Podcasts · Society & Culture · Education
Long Now
The Long Now Foundation
300 episodes
The Long Now Foundation is a non-profit dedicated to fostering long-term thinking and responsibility. Explore hundreds of lectures and conversations from scientists, historians, artists, entrepreneurs, and more through The Long Now Foundation's award-winning Long Now Talks, started in 02003 by Long Now co-founder Stewart Brand (creator of the Whole Earth Catalog). Past speakers include Brian Eno, Neal Stephenson, Jenny Odell, Daniel Kahneman, Suzanne Simard, Jennifer Pahlka, Kim Stanley Robinson, and many more. Watch video of these talks at https://longnow.org/talks
Episodes page 1 of 6
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Anne Heggli, Jonathon Keats, & Adam Csank: Art & Science at the Nevada Bristlecone Preserve
In a remote corner of the driest state in the country, Anne Heggli's team has been keeping watch over some of Earth’s oldest beings. Since 02012, Heggli’s NevCAN network has recorded conditions at the Nevada…
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(From the archive) Jonathon Keats: Envisioning Deep Time
Today, we’re going back in the Long Now archives for a talk from artist and experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats, originally recorded on Apr 7, 02015. You’ll hear his original pitch for the monumental art project…
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Bayo Akomolafe: The Untimely
In his Talk, poet-philosopher Bayo Akomolafe presented a riveting critique of linear time, and gave a persuasive invitation to step sideways, to slow down, to notice the cracks in our temporal systems. Through Yoruba…
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Claire Isabel Webb & Nina Miolane: The Geometry of Consciousness
**This evening is made possible with generous support from the John Templeton Foundation.** How do the binary electronic signals of neurons give rise to subjective experience? Mathematician and machine learning…
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Eric Ries: Incorruptible by Design
What if we redefined “profit” as maximizing human flourishing? Eric Ries has seen the corrosive effects of shareholder primacy at every company he’s worked with. Mission-driven companies, however, are the outliers:…
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Melody Jue: Ocean Memory
The ocean is not empty. It is a vast storage facility of memory agents. Ocean bodies use the chemical signatures of seawater for memory and intelligence in ways we can barely imagine. In her Talk, Melody Jue said our…
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Stefan Sagmeister: Finally, something good.
"The world is terrible, and the world is better," Stefan Sagmeister said. "Both can be true." It all depends on perspective. In his Long Now Talk, Finally, something good, Sagmeister urged us to zoom out. The faster…
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Indy Johar: Civilizational Optioneering
Indy Johar pointed to the first photographs of the whole Earth taken from space. “This was the moment the planet became self-aware." This planetary consciousness came with new responsibility, he argued. The task…
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Kate Crawford: Mapping Empires
Kate Crawford’s Long Now Talk traces an historical arc from Renaissance perspective to AI image models, illustrating how shifts in representational power shape empires, economies—even our shared sense of reality.…
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Lynn Rothschild: Nature’s Hardware Store
What if the solutions to humanity’s greatest challenges — on Earth and beyond — have already been invented by nature? In this forward-looking talk, evolutionary biologist and astrobiologist Dr. Lynn Rothschild explores…
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Blaise Agüera y Arcas: What is Intelligence?
Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s talk took us on a journey through What is Intelligence?, his groundbreaking new work connecting the evolutionary dots between life, computation, and symbiogenesis. He explores how, in our…
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Kim Carson: Inspired by Intelligence
**Kim Carson's new book [_Inspired by Intelligence: From Burnout to Becoming_](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DJGYQHN6?ref=cm_sw_r_ffobk_cp_ud_dp_GRXNCCGS6G4C982ADDQD&ref_=cm_sw_r_ffobk_cp_ud_dp_GRXNCCGS6G4C982ADDQD&social…
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Sara Imari Walker: An Informational Theory of Life
“What is life?” In her Long Now Talk, astrobiologist and theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker explores the many dimensions of that seemingly simple question. Starting from the simplest precursors, Walker assembled…
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Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson: Abundance
As they look upon the United States of America in 02025, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson see a country wrought by a half-century of failed governance. They see states and cities theoretically committed to progressive…
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Kim Stanley Robinson & Stephen Heintz: A Logic For The Future
Stephen Heintz and Kim Stanley Robinson say we live in an “Age of Turbulence.” Looking around our geopolitical situation, it’s easy to see what they mean. Faced with the ever-growing threat of climate change, the…
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K Allado-McDowell: On Neural Media
How will AI shape our understanding of our creativity and ourselves? In February, artist and technologist K Allado-McDowell delivered a fascinating Long Now Talk that explored the dimensions of Neural Media — their…
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Ahmed Best: Feel The Future
When you feel the future, how do you share that feeling in order to build community? Ahmed Best’s Long Now Talk was the first in the more-than-twenty-year history of Long Now Talks to be held on Valentine’s Day. It…
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Benjamin Bratton: A Philosophy of Planetary Computation
We find ourselves in a pre-paradigmatic moment in which our technology has outpaced our theories of what to do with it. The task of philosophy today is to catch up. In his Long Now Talk, Philosopher of Technology…
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Roman Krznaric & Kate Raworth: What Doughnut Economics Can Learn From History
Social philosopher Roman Krznaric and renegade economist Kate Raworth explore how we can survive and thrive by looking to the past for clues on how to build more regenerative economic frameworks. Doughnut economics…
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Neal Stephenson: Polostan
Neal Stephenson, visionary speculative fiction author and long-time friend of Long Now, joined us for a conversation with journalist Charles C. Mann on the research behind his new novel _Polostan_ , the dawn of the…
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Alicia Escott & Heidi Quante: The Bureau of Linguistical Reality Performance Lecture
The Bureau of Linguistical Reality is a participatory artwork facilitated by artist Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante which collaborates with the public to create new words for feelings and experiences for which no words…
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Jonathan Cordero: Indigenous Sovereign Futures
Alternative visions for social change rooted in the frameworks of capitalism and colonialism only reproduce contemporary structures of power. How can indigenous perspectives and knowledge inform the structural…
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Denise Hearn: Embodied Economies
Economic policy can seem abstract and distant, but it manifests the physical world, affecting us all. Our economic stories shape our systems, and they in turn shape us. What myths continue to constrain us, and how…
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Jared Farmer: Chronodiversity: Thinking about Time with Trees
_What really interests me is how long-lived plants allow humans to think about—and emotionally relate to—long units of time. They provide a bridge between human time and geological time. - Jared Farmer_ In his Long…
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Abby Smith Rumsey: Hijacked Histories, Polarized Futures
As authoritarianism continues to rise around the world, the stories we tell ourselves about our collective history become a battleground for competing visions of the future. Drawing extensively from Russian history in…
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Henry Farrell: The Complex Aftermath of Globalization
Over the last two years, the US government has started thinking about the future of the world in a very different way. Across speeches and policy papers, a vision of world politics has emerged which breaks sharply both…
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Coco Krumme: The False Promise of Optimization
Coco Krumme traces the fascinating history of optimization from its roots in America's founding principles, to its dominance as the driving principle of our modern world. Optimized models underlie everything and are…
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Chelsea T. Hicks & Bette Adriaanse: Radical Sharing
Our bodies, our houses, our land, our space: we humans don’t always like to share. Author Bette Adriaanse engaged in deep discussion with fellow author Chelsea T. Hicks. as well as virtual guests Brian Eno, Margaret…
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Anthropocene Magazine: The Climate Parables: Reporting from the Future
**Story & Performance Credits:** **Dodging the Apocalypse** story by Mark Alpert | Actor: Stuart Briggs | Video: Ruda Virginio | Score: Tristan de Liège **Victory Condition** story by Eliot Peper | Actor: Marilyn…
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Ryan Phelan: Bringing Biotech to Wildlife Conservation
How can we turn the tide on species loss and help biodiversity and bioabundance flourish for millennia to come? Ryan Phelan is Executive Director of [Revive & Restore](https://reviverestore.org); the leading wildlife…
