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So in the winter of 2012,

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I went to visit my grandmother's house

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in South India,

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a place, by the way,

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where the mosquitos have a special taste
for the blood of the American-born.

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(Laughter)

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No joke.

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When I was there,
I got an unexpected gift.

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It was this antique instrument

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made more than a century ago,

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hand-carved from a rare wood,

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inlaid with pearls

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and with dozens of metal strings.

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It's a family heirloom,

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a link between my past,

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the country where my parents were born,

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and the future,

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the unknown places I'll take it.

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I didn't actually realize it
at the time I got it,

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but it would later become
a powerful metaphor for my work.

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We all know the saying,

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"There's no time like the present."

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But nowadays, it can feel
like there's no time but the present.

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What's immediate and ephemeral
seems to dominate our lives,

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our economy and our politics.

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If you think about it,
our species evolved to think ahead,

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to chart the stars,

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dream of the afterlife,

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sow seeds for later harvest.

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Some scientists call this superpower
that we have "mental time travel,"

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and it's responsible for pretty much
everything we call human civilization,

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from farming to the Magna Carta

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to the internet,

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all first conjured in the minds of humans.

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But let's get real:

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if we look around us today,

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we don't exactly seem to be
using this superpower quite enough,

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and that begs the question, why not?

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What's wrong is how our communities,
businesses and institutions are designed.

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They're designed in a way
that's impairing our foresight.

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I want to talk to you
about the three key mistakes

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that I think we're making.

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The first mistake is what we measure.

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When we look at the quarterly
profits of a company

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or its near-term stock price,

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that's often not a great measure

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of whether that company
is going to grow its market share

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or be inventive in the long run.

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When we glue ourselves to the test scores
that kids bring back from school,

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that's not necessarily
what's great for those kids' learning

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and curiosity in the long run.

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We're not measuring
what really matters in the future.

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The second mistake we're making
that impairs our foresight

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is what we reward.

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When we celebrate a political leader
or a business leader

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for the disaster she just cleaned up

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or the announcement she just made,

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we're not motivating that leader

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to invest in preventing
those disasters in the first place,

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or to put down payments on the future
by protecting communities from floods

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or fighting inequality

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or investing in research and education.

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The third mistake
that impairs our foresight

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is what we fail to imagine.

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Now, when we do think about the future,

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we tend to focus
on predicting exactly what's next,

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whether we're using horoscopes
or algorithms to do that.

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But we spend a lot less time imagining
all the possibilities the future holds.

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When the Ebola outbreak
emerged in 2014 in West Africa,

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public health officials around the world
had early warning signs

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and predictive tools

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that showed how
that outbreak might spread,

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but they failed to fathom that it would,

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and they failed to act
in time to intervene,

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and the epidemic grew
to kill more than 11,000 people.

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When people with lots of resources
and good forecasts

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don't prepare for deadly hurricanes,

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they're often failing to imagine
how dangerous they can be.

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Now, none of these mistakes
that I've described,

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as dismal as they might sound,

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are inevitable.

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In fact, they're all avoidable.

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What we need to make
better decisions about the future

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are tools that can aid our foresight,

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tools that can help us think ahead.

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Think of these as something
like the telescopes

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that ship captains of yore used
when they scanned the horizon.

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Only instead of for looking
across distance and the ocean,

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these tools are for looking
across time to the future.

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I want to share with you a
few of the tools

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that I've found in my research

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that I think can help us with foresight.

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The first tool I want to share with you

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I think of as making
the long game pay now.

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This is Wes Jackson, a farmer
I spent some time with in Kansas.

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And Jackson knows

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that the way that most crops
are grown around the world today

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is stripping the Earth
of the fertile topsoil

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we need to feed future generations.

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He got together
with a group of scientists,

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and they bred perennial grain crops
which have deep roots

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that anchor the fertile topsoil of a farm,

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preventing erosion
and protecting future harvests.

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But they also knew

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that in order to get farmers
to grow these crops in the short run,

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they needed to boost
the annual yields of the crops

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and find companies willing
to make cereal and beer using the grains

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so that farmers could reap profits today
by doing what's good for tomorrow.

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And this is a tried-and-true strategy.

