Long Now

Eric Ries: Incorruptible by Design

30 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

What if we redefined “profit” as maximizing human flourishing? Eric Ries has seen the corrosive effects of shareholder primacy at every company he...

Melody Jue: Ocean Memory

09 Apr 2026

Contributed by Lukas

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 intelligen...

Stefan Sagmeister: Finally, something good.

12 Mar 2026

Contributed by Lukas

"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, F...

Indy Johar: Civilizational Optioneering

12 Feb 2026

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Kate Crawford: Mapping Empires

11 Dec 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Kate Crawford’s Long Now Talk traces an historical arc from Renaissance perspective to AI image models, illustrating how shifts in representational ...

Lynn Rothschild: Nature’s Hardware Store

05 Nov 2025

Contributed by Lukas

What if the solutions to humanity’s greatest challenges — on Earth and beyond — have already been invented by nature? In this forward-looking ta...

Blaise Agüera y Arcas: What is Intelligence?

09 Oct 2025

Contributed by Lukas

Blaise Agüera y Arcas’s talk took us on a journey through What is Intelligence?, his groundbreaking new work connecting the evolutionary dots betwe...

Kim Carson: Inspired by Intelligence

13 Jun 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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 Ta...

Sara Imari Walker: An Informational Theory of Life

29 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

“What is life?” In her Long Now Talk, astrobiologist and theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker explores the many dimensions of that seemingly s...

Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson: Abundance

16 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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. T...

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

01 May 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...

K Allado-McDowell: On Neural Media

10 Apr 2025

Contributed by Lukas

How will AI shape our understanding of our creativity and ourselves? In February, artist and technologist K Allado-McDowell delivered a fascinating ...

Ahmed Best: Feel The Future

28 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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-twen...

Benjamin Bratton: A Philosophy of Planetary Computation

20 Mar 2025

Contributed by Lukas

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...

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

11 Dec 2024

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Neal Stephenson: Polostan

14 Nov 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Neal Stephenson, visionary speculative fiction author and long-time friend of Long Now, joined us for a conversation with journalist Charles C. Mann o...

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

01 May 2024

Contributed by Lukas

The Bureau of Linguistical Reality is a participatory artwork facilitated by artist Alicia Escott and Heidi Quante which collaborates with the public ...

Jonathan Cordero: Indigenous Sovereign Futures

19 Apr 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Alternative visions for social change rooted in the frameworks of capitalism and colonialism only reproduce contemporary structures of power. How can ...

Denise Hearn: Embodied Economies

07 Mar 2024

Contributed by Lukas

Economic policy can seem abstract and distant, but it manifests the physical world, affecting us all. Our economic stories shape our systems, and they...

Jared Farmer: Chronodiversity: Thinking about Time with Trees

22 Dec 2023

Contributed by Lukas

_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...

Abby Smith Rumsey: Hijacked Histories, Polarized Futures

21 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

As authoritarianism continues to rise around the world, the stories we tell ourselves about our collective history become a battleground for competing...

Henry Farrell: The Complex Aftermath of Globalization

16 Nov 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 pape...

Coco Krumme: The False Promise of Optimization

19 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Coco Krumme traces the fascinating history of optimization from its roots in America's founding principles, to its dominance as the driving principle ...

Chelsea T. Hicks & Bette Adriaanse: Radical Sharing

10 Oct 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 aut...

Anthropocene Magazine: The Climate Parables: Reporting from the Future

28 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

**Story & Performance Credits:** **Dodging the Apocalypse** story by Mark Alpert | Actor: Stuart Briggs | Video: Ruda Virginio | Score: Tristan de Li...

Ryan Phelan: Bringing Biotech to Wildlife Conservation

20 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

Becky Chambers & Annalee Newitz: Resisting Dystopia

15 Jun 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Jenny Odell: Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock

14 Apr 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Jenny Odell describes _Saving Time_, her second book and the inspiration for her first Long Now Talk, as a “panoramic assault on nihilism.” The p...

Ismail Ali: Psychedelics: History at the Crossroads

21 Mar 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Psychedelics and other mind-altering substances have been used for thousands of years across the world in religious, spiritual, celebratory, and heali...

Ryan North: How to Invent Everything

28 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 i...

Adam Rogers: Full Spectrum: The Science of Color and Modern Human Perception

24 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Tracing an arc from the earliest humans to our digitized, synthesized present and future, Adam Rogers shows the expansive human quest for the understa...

Parag Khanna: Why Mobility is Destiny

17 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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...

