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Philosopher Roman Krznaric: Legacy Isn't About Being Remembered · Giant Ideas

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_02: Welcome back to Giant Ideas.
• 0:01
  SPEAKER_02: We are with the public philosopher Roman Krasanik and we're going to be talking about being a good ancestor.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_02: Last week talked, we talked about the idea at large, how it can shape society.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_02: But today we're going to talk a little bit more about how you can be a good ancestor, how it can change your life.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_02: So, Roman, welcome back.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks again for joining us.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_04: Well, let's get into the personal level of trying to really connect with future generations.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_02: This is good.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_02: So I want this to try to be as useful as possible to all the people watching and listening, Giant Ideas, to see how they can basically be a good ancestor and how it can make them happier and more fulfilled in their lives.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_02: So I'm going to be guided by you.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_02: How shall we start this?
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I think to start this, let's just think about the idea of the legacy that you want to leave to the future.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_04: Now, the great thing about human beings is that we die.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_04: And what I mean by that is that once we start hitting kind of middle age, we start thinking about what we want to leave when we're gone.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_04: Now, we could want to leave an egoistic legacy like a Russian oligarch who wants a football stadium named after them.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_04: Or you might want to leave a legacy to your family, whether that's, you know, a property or passing on a culture or language or religion.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_04: But what I'm talking about is trying to leave a kind of more transcendental legacy, something more universal for the strangers, the future and the world they live in.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_04: How do we do that?
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_04: Um, especially in a world where we're trapped in a kind of hyper-individualism.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_04: So I want to invite you to do a short visualization exercise.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_04: This will just take a couple of minutes.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_04: So what I'd like you to do first is called Human Layers, and it was developed by a brilliant organization called the Long Time Project.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_02: And Ron, can we open it?
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_02: Is this available to our listeners as well?
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_04: Everyone listening to this can do it right now, but just don't listen on double speed.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_04: Right?
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_04: Just slow down to regular times one speed.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_04: And give yourself a bit of space to do this, and just do exactly as I say.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_04: So first I want you to just close your eyes for a moment.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_04: Take a deep breath.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_04: And I want you to imagine with your eyes shut the face of a young person in your life who you really care about.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_04: It could be a nephew or niece or child or grandchild.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_03: Just picture their face for a moment.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_03: And now I want you to imagine, still with your eyes shut, that young person 30 years in the future.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_04: It's 30 years from today.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_04: Think again for a moment about now what they look like 30 years older, and consider for a moment about the joys in that person's life and the struggles they might be facing.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_04: And now finally I want you to imagine that young person is now 90 years old.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_04: It's their 90th birthday party, they're surrounded by family and friends and loved ones and work colleagues and neighbors.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_04: Now just go and have a look out the window.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_03: What kind of world do you see out there?
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_04: And now come back in and you notice this 90-year-old stands up and is about to give a birthday speech when suddenly they see a photograph of you, their dead departed ancestor, over on the wall, and they decide to tell the gathered room about a positive legacy that you left to their generation.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_04: Something that you did to be a good ancestor.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_04: Now think for a moment about what they said about you in their speech.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_04: And now just slowly open your eyes again and come back into the room.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_04: So the question I would ask you at this point, after having gone on that brief journey into the future, is what did it make you think and how did it make you feel?
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_02: I felt broadly positive, Roman, about this.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: You're a positive person.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: Let's hear more.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_02: So I I I I felt positive.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_02: I I uh on the 90-year one, I found well, let me let me go in order.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_02: On the 30-year one, I I thought about my daughter Skye, who's currently about to turn five.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: So she was about to be turning 35 in your scenario.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_02: And um I sort of that one was a bit more confused and chaotic.
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_02: Because I think someone who's gonna be 35 in 30 years is gonna be dealing with, I think, a very confused world about the world of work in particular.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_02: Will people be working anymore?
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_02: Will they be at a loose end?
