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 that, when assessed from a long-term perspective, most aspects of human development have improved.

Using relevant data from the United Nations, World Bank, and other global and national databases, Sagmeister artfully transforms the numbers into captivating visual representations that yield resonant understanding. By embedding information into eclectic mediums — antique paintings, clothing, sculptural objects, and installations — Sagmeister bridges the past and present, while telling a hopeful story of progress over time.

In a nonstop news cycle of crisis and outrage, Sagmeister’s work presses pause. This talk will give us a moment to reflect on the bigger picture. Sagmeister makes long-term progress more palpable, more perceptible, more human-scale. This talk won’t deny the present-day metacrisis, but will situate our current moment within the long upward arc of human advancement in health, education, safety, and quality of life. In doing so, he’ll challenge the helplessness that arises when we give into the panic, and falsely believe the future is in uncontestable decline.

Sagmeister’s approach reinforces a core Long Now principle: we must see beyond the present moment to meaningfully steward future generations. His talk provides tools for thought and action to cultivate an expanded temporal awareness. Sagmeister’s work demonstrates how perspective itself is a design problem. By showing that collective human action has produced measurable gains over centuries, his work restores a sense of participation in history.

This talk was presented February 17, 02026 at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco.

Episode notes: https://longnow.org/talks/02026-sagmeister/

The event livestream is here: https://youtube.com/live/KXVf6lBxx1Q

This talk is part of Long Now Talks.

Launched by Stewart Brand in 02003, Long Now Talks has invited more than 400 leading thinkers to share their civilization-scale ideas with a live audience and millions around the globe tuning in to our podcast and videos. Long Now Talks are brought to you by The Long Now Foundation, which has spent the last 25 years igniting cultural imagination around long-term thinking.

By inspiring thought and conversation about how we've been shaped by the last 10,000 years and what might be in store for us over the next 10,000 years, Long Now Talks seek to expand our collective sense of the present moment. Long Now Talks cover futurism and speculative fiction; time, nature, and contemplative practices; the intersection of the humanities and sciences; the evolution of counterculture to cyberculture; cultural imagination, land art and public monuments; and of course, long-term thinking and being a good ancestor.

In our age of compounding crises, The Long Now Foundation is a counterweight. We are a force that imagines new possibilities, thinks critically, and takes action over the long term. We believe that when we all come together, bound by commitment and curiosity, audacious things become possible. Will you join us? https://longnow.org/join

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 economic system collapses value into singular metrics like price, which renders our systems brittle and less capable of adaptation and optionality.

To survive the long now, we must transition to an "optioneering" architecture. Our institutions and economic grammar must be redesigned to increase the surface area of future freedom, not foreclose on it. We do this by shifting away from "closed projects" with finite ends, to "open gardens" where success is measured by the system's ability to evolve and surprise us. By valuing adaptation over control, we can build a civilization capable of coherence in motion.

The Q&A for this talk will be hosted by Denise Hearn, Long Now's Director of Strategic Initiatives.

Indy Johar is cofounder of Dark Matter Labs and of the RIBA award winning architecture and urban practice Architecture00. He is also a founding director of Open Systems Lab, seeded WikiHouse (open source housing) and Open Desk (open source furniture company). Indy is a non-executive international Director of the BloxHub, the Nordic Hub for sustainable urbanization. He is on the advisory board for the Future Observatory and is part of the committee for the London Festival of Architecture. He is also a fellow of the London Interdisciplinary School.

Indy was 02016-17 Graham Willis Visiting Professorship at Sheffield University. He was Studio Master at the Architectural Association - 02019-02020, UNDP Innovation Facility Advisory Board Member 02016-20 and RIBA Trustee 02017-20. He has taught and lectured at various institutions from the University of Bath, TU-Berlin; University College London, Princeton, Harvard, MIT and New School. He is currently a professor at RMIT University.

This talk was presented January 27, 02026 at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco.

Episode notes: https://longnow.org/talks/02026-johar/

This talk is part of Long Now Talks.

Launched by Stewart Brand in 02003, Long Now Talks has invited more than 400 leading thinkers to share their civilization-scale ideas with a live audience and millions around the globe tuning in to our podcast and videos. Long Now Talks are brought to you by The Long Now Foundation, which has spent the last 25 years igniting cultural imagination around long-term thinking.

By inspiring thought and conversation about how we've been shaped by the last 10,000 years and what might be in store for us over the next 10,000 years, Long Now Talks seek to expand our collective sense of the present moment. Long Now Talks cover futurism and speculative fiction; time, nature, and contemplative practices; the intersection of the humanities and sciences; the evolution of counterculture to cyberculture; cultural imagination, land art and public monuments; and of course, long-term thinking and being a good ancestor.

In our age of compounding crises, The Long Now Foundation is a counterweight. We are a force that imagines new possibilities, thinks critically, and takes action over the long term. We believe that when we all come together, bound by commitment and curiosity, audacious things become possible. Will you join us? https://longnow.org/join

Kate Crawford - Mapping Empires by The Long Now Foundation

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 print new biological materials on demand.

Cells, Rothschild explains, are micromachines with a 3.8-billion-year R&D history. Her research harnesses these ancient biological processes to engineer living systems that make tools, materials, and medicines that could sustain astronauts and settlements beyond Earth.

