Big ideas on a longer clock.
Long Now presents lecture-driven conversations for people who want ideas measured beyond news cycles. Recent episodes move from ocean memory and ancient trees to AI empires, abundance politics, biological design, and civilizational optionality.
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Long Now is a lecture-centered podcast about thinking across deep time. It takes the impatience of the present and sets it against oceans, trees, institutions, machines, and planetary systems. The show’s natural scale is large. Episodes ask what humans owe the future, how civilizations preserve optionality, and how better questions can matter as much as better answers. The register is calm, literate, and expansive. It favors speakers who can connect a precise subject to a larger civilizational frame. A talk about the ocean becomes an inquiry into memory, media, microbes, kelp, coral, deep water, and underwater scent. A talk about ancient trees becomes a way to understand how humans project meaning onto living things that outlast them. AI is treated with similar breadth. Kate Crawford’s episode maps technology and power across centuries, while Kim Carson’s talk asks how creative practice with AI might shift from extraction toward reciprocity. The show also spends time on material constraints. Dr. Lynn Rothschild’s work on life as building material brings astrobiology, DNA, mycelial networks, space travel, and circular design into the same conversation. Politics enters through duration rather than partisanship. The conversation with Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, moderated by Michael Pollan, looks at abundance, environmentalism, housing, energy, and the institutional habits that make building harder. Stefan Sagmeister’s talk pushes against catastrophe-saturated information habits by translating long-term human progress into visual art. Indy Johar brings the language of civilizational optionality to soil, water, energy, coordination, uncertainty, and planetary self-awareness. The show is not quick-take philosophy. It is patient, researched, and often visually minded, with several episodes pointing beyond audio toward maps, images, books, and video. The result is a podcast for listeners who want science, culture, design, and ethics held together without reducing any of them to a slogan.
Made for: For curious listeners drawn to philosophy, systems thinking, science, design, ecology, and technology at civilizational scale. It especially suits people who prefer patient context over daily outrage.
What sets it apart: Long Now turns talks into wide-angle editorial journeys, connecting concrete subjects such as ocean memory, ancient trees, AI power, housing, and space biology to long-term responsibility. Its center of gravity is duration: what changes when the time horizon stretches beyond a single lifetime.
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
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A thoughtful case for slowing down with AI before deciding what to build.
Kim Carson's Long Now talk treats AI and creativity as a slower, more human question. Instead of centering speed or novelty, it asks what people are for, what should be built, and who that work should serve.
A clear argument that environmental rules can sometimes slow the future they were meant to protect.
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's Abundance conversation looks past daily politics to the conditions that let societies build for the future: governance structures, cultural stories, and incentives that reward action.
Larry Brilliant connects hippie idealism, monastery life, and the painstaking smallpox work in India.
Larry Brilliant's story follows an unlikely path from left-wing hippie circles to monastery life, United Nations work, and the smallpox campaign in India.
Peter Boghossian applies street epistemology to guests debating free speech, immigration, and belief.
Big questions, patiently tested.
Ryan North discusses his book 'How to Invent Everything', a practical guide for rebuilding civilization from first principles, with the Long Now Foundation.
Kate Raworth’s doughnut model pairs 12 social needs with nine planetary boundaries, offering an alternative to endless GDP growth.
How did a hippie doctor from Detroit end up eradicating smallpox and meeting Steve Jobs in India?
Dr.
Jonathan Keats, who calls himself an experimental philosopher, argues that thought experiments should be run in the world, starting with his 2000 piece at San Francisco's Refusalon gallery, where he thought for 24 hours and sold about $75 worth of thoughts.
Media scholar Melody Jue explores the concept of ocean memory through marine biology and media theory, examining how the sea stores and remembers information.
Stefan Sagmeister argues that despite negative news, long-term data shows human progress, and he uses art to make that visible.
Architect philosopher Indy Johar discusses the concept of civilizational optioneering as a way to protect rare planetary self-awareness in times of volatility.
In Long Now's “Mapping Empires,” Kate Crawford traces representational power from God to the individual human eye and, increasingly, the machine.
Dr.
Kim Carson frames Long Now’s “Inspired by Intelligence” around a single question: “what if AI is not here actually to replace us, but to remind us who we actually are?” She uses a personal example from her custom “Kim GPT,” where feeding it her longhand 2024 intention produced her exact writing twice, to argue that AI can mirror patterns but not tell someone their purpose.
Michael Pollan moderates Rebecca Lendl, Ezra Klein, and Derek Thompson around Abundance, a book about building more houses, faster infrastructure, and a more effective liberal politics.
The Long Now Podcast brings together Kim Stanley Robinson and Stephen Heintz to examine how imagination, policy, and longer timescales could reshape planetary governance.
Jared Farmer discusses his book 'Elder Flora' and the concept of chronodiversity, exploring how humans project values onto ancient trees and use them to think about deep time.
Ryan North discusses his book 'How to Invent Everything', a practical guide for rebuilding civilization from first principles, with the Long Now Foundation.
Dorie Clark discusses how to cultivate long-term thinking in a personal context, countering society's short attention span.