized is we had all these questions about time. Why does time seem to slow down when you're scared and why does it seem to speed up as you get older? So today, what I want to do is take you on a quick journey through my career in time and what surprises we've discovered about how the brain perceives time.

So, to get into something as big and mysterious as time, what I want to do is start with a very simple visual illusion. So this is called the flash-lag effect. And if you fix on the red square, you'll see this green circle moving around. And what's happening is that there's a flash that's occurring in the middle of the green ring, but it doesn't actually look as though the flash is happening in the middle. Again, if you fixated on the red square, you should be able to see clearly that it looks like the flash is kind of lagging behind. So what this means is that even though on the left here, that's what's hitting your retina, what you perceive is something more like what's happening on the right. So why does this happen?

So when I started looking at this some years ago, there was a paper in the literature on it and it suggested the following: it said, look, maybe what happens is as things are going through time, an event occurs like the flash where the arrow is, the small arrow, and what you're doing is you're guessing ahead. You're guessing ahead where the moving object is going to be. So I thought about that and I actually had some reasons to doubt that explanation. And so I set up a very simple experiment, which was the following: I had the ring come around and a flash happens in the middle of the ring like you just saw and the ring continues just like you saw. Or, randomly interleaved, a different condition is that the ring comes to a stop. Or, the ring reverses direction at the moment of the flash.

So the thing to note is that everything up to and including the flash is identical and the only thing I'm changing is what happens in the future of the flash. I'm changing either it goes that way or it stops or it goes that way. It's the only thing I'm changing. So I'm going to show you all three of these conditions in a row here. So that's the continuous case, that's the reversed case, and that's the stopped case. Let me see if I can show you that again. Here's the continuous case, reversed case, and the stopped case.

So what you might have noticed is that what I'm doing here is I'm just displaying essentially I'm taking the data which I gather from lots of subjects and I'm just sort of plotting it here. In the continuous case you see the ring below the flash. In the reversed case you see the ring above the flash. And in the stopped case there's no illusion at all. Is that what everybody saw? Do you all see that? No. Okay, wait, I'm going to do this again so you see continuous, reversed, stopped. You guys all... Okay. Those of you who aren't seeing that, come see me afterwards. So I tested a whole bunch of people and this is what everybody sees. And so it turns out this is a very strange result because this rules out the idea of motion extrapolation that you're just sort of seeing the flash ahead of where, you know, you're just extrapolating ahead of where it is. Because everything up to and including the flash is the same, so you should see the flash this way every time if that's what's going on. But somehow there's something weirder going on, which is that I'm asking people what they see at the moment of the flash but their answer depends on what's happening just in the future of the flash, what's happening after the flash.

And so this was my first step in understanding something, which is that our perception of an event depends on what happens next, depends on what happens in the near future. So when we talk about where awareness occurs, it's not that we're guessing ahead, but instead it's more like we're filling in behind. After we've seen something, then we fill in. This is the moment of the flash, you're filling in behind. Now nothing is happening backwards in time here. The right way to do this is with two timelines.

So you've got time in the world and there's this event of, let's say, the flash here. And then you've got time in your head. And what happens is you see the flash later, but what's going on is information that comes after the flash, all of this gets subsumed into what you think you see at the moment of the flash. And so what does this mean? It means that in this weird way, we're not seeing things real-time in the world. What we're able to see is that we live in the past. And so I don't mean like this or like this, but what I mean is when you think the moment "now" occurs, it's already happened a long time ago. It's already passed by the time you think that you see it. For all you know, my talk might be over by now. Okay, it's not that far, but what it means is that signals in the brain take a large amount of time to actually get processed. And this is because of the speed at which signals come into the brain and it's actually an extremely slow speed. Signals come into the brain and they have to get processed and mushed around and so on, and then finally you have this conscious experience but it's always behind reality. And so what this means is that your perception of the world is like one of these live television shows like Saturday Night Live, which is not actually live. They air this with a delay in case somebody cusses or falls down or there's a wardrobe mishap, that kind of thing. And so what you're seeing is not actually live and this is the same with our perceptual lives.

So, how far in the past do we live? Well, I did a whole series of studies which I'm not going to show you here, but it turns out it's about 80 to 100 milliseconds is how far in the past we live. But this is just for the flash-lag effect. This is just in vision. Now there's something very significant about this, which is within the visual system, not all signals get processed at the same speed. Instead, you process bright signals at a particular speed and dim signals at a slower speed, and the difference between the brightest and the dimmest signals you can see is 80 milliseconds. And so what's happening is the brain is collecting up all of the information before it makes a conclusion about what it's seeing at some moment. It's collecting up everything from the bright to the dim information.

So what I've suggested in the literature is that Mother Nature has carved out this window of time as the balance of two constraints, which is on the one hand she wants to operate as close to the border of the present as possible, but on the other hand she has to account for the way that things get smeared out in time based on just the mechanics of the retina and what happens from there. So what this means is that the visual system waits to collect up all the evidence, bright to dim, before it concludes anything about what's happened in there.

Now here's the really interesting part. What I just showed you was from the visual system and that's this 80 milliseconds. But how far in the past do we live in total? I mean, what's the total amount between here and here? I mean, we know that this gets incorporated into what you think you see, but how far is that distance? Well, what we have, and I'll show you this in a minute, but what we have is this unified percept of the world across all of our senses. But it turns out that our senses all process things at very different speeds. And somehow our brain unifies all that, and when you think that the moment "now" is occurring with all of your senses, your brain has to wait to collect up all of that. So what's the slowest thing? The slowest thing is the signals from your toes because that has to climb all the way up your spinal cord to your brain. So if I touch your toe and your nose at the same time, you'll feel that as simultaneous. But that's very weird, right? Because the signals from your nose get to your brain right away and the signals from your toes have to travel up here. So the question is when your brain registers the signal from your nose does it say "Okay, before I perceive that, I'm going to wait and see if anything else comes up the pipeline." And the answer is somehow yes, that's exactly what it's doing. It waits to collect up all this information. And so because the brain waits to collect this up, this led me to a bizarre but testable prediction that tall people live further in the past than short people because their brain has to wait to collect up all that information.