Eric Debrah Otchere: Sonic Spaces

10 Feb 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Eric Debrah Otchere's research revolves around the power of music in the context of work; covering an ambitious range from ethnographic research on Gh...

Wade Davis: Activist Anthropology

27 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

Johanna Hoffman: Speculative Futures: Design Approaches to Foster Resilience and Co-create the Cities We Need

20 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Urbanist, researcher and writer Johanna Hoffman gave a Long Now Talk about speculative futures — a powerful set of tools that can reorient urban dev...

Kate Darling: The New Breed

13 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

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. Fr...

Suzanne Simard: Mother Trees and the Social Forest

05 Jan 2023

Contributed by Lukas

Forest Ecologist Suzanne Simard reveals that trees are part of a complex, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creature...

Alicia Eggert: This Moment Used To Be The Future

15 Dec 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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:...

Jonathan Haidt, Kevin Kelly, & Stewart Brand: Democracy in the Next Cycle of History

06 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Jonathan Haidt sees that we have entered a social-psychological phase change that was initiated in 02009 when social media platforms introduced severa...

Michael Tubbs: Upsetting the Setup: Creating a California for All

16 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

Edward Slingerland: Drinking for 10,000 Years: Intoxication and Civilization

26 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Philosopher Edward Slingerland’s latest research is a deep dive into the alcohol-soaked origins of civilization — and the evolutionary roots of hu...

Creon Levit: Space Debris and The Kessler Syndrome

14 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 numb...

Dorie Clark: The Long Game: How to be a long-term thinker in a short-term world

18 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Personal goals need a long-term strategy too. Dorie Clark offers concrete practices to sharpen strategic thinking and incorporate a long-term perspec...

Kim Stanley Robinson: Climate Futures: Beyond 02022

27 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

Long Now continued our dialogue with the acclaimed writer Kim Stanley Robinson around [COP26](https://unfccc.int/conference/glasgow-climate-change-con...

John Markoff & Stewart Brand: Floating Upstream: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand

27 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 Ma...

Prerna Singh: State, Society and Vaccines

25 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

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 ...

Sean Carroll: The Passage of Time and the Meaning of Life

02 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

What is time? What is humankind’s role in the universe? What is the meaning of life? For much of human history, these questions have been the provin...

Neal Stephenson: Termination Shock

17 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

From the Metaverse in Snow Crash to digital currency in Cryptonomicon, Stephenson's thrilling stories offer uncanny insights into our future. [Neal ...

Geoff Manaugh & Nicola Twilley: Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine

08 Feb 2022

Contributed by Lukas

**Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley** track the history and future of quarantine around the globe, chasing the story of emergency isolation through tim...

David Rooney: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks

23 Dec 2021

Contributed by Lukas

As with all Long Now Talks, David Rooney’s talk on Thursday, September 9, 02021 began with a few tones from Brian Eno’s January 07003: Bell Studie...

Alexander Rose: Continuity: Discovering the Lessons behind the World’s Longest-lived Organizations

23 Sep 2021

Contributed by Lukas

One of [Long Now](https://longnow.org/)’s founding premises is that humanity’s most significant challenges require long-term solutions, including ...

Nathaniel Rich, Ben Novak, & Ryan Phelan: Second Nature: Green Rabbits, Passenger Pigeons, Cloned Ferrets, and the Birth of a New Ecology

20 Aug 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Reporter and writer Nathaniel Rich delves deep into conversation with [Revive & Restore](https://reviverestore.org/)'s Ryan Phelan and Ben Novak to di...

Tim O'Reilly: What’s The Future? It’s Up to Us.

04 Mar 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Based on four decades in technology and media, constantly in the eye of innovation, O’Reilly is starting vital conversations about our future. Be re...

Peter Leyden: The Transformation: A Future History of the World from 02020 to 02050

23 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

A compelling case can be made that we are in the early stages of another tech and economic boom in the next 30 years that will help solve our era’s ...

Jason Tester: Queering the Future: How LGBTQ Foresight Can Benefit All

03 Feb 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Jason Tester asks us to see the powerful potential of "queering the future" - how looking at the future through a lens of difference and openness can ...

Scurvy Salon: The History & Science of a Persistent Malady

29 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

A special night of short talks about the long history and scientific background behind a most persistent malady. And the drinks that can help keep it ...

Rick Prelinger: Bay Area Telecommunications Infrastructure History

20 Jan 2021

Contributed by Lukas

Rick Prelinger uncovers the diverse histories of Bay Area telecommunications infrastructure: telephone, radio, television, data, image and sound. A to...

