PODCAST
The Long Now Foundation
by The Long Now Foundation
The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to encourage and foster long-term thinking and responsibility through a variety of projects including a clock designed to last 10,000 years (now being constructed in Texas), a monthly seminar series about long-term thinking, and the Rosetta Project which documents and preserves the diversity of human languages. Find out more at http://longnow.orgLong Now’s founders and board of directors include pioneering scientists, writers, technologists, artists and futurists such as Brian Eno, Danny Hillis, David Eagleman, David Rumsey, Douglas Carlston, Esther Dyson, Katherine Fulton, Kevin Kelly, Kim Polese, Michael Keller, Paul Saffo, Peter Schwartz, Ping Fu and Stewart Brand. The Long Now Foundation is headquartered in San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center. Projects of the Long Now Foundation include: The 10,000 year clock: http://longnow.org/clock/ The Interval at Long Now: https://theinterval.org The Rosetta Project: http://roset
Episodes
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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 cosmology, slave ship histories, and decolonization strategies, he invited us to...
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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: demonstrating stronger profits, better talent, and deeper loyalty. So why don't we...
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Melody Jue - Ocean Memory
The ocean is not empty. It is a vast storage facility of memory agents. Ocean organisms use the chemical signatures of seawater for memory and intelligence in ways we can barely imagine. In her Talk, Melody Jue said our struggle to understand ocean memory comes from our terrestrial bias. This…
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Claire Isabel Webb & Nina Miolane - The Geometry of Consciousness
What is consciousness — and how might we describe it scientifically? Neuroscience can map neural activity with extraordinary detail, yet the relationship between electrical signals and subjective experience remains one of humanity’s most enduring questions. Mathematician and machine learning...
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Stefan Sagmeister - Finally, something good.
Acclaimed designer Stefan Sagmeister brings data to life to convey an uplifting message for our current times. Amid the stark reality of a world facing the aftermath of an unprecedented global pandemic, natural disasters, and political turmoil “Finally, Something Good” presents tangible evidence...
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Indy Johar - Civilizational Optioneering
In this talk, Indy Johar proposes that civilization’s longevity depends less on stability or efficiency, and more on optionality. Entropy drives systems toward homogenization and exhaustion, but life acts as a counterforce, generating new pathways for becoming. Johar argues that our current...
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Kate Crawford - Mapping Empires
Kate Crawford - Mapping Empires by The Long Now Foundation
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Lynn Rothschild - Nature’s Hardware Store: Building the Future with Biology
In her Long Now Talk, NASA researcher Dr. Lynn Rothschild explores how the extreme constraints of space travel can enable radical sustainability on Earth. Hear how her teams have used mycelium, the root structure of fungi, to grow off-planet construction materials, and programmed bacteria to…
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Blaise Agüera y Arcas - What is Intelligence?
Blaise Agüera y Arcas - What is Intelligence? by The Long Now Foundation
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Kim Carson - Inspired by Intelligence: Purpose and Creativity in the AI Era
Kim Carson - Inspired by Intelligence: Purpose and Creativity in the AI Era by The Long Now Foundation
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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 term for an emerging set of creative forms that use artificial neural networks...
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Sara Imari Walker - An Informational Theory of Life
Sara Imari Walker - An Informational Theory of Life by The Long Now Foundation
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Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson, Michael Pollan - 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 futures instead bogged down in labyrinthine mires of process and deliberation — a...
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Stephen Heintz & Kim Stanley Robinson - 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 looming potential breakdown of the post-01945 international order, and the ambiguous...
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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. Benjamin Bratton is a Professor of Philosophy of Technology and Speculative Design at University of California, San Diego and the...
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Ahmed Best - Feel The Future: A Valentine's Evening
When you feel the future, how do you share that feeling in order to build community? Over the past quarter-century, Best — first as an actor, musician, and performer, and later as an Afrofuturist scholar and lecturer — has worked to answer that question. Drawing on his experiences as a cast…
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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 describes the social and planetary boundaries needed for all people to prosper...
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Neal Stephenson - Polostan
We are thrilled to be hosting the launch of Neal Stephenson's newest book Polostan. This is the first installment in a monumental new series called Bomb Light -- an expansive historical epic of intrigue and international espionage, presaging the dawn of the Atomic Age. Set against the turbulent...
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The Bureau of Linguistical Reality Performance Lecture - Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante
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…
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Indigenous Sovereign Futures - Jonathan Cordero
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...
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Denise Hearn - Embodied Economies: How our Economic Stories Shape the World
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 will explore concepts…
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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 Join us for an evening with geohumanist and historian Jared Farmer, who will share his...
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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 the 20th century, Rumsey offers a framework to discuss our current social and...
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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 with the old logic of the Cold War and the newer politics of globalization.…
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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 deeply embedded in the technologies and assumptions that have come to comprise…
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Bette Adriaanse & Chelsea T. Hicks - Radical Sharing
Bette Adriaanse is a writer and co-founder of TRQSE, an international network of artists and scientists working together on social issues. Her new novel What’s Mine revolves around topics of property and sharing, and she is interested in the ways our sharing habits influence our societies and our...
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Climate Parables - Climate Fiction Storytellers
The Long Now Foundation has teamed up with Anthropocene Magazine (a publication of Future Earth) and Back Pocket Media to take the magazine’s new fiction series “The Climate Parables,” from the page to the stage. Starting with the idea that survival in the Anthropocene depends on upgrading not…
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Resisting Dystopia - Becky Chambers & Annalee Newitz
Join us for a thought-provoking conversation between two Hugo award-winning science fiction authors, Becky Chambers and Annalee Newitz. Known for challenging classic science fiction tropes such as war, violence, and colonialism, both authors create vivid and immersive worlds that are filled with...