I actually announced this and our results from this on NPR one day and when I got back to my lab I logged into my email and I had dozens of emails from people who said "I'm short and I really appreciate you saying that." So it turns out that in total, on average, we probably live something like half a second in the past. That's how long it takes for the brain to collect up all this information from our toes and everything else and put this all together. And I was thinking about this recently, and the fact that your brain has to put this all together before you have any conscious experience of it leads to an interesting consequence, which is that if you are walking down the street enjoying a coffee and something happens that causes your brain to suddenly cease, like that, what it means is that before all the conscious signals come together, you're dead. Your brain's already squished. And so you won't perceive your own death, which is really interesting, right? And it's not just true of something like this, it's anything that's faster than the signals can come together. So if you get shot in the head or get blown up with a bomb or something, you will disappear before you were aware of what happened because it takes half a second for your brain under normal circumstances to put this all together. So that's the good news from science. So, and I think that this is what happened, I mean, this was captured in the final episode of The Sopranos. So after eight seasons, this is the last, you know, 25 seconds of The Sopranos right here.

So that was... for any of you who watched The Sopranos, how many people saw that and saw that final episode? Right. So a lot of people were pissed off about that ending because they didn't know what had just happened. But it harked back to something that had happened in season six when one of the characters said, "You probably don't even hear it when it happens, right?" talking about when you get knocked off. And so what happened is Tony Soprano got a bullet to the back of his head in this final episode, but all that you would experience if you were from Tony's point of view is that everything just stops. You wouldn't experience the gunshot and the pain and the whatever because your brain is already soup by the time that before the signals could come together. You wouldn't be aware of the last half second of your life. So your death might not be nearly as scary as you think. Okay.

All right. Now, so what we've established so far is that you live in the past and you have signals streaming in from your ears and your eyes and your fingertips and so on, your toes. Now, here's the thing: the bigger problem is that the brain needs to figure out how to coordinate all these signals because they arrive at very different times and yet your perception is unified. So let me give you an example of this. So at the Olympics when they're starting the runners, they use a gun to start the sprinters. So I did an experiment where I got a bunch of sprinters together and I started them with a gun versus a flash of light to see, you know, how fast they would get off the blocks. Because we know that light travels faster, the speed of light is much faster than the speed of sound. And so it turns out that using a flash of light doesn't help. In fact, the sprinters get off the blocks about 40 milliseconds slower. Why is that? It's because your auditory cortex can respond to a bang much more quickly than your visual cortex can respond to a flash and then can send out signals to the motor system and down the body and you can get off the blocks. And this is why they use a gun.

But here's the mystery. The mystery is that when I clap my hands, that looks synchronized to you. We know that the auditory cortex processes much more quickly than visual cortex. You can tell this from the physiology too, you can dunk electrodes in there and measure that. But that looks like it's synced even though part of your brain is getting that information before another part. So your brain is going through a lot of trouble to actually sync things up. And I'll give you one more example of this, which is that in the early days of television broadcasting the engineers were worried about how they could broadcast the sound and the visual signals and keep them synchronized with each other. And what they realized quite accidentally, and they wrote a paper on this in the 1950s, was that they don't actually need to keep them synchronized. As long as the sound and the visuals are within about 80 milliseconds of one another, your brain does all the work of syncing those up. And if you've ever seen something that seems out of sync, it means that it was more than 80 milliseconds out of sync because your brain can't tell the difference as long as they're within 80 milliseconds of one another. It seems perfectly synchronized to you.

And I'll give you a way that you can demonstrate this to yourself, which is if you're watching some kids playing basketball, it'll seem like the basketball is hitting the ground, the sight and the sound of that are synchronized. Now what you do is you start backing up. So you back up, you back up, they're dribbling, you're watching them, and it seems synchronized. More and more you back up, it still seems synchronized until you hit 110 feet. And then it doesn't seem synchronized anymore. Then it seems off, then the sight and the sound seem off. Why? Well, 110 feet is where the speed of light and the speed of sound are reaching you at over 80 milliseconds apart. So when they reach you at that level apart, then your brain can't sync it up anymore. But as long as they're within that window, your brain has no problem syncing it up and that's what it does.

Okay. So, so this is the question I turned to: is how does the brain actually do that? So I'll tell you some... the various things that I explored here. Actually, this is an old list that's been updated, but we've published lots of papers on this stuff. But I'm going to tell you about a few things. One of them is about the warping of time. I'll put this all together here in a minute about the warping of time. What happens when something seems to go in slow motion like when you fall off of a roof? Also, what happens when you make a saccade? So saccades are the rapid ballistic eye movements that we make about three or four times every second. Your eyes are always moving around the scene like this. And as they do, you actually your visual system shuts down during the time that they're jumping because otherwise it would look like the whole world streamed by. So you're not actually seeing anything while your eyes are moving around. And yet, despite these gaps in time, we never even notice it. We don't notice that there's a gap. And one way you can prove this to yourself is very interesting. When you get home I'd like you to do this: look in a mirror and look at your eyes. So look at your right eye, then look at your left eye, then your right eye, then your left eye. If you're watching someone else do this you can see their eyes move very obviously their eyes are moving. But when you do it and you're watching yourself, it's instantaneous. You'll be looking at your right eye, then instantaneously you'll be looking at your left eye. And instantaneously you'll be looking at your right eye. You don't see the gap there at all, which is very weird.

So, okay, so I'll talk about all these things. But the parts I want to get to are the issue of now, what happens when you get the motor system involved also? What happens when your motor system is part of this? And this is actually the secret to understanding how everything gets synchronized. So let me turn to this issue about how the brain coordinates its signals, meaning how does it know the visual and the touch and the hearing? How does it put all those together and know the right order to put those in?

So for to answer that I'd like to turn to the Mongol Emperor Kublai Khan who reigned from 1260 to 1294 and he founded the Yuan Dynasty. Now, what he had done is conquered the largest kingdom the world had ever known. His kingdom reached from the Pacific to the Black Sea and from Siberia to modern-day Afghanistan. And it was his territory actually covered a fifth of the world's inhabited area. So it was absolutely enormous. So he situated himself in what is modern-day Beijing. And the thing to note is that this was back in the day before iPhones and telegraphs and trains or email or anything like that. So the question is how in the world did Kublai Khan know his empire? How could he possibly there's no way you could travel something this large by yourself in a short lifetime. How could you possibly know what your empire contained?