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_02: Will will people be sort of worrying about what is their purpose in life?
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I think probably yes is my guess at the moment because of AI.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_02: But the 90-year one was actually much more positive.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_04: That's really interesting.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_02: What did you see out the window when you looked out?
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I looked out at a very um reassuringly familiar London scene.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_02: I kind of imagined this was taking place in a London Victorian terraced house, which I imagine people will still be living in, despite all everything that changes and all the technology.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_02: I think probably people in London will still be living in these quaint Victorian terraced houses.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_02: So that was quite reassuring and comforting.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_04: And what did Skye say about you and her 90th birthday speech?
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I'm positive about the world, but also about myself.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_02: So I gave myself a pat on the back and imagine my daughter saying that, you know, my my dad, uh, at a time of profound technological change, was at least trying to back the technology, which was a force for good in the world.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and and then I started thinking about our space investments because my daughter Skye is a um she wants to be an explorer.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_02: And I always feel a little bit sad that I'm not sure there's much of the world left to explore.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_02: You will you've been living in many more places than me, Roman, so you'll tell me if I'm wrong.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_02: But I always think maybe you can't be an explorer.
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_02: But you could be a space explorer, I thought.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_02: The negative bit, as I looked out, I thought a nice kind of um comforting London scene and these terraced houses and parks of London.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_02: But I did imagine a much more kind of balkanized world world.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_02: That was the negative that sprung to mind was that have we really managed to get our act together to make the world come together, or is are things very balkanized between countries?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_04: That's really interesting, actually.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_04: Because I remember when I did it for the first time, I was imagining my daughter when she was my daughter Siri, when she was at that time 10.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_04: And suddenly I kind of realized, thinking forward to her 90th birthday, I thought, my gosh, she could be alive in the year 2100.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_04: And that future isn't science fiction, but it's like an intimate family fact.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_04: Yes.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_04: But the other rec realization I had was that I thought, in that future, whatever it's like, whether it's good or bad, or whether she's in space or not in space, um, she's going to be part of a web of human relationships and the web of the living world as well, like the air she breathes, the water she drinks.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_04: So the the recognition I had, which might sound kind of simple simple and obvious, was that if I care about her life, I need to care about all life.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_04: So for me, that exercise was like a jump from something quite personal to something much more universal, something broader.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_04: And I think in a way, that's what I'm trying to do in my work to try and encourage people to realize that you know we're not alone.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_04: You know, um, if you are investing or designing for the future or whatever it is, um, that your loved ones and you know, the fut all those future generations are going to be parts of networks.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_04: You know, they're not gonna probably be able to survive alone in a bunker.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_02: It's I mean, it's a very simple exercise, but I I find it um I find it very profoundly um impactful.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_02: Because it's actually unusual for people to really visualize the world in the future, your family in the future.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_04: Right, it's amazing we don't give ourselves that that time or space.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_04: It's such a simple thing.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_04: I think it it shows something quite beautiful about humans that we we can do this.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 7:31
  SPEAKER_04: You know, and it's not a function of wealth or culture or whatever.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_04: Like my dad, for example, was a refugee from Poland to Australia after the Second World War.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_04: And even though he was just trying to scrape a living, you know, start he arrived with nothing, he was thinking about the future, about you know, trying to make a life for his children and grandchildren and that kind of thing.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_04: Um, even though he was sort of also caught in the moment of just trying to make ends meet and pay his rent and that kind of thing.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_02: So I think we've all got this capacity.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_02: I had a visitor in my visualization, which was uh a man called Anthony Scaramucci, Trump's former uh press secretary.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_02: So uh the mooch is actually quite profound, I find, on lots of topics, and he's quite good at um telling you how to be successful in the short term.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_02: But he also says something quite interesting about legacy the other day, which made me think.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_02: He he said, uh, can you try to name all four of your great-grandparents, their first names?
