The Long Now Foundation
1:12:58Bayo Akomolafe on "The Untimely": Staying in the Gap Between the Tick and the Tock
At the Long Now Foundation's Cowell Theater talk in San Francisco, poet-philosopher Bayo Akomolafe tried out an idea he said he was "still working out": the untimely. He started from a question the ho
48:44Why Brains and AI Both Build a Torus: Nina Miolane on the Geometry of Intelligence
How does the on-or-off electrical firing of neurons give rise to everything we see, hear, feel, and decide? Mathematician and machine learning researcher Nina Miolane, who runs the Geometric Intellige
1:07:50Eric Ries on Financial Gravity and Building Companies That Stay Good
In a Long Now Talks conversation at San Francisco's Cowell Theater, Eric Ries, author of The Lean Startup, discussed his new book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad…and How Great Companies Stay
1:02:34Smelling the Sea with Our Ears: Melody Jue on Ocean Memory
Does the ocean have memory? Melody Jue, a scholar of literature and environmental media studies, took this question as the thread for a talk at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco for Long Now Talks.
4:52Bristlecone Time: Jonathon Keats's Clock That Measures Time by a Tree's Growth
Centuries of the Bristlecone asks what a standard of time would look like if it came from a living thing that measures its life in millennia rather than from atomic precision. The project centers on a
1:09:10Stefan Sagmeister on Why the World Looks Worse Than It Is, and How Design Can Show the Long View
At a Long Now Talk in San Francisco on February 17, 2026, designer Stefan Sagmeister made a case for what host Lisa Kay Solomon called "informed optimism." His argument is that the world can be terrib
1:04:24Indy Johar on Civilizational Optionality: Preserving a Planet That Has Become Self-Aware
At a Long Now Talk at San Francisco's Cowell Theater, Indy Johar, co-founder of Dark Matter Labs, argued that a long-term view matters more now, because the future is becoming "foreshortened," opaque
1:15:57Lost Landscapes of San Francisco at 20: Rick Prelinger's Crowd-Narrated Tour Through a Century of Found Film
For two decades, archivist Rick Prelinger has assembled a yearly compilation of archival San Francisco footage and shown it to a live audience in a theater. The format is unusual: most of the film is
1:12:35Nature's Genetic Hardware Store: Lynn Rothschild on Building Space Habitats, Medicines and Materials with Biology
Lynn Rothschild is an evolutionary biologist, astrobiologist and synthetic biologist at NASA Ames Research Center. In her Long Now talk she argued that the most promising technology for living beyond
1:12:24Blaise Agüera y Arcas: Life Is Computational, and Intelligence Grows Through Merging
In this Long Now Talk, Blaise Agüera y Arcas, VP and Fellow at Google and founder of the Paradigms of Intelligence team, argues against several common assumptions. The first is that artificial general
44:38AI as a Mirror, Not a Replacement: Kim Carson on Purpose, Vulnerability, and Creativity
Kim Carson, introduced at The Interval at Long Now as an "AI creativity evangelist," built this talk around one question: what if AI is not here to replace us, but to remind us who we actually are? Ca
3:39Assembly Theory and Why Existence Is Rare: Sara Imari Walker on Measuring Life
In this short excerpt from her Long Now Talk, astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker explains where Assembly Theory came from and what it claims. Her starting point is measurement: a theory about the origin
1:09:42Sara Imari Walker on Assembly Theory: Life as Lineages of Propagating Information
What is life, and why do we still lack a language for it? In this Long Now Talk, astrobiologist and theoretical physicist Sara Imari Walker argues that we understand life about as well as humanity und
1:17:08Speed Is a Choice: Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson on Abundance After Trump's Return
At a Long Now Talk in San Francisco on March 27, 2025, the journalist and author Michael Pollan hosted Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, co-authors of Abundance. The book argues that American liberalism
1:04:39A Logic for the Future: Stephen Heintz and Kim Stanley Robinson on Imagining Planetary Governance
On March 19, 2025, at the Cowell Theatre in San Francisco, the Long Now Foundation brought together two people who approach the same problem from opposite ends. Stephen Heintz is a public policy exper
54:22K Allado-McDowell on Neural Media: How AI Locates Us, and Where It Could Look Instead
At a Long Now Talk at San Francisco's Cowell Theatre in February 2025, artist and technologist K Allado-McDowell set out a framework for understanding the moment we are in with AI. They call it "neura
7:03Crossing the Brooklyn Bridge Again: Ahmed Best on Vulnerability and Shared Stories
In this short Long Now talk, actor and Afrofuturist Ahmed Best tells one personal story: walking across the Brooklyn Bridge with his young son, twenty years after he had gone to that same bridge inten
1:02:55Ahmed Best's Formula for Feeling the Future: The Emotional Engine, Einstein, and Godzilla
At the Long Now Foundation's Valentine's Day 2025 event at San Francisco's Herbst Theatre, Ahmed Best argued that the future is not only something to think about. It is something to feel, and to share
54:58Benjamin Bratton on Planetary Computation: Why Our Technology Has Outrun Our Concepts
Benjamin Bratton, Professor of Philosophy of Technology and Speculative Design at UC San Diego and director of the Antikythera program, gave this talk at the Long Now Foundation in January 2025. His c
1:10:32Lost Landscapes of San Francisco 19: Rick Prelinger's Archival Tour of Streets, Labor, Loss and Play
Rick Prelinger's annual Lost Landscapes screening is less a lecture than a live, collectively narrated film. For the nineteenth edition, presented with the Long Now Foundation, Prelinger stitched toge