Well, what he did is he hired emissaries like Marco Polo and these emissaries would travel out to the distant reaches of his empire and they would convey news back to him about what was going on in the empire. And of course he had many, many different emissaries that would always bring news back to him about what had happened. Now I haven't ever heard a historian talk about this but I imagine it must be true that Kublai Khan had a temporal problem because of wars and weather and other issues, the different emissaries would come back to him at different times and at different paces. And so what this means is that one emissary could come back and say "Oh, a war has just ended" and another emissary comes back and says "Oh, a war has just begun" and they're talking about the same war but they got there at different times. And so the question is how did the great Khan synchronize all these signals? How did he figure this out? And the same problem that the Khan has is the same problem that the brain has, which is to say it's always sending out motor signals and it's getting back all these different streams of information.

So you've got somatosensory information coming back, you've got auditory, you've got visual information coming back to the brain. But the issue is that all of these things get processed by the brain at different speeds and at different places in the brain. And yet, somehow to us, everything seems synchronized. So the question is how does that happen? How does it happen that when I do this it seems like it's synced up? So what this means is that the brain is somehow pulling off major video editing tricks on all this stuff. And the question is why? Why does it matter to the brain so much for it to get all this timing right? And here's what I'm going to suggest the reason is. It has to do with causality. Because one of the most fundamental things an animal does is figure out whether it was the one that caused something or not. And what it really comes down to is a temporal order judgment, which is to say did I put out the motor act and then I got sensory feedback, in which case I'm going to take credit for having done that. Versus I got sensory feedback and then I did some motor act, in which case I'm not taking credit for it. I had nothing to do with that if it happens the other way. But what we're talking often is tens of milliseconds is the only difference here.

So at bottom, this is the challenge that animals have to figure out. The reason this is a really difficult challenge is because the speed of sensory signals can change. So for example, when you go from a bright outdoors into a dimly lit room, the speed at which your retinas are talking to your brain slows down by quite a bit. And what that means is that now your vision and your motor actions are out of sync a little bit. So if right when you walked in the room I threw you a ball, you would miss it. You would be bad at I don't know if any of you ever play volleyball right when the sun's going down, you know, you're outside playing volleyball, everyone's having a good time, and then right as the sun starts going down, everyone starts getting hit in the face with the ball and so on. Because what's happening is your your time is getting out of sync now. And so on a longer timescale than that, I mean there are all these short-term changes, but on a long timescale, when you grow from a baby to an adult, it takes a longer time to send signals out and to get signals back. And so all of this led me to think a while ago, somehow the brain is having to figure out what its expectations are. It's having to modulate on the fly how long it expects signals to come back. And on this, you know, on this long timescale it changes things, but also on the short timescale because if you're playing volleyball at night, you know, once dusk hits, you can get used to it. After a few moments you get used to the speed, it's just that as it's changing, your timing is messed up. And so somehow I thought the brain is probably always doing this on the fly. It's always readjusting and recalibrating the expected time that it takes for signals to come in. But how does it do that? And what I reasoned is that it does it by interacting with the world. Because whenever you touch things or you kick things or anything you do like this, what you're doing is you're saying to the brain is saying "Okay, everybody synchronize your watches. I'm putting out a motor act, and what I expect is that I'm going to see and hear and feel it all at the same time." That's the that is the prior expectation it comes to the table with. And if for some reason I hit it and it went like that, then my brain would adjust the timing. So in other words, your brain doesn't know a priori what your body is, how big it is, what the the lighting level is and stuff like that. So my my hypothesis was "Look, the best way to to predict the future is to create it, is to go out and interact with the world and do this, and that's how you constantly keep yourself calibrated because you know that when you're the one who did something, that everything should be synchronized with that." In fact, it's the only thing that you know everything should be synchronized with. So I took this hypothesis and I created a very simple experiment, which goes like this. You hit a button and that causes a flash of light. And that's it. There's just a single button, you hit it, a flash of light happens, no problem. Then what we do is we inject a small delay in there, about 100 milliseconds, so that you hit the button and then the flash of light happens. You hit the button and then the flash of light. What happens very quickly is that your brain adjusts how that feels so that that comes closer to simultaneity so that it doesn't feel like 100 milliseconds. After just a couple of hits, it feels like it's closer to being simultaneous because your brain is the one putting out the motor act it exactly like this thing I said where if I went your brain adjusts. That's what we're doing here with the visual system. Now this is what happens, and then I pull a trick on it, which is now what I do after you've gotten used to this delay, I now present you a flash right after you hit the button. And what happens is you think that the flash happened before you hit the button. So you hit a button, a flash occurs and you say "Whoa, I didn't do that. It flashed just before I hit it." And this is kind of amazing because what this is is a reversal of action and effect, where you're the one doing something but you no longer think you are because of this calibration in time that's always happening. And so that got me really thinking about something which is that I'd seen that before. When I saw, you know, the first time I saw a subject say "Whoa, that wasn't me," I thought "That looks really familiar. I've seen this before." And where I saw that was in this call this credit misattribution. This is one of the main symptoms that we find in schizophrenia. In schizophrenia, people all the time do things and they don't take credit for it. They say "That wasn't me that caused that thing to happen." And then it's actually perfectly rational to cook up a different sort of explanation for it and say someone else is doing it, it's some, you know, signal from a radio tower, it's whatever it is, but it's not me that did whatever is going on. And so I started thinking about this as a pathology of time. And so and this made me think about another symptom of schizophrenia, which is auditory hallucinations. So under normal circumstances we're always talking to ourselves. You have an internally generated voice and you're listening to that. It's an internal loop even if you're not using your mouth. But it struck me what happens if you generate the voice and before hearing it, you're getting the timing wrong? Then you would hear it before you thought you generated it and you'd have to attribute that to somebody else. You'd have to say that's somebody else's voice because the timing is off even just by a few milliseconds. And so this is something we've been testing in the lab for a while. And what we find is that schizophrenics do not recalibrate. So when we give them the the tests this thing like where you hit the button and the flash of light occurs and so on and we measure how much they recalibrate, they actually don't recalibrate. So this is still you know this is work I'm going to be pursuing at Stanford now. But the issue is if this is the right way to think about schizophrenia, this completely changes our approach to it. It means that instead of trying pharmacological solutions, which actually haven't been that successful, just imagine if you could give somebody a video game that they play for a few minutes and then their auditory hallucinations go away. So this is the work I'm going to be pursuing now that I've landed here and tell you in six months how that's going. So thank you.