James Nestor: The Future of Breathing

22 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Drawing on thousands of years of medical texts and recent cutting-edge studies in pulmonology, psychology, biochemistry, and human physiology, journal...

Miles Traer: The Geological Reveal: How the Rock Record Shows Our Relationship to the Natural World

18 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Before us, after us, and without our realizing it: geology, ecology, and biology uniquely record human activity. Geoscientist Miles Traer, co-host of ...

Nadia Eghbal: The Making and Maintenance of our Open Source Infrastructure

10 Dec 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Nadia Eghbal is particularly interested in infrastructure, governance, and the economics of the internet - and how the dynamics of these subjects play...

Roman Krznaric: Becoming a Better Ancestor

18 Nov 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Human beings have an astonishing evolutionary gift: agile imaginations that can shift in an instant from thinking on a scale of seconds to a scale of ...

Julia Watson: Design by Radical Indigenism

06 Oct 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Responding to climate change by building hard infrastructures and favoring high-tech homogenous design, we are ignoring millennia-old knowledge of how...

Scott Kildall: Art Thinking + Technology: A Personal Journey of Expanding Space and Time

25 Sep 2020

Contributed by Lukas

What place is there for art in the 21st century world of technology, business, and science? Everywhere. Award-winning cross-disciplinary artist and cu...

Genevieve Bell: The 4th Industrial Revolution: Responsible & Secure AI

28 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

"I have always felt I have an obligation to build the future I want to see. We know that AI-powered cyber-physical systems (CPS) will scale in soci...

Craig Childs: Tracking the First People into Ice Age North America

17 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Craig Childs chronicles the last millennia of the Ice Age, the violent oscillations and retreat of glaciers, the clues and traces that document the fi...

Peter Calthorpe: Urban Planet

06 Aug 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Throughout Peter Calthorpe's decade-spanning career in urban design, planning, and architecture, he has developed and practiced the key principles of ...

Lonny J Avi Brooks: When is Wakanda: Imagining Afrofutures

27 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

"As a forecaster and Afrofuturist who imagines alternative futures from a Black Diaspora perspective, I think about long-term signals that will shape ...

Kim Stanley Robinson: Adapting to Sea Level Rise: The Science of <em>New York 2140</em>

17 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Legendary science fiction author [Kim Stanley Robinson](http://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/) returns to The Interval to discuss his just released nove...

Brian Fisher: Edible Insects

15 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

At the intersection of climate change, biodiversity loss, and food scarcity lies an unexpected and abundant resource: insects. [Brian Fisher](https://...

Annalee Newitz: Science Needs Fiction

14 Jul 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Science fiction does more than predict future inventions. Stories are a testbed for exploring the unexpected ways people could incorporate technology ...

Larry Brilliant: Sometimes Brilliant: in Conversation with Stewart Brand

29 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

After sitting at the feet of Martin Luther King at the University of Michigan in 1962, Larry Brilliant was swept up into the civil rights movement, ma...

Laurance Doyle: Interspecies Communication and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

23 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Dr. Laurance Doyle is an astrophysicist and principal investigator at SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) with expertise in diverse subjec...

Rick Doblin: Transformational Psychedelics

11 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Humans have consumed psychedelics for at least the last 10,000 years. The outlawing of psychedelics in most of the world in the 20th century didn’t ...

D. Fox Harrell: Coding Ourselves/Coding Others

11 Jun 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Through building and analyzing systems, [D. Fox Harrell](http://foxharrell.com)'s research investigates how the computer can be used to express cultur...

Jennifer Granick: Modern Surveillance: Why You Should Care and What You Can Do

04 May 2020

Contributed by Lukas

The future of privacy begins with the current state of surveillance. The 21st century practices of US intelligence agencies push the technological, le...

Renée DiResta: Disinformation Technology: How Online Propaganda Campaigns Are Influencing Us

06 Apr 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Clandestine influence campaigns are rampant on social media. Whether pushing Russian agitprop or lies about vaccines, they can impact policy and make ...

Michael Mikel: The Five Ages of Burning Man

23 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Burning Man co-founder Michael Mikel (aka [ Danger Ranger](https://twitter.com/danger_ranger)), who serves as Director of Advanced Social Systems for ...

Robert McIntyre: Engram Preservation: Early Work Towards Mind Uploading

03 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Is it possible to preserve and read memories after someone has died? Robert McIntyre thinks it is, and that the technology is closer than most people ...

Eric Ries: Long-Term Stock Exchange

03 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Companies that operate with a long-term mindset tend to outperform their peers over time. But the pressure to achieve short-term quarterly gains often...