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_02: And I was able to get one out of four only.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_02: And he used it to make make the point that there is no point worrying about legacy, certainly selfish legacy, because if you can't remember your own great grandparents' name, it will be the same for you and we'll just be forgotten.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_04: And was that an argument for just doing whatever you like in the present moment and not trying to make the world a better place?
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_02: I don't think it was that, to be fair, Tim.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_02: I think it was more about trying to avoid kind of uh you know, caring so much about what the world thinks about you and doing things for status and trying to kind of advance yourself in in terms of perception of you.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, I think there's a cultural thing there because you ask people, for example, from some place, you go to ask someone from Mexico, for example.
• 9:05
  SPEAKER_04: You know, I found like in Mexico, people know their grandparents, great-grandparents, they'll they'll they'll be able to name second cousins and third uncles and all this kind of stuff.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_04: And maybe it's also because it's partly a kind of like a Western cultural thing.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_04: But I I think there is something really important there about trying to get away from the idea of a legacy is about me being remembered personally for my greatness.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_04: Like Alexander the Great wanted to have statues of himself built all over his empire because he wanted to be remembered as a god.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_04: And I think that's a pretty pathetic way of leaving a legacy.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_04: And I think about it quite a lot because I'm a writer.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_04: And I think, well, I actually I want my books to be read, you know, in a hundred years' time still.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_04: That would be nice.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_04: But actually, what I think, if I'm I hope I'm being truthful, what cares, what I care about more is that the ideas that I've tried to bring to the world are out there floating in people's people's minds.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_04: It doesn't have to be my name that is remembered, but I hope that the ideas still resonate.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_02: So let's try to bring some some practical examples to life.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_02: You you mentioned your daughter, I believe you've got two daughters.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_02: You actually gave them your vote, is that right?
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_04: Daughter and son, actually.
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_04: So twins, boy go twins.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_04: So yeah, that was something practical.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_04: Um, me and my partner did at the time, first did at the time, the UK election in 2019, when they were my our kids were turning 11, we decided to give them our votes in the election of that year.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_02: Amazing.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_04: So we, you know, we sat around the kitchen table and we debated the party manifestos, we told them how the electoral system worked, and they then told us where to put the X on the ballot sheet.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_04: And in case you're wondering, they didn't exactly vote how their parents were.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_04: But the reason we did that, of course, is because we knew we were making decisions as adults that would affect their lives, and they were having no say in that.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 10:49
  SPEAKER_04: And they should have the right to have, you know, a say in things.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_04: And it's a bit like the idea of you know putting uh a seat for future generations in your or in your in your board meetings.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_04: It's that same kind of idea of trying to give a voice.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_04: Or I got an uh a message not long ago from the um mayor of Quebec, sorry, the the chief of staff of the mayor of Quebec in Canada, who said that in nearly 200 municipalities and cities across Quebec now, they they put an empty chair in the council meetings to represent future generations.
• 11:21
  SPEAKER_04: And look, any company, any person, any family could do that, right?
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_04: When you're having any kind of discussion of strategy of futures or whatever.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_04: Just put down an empty chair, you know, and and bring at least the idea of the future into the room in a way that you can literally visualize.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_02: Do you have any other rituals that you have in your life, your family's life to try to help you be a long-term thinker?
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, I think there's basic things that we do, you know, as a as a family, um, is that we try and live by certain basic rules um of how we impact on the world, which is basically the obvious stuff of trying to find ways of living lightly.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_04: So we don't have a car.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_04: Uh we used to have a car.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_04: We now use a local car club, which you can hire a car by the hour to get around.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_04: It's a social enterprise and we go around mostly on bicycles, but occasionally we need a car.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_04: Great.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um you tried to make a make a wider point though as well, am I right?
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: You did you did you paint your your driveway?
