Alexander Rose is the Executive Director at the Long Now Foundation, a San Francisco-based group dedicated to encouraging long-term thinking. He is also the foundation's Clock Project Manager, overseeing the design and construction of a monument-scale clock that is intended to run for 10,000 years in the desert of west Texas. Our conversation began with the clock, both as a physical object and as a statement about our culture's obsession with the short term. This naturally opened up a discussion of the present and how long-term thinking has the potential to transform unsolvable issues into solvable ones. This is our second project-based conversation and, as with Peter Warren, the discussion turned to how we can make The Conversation happen, especially between people who have very different time horizons. Learn more at www.findtheconversation.com