Policy makers typically ignore or misuse history. They are attracted by simplistic theories and analogies and take little account of huge events outside their policy-making domain. Scholarly historians can cure those blindnesses but are seldom invited to. Specifically, trained historians can help improve policy decisions by bringing the perspectives of vertical history (deep causes), horizontal history (complex linkages), chronological proportionality (many big deals aren't big for long), uninte...
Jul 13, 2010•2 hr 41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Finally achieving fusion energy may be closer than everyone thinks. For decades the dream has been to employ the reaction that powers stars to generate high-volume electricity without the drawbacks of fission reactors---no high-level waste, no weapons application, no risk of meltdown, no use of uranium, and (as with fission) no greenhouse gases. Ed Moses is director of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore Labs. Focussing massive amounts of laser light for a billionth of a s...
Jun 17, 2010•2 hr 39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hidden and powerful and growing worldwide at twice the rate of the legal economy, "deviant globalization" is described by Nils Gilman as "human trafficking, drug dealing, gun running, cross-border waste disposal, organ trading, sex tourism, money laundering, transnational gangs, piracy (both intellectual and physical), and so on." He adds: "The structure of the current global economy is not designed for equitable, plodding growth; it's designed to reward opportunistic, risk-seeking innovators. W...
May 04, 2010•2 hr 35 min•Transcript available on Metacast David Eagleman may be the best combination of scientist and fiction-writer alive. Sum, his collection of afterlife alternatives, made a stunning literary debut last year and now appears in 21 languages. Simultaneously he is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, specializing in time perception. In this talk he spells out how to save the world.
Apr 02, 2010•2 hr 30 min•Transcript available on Metacast President Obama's first executive action was the Open Government Memorandum calling for more transparent, participatory, and collaborative government. It is likely that one of the longest lasting effects of the current administration will be how much it changed the culture of Washington by opening government data and pioneering innovations in policymaking. As the United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer and leader of the President's Open Government Initiative in the White House, Beth Noveck...
Mar 05, 2010•2 hr 45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Journalist Weisman traveled the world to investigate what happens when humans stop occupying an area. How long do our artifacts last? How does nature recover? What does that say about the human impact on the world? What would be the actual sequence of events if all of humanity suddenly disappeared? The exercise provides inspiration and techniques for humans to occupy Earth more lightly and therefore more durably.
Feb 25, 2010•2 hr 42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Long Finance aims to “improve society’s understanding and use of finance over the long-term”, in contrast to the short-termism that defines today’s financial and economic views. The immediate objective of the initiative is to establish a Foundation that can ignite global debate on long-term finance, by examining how commerce should enable and encourage environmental and social sustainability.
Feb 01, 2010•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast Anthropologist Wade Davis is one of the world's great story tellers, with personal adventures to match. An Explorer-in-Residence at National Geographic, he specializes in hanging out with traditional peoples and exploring their religious practices. He first came to public notice with his discovery of the reality of zombies in Haitian voodoo and the substance used to poison them---chronicled in his 1985 book, The Serpent and the Rainbow. He is the author of 13 books, including One River and Shado...
Jan 14, 2010•2 hr 49 min•Transcript available on Metacast Rick Prelinger, a guerrilla archivist who collects the uncollected and makes it accessible, presents the fourth of his annual Lost Landscapes of San Francisco screenings. You'll see an eclectic montage of rediscovered and rarely-seen film clips showing life, landscapes, labor and leisure in a vanished San Francisco as captured by amateurs, newsreel cameramen and industrial filmmakers. How we remember and record the past reveals much about how we address the future. Prelinger will preface the scr...
Dec 05, 2009•2 hr 47 min•Transcript available on Metacast Are we the first civilization to try and innovate our way out of climate change? How have past societies engineered sustainable solutions to a shifting world? Sander van der Leeuw, Director of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University and External Faculty Member of the Santa Fe Institute, has spent his career studying these questions. At his Seminar van der Leeuw will be exploring this research into the past, as well as its application to our current global pred...
