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On the show
From 13 epsHosts
Recent guests
Recent episodes
Bayo Akomolafe: The Untimely
May 20, 2026
1h 13m 00s
Claire Isabel Webb & Nina Miolane: The Geometry of Consciousness
May 20, 2026
50m 47s
Eric Ries: Incorruptible by Design
Apr 30, 2026
1h 10m 17s
Melody Jue: Ocean Memory
Apr 9, 2026
1h 03m 10s
Stefan Sagmeister: Finally, something good.
Mar 12, 2026
1h 08m 49s
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| Date | Episode | Topics | Guests | Brands | Places | Keywords | Sponsor | Length | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5/20/26 | ![]() Bayo Akomolafe: The Untimely✨ | linear timeYoruba cosmology+4 | Bayo Akomolafe | Yoruba cosmology | — | linear timeYoruba cosmology+4 | — | 1h 13m 00s | |
| 5/20/26 | ![]() Claire Isabel Webb & Nina Miolane: The Geometry of Consciousness✨ | consciousnessgeometry+4 | Nina Miolane | Geometric Intelligence LabUC Santa Barbara | — | neuronssubjective experience+4 | — | 50m 47s | |
| 4/30/26 | ![]() Eric Ries: Incorruptible by Design✨ | profithuman flourishing+3 | Eric Ries | The Long Now Foundation | — | profithuman flourishing+5 | — | 1h 10m 17s | |
| 4/9/26 | ![]() Melody Jue: Ocean Memory✨ | ocean memoryenvironmental knowledge+4 | Melody Jue | The Long Now FoundationAma divers’ fishing tradition | PacificArctic | ocean memorychemical signatures+5 | — | 1h 03m 10s | |
| 3/12/26 | ![]() Stefan Sagmeister: Finally, something good.✨ | perspectivehuman progress+3 | Stefan Sagmeister | — | — | Stefan Sagmeisterhuman progress+4 | — | 1h 08m 49s | |
| 2/12/26 | ![]() Indy Johar: Civilizational Optioneering✨ | civilizationplanetary consciousness+4 | Indy Johar | The Long Now Foundation | — | civilizational optionalityplanetary project+4 | — | 1h 07m 46s | |
| 12/11/25 | ![]() Kate Crawford: Mapping Empires✨ | AIhistorical perspective+5 | Kate Crawford | The Long Now FoundationCalculating Empires | — | AI image modelsRenaissance perspective+5 | — | 1h 15m 08s | |
| 11/5/25 | ![]() Lynn Rothschild: Nature’s Hardware Store✨ | naturebiological strategies+4 | Lynn Rothschild | NASA AmesBrown University+1 | — | naturehardware store+5 | — | 1h 16m 23s | |
| 10/9/25 | ![]() Blaise Agüera y Arcas: What is Intelligence?✨ | intelligencesymbiogenesis+3 | Blaise Agüera y Arcas | GoogleParadigms of Intelligence | — | intelligencesymbiosis+4 | — | 1h 14m 40s | |
| 6/13/25 | ![]() Kim Carson: Inspired by Intelligence✨ | AIcreativity+4 | Kim Carson | IBMInspired by Intelligence: From Burnout to Becoming+1 | AI | AIcreativity+5 | — | 48m 03s | |
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| 5/29/25 | ![]() Sara Imari Walker: An Informational Theory of Life✨ | origins of lifeassembly theory+3 | Sara Imari Walker | ATPThe Long Now Foundation+1 | — | lifeassembly theory+3 | — | 1h 10m 54s | |
| 5/16/25 | ![]() Ezra Klein & Derek Thompson: Abundance✨ | governanceprogressive values+4 | Ezra KleinDerek Thompson | The Long Now Foundation | — | governanceprogressive+5 | — | 59m 28s | |
| 5/1/25 | ![]() Kim Stanley Robinson & Stephen Heintz: A Logic For The Future✨ | geopoliticsclimate change+4 | Stephen HeintzKim Stanley Robinson | Rockefeller Brothers FundAtlantic Charter | — | Age of Turbulenceclimate change+4 | — | 57m 10s | |
| 4/10/25 | ![]() 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 inspired by the connective design of the human brain. Their Long Now Talk is a journey through the strange valleys and outcroppings of this age of neural media. That journey began in 02015, in the wake of K Allado-McDowell’s encounter with an image known as “trippysquirrel.jpg.” That picture — a squirrel flowing into dog into a slug, a hallucinogenic collection of misplaced eyes and waves of color — was generated by what was then a cutting-edge artificial intelligence system: a convolutional neural network. What AI researchers did with the creation of images like “trippysquirrel.jpeg” was to invert the traditional role of the neural network as classifier: transforming it into a tool for the generation of novel material. The captivating, uncanny potential of these AI-generated images inspired Allado-McDowell to form and lead the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google, and to begin their own explorations into co-creating art with artificial intelligence. Now, after a decade spent composing novels, operas, and more alongside a variety of AI models, Allado-McDowell sees the mode of creativity offered by these non-human intelligences as not just a novelty but an entirely new, sometimes bizarre paradigm of media. Allado-McDowell tells a fascinating story involving statistical distributions, anti-aging influencers at war with death itself, and vast quantities of “AI Slop,” the low-quality, faintly surreal output of cheap, rapidly proliferating image models. Yet even in this morass of slop Allado-McDowell sees reason for optimism. Referring to the title of their 02020 book Pharmako-AI, which was co-written with GPT-3, Allado-McDowell notes that the Greek word pharmakon could mean both drug and cure. What may seem poisonous or dangerous in this new paradigm of neural media could also unlock for us new and deeper ways of understanding ourselves, our planet, and all of the intelligent networks that live within it. | — | ||||||