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In fact, it was used
by George Washington Carver

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in the South of the United States
after the Civil War

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in the early 20th century.

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A lot of people have probably heard
of Carver's 300 uses for the peanut,

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the products in recipes
that he came up with

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that made the peanut so popular.

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But not everyone knows
why Carver did that.

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He was trying to help
poor Alabama sharecroppers

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whose cotton yields were declining,

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and he knew that planting
peanuts in their fields

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would replenish those soils

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so that their cotton yields
would be better a few years later.

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But he also knew it needed
to be lucrative for them in the short run.

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Alright, so let's talk
about another tool for foresight.

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This one I like to think of
as keeping the memory of the past alive

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to help us imagine the future.

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So I went to Fukushima, Japan

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on the sixth anniversary
of the nuclear reactor disaster there

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that followed the Tohoku earthquake
and tsunami of 2011.

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When I was there, I learned
about the Onagawa Nuclear Power Station,

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which was even closer
to the epicenter of that earthquake

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than the infamous Fukushima Daiichi
that we all know about.

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In Onagawa, people in the city
actually fled to the nuclear power plant

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as a place of refuge.

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It was that safe.

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It was spared by the tsunamis.

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It was the foresight of just one engineer,

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Yanosuke Hirai,

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that made that happen.

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In the 1960s, he fought
to build that power plant

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farther back from the coast

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at higher elevation
and with a higher sea wall.

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He knew the story of his hometown shrine,

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which had flooded
in the year 869 after a tsunami.

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It was his knowledge of history
that allowed him to imagine

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what others could not.

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OK, one more tool of foresight.

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This one I think of
as creating shared heirlooms.

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These are lobster fishermen
on the Pacific coast of Mexico,

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and they're the ones who taught me this.

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They have protected
their lobster harvest there

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for nearly a century,

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and they've done that
by treating it as a shared resource

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that they're passing on to their collected
children and grandchildren.

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They carefully measure what they catch

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so that they're not taking
the breeding lobster out of the ocean.

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Across North America,
there are more than 30 fisheries

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that are doing something
vaguely similar to this.

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They're creating long-term stakes
in the fisheries known as catch shares

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which get fishermen to be motivated

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not just in taking whatever they can
from the ocean today

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but in its long-term survival.

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Now, there are many,
many more tools of foresight

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I would love to share with you,

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and they come from all kinds of places:

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investment firms that look
beyond near-term stock prices,

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states that have freed their elections

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from the immediate interests
of campaign financiers.

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And we're going to need to marshal
as many of these tools as we can

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if we want to rethink what we measure,

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change what we reward

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and be brave enough
to imagine what lies ahead.

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Not all this is going to be easy,
as you can imagine.

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Some of these tools
we can pick up in our own lives,

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some we're going to need to do
in businesses or in communities,

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and some we need to do as a society.

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The future is worth this effort.

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My own inspiration to keep up this effort
is the instrument I shared with you.

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It's called a dilruba,

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and it was custom-made
for my great-grandfather.

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He was a well-known
music and art critic in India

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in the early 20th century.

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My great-grandfather had the foresight
to protect this instrument

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at a time when my great-grandmother
was pawning off all their belongings,

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but that's another story.

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He protected it by giving it
to the next generation,

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by giving it to my grandmother,

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and she gave it to me.

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When I first heard
the sound of this instrument,

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it haunted me.

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It felt like hearing a wanderer
in the Himalayan fog.

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It felt like hearing
a voice from the past.

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(Music)

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(Music ends)

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That's my friend Simran Singh
playing the dilruba.

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When I play it, it sounds
like a cat's dying somewhere,

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so you're welcome.

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(Laughter)

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This instrument is in my home today,

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but it doesn't actually belong to me.

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It's my role to shepherd it in time,

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and that feels more meaningful to me
than just owning it for today.

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This instrument positions me
as both a descendant and an ancestor.

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It makes me feel part of a story
bigger than my own.

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And this, I believe,

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is the single most powerful way
we can reclaim foresight:

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by seeing ourselves
as the good ancestors we long to be,

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ancestors not just to our own children

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but to all humanity.

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Whatever your heirloom is,

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however big or small,

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protect it

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and know that its music
can resonate for generations.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)