So where we are so far, just to summarize that last part is that is that the is that temporal order is dynamically recalibrated. This is what I was showing you about how the brain has no reason to know what the timing should be so it's constantly interacting with the world and recalibrating its timing so that that's always right and that this is is impaired in schizophrenia. So now I want to return to my fall from the roof, which is this question about "What happened? Is it actually the case that time ran in slow motion for me, or was it something else that was going on?" And so this is something that, you know, 80% of you raised your hand on. All of you have had some sort of experience where you feel like "Wow, that took a really long time, it seemed to take a long time." So people very commonly report this, and over the course of many years now I've collected hundreds of emails of people's stories about this and what happened to them. But what I found in the literature was nothing. In other words, this had never been tested. Like how do you actually test that? And it's not surprising it hadn't been tested because you can't stick subjects in a life-threatening situation to see what happens. So I thought about "What's going on here?" and I thought "Look, this probably boils down to two main hypotheses," which is that either during the course of the accident you have a higher, let's call it a time density, where things are things are running in slow motion and you think that things are taking a long time. And the second hypothesis is that in fact it's not that, but it's retrospective recollection. There's something that happens during the event where you look back at that and you think "Wow, that must have taken a really long time." So here's how we set about to test this. We built and we patented a device that we can strap to people's wrists and it does the following: it picks random digits like let's say the number four here and it's a matrix of LED lights and it alternates which lights are on and off and it presents a number in there. So, you know, all these lights are on and the rest are off, and then in the next moment these lights are off and these are on and they go back and forth like that. At a particular pace, you have no problem seeing that that's the number four. But if I tune it just a little bit faster than that, you can't see anything because all the positive and negative images blend together and you can't tell me which number it is. Okay, so what we did, as I mentioned, is we built this and we strapped it to people's wrists and we reasoned that if they were in a really scary situation and they were seeing it in slow motion, then they should be able to see numbers that are running normally at a pace that's too fast that you would never be able to see normally. Okay, so now we just need to figure out how do we make them scared. And so our first idea was "Look, why don't we stick volunteer subjects in a life-threatening, terrifying situation?" But because we're scientists, we always try to come up with a better idea. Um... but we never did, actually. So we went with the first idea and we dropped people from from a 150-foot tall tower in free-fall backwards. So we... so here's what here's what the experiment looks like. This is the zero-gravity tower in Dallas. So that's me dropping and then they're caught in a net below and they're going 70 miles an hour when they're caught in the net there. So that's the experiment. Do I have any volunteers? Yeah, talk to me afterwards. So I actually ran this myself three times to make sure that everything was working and so on and I can report that it's equally terrifying all three times because you're falling backwards, which goes against every Darwinian instinct that you have and so... it it accomplished what I set out to do, which was to find something that was safe but completely terrifying. So what we did is we had people watch somebody else fall and then estimate on a stopwatch how long that took. And then after their own fall to remember their fall and estimate how long that took. And we found that people on average judged their own fall to be at least 36% longer. And the reason I say "at least" is because what happened with a lot of people is when they were remembering their own fall they would do this and then at some point they would stop the watch and they'd say "Actually, it felt a lot longer, but I'm a little embarrassed to let the watch run longer." And so nonetheless it was clear that there was a duration distortion there. It's clear that there was a duration distortion that was probably even longer than that. But the question is: was it the case that people were seeing in slow motion like Neo? And so we compared the so what we did is we asked people to report the numbers that were flashing and we compared this to ground-based controls, the speed that they can see. And what we found is that people were actually no better at reporting the numbers than they were on a ground-based control. In other words, they weren't actually seeing in slow motion. So this was weird, right? Because we had this thing going on, but it was clear that nobody was able to perceive what was going on here. I mean, they were able to see just fine the numbers, except they couldn't see them any faster than they normally could. So what I realized is what's going on is the following. When you're in a life-threatening situation where everything's really hitting the fan, there's this other part of your brain called the amygdala, which comes online and this is essentially your emergency control center. It focuses all the attention on the situation at hand and it essentially acts like a secondary memory track. You're laying down memories through the amygdala. And so what this means is that you've got much denser memories about what happened. And when you read that back out, it seems like it must have taken a longer time. So in other words, time and memory are intertwined. So when you're in a car accident and you remember all these issues like, "Okay, the hood crumpled and the rearview mirror fell off, and I was watching the face of the other guy and so on," it's because you're laying down this density of memories on this on this secondary track. And when you read that back out, even immediately, even like, "What just happened? What just happened? What just happened?" you read that out immediately and the way that we judge the passage of time has something to do with the density of memory. And so when you read that back out, your only conclusion is that must have taken a much longer time because I have so much more memory about it. So when I published this a lot of people said "No, that's bullshit. I know that it took longer. I know that this thing took slow." So I said to people, "Look, when you were in a car accident the guy who was in the seat next to you screaming, did it actually sound like he was saying 'Nooo'? Because if it didn't, it means that time actually didn't slow down." And in fact, people had to admit that there was nothing like that going on. If your perception was like a movie and you stretched it out, then that's what would happen. But it turns out what's going on here is is a trick of the memory. It has to do with reading out much denser memories and making the naturally assumption that that many memories must equal a longer time. So what that means is that time and memory are are inseparable. And this actually led me to understand something else, which is this question about why does time speed up as you grow older? Because when you're a child, you're here's the scoop: when you're a child, you're figuring out all the rules of the world. You're figuring out how to operate in the world and what's culturally appropriate and what's socially appropriate and so on, and everything is novelty to you. And so when you get to the end of a childhood summer, you've had so many experiences that are really new to you that when you look back how long it's been since since April since you were in school or something, it seems to last a really long time because you have so many memories to draw on. When you get to be old like we are, what happens is that you look back at the end of a summer and it's all kind you've been doing the same stuff. And so when you look back to try to remember what you just did the last several months, you've only got a few little highlights and so what you assume is "God, that must have taken a shorter time. It seems like just yesterday that it was April." But it's because of this issue of the intertwining of time and memory and how we make judgments about time.

