Long Now
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
June 13, 2025 • 48 mins
What if AI is not here actually to replace us, but to remind us who we actually are?
That was the question at the heart of Kim Carson’s Long Now Talk. In _Inspired by Intelligence: Purpose and Creativity in the AI Era_, Carson challenged us to avoid the easy narratives of tech-driven utopia and dystopia, charting a course through those two extremes that made the case for AI not as a way to make humans unnecessary but to emphasize ...
Mark as Played
May 16, 2025 • 59 mins
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 futures instead bogged down in labyrinthine mires of process — a society stuck in low gear. Yet they also see opportunity to turn those failures on their heads, and to build a better society based around more responsive,...
Mark as Played
May 16, 2025 • 59 mins
### The power law is the shape of our age
You know something is up when an audience member is taking cell phone photos of the presenter's slides for instant transmittal to a business partner.
Chris Anderson does have killer slides, full of exuberant detail, defining the exact shape of the still emerging opportunity space for finding and selling formerly infindable and unsellable items of every imaginable description. The 25 milli...
Mark as Played
May 1, 2025 • 57 mins
Philosophical inquiry and scientific absurdism meet in the conceptual precision and ice dry wit of Jonathon Keats. In his talk at The Interval, Keats discussed his forays into very long-term photography and other deep time projects. He also announced a site-speciific collaboration with The Long Now Foundation that will create a long-term art work on our Mt. Washington property in Eastern Nevada.
As an experimental philosopher and ...
Mark as Played
May 1, 2025 • 57 mins
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 looming potential breakdown of the post-01945 international order, and the ambiguous prospects of rapid technological changes in fields like AI, biotechnology, and geoengineering, it is clear that we need new answers to n...
Mark as Played
April 10, 2025 • 57 mins
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 term for an emerging set of creative forms that use artificial neural networks inspired by the connective design of the human brain.
Their Long Now Talk is a journey through the strange valleys and outcroppings of thi...
Mark as Played
March 28, 2025 • 59 mins
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 was also the first to feature a sing-a-long performance of Al Green’s 01970s soul music classic “Let’s Stay Together,” with the speaker accompanying the audience at San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre on a 7-piece drum kit. ...
Mark as Played
March 20, 2025 • 57 mins
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 Benjamin Bratton took us on a whirlwind philosophical journey into the concept of Planetary Computation — a journey that began in classical Greece with the story of the Antikythera mechanism, the analog computer that ga...
Mark as Played
December 10, 2024 • 52 mins
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 describes the social and planetary boundaries needed for all people to prosper within the means of the living planet. Studying historic examples through the lens of doughnut economics, Krznaric and Raworth find the envir...
Mark as Played
November 13, 2024 • 56 mins
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 Atomic Age, and the craft of historical storytelling.
_Polostan_ is the first installment in a monumental new series called Bomb Light - an expansive historical epic of intrigue and international espionage, presaging t...
Mark as Played
May 1, 2024 • 50 mins
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 yet exist. Recognizing the climate crisis is causing new feelings and experiences that have yet to be named, the project was created with a deep focus on these and other Anthropocenic phenomena. The Bureau views the w...
Mark as Played
April 19, 2024 • 55 mins
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 transformation necessary to improve the health of the natural world and of human communities?
Dr. Cordero discussed how indigenous epistemologies challenge the ideas and practices related to capitalism and colonialism and ho...
Mark as Played
March 7, 2024 • 56 mins
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 might new stories emerge to scaffold the future? This talk explores concepts we often take as gospel: profits, competition, economic value, efficiency, and others — and asks how we might reshape them to better serve plane...
Mark as Played
December 22, 2023
_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 Now Talk, Geohumanist and historian Jared Farmer shared his multi-faceted approach to understanding our human relationship with trees over millennia. From ancient stories, as objects of reverence, named individuals and...
Mark as Played
November 21, 2023 • 55 mins
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 the 20th century, Rumsey offers a framework to discuss our current social and political tensions and how our increasing polarization could shape our future.
Abby Smith Rumsey was joined by archivist and filmmaker Ric...
Mark as Played
November 16, 2023 • 59 mins
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 with the old logic of the Cold War and the newer politics of globalization.
The globalization bet has turned sour, but it has created a far more closely connected world than ever existed before. Problems such as cl...
Mark as Played
October 19, 2023 • 31 mins
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 deeply embedded in the technologies and assumptions that have come to comprise not only our material reality, but what we make of it. How did a mathematical concept take on such outsized cultural shape?
Krumme's work i...
Mark as Played
October 9, 2023 • 56 mins
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 Levi, and Aqui Thami, about property, sharing, and how to make a lasting positive change in the way we share the world with each other. Alternating between thinkers and doers whose approaches are helping to foster long ...
Mark as Played
June 28, 2023 • 64 mins
**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 Pittman | Video: Back Pocket Media and Ruda Virgini | Found footage by: Chris Lange, Oscar Osbo, Robert Pullum, Sean Kirmani, Matt Trainor, Billy Bjork, Loren Hamilton, Panorama International Productions, Living with Fir...
Mark as Played
June 20, 2023 • 64 mins
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 conservation organization promoting the incorporation of biotechnologies into standard conservation practice. Phelan shared the new Genetic Rescue Toolkit for conservation – a suite of biotechnology tools and conserva...
Mark as Played
Popular Podcasts
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Gregg Rosenthal and a rotating crew of elite NFL Media co-hosts, including Patrick Claybon, Colleen Wolfe, Steve Wyche, Nick Shook and Jourdan Rodrigue of The Athletic get you caught up daily on all the NFL news and analysis you need to be smarter and funnier than your friends.
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy, Jess Hilarious, And Charlamagne Tha God!