This talk was presented October 14, 02025 at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco.

Episode notes: https://longnow.org/talks/02025-rothschild/

The event livestream is here: https://youtu.be/caKccZHa7E4

This talk is part of Long Now Talks.

Launched by Stewart Brand in 02003, Long Now Talks has invited more than 400 leading thinkers to share their civilization-scale ideas with a live audience and millions around the globe tuning in to our podcast and videos. Long Now Talks are brought to you by The Long Now Foundation, which has spent the last 25 years igniting cultural imagination around long-term thinking.

By inspiring thought and conversation about how we've been shaped by the last 10,000 years and what might be in store for us over the next 10,000 years, Long Now Talks seek to expand our collective sense of the present moment. Long Now Talks cover futurism and speculative fiction; time, nature, and contemplative practices; the intersection of the humanities and sciences; the evolution of counterculture to cyberculture; cultural imagination, land art and public monuments; and of course, long-term thinking and being a good ancestor.

In our age of compounding crises, The Long Now Foundation is a counterweight. We are a force that imagines new possibilities, thinks critically, and takes action over the long term. We believe that when we all come together, bound by commitment and curiosity, audacious things become possible.

Will you join us? https://longnow.org/join

Blaise Agüera y Arcas - What is Intelligence? by The Long Now Foundation

Kim Carson - Inspired by Intelligence: Purpose and Creativity in the AI Era by The Long Now Foundation

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, telling a 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.

This talk was presented February 25, 02025 at the Cowell Theatre in San Francisco. The event livestream is here: https://www.youtube.com/live/AsCGRjl3zac?si=KBfIfkqatLwdMr8M

Episode notes: https://longnow.org/ideas/neural-media/

To learn more about K Allado-McDowell’s work, visit https://www.kalladomcdowell.com/

This talk is part of Long Now Talks.

Launched by Stewart Brand in 02003, Long Now Talks has invited more than 400 leading thinkers to share their civilization-scale ideas with a live audience and millions around the globe tuning in to our podcast and videos. Long Now Talks are brought to you by The Long Now Foundation, which has spent the last 25 years igniting cultural imagination around long-term thinking.

By inspiring thought and conversation about how we've been shaped by the last 10,000 years and what might be in store for us over the next 10,000 years, Long Now Talks seek to expand our collective sense of the present moment. Long Now Talks cover futurism and speculative fiction; time, nature, and contemplative practices; the intersection of the humanities and sciences; the evolution of counterculture to cyberculture; cultural imagination, land art and public monuments; and of course, long-term thinking and being a good ancestor.

In our age of compounding crises, The Long Now Foundation is a counterweight — our community of 12,000 strong across 65 countries over our first quarter century. We are a force that imagines new possibilities, thinks critically, and takes action over the long term. We believe that when we all come together, bound by commitment and curiosity, audacious things become possible. Will you join us? https://longnow.org/join

Sara Imari Walker - An Informational Theory of Life by The Long Now Foundation

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 society stuck in low gear. Yet they also see opportunity to turn those failures on their heads, and to build a better society based around more responsive, efficient governance.

This is the vision that animates Abundance, Klein and Thompson’s new book and the focus of their Long Now Talk, hosted by Michael Pollan and co-sponsored with Manny’s and City Arts & Lectures. Despite Long Now’s focus on long-term thinking — of counterbalancing civilization’s pathologically short attention span — there was much to appreciate in Klein and Thompson’s call for American governance to “rediscover speed as a progressive value.” In their wide-ranging discussion, the two authors made the case for a vision of liberalism that builds, both for its own sake and as a bulwark against reactionary right-wing movements that have capitalized on the shortcomings of contemporary progressive politics.

Episode notes: https://longnow.org/ideas/abundance/

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 Director of Antikythera, an cross-disciplinary think tank researching the philosophy of computation supported by Berggruen Institute. In his Long Now Talk, Bratton takes 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 its name. But his inquiry stretches 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.

This talk was presented January 29, 02025 at the Cowell Theater in San Francisco.

To learn more about Benjamin Bratton’s Long Now Talk, go to

https://longnow.org/ideas/a-philosophy-of-planetary-computation/

To learn more about Antikythera’s work, go to

https://antikythera.org/

This Talk is part of Long Now Talks.

Launched by Stewart Brand in 02003, Long Now Talks has invited more than 400 leading thinkers to share their civilization-scale ideas with a live audience and millions around the globe tuning in to our podcast and videos. Long Now Talks are brought to you by The Long Now Foundation, which has spent the last 25 years igniting cultural imagination around long-term thinking.

By inspiring thought and conversation about how we've been shaped by the last 10,000 years and what might be in store for us over the next 10,000 years, Long Now Talks seek to expand our collective sense of the present moment. Long Now Talks cover futurism and speculative fiction; time, nature, and contemplative practices; the intersection of the humanities and sciences; the evolution of counterculture to cyberculture; cultural imagination, land art and public monuments; and of course, long-term thinking and being a good ancestor.

In our age of compounding crises, The Long Now Foundation is a counterweight — our community of 12,000 strong across 65 countries over our first quarter century. We are a force that imagines new possibilities, thinks critically, and takes action over the long term. We believe that when we all come together, bound by commitment and curiosity, audacious things become possible. Will you join us? https://longnow.org/join