So, um, what I'm not going to tell you tonight about is how to live longer, but I am going to tell you how to make it seem as though you can you've lived longer. And that is by seeking novelty. So what I'd like actually what I'd like you to do is anybody here who's wearing a wrist watch, who's wearing a wrist watch? I'd like you to take your watch off and put it on the other hand. Yes. Now this sounds stupid, but in fact what happens is we automatize most of our lives. I mean almost everything we do we're we're training ourselves to become really automatic about things and the problem with that is that time disappears because you know you just you look at your watch see what time it is it's a totally natural thing. It's like when you're driving home, from you know the first time you drive to your work and back the very first time you do it, it seems to take a really long time but after that it starts becoming really automatic because you've automatized it. Time shrinks to zero. I mean you've all had this experience, right? The first time you drive there you think "Wow, this is far" and after a while it takes nothing. Okay, what I'd like you to do is drive a different route home tonight. Make sure that you go a different route home and try to do this every day. I try to do this every single day, just take a different route over to work so that I can get some of my life back so that I'm not an automated robot. Um, go home tonight and rearrange your office. Whatever's going on with your office, just rearrange it so you can see things differently. And you know of course coming to things like Long Now Foundation events allows you to inject novelty in your life and so things seem to last longer. And when you look back at the end of today, it'll seem like a you know a richer than normal Tuesday and you'll have lived a little bit longer. So the more novelty you seek, the better off you'll be there.

Okay. So, um, that's all I'm going to say before we do the Q&A, but you know one way that I found novelty as a child was to fall from this height of a roof and, you know, that that 0.8 of a second really changed my life trajectory in terms of what I ended up studying and what my life work was and so it's an ongoing passion of mine to figure out how the brain constructs reality from the brief "now" to the "long now." So with that, let's move to Q&A with Stewart and Danny. Thank you very much.