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_04: Uh we did actually.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's funny how you remember that.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_04: Uh yeah, we did actually paint, try to paint our driveway um so that, well actually with with chalk on the ground so that people wouldn't part their cars there.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_04: In fact, I wanted to put a big skip there and and plant, you know, uh grow vegetables in it or in a kind of trailer, but I knew the council would kill me for that.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_04: Um so I mean, these are just small things, um, you know, and you know, trying to live within a carbon budget, you know, trying to, you know, the average phone is thrown away after less than three years and uses half the elements in the periodic table.
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_04: So try and buy secondhand, you know, electrical equipment, all that kind of stuff and digital devices.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, that's all obvious stuff.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, and that's only beginning.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_04: I think it's also fundamental to change the system.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_04: So that's why, you know, I've gone with my kids on demonstrations, whether it's Extinction Rebellion or other things.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_04: But that kind of like, you know, protesting on the streets is not for everybody.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_04: Everyone has to find their own route.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_04: Some people want to write poetry about a future river.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_04: You know, some people might sort of think, right, I'm I want to create a company that creates some amazing cancer cure, you know.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_04: Um, great.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_04: Find your way.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_04: But I think, you know, I once heard the great American environmental campaigner Bill McKibben asked, someone asked him in the audience, you know, what should I do as an individual?
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_04: And his reply was this be less of an individual.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_04: And I think there's something really important there about, in a sense, it doesn't matter what you do, but do it with others.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_04: You know, this is teamwork, yeah, right?
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_04: Whether it's putting solar panels on the roof of your kid's school, whether it's, you know, saying we're going to turn our company into a steward-owned company and be a bit like Patagonia and put some of the shares in a kind of trust, you know, for the earth rather than just for our um short-term shareholders, you know.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_04: What can you do with others?
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_02: You you wrote The Good Ancestor.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_02: You also wrote a book called Carpe Diem Regained.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_02: So one of them is about seizing the day uh and and acting for the now.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_02: One of them is a long-term thinking book.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_02: On a Monday afternoon uh in a gloomy October London, how should we think about doing both at the same time?
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_04: That's a really good question.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_04: Because I think carpe diem, the idea of seizing the day, it sounds like it's about the present moment.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_04: You know, like the idea of, you know, live every day as if it were your last.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_04: But actually, if you think about how to live our lives in a meaningful way, I think one of the most important things is to project yourself to the end of your life and look back and wonder: do I have regrets?
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_04: Do I want to get to the end of my life and be on my deathbed or in a hospice and think, I regret certain decisions, um, whether it's in family, in business, politically, whatever.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_04: And ultimately, I think to live a life of depth and meaning, we need to do this kind of regret analysis to project ourselves towards the future.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_04: And that helps inform the decisions that we make today.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_04: And that projection to the future, of course, is a kind of long-term thinking.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_04: How do I make or live a life so that I don't look back on my life with regret?
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_04: And that is about a kind of future thinking.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_04: It's about, may well be about being a good ancestor, you know.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_04: How can I be in those final moments and think, yeah, I'm glad with what I did and and how I lived?
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_02: Have these thoughts and and and ideas made you less fearful of death?
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_04: It's really difficult.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_04: You know, if I'm honest, as I get older, I fear death more.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_04: Okay.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_04: Um, partly because it's a very physical thing.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_04: Like I play a lot of sport and I can feel my body crumbling, you know, on the tennis court because I'm much slower than I used to be.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_04: In parallel to that, I've started going to this um Buddhist meditation retreat in the south of France called Plum Village.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_04: And it was um invented by this Vietnamese Buddhist monk called Titna Hahn, who in the 1960s was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King Jr., he was an anti-war, anti-Vietnam War activist.
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_04: Um and it's a kind of Buddhism which is very much about not just gazing at your own naval, but kind of trying to do good in the world.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_04: And I find that kind of Buddhist ideas of impermanence that, you know, the idea of like you're just a whirlpool.
• 16:29
  SPEAKER_04: You know, if you look at a whirlpool, okay, in a river, right, you can just kind of identify what it is, but a whirlpool really has no edge to it.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_04: You can't say where the whirlpool ends and the river begins because it's just a flow, right?