Bruce Sterling: How to Be Futuristic

18 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

The future is a kind of history that hasn’t happened yet. The past is a kind of future that has already happened. The present moment vanishes before...

Fred Lyon: San Francisco Time: The Photography of Fred Lyon

12 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

[Fred Lyon](http://www.fredlyon.com/) is a time traveler with a camera and tales to tell. At 94-years-old, this former LIFE magazine photographer and ...

Caroline Winterer: The Art and Science of Deep Time: Conceiving the Inconceivable in the 19th Century

06 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

The ambition to think on the scale of thousands, millions, even billion of years emerged in the 19th century. Historian and author [Caroline Winterer]...

Tiffany Shlain: 24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week

29 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

As the world is becoming more technologically connected, finding time for oneself and face-to-face connections is becoming increasingly difficult. Man...

Bina Venkataraman: Long-Term Thinking in a Distracted World

29 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

What does practical long-term thinking look like? Bina Venkataraman’s new book, [_The Optimist's Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age_](https...

Kelly Wanser: Is Reflecting Sunlight from the Atmosphere a Bridge to the Future?

15 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Recent data shows damage from climate change rapidly increasing. There are many scientifically proposed methods (from the U.S. National Academy of Sci...

Esther Dyson: The Short Now: What Addiction, Day Trading, and Most of Society’s Ills Have in Common

09 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

Long Now board member Esther Dyson shares her ongoing work to move communities away from short-term thinking and into health. In conversation with pre...

Adrienne Mayor: Gods and Robots: Ancient Dreams of Technology

23 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Millennia before engineering or software, robots and artificial intelligence were brought to life in Greek myths. The author of [_Gods and Robots Myth...

Annalee Newitz: We're in the Wrong Timeline

13 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

[_Annalee Newitz's_](https://www.techsploitation.com/) new novel, [_The Future of Another Timeline_](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780765392121), is...

Jacob Ward: The Loop: Decision Technology and How to Resist It

04 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

If we use AI to write our favorite music for us, will we lose the ability to write music ourselves? If an AI coach keeps divorced parents from arguing...

Andrew McAfee: More From Less

02 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Andrew McAfee draws on a wide range of evidence to show that the world is already on the right track toward long-term health when it combines 1) techn...

Lewis Dartnell: ORIGINS - How Earth’s history shaped human history

13 Nov 2019

Contributed by Lukas

From the cultivation of the first crops to the founding of modern states, the human story is the story of environmental forces, from plate tectonics a...

Brittany Cox: Horological Heritage: Generating bird song, magic, and music through mechanism

06 Nov 2019

Contributed by Lukas

From kings and philosophers to craftsmen and inventors, horology has been prized as an extraordinary marriage between art and science. Antiquarian Hor...

Gurjeet Singh: The Shape Of Data And Things To Come

28 Oct 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Big Data promises unparalleled insights, but the larger the data, the harder they are to find. The key to unlocking them was discovered by mathematici...

Suhanya Raffel: World Art Through The Asian Perspective

21 Oct 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Coming to the fore in this century is Asian perspective on everything. A thrilling place to watch the shift is in art. Extraordinary contemporary art...

Nicola Twilley: Exploring the Artificial Cryosphere

23 Aug 2019

Contributed by Lukas

The invisible backbone of our food system is a man-made, distributed, and perpetual winter of refrigeration we've built for our food to live in. It ha...

Monica L. Smith: Cities: The First 6,000 Years

23 Aug 2019

Contributed by Lukas

“Cities were the first Internet,” says archaeologist Monica Smith, because they were the first permanent places where strangers met in large numbe...

Neal Stephenson: Neal Stephenson - Fall, or Dodge in Hell

14 Aug 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Neal Stephenson author of _Fall, or Dodge in Hell_ in conversation with Long Now Board Member, Kevin Kelly. Tickets included a signed copy of _Fall, ...

Marcia Bjornerud: Timefulness

14 Aug 2019

Contributed by Lukas

We need a poly-temporal worldview to embrace the overlapping rates of change that our world runs on, especially the huge, powerful changes that are mo...

Kim Stanley Robinson: Learning From Le Guin

12 Jul 2019

Contributed by Lukas

The legacy of [Ursula K Le Guin](http://www.ursulakleguin.com/) lives beyond the page in generations of writers who have learned from her. She used fa...

Mariana Mazzucato: Rethinking Value

12 Jul 2019

Contributed by Lukas

What happens when we confuse price with value? We end up undervaluing care. We pollute more. And the financial sector is allowed to brag about how pro...