All right. Danny. I remember when you were designing the duration of the tick in the clock. You guys had a discussion. You want to revisit that for a minute? Oh yeah, that's there's an interesting design problem in the clock which is it has a very slow pendulum. Yeah. And you want to hear a pendulum as if it has a regular tick. So there's some rate at which you hear something as a rhythm. Yeah. But if it slows down, it gets to some point where it starts just feeling like a leaky roof that it's sort of annoying. You lose lock. Is there any theory that actually... So and and one of the things just experimenting with it I certainly notice it definitely depends on your state of mind. Hmm. So that actually the clock we ended up adjusting down to seven and a half seconds because you can get in a state of mind where where that becomes a tick. It becomes a rhythm but it's not that unless you really slow down and calm down. Is that actually a different... I mean is there a.... Yeah, the general story is that your capacity to predict when the next thing is happening has noise that grows in proportion to the amount of time you're judging. So what that means is if I'm judging one second ticks, I know pretty precisely when the next tick is going to happen. But if it's seven and a half seconds, my judgment of exactly when it's going to happen is pretty smeared out and it quickly reaches a point perceptually where it just it stops even feeling like a rhythm. This was years ago that we did this I'd actually forgotten that but I did some testing in my lab about at what point people found the rhythm to to go away. And what number did you get? I don't remember. I wish I remembered. Yeah. Shoot. We can read about it, right? But yes, we can read about it. That's right. But we talked on the phone at the time and I measured what it was. So presumably the seven and a half seconds was within that window. Yeah. That could be. Yeah. And what did you wind up with in the clock on that? Well we ended up with seven and a half seconds, which is really kind of half that because you kind of get some kind of a tick on each swing, so you sort of get half seconds but... But 10 seconds was too long. 10 seconds was too long. Yeah. Yeah. But a go a little further, Danny, when it is the seven and a half seconds, which feels like a long time between ticks, what does that do to experience time at that kind of tick pace? Well what what I thought was interesting was that it was different depending on how much you were focused on. Hmm. So and it sort of goes with your noise theory. If you're thinking of a whole bunch of other things, then you know your mind goes off at different directions, so you have events happening so your perception of time is varying a lot if you're you're thinking of other things. Whereas if you really clear your mind, you get much more uniform perception of time and then you can lock into that rhythm. So it's almost a it's almost a feedback situation that you've cleared your mind, you hear it as a rhythm. So it's inviting you to be meditative basically as you're climbing up the stairs of the clock? Well I think it's after you get up there because I think even climbing the stairs there's enough going on that it keeps you out of that state. When you sit in one of the little places you realize there's a steady tick. Yeah I think it's after you sit down, after you've gotten there and you're you're waiting you get into that state. You know there's another consequence to that which is interesting, which is as we pay more attention to time, things seem to also take longer. I mean we're more focused, as you said, and we can judge a rhythm better, but also things seem to take longer, which is why a watched pot never boils because when you're when you're thinking about time it you your attention is on that. Whereas when you're normally busy and so on, time seems to fly when you're at a party and having fun you're not paying much attention to time. What I need to point out is it's different prospectively and retrospectively. So prospectively if you are paying attention to time things seem to take a long time and so on, but it's exactly the opposite retrospectively, which is when you you know when you get off an I just got off an airplane and the ride seems so boring it seems like it's taking forever, but looking back I think the whole thing disappeared like that, I don't even remember it because of this memory issue. So, so yeah that was the thing that a little bit weirds me out about your stuff, which is I have I have had this experience of, you know, the car accident and everything seems vivid and you think of all these your life flashes before your eyes and, you know, you imagine you're falling down the well with Alice and, you know, all of that. And what you're telling me is actually I'm perceiving that all the time I just forget it. It's actually slightly worse than that. We you you actually your memory under normal circumstances is like a sieve, you're not writing down most of what's happening. So my life was much more interesting than I remember? That's actually right. That's exactly right. Yeah under normal circumstances you're laying down very thin memory and then when in when you're in an emergency situation you're writing down lots of things but under normal circumstances the rest of that stuff just passed through. Right. But I'm actually perceiving those things I'm just not remembering. So... it's not even clear that you're perceiving it. And that's because in an emergency situation you're super focused on what's at hand, but you know when you're walking along the sidewalk to get over to the dinner, you're not looking at how many cracks are in the sidewalk and what the person in front of you is wearing. You're actually not even attending to all that. You're so automated in the way that you can just walk on the sidewalk that you're just living internally and not paying much attention to that. But aren't you sort of slipping back into your other theory that you disproved because if you're saying if I am attending to more it is sort of like I have more ticks in there? No, it's that you're laying down more memory. So you're focused on the situation at hand and as a result of that you're laying down more memories about it. And there's a reason to do that because in an emergency situation I had a parachute fail once, and you know I had 8 seconds before I was going to die. And you know you've heard so many of these stories, but... Oh God. I still feel each one of those. It's actually kind of impressive you guys survived that. But the reason you cut into that dense time, the amygdala cuts in, is it is not only sort of registering this amazing thing going on, it is trying to enact you to put your hands out. In your fall, in my case to reach for the parachute and do the right thing with the reserve chute. And that is presumably the real reason the brain gives you this extra density when you're in an emergency situation, yes? Almost. It's the there's two things that are going on when this emergency kicks on. One of them is you're doing acts that are essentially pre-conscious. You can react to things even before you're consciously aware because consciousness takes a long time to actually sorry everything I showed about how long we live in the past I'm talking about conscious awareness. Unconsciously you can react to things very quickly. The reason that you lay down more memory during an emergency event is because that's what memory is for. You really need to write it down when things are hitting the fan or other circumstances not just let them occur. So you'd like to learn from it later? Exactly right, exactly right. That's when you that's when you need to write it down. Well now. Matthew Arnold said something about quick memory by tablets. I learned to not do any more parachuting. That's Good. It works. So does the same effect explain I mean a lot of times athletes describe like just as I'm about to hit the ball time slows down. Is that because it's important to them and they're actually learning a lot at that moment? Presumably yes. I've I've talked to a lot of athletes who talk about things seeming to go in slow motion. We what we did with our test is see if things are actually going in slow motion and they're not. But yes, I think for an athlete who's doing something very important like throwing the ball or doing the batting in that moment they're completely focused on what's going on. And I wouldn't have thought that their amygdala would go off in a situation like that, but maybe when you're, you know, maybe when you're being watched by 50 million fans and you're hitting the ball, it is a really stressful situation. Okay, here's a question from Robert May which sort of jumps out of the short now and in what you're pointing out about how the short now works in the brain to the long now. He says "Long now is a temporal problem and so what are some possible tactics that we might get and what's the generational equivalent of using motor skill-driven events to synchronize experiences of reality across 30 or 300 generations?" In other words, what can we learn from how the short now works in the brain to managing how we think about and operate in the long now? Got anything? I'm not sure. That's an interesting one. Synchronize... Okay, so he's making the point about the the motor skill stuff that you're giving that you're always informing the brain and, you know, we heard about John Lilly earlier today in one of the ignite talks and John spent the last few years in a deprivation tank, presumably hallucinating and okay so why do we hallucinate in a deprivation tank? Well get back to the long now in a minute. Um, it's because your brain is relying on all these things coming in to it's monitoring the outside world, but when that all goes away it has no choice but to keep generating internal activity. And so under normal circumstances what you're seeing anyway is mostly internal activity, but it's anchored it's anchored by what is dribbling in through these holes in your skull and what's coming in here. So but what happens when you block that off, it just goes off on its own. And that's what dreaming is at nighttime, you close your eyes and, you know, the system just goes off on whatever it wants to. And that's exactly what happens in a sensory deprivation tank. Okay, so you're talking about consciousness just now, and it sounded like consciousness is even slower than than the sensory detecting flashes and stuff. How much slower and why? It's probably half a second is how long it takes for consciousness to come online. And the why is because we put together a conscious story of what just happened and the brain seems to put a lot of effort into making sure it does that right. Okay I did that, this came in, the toe and the nose were touched, all this happened. So you put that together as a story because that's what you use as a building block for planning the future. You say "Okay, well I know this happened, I know that happened in the world" and so on and that's how you that's how you plan forward. So that it's always trying to cohere the world in time so that it can predict and get ahead of the game? Exactly. So the important thing is that getting back to this amygdala issue, if if suddenly a lion jumps out, we can be you know we can be out of these chairs and running by the time we become consciously aware of of what's going on. And we've all had this experience where, you know, your foot is halfway to the brake before you consciously realize that there's a car pulling out of the driveway and so on. Your body can react very quickly to things because that's the important thing for it to do. But in terms of conscious perception, that takes its time to put together the best story that it's able to of what happened across all these senses, all these signals, so that it can use that to plan other things. And presumably magicians know how to trick that whole process? Yeah, that's right. That yeah, exactly. Although that tends to be more of a distraction thing so, you know, something falls, you're doing something while while in the meantime you're doing something over here, yeah. So it sounds a lot like consciousness is kind of in the same role as an historian is talking about history of, for instance it's really interesting how, you know, it always surprised me that the good guys always won until you notice who was telling the story. Then you realize well who's telling the story right and that's exactly right. Exactly right. So it's just going back looking at the stuff that happened, taking all the knowledge between the events being described and the current event, and using that to interpret the events being described. It's exactly it, it's exactly it. I mean the thing that weirds me out about consciousness is we are made of trillions and trillions of cells we're these huge massive creatures that are essentially being run by this three-pound mission control center up here and it has to put together lots of data in order to tell us, you know, how we're how we're interacting in the world. And so it keeps things at this level that that we can understand and do something with, but at this very high level as opposed to, um, as opposed to details of what the DNA is doing and the proteins and so on and we don't have any access to that. I remember one thing you were looking at a few years ago when you gave one of these talks is you wanted to figure out what happens when people quote "wake up" in the morning. Did you figure it out? No, I haven't figured that out yet. I, um, no, I mean you may remember actually I wrote an article for Discover Magazine called "10 Unsolved Mysteries of the Brain" and I listed what were like the main unsolved mysteries, and one of them was why do brains sleep and dream? This is something we spend an eight a third of our lives doing, eight hours a night, and we just, you know, we have very poor understanding of of why we do this. There are lots of theories about taking out the neural trash and consolidating information there's all sorts of stuff that we can say about it, but as far as why we're doing it there's I actually have a new theory about that, but... Well let's hear it, come on. Okay, okay, um, the theory is this. There's okay, so the brain is very plastic, and if you for example go blind, the other parts of your brain will take over what we call the visual cortex now gets taken over by hearing and touch and vocabulary and other things. Okay. The sort of new discovery that that the field has made is that this actually happens quite rapidly, it happens so rapidly that if you stick somebody in the scanner with a very tight blindfold, in 90 minutes you start seeing you start seeing the visual cortex respond to to sound and other things. So the visual cortex starts getting taken over quickly. So that led me to hypothesize that maybe what dreaming is about is just keeping the visual cortex active at night because when the planet rotates around on the other side from the sun, or used to anyway, you can still hear and feel and smell and all that, but you can't see anymore in evolutionary time, historically. There's so it's defending itself against the auditory cortex? Exactly right, exactly right. It's a way of keeping itself going so that it's defending itself. So so when you look at the circuitry of dreaming it's this midbrain activity that plugs all this activity smack into the visual cortex and that's what it's doing is keeping the visual cortex active at night. And then the rest of the brain, you know, is a storyteller so it interprets what's going on there but I think it's just a matter of keeping it alive. Why is it such a crappy storyteller? Yeah, good question. It's so weird we stick our our heads in the night blender each night and we just have these weird experiences.

