Long Now

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

Stefan Sagmeister: Finally, something good.

March 12, 2026 • 68 mins
"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 the news cycle spins, and the more we scroll, the more we catastrophize. Meanwhile, the things that improve tend to do so slowly and quietly. In this visually stunning talk, Sagmeister takes us on a journey through hi...
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Indy Johar: Civilizational Optioneering

February 12, 2026 • 67 mins
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 before us is not simply to survive, but to reimagine civilization as a planetary project. As climate and ecological instability creates extreme whiplash effects, we will find it increasingly difficult to predict, prepare...
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Kate Crawford: Mapping Empires

December 11, 2025 • 75 mins
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. During the talk, Crawford gives a tour through her detailed artwork Calculating Empires. Through examples ranging from Liebig’s critique of agriculture “robbing” soil nutrients, to Faraday’s latex insulation that devastat...
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Lynn Rothschild: Nature’s Hardware Store

November 5, 2025 • 76 mins
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 how life’s patterns, materials, and mechanisms, refined over billions of years, can serve as a blueprint for building better futures on Earth and other planets. Drawing on insights from deep time, Dr. Rothschild wil...
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Blaise Agüera y Arcas: What is Intelligence?

October 9, 2025 • 74 mins
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 symbiotic world, things combine to make larger things all the time. We might think of humanity in terms of the individual — but we're already part of everything we're creating, which is in turn co-creating us. In the st...
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Kim Carson: Inspired by Intelligence

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 ...
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Sara Imari Walker: An Informational Theory of Life

May 28, 2025 • 70 mins
“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 a grand cathedral of meaning, tracing an arc across existence that linked the fundamentals of organic chemistry, the possibility space of lego bricks, and the materialist philosophy of Madonna. As the leader of one...
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Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson: Abundance

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,...
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Kim Stanley Robinson & Stephen Heintz: A Logic For The Future

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...
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K Allado-McDowell: On Neural Media

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...
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Ahmed Best: Feel The Future

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. ...
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Benjamin Bratton: A Philosophy of Planetary Computation

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...
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Roman Krznaric & Kate Raworth: What Doughnut Economics Can Learn From History

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...
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Neal Stephenson: Polostan

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...
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Alicia Escott & Heidi Quante: The Bureau of Linguistical Reality Performance Lecture

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...
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Jonathan Cordero: Indigenous Sovereign Futures

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...
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Denise Hearn: Embodied Economies

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...
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Jared Farmer: Chronodiversity: Thinking about Time with Trees

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...
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Abby Smith Rumsey: Hijacked Histories, Polarized Futures

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...
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Henry Farrell: The Complex Aftermath of Globalization

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...
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