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Becky Chambers & Annalee Newitz: Resisting Dystopia
One of our guiding principles at Long Now is that in order to get to a future that we want to live in, we must first be able to imagine it. For many, it is much easier to imagine a dystopia than a thriving…
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Jenny Odell: Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock
Jenny Odell describes _Saving Time_, her second book and the inspiration for her first Long Now Talk, as a “panoramic assault on nihilism.” The particular nihilism that Odell confronts is rooted in what she calls…
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Ismail Ali: Psychedelics: History at the Crossroads
Psychedelics and other mind-altering substances have been used for thousands of years across the world in religious, spiritual, celebratory, and healing contexts. Despite a half century of a "War on Drugs" in the…
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Ryan North: How to Invent Everything
How would someone fare if they were dropped into a randomly chosen period in history? Would they have any relevant knowledge to share, or ability to invent crucial technologies given the period's constraints? Ryan…
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Adam Rogers: Full Spectrum: The Science of Color and Modern Human Perception
Tracing an arc from the earliest humans to our digitized, synthesized present and future, Adam Rogers shows the expansive human quest for the understanding, creation and use of color. We meet our ancestors mashing…
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Parag Khanna: Why Mobility is Destiny
The map of humanity isn’t settled -- not now, not ever. In the 60,000 years since people began spreading across the continents, a recurring feature of human civilization has been mobility—the ever-constant search for…
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Eric Debrah Otchere: Sonic Spaces
Eric Debrah Otchere's research revolves around the power of music in the context of work; covering an ambitious range from ethnographic research on Ghanaian indigenous fishing culture to personalized musical…
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Wade Davis: Activist Anthropology
What is the role and purpose of Anthropology today? Wade Davis looks back at the pioneering work of Franz Boas in the early 20th century that upended long-held Western assumptions on race & gender, along with…
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Johanna Hoffman: Speculative Futures: Design Approaches to Foster Resilience and Co-create the Cities We Need
Urbanist, researcher and writer Johanna Hoffman gave a Long Now Talk about speculative futures — a powerful set of tools that can reorient urban development help us dream and build more resilient, equitable cities.…
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Kate Darling: The New Breed
Robot ethicist Kate Darling offers a nuanced and smart take on our relationships to robots and the increasing presence they will have in our lives. From a social, legal, and ethical perspective, she shows that our…
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Suzanne Simard: Mother Trees and the Social Forest
Forest Ecologist Suzanne Simard reveals that trees are part of a complex, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground mycorrhizal networks by which trees…
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Alicia Eggert: This Moment Used To Be The Future
In _The Clock of the Long Now_, Long Now founder Stewart Brand wrote, in response to Zen poet Gary Snyder, the following musing on the nature of time: >THIS PRESENT MOMENT USED TO BE THE UNIMAGINABLE FUTURE…
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Jonathan Haidt, Kevin Kelly, & Stewart Brand: Democracy in the Next Cycle of History
Jonathan Haidt sees that we have entered a social-psychological phase change that was initiated in 02009 when social media platforms introduced several fateful innovations that changed the course of our society and…
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Michael Tubbs: Upsetting the Setup: Creating a California for All
Governance moves slow. The work of the politician and the public servant ought to inherently be one of long-term thinking — of taking in concerns both urgent and longstanding and crafting solutions to them that will…
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Edward Slingerland: Drinking for 10,000 Years: Intoxication and Civilization
Philosopher Edward Slingerland’s latest research is a deep dive into the alcohol-soaked origins of civilization — and the evolutionary roots of humanity’s appetite for intoxication. “Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced and…
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Creon Levit: Space Debris and The Kessler Syndrome
More than one hundred million pieces of human-made space debris currently orbit our planet, most moving at more than 10,000 mph. Every year their number increases, creating a progressively more dangerous environment…
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Dorie Clark: The Long Game: How to be a long-term thinker in a short-term world
Personal goals need a long-term strategy too. Dorie Clark offers concrete practices to sharpen strategic thinking and incorporate a long-term perspective within a personal time scale. By reorienting ourselves to focus…
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Kim Stanley Robinson: Climate Futures: Beyond 02022
Long Now continued our dialogue with the acclaimed writer Kim Stanley Robinson around [COP26](https://unfccc.int/conference/glasgow-climate-change-conference-october-november-2021) and his award-winning book [_The…
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John Markoff & Stewart Brand: Floating Upstream: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
In his Long Now Talk, John Markoff was joined in conversation with Long Now's Co-founder Stewart Brand and Executive Director Alexander Rose around Markoff's new biography of Brand. Journalist John Markoff writes…
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Prerna Singh: State, Society and Vaccines
As a society, how do we address the "wicked hard problem" of vaccine acceptance? How can public health institutions reach those who are hesitant when even robust fact-based campaigns don't seem to work? Infectious…
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