| 3/28/25 | ![]() 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 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. Finally, it was the first to feature a live theater performance from audience volunteers, depicting the past, present, and future through glances, gestures, and play. Yet beyond these firsts, Ahmed Best’s Long Now Talk felt deeply rooted in the spirit of Long Now Talks. Over the course of _Feel the Future_, Ahmed’s Valentine’s Evening Long Now Talk, he lead the audience on a journey through creativity and imagination, drawing on his experiences as a cast member on the award-winning percussion performance Stomp, as Jar-Jar Binks, the ground-breaking first major CGI character actor in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, and as a lecturer at the Stanford d.school and one of the leaders of the AfroRithms Futures Group. The core of Ahmed’s argument? Feeling is a form of communication in itself, beyond words — and only by taking action and sharing our feelings of the future with each other in our communities can we create the futures we want for ourselves. Using a diverse range of creative and imaginative tactics, Best incorporated play and motion in order to help us Feel The Future. | — | ||||||
| 3/20/25 | ![]() 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 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 gave his think-tank Antikythera its name. But his inquiry stretched far beyond antiquity — back to the very origins of biological life itself and forward to a present and future where we must increasingly grapple with artificial life and intelligence on a planetary scale in time and space. How might complex planetary intelligence thrive over the long now? To Bratton, that intelligence is a “emergent phenomenon of an ancient and deep biogeochemical flux” — not merely resident to the Earth but an outcropping from it. Our planet has evolved us, and we have in turn evolved a stack of technologies that can help us understand and govern that very same planet that produced us. The preconditions for long-term adaptiveness, Bratton argues, will need to be artificially realized, and we won’t be able to control what happens as a result of bringing them into existence. This, Bratton says, is the Copernican trauma of our time. In concluding his remarks, Bratton turns to James Lovelock, the pioneering environmental scientist who first proposed the Gaia Hypothesis. Referencing Lovelock’s final book, Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence (02019), Bratton notes that for both Lovelock and himself the potential coming of post-human intelligence was not cause for “grief.” Instead, the frame of the planetary makes it so that finding ourselves in a grander story where “the evolution of intelligence does not peak with one terraforming species of nomadic primates,” is, to Bratton, “the happiest news possible.” | — | ||||||
| 12/11/24 | ![]() 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 within the means of the living planet. Studying historic examples through the lens of doughnut economics, Krznaric and Raworth find the environmentally safe and socially just space in which humanity and all other living things can flourish. | — | ||||||
| 11/14/24 | ![]() 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 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 the dawn of the Atomic Age. Set against the turbulent decades of the early twentieth century, Polostan is an inventive, richly detailed, and deeply entertaining historical epic from Stephenson, whose prior books include [_Cryptonomicon_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptonomicon) and [_The Baroque Cycle_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baroque_Cycle) | — | ||||||
| 5/1/24 | ![]() 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 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 words created in this process as also serving as points of connectivity: advancing understanding, dialogue, and conversations about the greater concepts these words seek to codify. This talk was an intimate sharing of The Bureau's findings from their decade long social art practice as well as a Word Making Field Session where Escott and Quante collaborated with participants to collectively coin a term together. Participants were encouraged to consider in advance their personal unnamed experience(s) of our changing world as well as their unique feelings for which they wish there was a word and to bring the diversity of their linguistic backgrounds to this conversation as the Bureau creates neologisms in all languages. | — | ||||||