Okay, I've got two mental aberration questions. One from Eva about the schizophrenia side, they don't recalibrate in their testing. How how is a video game going to fix that? Yeah, good question. Um, so this is what we need to figure out is what so what we were able to determine is simply that they don't with with hitting the button and the flash they don't recalibrate normally. But our expectation is that if we train them up on this, you know, we do things like inject a delay very slowly and make it a larger and larger delay and do this slowly enough that we can get them to recalibrate. That's our expectation. And so if this is right, then we should be able to get the to pull things slowly into shape so that all their all their different sense organs are are doing things at the right speed and if this is right, then their hallucinations should go away. And so would you work with auditory signals since it's a voice? Yeah, exactly. So we've done yeah, thank you. So we've done this with touching a button which causes a which causes a bang. so we've done this with buttons and bangs and flashes at the same time and all these things calibrate to one another. Couldn't you just give them VR glasses and headphones and tactile sensors and actually insert all the delays and just straighten it out? That that may be right. We might be able to do that now. We started this experiment back in the Dark Ages where we didn't have that but that's a really good idea, yeah.

So here's OCD question from either ITA or Ida. Have you noticed any interesting brain activity for people that are experiencing a victim of obsessive-compulsive disorder? This actually is not something that this is... That that um... I'm sorry Ida, but that that's not my area of expertise obsessive-compulsive, so I I haven't I haven't looked at that. Send your obsessive-compulsive to me. Okay, Nick Manos, in order to hit a baseball you can't live in the past. Do we live in an expectation-fueled world? Yeah, the really I mean a baseball is a very interesting situation because the time it takes to leave the pitcher's mound underground home plate is faster than you can be consciously aware of what's going on. So, so he's exactly right about that. The you start swinging the bat right when the pitcher is moving the arm and the pitcher releases the ball and the best you can do is adjust your swing as it's going, but the whole process is is pre-conscious. So I played baseball for years and my experience always was, um, you know, I hit the ball and I I say to myself "You've hit the ball you idiot throw the bat down and run" because by the time I'm consciously aware that the ball is is going away from me it's already happened and then I have to go and do something about it. So it's a completely unconscious pre-conscious thing that happens. And so this is when you know some sports and stuff like that people are saying don't overthink it, don't get in the way of your own instant response. That's right because a big part of what happens in sports is that you train for hours and hours to automatize the behaviors. Actually when I played baseball our coach used to say "I want you guys to think out there" and I'd say "actually you don't want us to think out there you want us to train a sufficient number of hours that we automatize these behaviors and then we go out and just do our thing" but he didn't believe me so I had to write a books and make a television show about it. And that's how I was able to pull a reserve chute because we trained for that endlessly in the army. I didn't have to derive it on the spot. Yes, exactly. Yes, exactly. Yes, exactly.

So we're going to continue this discussion but we're also going to invite the rest of the Long Now board that are here. Please join us. And we're going to do a little so we can continue a bit of this discussion and then please keep the questions coming and and we're going to we can move into a bit of the more broad "ask the board anything" kind of questions. And then we're just going to do this for a few more minutes and then we're going to head over to the party portion of the evening. Let's get the lights up in the house a bit. Yeah house lights please. And so first of all I'd like to announce Katherine Fulton just joined our board last month. Kim Polese, one of our more recent board members. and Ping, also one of our more recent board members. and Peter Schwartz. And so since you're the newest, Katherine, and you have a mic. I wanted to ask what is it about Long Now that is is interesting to you? What's what's attractive to you about starting to think about the long term? Wow, I have to get my kind of why are you here sort of. Yeah, I um is this is it working? Yeah. that means I have to get my head out of the brief "now" into the "long now." I'm not sure that that's a that's a big um that's a shift. So I I don't know about the rest of you, but I certainly do struggle every day with the speed with which our lives are moving and I think I can't think of a a more challenging and inspiring thing to do to figure out how we do the opposite of what we've been talking about here tonight, actually lengthen that amount of time. And as as you know Xander, the I'm really interested deeply interested in in the pace layering model that Stewart has given us many, many years ago. I remember the GBN talk when when that was first when you first um showed us the pace layering. A lot of the projects of Long Now are about intervening and preserving and looking at nature and culture the lower parts and I'm deeply interested in the ones in the middle in governance. As we've been sitting here tonight there's been a vice-presidential debate. Governance but governance for Long Now, governance in in the society and, you know, how we look at and how we might think about the design of the social systems, um, as well. And so I'm I'm feeling in in at the moment in a place of deep humility being here. And I think that's not a bad thing to take to that question.

Well we're excited to have you working on our governance question as I mentioned earlier, how we govern ourselves into the future generations is definitely at the forefront of what we're thinking. Ping, we met each other because you became a member and I looked you up and I was like "Wow, this is an amazing person" and you started you did a lot of work in 3D scanning and then we were just starting to figure out how to 3D scan the place in Texas and I emailed you and you said "All right, let's go." And so literally like a week later there we were standing over a 500-foot hole with a custom-built laser scanner scanning the walls and then eventually you became a board member. And so I'm also interested into what was attractive to you about Long Now. Well I was born in China, which is a country with a very long history and I remember came to United States and people think 100 years old object is antique. And in China even for 500 years old is not antique. So, um, one of the things that I was always interested in consists of being able to think about living in unlimited time and space. And so that's one of the things that's very attractive with Long Now as "long term thinking." It's the "long and "now," it's not just in the future. Actually the Great Wall of China is the "Long Wall," it's not "Great Wall," if you do the direct translation. So I I always was interested in this concept of time and space.

Nice. Um, and I mentioned earlier tonight the initiative around education. and actually a lot of that was driven by Kim, and I know that the education space and long-term thinking is been something that you've been thinking about, so I'd love to hear your thoughts about that. Well, I think part of it is self-preservation for Long Now, in that Long Now will not exist unless the next generation cares about Long Now existing. But more broadly, you know, I think more and more we're focused on the next election cycle, the next budget cycle, testing and you know K-12 is very short-term focused. And all the most important societal environmental problems really require long-term thinking. And long-term thinking requires critical thinking and system level thinking, problem solving, being able to synthesize different disciplines, policy science, and so forth, and that is that kind of curriculum is in short supply in K-12 and in in education in general. somewhat necessarily because of sort of the prescription of the content in education today, but also nevertheless we can integrate long-term thinking in the existing curriculum. And so the question is how do we do that? And you know it's very clear that if you look at Revive and Restore and 10,000-year Clock and all species and, you know, name all the Long Now projects, kids love this stuff. They get into it. You know, they love dinosaurs. They love long-term visioning and imagining until we stamp it out of them. And so the question is how how do we integrate it instead of stamping it out of kids? How do we integrate long-term thinking and in so doing help them prepare to be the leaders, you know, the entrepreneurs of tomorrow.