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Bringing Biotech to Wildlife Conservation - Ryan Phelan
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; the leading wildlife conservation organization promoting the incorporation of biotechnologies into standard conservation practice....
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Jenny Odell - Saving Time: Discovering A Life Beyond the Clock
Artist and writer Jenny Odell brings her acutely insightful observations to the dominant framework of time, based on industrial and colonial worldviews, that is embedded within our societies. Addressing the inability to reconcile the artificially constructed time pressures of modern culture with...
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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 resources, stability and opportunity. Driven by global events from conflicts,...
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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 United States, there has been a recent resurgence in public interest in ending drug...
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Eric Debrah Otchere - Sonic Spaces: A Psychology of Music and Work
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 preferences via modern technology. Throughout history, the power of music to enhance...
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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 North uses these hypothetical questions to explore the technological and implicit...
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Alicia Eggert - This Moment Used To Be The Future
Interdisciplinary artist Alicia Eggert's sign work uses sculpture to bring time to the foreground, embodying its passage through carefully chosen quotes. These words, rendered in neon and steel, cycle rhythmically through subtle text changes designed to encourage a heightened awareness of time…
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Johanna Hoffman - Speculative Futures
Urbanist, researcher and writer Johanna Hoffman joins us to talk about speculative futures -- a set of design tools that can reorient urban development to help us dream and build more resilient, equitable cities. Navigating modern change depends on imagining futures we’ve never seen. Urban…
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Jonathan Haidt - 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 disintegrated our consensus on reality. In this conversation with Long Now...
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Michael Tubbs - Upsetting The Setup: Creating a California for All
How do we address society's most pressing issues and create opportunity for those who need it most? Can we create a blueprint for a just and inclusive economy that includes a safety net that centers dignity, quality jobs that empower workers, housing as a human right, wealth creating…
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Drinking for 10,000 Years: Intoxication and Civilization - Edward Slingerland
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 Stumbled Our Way to Civilization” elegantly cuts through the tangle of urban legends that...
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Space Debris and The Kessler Syndrome: A Possible Future Trapped on Earth - Creon Levit
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 for working spacecraft. In order to operate in space, we track most of this…
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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 on the big picture, and using the power of small but persistent changes over...
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John Markoff - Floating Upstream: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
Join us for an illuminating evening with journalist John Markoff 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 about technology, society and the key figures who shaped Silicon...
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Kim Stanley Robinson - Climate Futures: Beyond 02022
Long Now continues our dialogue with the acclaimed writer Kim Stanley Robinson around COP26 and his most recent book The Ministry for the Future. Clean energy advocate & author Ramez Naam will join Robinson on stage after the talk for a further discussion. Tackling topics from carbon quantitative...
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Geoff Manaugh, Nicola Twilley - Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine
Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley track the history and future of quarantine around the globe, chasing the story of emergency isolation through time and space—from the crumbling lazarettos of the Mediterranean, built to contain the Black Death, to an experimental Ebola unit in London, and from the...
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Neal Stephenson - Termination Shock
Neal Stephenson’s sweeping, prescient new novel transports readers to a near-future world in which the greenhouse effect has inexorably resulted in a whirling-dervish troposphere of superstorms, rising sea levels, global flooding, merciless heat waves, and virulent, deadly pandemics. One man, a...
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David Rooney - A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks
How has time been imagined, politicized, and weaponized over the centuries—and how it might bring peace? Horologist David Rooney tells the hidden story of timekeeping and how it continues to shape our modern world. From medieval water clocks to monumental sundials, and from coastal time signals…
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Kate Darling - The New Breed: What Our Animal History Reveals For Our Robotic Future
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 current ways of thinking don’t leave room for the robot technology that is soon to...
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Prerna Singh - State, Society & 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 diseases are one of the long-standing challenges for humanity; historical plagues…
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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 definitions of "social progress". Boas and his students used comparative ethnography to...
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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 communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities, and share and exchange…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to encourage and foster long-term thinking and responsibility through a variety of projects including a clock designed to last 10,000 years (now being constructed in Texas), a monthly seminar series about long-term thinking, and the Rosetta Project which documents and preserves the diversity of human languages. Find out more at http://longnow.orgLong Now’s founders and board of directors include pioneering scientists, writers, technologists, artists and futurists such as Brian Eno, Danny Hillis, David Eagleman, David Rumsey, Douglas Carlston, Esther Dyson, Katherine Fulton, Kevin Kelly, Kim Polese, Michael Keller, Paul Saffo, Peter Schwartz, Ping Fu and Stewart Brand. The Long Now Foundation is headquartered in San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center. Projects of the Long Now Foundation include: The 10,000 year clock: http://longnow.org/clock/ The Interval at Long Now: https://theinterval.org The Rosetta Project: http://roset
HOSTED BY
The Long Now Foundation
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How many episodes does The Long Now Foundation have?
The Long Now Foundation currently has 341 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The Long Now Foundation about?
The Long Now Foundation was established in 01996* to encourage and foster long-term thinking and responsibility through a variety of projects including a clock designed to last 10,000 years (now being constructed in Texas), a monthly seminar series about long-term thinking, and the Rosetta Project...
How often does The Long Now Foundation release new episodes?
The Long Now Foundation publishes regularly with 341 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
Where can I listen to The Long Now Foundation?
You can listen to The Long Now Foundation on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The Long Now Foundation?
The Long Now Foundation is created and hosted by The Long Now Foundation.
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