| 4/19/24 | ![]() 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 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 how the enhancement of indigeneity and sovereignty are critical to the maintenance of indigenous epistemologies. Throughout his talk, Dr. Cordero drew from academic and communal discourses on decolonization, settler colonialism, and epistemicide, revealing the nuances of indigenous worldviews with deeply researched case studies. Dr. Cordero also shared how indigenous perspectives and knowledge inspire work of the [Association of Ramaytush Ohlone](https://www.ramaytush.org/), where he serves as Executive Director. | — | ||||||
| 3/7/24 | ![]() 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 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 planetary flourishing — today, and well into the future. Drawing on insights from economics and the social sciences more broadly, writer and researcher Denise Hearn makes the case that the challenge for 21st century policy-making is figuring out how much we can "hold economic reasoning back." In her Talk, she asks: in what areas can we bring in new paradigms and systems of understanding that don't produce the same problems that our societies are trying to escape? | — | ||||||
| 12/22/23 | ![]() 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 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 clonal organisms, sources of wealth in ancient and modern times, the lungs of the planet and the wood wide web - trees are deeply interwoven with our histories, cultures and growing scientific understanding of our complex global ecosystem. Through his work, Farmer reflects on our long-term relationships with long-lived trees, and considers the future of oldness on a rapidly changing planet. | — | ||||||
| 11/21/23 | ![]() 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 political tensions and how our increasing polarization could shape our future. Abby Smith Rumsey was joined by archivist and filmmaker Rick Prelinger for the Q&A. This Long Now Talk is presented in partnership with the [Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences](https://casbs.stanford.edu/about?ref=longnow.org) (CASBS) at Stanford University. CASBS brings together deep thinkers from diverse disciplines and communities to advance understanding of the full range of human beliefs, behaviors, interactions, and institutions. A leading incubator of human-centered knowledge, CASBS facilitates collaborations across academia, policy, industry, civil society, and government to collectively design a better future. | — | ||||||
| 11/16/23 | ![]() 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. The globalization bet has turned sour, but it has created a far more closely connected world than ever existed before. Problems such as climate change, economic inequality, food security, supply chain vulnerabilities, democratic weakness and mass migration emerge from the interdependent choices of people and governments in a global system without any global rulers. In a complex interdependent world, is the only way forward to accept these complexities, and try to work with them? That is the challenge that the US now faces – moving from the simple imagined futures of the past to a more entangled and realistic vision of our planet's future. This Long Now Talk is presented in partnership with the [Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences](https://casbs.stanford.edu/about/about-us?ref=longnow.org) (CASBS) at Stanford University. CASBS brings together deep thinkers from diverse disciplines and communities to advance understanding of the full range of human beliefs, behaviors, interactions, and institutions. A leading incubator of human-centered knowledge, CASBS facilitates collaborations across academia, policy, industry, civil society, and government to collectively design a better future. | — | ||||||
| 10/19/23 | ![]() 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 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 in scientific computation made her aware of optimization's overreach, where she observed that streamlined systems are less resilient and more at risk of failure. They limit our options and narrow our perspectives. Optimal Illusions exposes the sizable bargains we have made in the name of optimization and asks us to consider what comes next. | — | ||||||
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