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_04: And I think we're all kind of like that.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_04: We're just kind of a flow in the universe.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_04: And so I'm always seesawing before this between these ideas.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_04: I'm decrepit and getting older, and oh my god, what's happening to my body and my mind?
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_04: But also, look, we're just here for a tiny eye blink in the great cosmic story, and I do find that quite that perspective helpful.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_02: And and thinking house be a good ancestor, clearly, if you do that, if we all do that, it's better for the world, it's better for future generations.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_02: Is it also something which makes you happier selfishly?
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_04: Absolutely, it does.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_04: Look, human beings are relational creatures.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_04: You can go to a Michelin-style restaurant by yourself and have a pretty decent time, but you're probably going to have a better time going with one of your mates and having a kebab, right?
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_04: And we all know that, right?
• 17:31
  SPEAKER_04: It's we all understand that human beings are deeply relational creatures.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_04: And what I'm trying to say is that that relationality that we feel when we're having a kebab with our friend, um, or falfel in my case, since I'm vegetarian, um, is also something that can extend through time.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_04: We can feel connected through the generations.
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_04: And I feel kind of good, you know, thinking about my children or their futures and future generations.
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_04: I feel more connected to the world.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_04: You know, I feel more alive, right?
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_04: And I think it's a kind of a habit of thought, you know, um, to feel that we're kind of interconnected.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_04: In lots of other cultures, this is totally normal.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_04: The idea of seventh generation decision making in Native American culture and stuff like that.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_04: It makes me feel really great to feel uh connected, to not feel isolated and alone.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, what about you?
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_02: I feel already happier having listened to your talk uh a few weeks ago and tried to kind of deploy some of this thinking in my in my life, and I feel I feel for sure happier.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, if you think about it, right, the idea of uh leaving a legacy to the future is transcending death.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_04: Right?
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_04: Isn't that cool?
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_04: It's great.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_04: Right.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, it's it's kind of it's a kind of living beyond your own bodily life.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_04: I think it's fantastic.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_04: It's a kind of eternity.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_04: So, hey, who wouldn't want that?
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_02: How have your kids reacted to it?
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_02: They've been immersed in it, they've got your vote, age 11.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_02: Do they love this stuff?
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_04: You know, it's funny with my kids, you know, I always wonder whether they've actually read my books or not.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_04: You know, but I think they have.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_04: I think they've got this one, but they have very different approaches.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_04: You know, like one of them, you know, wants to be an activist of some kind, another one wants to probably be a scholar of some kind.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_04: But I think both of them feel that that, you know, if you live your life just in a very kind of narrow, self-centered way, it might be all right, but you're going to feel pretty alone in the end.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_04: You know, and that actually to be a full human being is to recognize that we are these sort of social creatures.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_04: Um, we're as gregarious as bees, as Aristotle said, you know, and let's do more to bring out that side of our ourselves, let's recognize our deep interrelationality.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_04: This is part of who we are.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_04: It's almost not so much I think therefore I am, but you are, therefore, I am.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_04: I love that.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_02: One more piece of advice for the listeners and and people watching this.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_02: If there was one thing that they should change about how they act and live, having listened to you over two episodes, what would it be?
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_04: I think it's just that idea of you know, human beings are habit-driven creatures.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_04: And I think that idea of you know looking yourself in the mirror in the morning and saying, What can I do today to be a good ancestor?
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_04: Or at night to say, What did I do today to be a good ancestor?
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_04: And look, you may not achieve anything on any one particular day, but if you make that a habit like brushing your teeth, then you may well be on a pathway to be remembering being remembered well by the generations to come, which I think they deserve for us to be the good ancestors.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_02: Fantastic.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_02: They should also share this episode with a friend because it's absolutely required viewing, in my in my opinion.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_02: Roma, thank you so much for coming on Giant Ideas.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_04: It's been a huge privilege and pleasure.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you.