Nov 19, 2009•2 hr 30 min•Transcript available on Metacast This talk launches Brand's new book: Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto. His argument is that taking account of the emerging global forces of climate change, urbanization, and biotechnology forces a rethink of some traditional environmental positions. Cities are Green, with huge room for improvement. Nuclear power is Green, with better still to come. Genetic engineering is Green and shows potentially revolutionary promise. Direct intervention in the ...
Oct 10, 2009•2 hr 30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Arthur Ganson uses humble materials to create kinetic sculptures of humor, drama, and emotion. His work has been shown around the world, and has been an ongoing inspiration for the 10,000 Year Clock project at Long Now. His machinated gestures play with time spans that range from the epochal to the momentary. One of the touchstone pieces for the Clock project is the Machine with Concrete. The input of the piece is a 200 revolution per minute motor, and after series of gear redu...
Sep 15, 2009•1 hr 23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Wayne Clough is the 12th Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. In July 1998 he took the reins of the world's largest museum and research complex and has since initiated long-range planning for the Smithsonian that includes increasing its accessibility. Many of the 137 million objects in the Institution's collection will be digitized and made available to the public along with curatorial content produced by Smithsonian experts.
Aug 18, 2009•1 hr 27 min•Transcript available on Metacast She's the head of a plant genetics lab at UC Davis; he teaches organic farming there. They're married (with kids), and they coauthored Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food. In the book they wrote: "To meet the appetites of the world's population without drastically hurting the environment requires a visionary new approach: combining genetic engineering and organic farming. Genetic engineering can be used to develop seeds with enhanced resistance to pests and pathog...
Jul 29, 2009•2 hr 41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Paul Romer is best known as the lead developer of New Growth Theory, which shows how societies can speed up the discovery and implementation of new technologies; essentially, ideas about how objects interact. However, to address the big problems we’ll face this century; insecurity, harm to the environment, and global poverty, new technologies will not be enough. His current focus is on mechanisms that can speed up the discovery and implementation of new rules - ideas about how people inter...
May 19, 2009•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast Michael Pollan describes his program to transform American agriculture as a "sun food agenda." He is the author of two influential books---In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto; and The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. He is the director the Knight Program in Science and Environmental Journalism at UC-Berkeley.
May 06, 2009•58 min•Transcript available on Metacast More than any other political entity, cities learn from each other. San Francisco's youthful mayor has traveled the world examining what works best in other cities. Now in his sixth year on the job, he has seen various ideas and programs bloom or wither, and has led the city's ambition to become one of the world's Greenest. In this talk we hear about lessons learned and plans in the making, in a world now mostly urban.
Apr 09, 2009•1 hr 1 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Pirahã, a remote Amazonian tribe with little outside contact, have attracted the attention of mainstream media, scientists, zen buddhists, professors of religion, mathematicians, philosophers and others because of their unusual confluence of values, language, and culture. Now, after 20 years of high intellectual and physical adventure living among them, Dan Everett proposes a revolution in anthropology and linguistics: culture profoundly shapes language, even at the most fundamental l...
Mar 21, 2009•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast A close student and observer of the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe twenty years ago, engineer Dmitry Orlov finds a similar sequence of events taking shape in America. His savagely humorous presentation spells out how Russia was better prepared than the US is for the stages of collapse that begin with financial meltdown. Renewal awaits on the other side of collapse, and there are ways to hasten that process. Orlov is the author of Reinventing Collapse: Soviet Example and American...
Feb 14, 2009•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast "It is not accurate to say we can still stop climate change," says Saul Griffith, the Bay Area inventor who received a MacArthur "genius" award in 2007. "We are now working to stop worse climate change or much-worse-than-worse climate change." Griffith has done the research and the math to figure out exactly what it will take for humanity to soften the impact of climate change in the next 25 years, and he lays it out in a dazzling presentation. It is horrifying news. The politi...
Jan 17, 2009•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast Rick Prelinger is a guerrilla archivist who collects the uncollected and makes it accessible. Prelinger will be presenting his third annual "Lost Landscapes of San Francisco" event, an eclectic montage of lost and rarely-seen film clips showing life, landscapes and labor in a vanished San Francisco as captured by amateurs, newsreel cameramen and industrial filmmakers. How we remember and record the past reveals much about how we address the future. Prelinger will preface the film with a brief ta...
