TRANSCRIPT:

When I was a kid, growing up in the '60s, people used to imagine the future. What's it going to be like in 2001? And we watched movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey or read books like 1984. We imagined the future as sort of being out there. And we really wanted to get there. And so I noticed that by the time it got to be 1990, the future was still out around the year 2000. So it was as if the future had been shrinking by one year, per year, my entire life. And we were about to fall off the cliff. And in thinking about that, I realized, I wanted to – I think I wanted that excitement of the future again, pulling me toward it. And so I realized, I had to make a project that pulled me toward the future. And so I started thinking about building a clock that would last for 10,000 years.

And so the 10,000-year clock was, initially, just a kind of a puzzle for me to think about the future. But then I started noticing that other people got kind of curious about the idea. And they would start talking about it. And I realized, it made them think about the future, too, just my imagining doing this project. And then Stuart Brand came along, and said, you know, you really have to do this. We're going to start a foundation together, and really build it. And ever since then, I've actually been working on building a clock that will last for 10,000 years. And for me, it really does accomplish that. It really does put part of my mind – 10,000 years from now is a real place for me, now.

The clock is buried in a mountain. It ticks very slowly. It doesn't tell you the time until you wind it. So if you walk away from it for a thousand years, it keeps ticking. But it won't tell you what time it is until you wind it forward. It chimes when you wind it. Every time it chimes, it chimes a different sequence that has never chimed before. So it's something that I hope you'll want to visit. You probably won't visit it, though, because it'll be far away, buried in a mountain. You can't build a building that is going to be around for 10,000 years. Probably this city won't be here 10,000 years from now. So a mountain's a pretty safe place to put something.