The Long Time Academy podcast aims to galvanise public imagination and collective action to help us all be good ancestors. The podcast actively courts a mainstream audience and is a one-stop destination to easily understand what ‘Long Timeism’ is and give the audience the tools to emotionally experience it. The mission of the podcast series is to find new ways to help us care about the long-term future so that we take responsibility for it in the short-term.
As we face a monumental inflection point for humanity, each of us has a complex, emotional relationship with time - the present feels exhausting as we’re driven to peak productivity, at the same time the future is filled with paralysing dread of the climate crisis, and the sense that centuries of racist and unfair systems are completely intractable; everything feels too urgent and too big to change - with not enough time in which to do it. But can changing our relationship with time change not only how we feel today, but also give us new agency with which to determine our future - as individuals, and as a species?
The Long Time Academy attempts to do just that. Six, hour-long episodes form a cohesive curriculum that gives listeners a new-found sense of spaciousness in their relationship to time, and an awe and passion to become good ancestors.
Host Ella Saltmarshe, is an anthropologist, writer, activist and co-founder of The Long Time Project, a not-for-profit finding new ways to help us care about the long term future, so that we take care of it in the short term.
Beginning with the question “How does time feel for you today?”, the challenge of the series was to meet listeners where they are, then gradually explore larger spans of time and more challenging spiritually, philosophical, economic, legal, political and cultural ideas as the series progresses, with the help of a 40-strong ‘faculty’ including Brian Eno, George the Poet, Celeste Headlee, Adrienne Maree Brown, Jay Griffiths, Katie Paterson, Michelle Schenandoah, and Tyson Yunkaporta. These exceptional contributors explore how we became a society that values life on earth by the microsecond, how we can stretch time, the fairytales behind modern economics, what a future-tense politics might look like, how we decolonise the future, and why pop culture has the power to change the systems we are led to believe are immovable monoliths.
Each interviewee’s contribution is a richly sound-designed scene, bringing their research, ideas or stories to life. The sound design and original music is rooted in the real world, found sound and nature recordings so as to feel familiar but cinematic, rhythmical and visceral, enveloping listeners in a rich and entertaining way.
Ella carefully guides us through this vast subject matter, offering up her own responses to the materials, including personal stories and archive as well prompts, questions and regular pauses for reflection.
Short, interactive exercises - Long Time Practises - accompany each episode, encouraging listeners to feel the ideas as well as understand them. Listeners find themselves walking through history to meet their loved ones in the past and in the future, visualise their own deaths, travel 4.6 billion years in a cinematic deep-time experience, take part in a sacred indigenous practice gifted to the students by a Mohawk clan mother, and learn to decolonise their vision of the future with the actor who played Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars. It’s ‘homework’, but not as you’ve ever known it!
The goal of the podcast is to genuinely transform how listeners feel about the time they have on earth, and to go on a journey together where we develop our capacity to be good ancestors. What makes this podcast so unique is that each entertaining and beautifully sound-designed main episode is coupled with an immersive ‘practice’ episode allowing listeners to not only learn about the topics being discussed, but also feel these ideas and immerse themselves in a variety deep time experiences - a death meditation, a walk through deep time, a never-before-recorded Haudenosaunee ‘thanksgiving’ address, a time-traveling exercise and more.
Accompanying the series is a website (thelongtimeacademy.com) containing tools for listeners to bring long time ideas into their daily lives, and live online events providing an even richer experience for the listener. Despite having just been released, the series is already fulfilling the impact goals of the creative partnership. Following the podcast, the Government of Canada asked host Ella to present to over 3000 Canadian policymakers; in Australia and NZ, groups of policymakers are hosting listening parties; and the podcast is being recommend in popular lifestyle publications like Stylist, Pick of the Week on Great British Podcasts, and has been a Spotify pick.
On average, Apple Podcasts users who hit play on The Long Time Academy spent between 42-59 minutes per episode. This remarkable statistic is a testament to the show’s storytelling approach and series design, and places the show as a best-in-class original podcast from a brand partnership.