Dec 20, 2008•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast Bioengineer Drew Endy is the leading enabler of open-source biotechnology. Technology historian Jim Thomas is the leading critic of biotech, based with ETC Group in Ottawa. "Synthetic Biology includes the broad redefinition and expansion of biotechnology, with the ultimate gils of being able to design and build engineered biological systems that process information, manipulate chemicals, fabricate materials and structures, produce energy, provide food, and maintain and enhance human health and o...
Nov 18, 2008•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast "You cannot manage elements of the environment individually, one by one, or all your best efforts will unravel," says Johnson. Government planning is needed, and it must match the pace and scale of the environment itself. He instigated that kind of planning when he was California's Secretary of Resources in the 1980s, and he is inspired by the exemplary Green Plans of the Netherlands, New Zealand, and Singapore. In thi...
Oct 04, 2008•1 hr 3 min•Transcript available on Metacast Prizes are proving themselves as powerful tools to accelerate goal-specific innovation. Diamandis, the founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation, has built on the success of the $10 million Ansari X Prize that inaugurated private-sector spaceflight in 2004 with Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne. Currently in play are new prizes for a $10,000 human genome, for a private Moon landing, and for a super-efficient car, with more in the pipeline. But prize contests so far have focussed on near-term goals-...
Sep 13, 2008•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast At an event hosted by the Long Now Foundation, science fiction author Neal Stephenson reads from his latest novel Anathem.
Sep 09, 2008•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast The viral success story of the year is a techno-thriller called Daemon. Software developer Suarez printed the book himself after being turned down by mainstream publishers. Blog raves, Amazon raves, and brief item in Wired magazine turned the book deservedly into a runaway hit. In this presentation, his first on the subject, Suarez spells out the ideas behind Daemon and its forthcoming sequel, Freedom™: "'Bots' are simple software programs designed to automate tasks - such as finding, retr...
Aug 09, 2008•1 hr 18 min•Transcript available on Metacast Burtynsky's massively informative photographs change minds and influence policy. They are also exquisite art. Their historical value will grow with time. Other art has similar reach. There should be a gallery that collects, displays, and sifts such works over centuries and millennia, and develops ways to preserve them. That is exactly Burtynsky's plan--- a 10,000-year Gallery to accompany the 10,000-year Clock. His presentation will explore and demonstrate the idea. Edward Burtynsky is an Office...
Jul 24, 2008•1 hr 17 min•Transcript available on Metacast Everything living evolves, but humans evolve culturally as well as biologically, and that puts us in a peculiar relation to the rest of life, with a peculiar responsibility. If we can understand how cultural evolution works, we'll have a better handle on how to manage our responsibilities. The question that Ehrlich has been exploring lately is whether cultural evolution really does show patterns that would yield predictive theory. He now has data from Polynesian canoes that indicate the answer i...
Jun 28, 2008•1 hr 17 min•Transcript available on Metacast Quadir is the now-legendary founder of GrameenPhone, which transformed his home country of Bangladesh in the 1990s and led the way for the cellphone revolution throughout the developing world. Currently Quadir heads the Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship at MIT and is building Emergence BioEnergy Inc., a project to develop local electricity for the rural poor, using such devices as a fuel cell that runs on anaerobic bacteria. Linking new technology with the boundless resourceful...
May 22, 2008•1 hr 16 min•Transcript available on Metacast Distinguished historian Ferguson and renowned futurist Schwartz disagree profoundly on the nature of human progress. Both use scenarios (called "counterfactual history" by Ferguson) to analyze how events play out. Ferguson wrote The War of the World (2006), a history of the violence that defined the 20th Century. Schwartz wrote The Art of the Long View (1991), the standard text on scenario planning, and The Long Boom (1999), on global prosperity in the 21st century. Both speakers regard history ...
Apr 29, 2008•2 hr 41 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