Thank you. And Peter, I know you just snuck out of Dreamforce to be here. No, thank you for for coming over. So you've been spending very much time in the "now" today, but your work in "The Art of the Long View" and scenario planning was one of the very first things that really got Long Now trying to figure out its long-term future. And I know at one point we had talked about doing 5,000-year scenarios. I don't think we've gotten quite to that point yet, but I'm curious as to what you're where you're at in the working very much in the "now" in your current job, which is a little bit different than what you're doing before, and how that fits in Long Now. Well, the truth is companies like Salesforce, I now work at Salesforce for those of you who don't know it, and apologies to all of you for disrupting San Francisco. It's a tank down at this part of town it's okay, it's the other part of town that's not too great. Companies like Salesforce and the yeah, Right. Companies like Salesforce are let me call them surfers of the present, right? But what they're also, you know, they're riding these waves, but the truth is that you've got to build the right surfboard for the right kind of waves. You need a longboard, a shortboard, and so part of my job is to think about how to build companies, how to build a company that actually can ride the successive waves of change that are coming along. You have to think about each of these waves, you have to think about what the nature of a business, a company, an organization, of technology, of competition, looks like as you're riding each of these waves. My CEO, Marc Benioff, whom I love, says "We don't do strategy at Salesforce," and I'm the head of strategy. That's true. He says "Tactics becomes strategy. We do tactics. Tactics evolve into strategy." So in a company like that you don't actually do long-term scenarios. What you do is you figure out how to compete in a regularly rapidly evolving environment. And so that's what I help the company to do, is to figure out how we can surf better in a rapidly evolving surfing condition. Gotcha. So it's a very different than your GBN work. Very different than Shell, for example, where it's fifty years. Nice.

And um, Kevin, you you just recently gave a talk for Long Now and kind of the next year of next thirty years of technology. and you've I know that your the rule that you gave yourself for this current book tour was to only do podcasts or things that had podcasts in them. and I'm curious as to how going through that process, I think we caught you at the beginning of it and now you've gone through that whole cycle, is what surprised you about talking to all the people about the future. Yeah. So, um, I think one of the things that surprised me was a was the questions I was getting again and again. and the kinds of even questions that were almost that I got from every interview. and they revolved around what I can only assume is a legitimate and genuine concern about AIs taking all our jobs. That was the question that came up every single time. And um, I haven't figured out yet where that's coming or where that concern is coming from. Is it is it like people really are worried they're not going to have a job in 20 years? Is it that they having imagined what this world would be like and so therefore they're forming an hypothesis that is saying I should be concerned about this today even though it hasn't happened, which would be kind of a remarkable thing where people really are imagining future problems and trying to deal with it today. Um, or is it because they have heard other people worry about it or is it because of the we see movies where this is a common scenario. But in any case, I was surprised by how common that concern was because it was I mean I don't think that was a concern or a real concern maybe 20 years ago or 10 years ago. Can I say something? Yeah. So I've been giving presentations the last few days and I have this great quote from Time Magazine about job loss and automation and just to paraphrase it, it's pretty close, is it’s "Automation is now becomes so profound, computing technology is moving so fast that we can expect fully that many of the office and service jobs that we have today will soon be eliminated." And I then I could say to the audience "Well, most of you are of course unemployed because that quote was from 1961," right? And that was about the third wave of concern. and in between we've had about two more since then. In 1950, approximately 60% of the working age population of America had jobs. In 2015, almost 80% of the working age population of a population that's now 330 million versus 160 million have jobs. There's nothing to worry about. Kevin, I've got a question relating to what Ping Fu was saying. You've book toured for this book now in the US, but also in China fairly extensively. Was there any sort of cultural difference in the questions and uptake you were getting there? Yeah, that's actually interesting because that's not a common question in China for me. The the questions in China were um in general the most common question is um a little bit more of "How do we make this happen sooner?" Hmm. "In the sense of not the AI, but just like how do we bring all the things I'm talking about in my book, this kind of next 20 years, the increase in VR, the increase in screens and flow." The the Chinese are actually in, you know, they're replicating 100 years of development in a couple decades. And so they're still in the transition from the manufacturing industrial age to this internet economy, which is very uneven. And they want to know how how we can actually extend this faster, better rather than, um, you know, what happens when the AIs take over. And so, um, I think there is a cultural difference in just in the stage of where they are. Um, but so this I you know Peter, it's true that automation, the perils of automation is not new, but I think um I I don't think people I don't think the ordinary person was really concerned about that. maybe some editorials, maybe some business people, but I'm detecting that in the general population. People really this is a question I hear again and again. I hate to tell you, but this is not the general population. That's true. and podcasters are not the general population either. You're correct. Yeah.

So I want to take this brief opportunity to thank all of you, especially Stewart, who took a chance on me when I was 24 years old to start building this ridiculous Clock and to work with all of you. It has been an absolutely amazing 20 years, all of your trust in letting me do ridiculous projects from robots to flamethrowers to bars to whatever has been amazing. The board gradually learned never to say no to Alexander. Because when we did things did not get better and when we didn't say no things got better even though we were surprised. Well, thank you all. And I I want to get everyone who's ever I've ever who's ever worked for Long Now to stand up in the audience or I've ever asked for a favor or I've leaned on. Stand up. Jim, you're here, Scout, you changed all our tires. Thank you guys. And I want to get all our staff to come out. Hopefully they're here. Come on out. This is make sure you're in the light. This is all the staff that could actually walk away from the stuff they're doing. All our interval staff is still making drinks right now, they're working their asses off. All the guys who are doing the events, all the people who build the clock, all the people who've ever micro-etched things into Rosetta discs, there's 40 people working 24 hours a day at the clock site blowing stuff up right now, cutting with giant diamond chain saws, and working away on CAD. And so this is a small sample of all of those people. They're all amazing. I I love all of you guys. So thank you so much and one last round of applause for all these people. Thank you. And Ryan, please come up here, you're on staff. And a round of applause for Alexander Rose.