Stewart Brand – The Polymath of Polymaths (#281)

“Stay hungry. Stay foolish.” – Stewart Brand

Stewart Brand (@stewartbrand) is the president of The Long Now Foundation, established to foster long-term thinking and responsibility. He leads a project called Revive & Restore, which seeks to bring back extinct animal species such as the passenger pigeon and woolly mammoth.

Stewart is very well known for founding, editing, and publishing The Whole Earth Catalog (WEC), which changed my life when I was a little kid. It also received a national book award for its 1972 issue.

Stewart is the co-founder of The WELL and The Global Business Network, and author of Whole Earth Discipline, The Clock Of The Long Now, How Buildings Learn, and The Media Lab. He was trained in biology at Stanford and served as an infantry officer in the US Army.

I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did!

You can find the transcript of this episode here. Transcripts of all episodes can be found here.

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Want to hear another conversation with a fascinating polymath?  Listen to this episode with Kevin Kelly, in which we discuss population implosions, The Long Now Foundation, organizational methods for learning, and much more? — Listen to them here (stream below or right-click to download part 1 | part 2 | part 3):

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QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.

Scroll below for links and show notes…

Selected Links from the Episode

• Connect with Stewart Brand:

The Long Now Foundation | Twitter

• Cool Tools for Travel — Tim Ferriss and Kevin Kelly
• Revive & Restore
• Whole Earth Catalog
• Steve Jobs’s Stanford University Commencement Speech
• Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand
• The Clock Of The Long Now: Time and Responsibility by Stewart Brand
• How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built by Stewart Brand
• The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at M.I.T. by Stewart Brand
• Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book by and for Women by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective
• A clip of Stewart Brand and Steve Jobs from The Library of Congress’ Memory & Imagination documentary
• Seeing Whole Systems by Nicky Case, SALT
• The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe by Arthur Koestler
• My most recent TED Talk: Why You Should Define Your Fears Instead of Your Goals
• The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)
• Are Psychedelic Drugs the Next Medical Breakthrough?
• The Merry Pranksters
• Acid Test Graduation Ceremony 1966
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
• The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
• Adventures of a Bystander by Peter F. Drucker
• SRI International’s Augmentation Research Center (ARC)
• Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff
• Pace Layer Thinkers: Stewart Brand and Paul Saffo’s Conversation at The Interval, Recap and Full Audio by Mikl Em, The Long Now Foundation
• SALT Summaries, Condensed Ideas About Long-term Thinking by Stewart Brand and Brian Eno
• Deep Optimism by Matt Ridley, SALT
• Why the West Rules — For Now by Ian Morris, SALT
• How Societies Fail — And Sometimes Succeed by Jared Diamond, SALT
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond
• Time Travel by James Gleick, SALT
• Time Travel: A History by James Gleick
• Kevin Kelly’s various SALT appearances
• Nature is Rebounding: Land- and Ocean-sparing through Concentrating Human Activities by Jesse Ausubel, SALT
• Why Cities Keep on Growing, Corporations Always Die, and Life Gets Faster by Geoffrey West, SALT
• Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West
• The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera
• The Woolly Mammoth Revival, Revive & Restore
• CRISPR
• The American Chestnut Foundation
• Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand by Jon Turney, The Guardian
• Joining 3.5 Billion Years of Microbial Invention by Craig Venter, SALT
• CrossFit
• The Mother of All Demos, presented by Douglas Engelbart (1968)
• Learning to Breathe Fire: The Rise of CrossFit and the Primal Future of Fitness by J.C. Herz
• The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of CrossFit
• Stewart Brand States Information Wants to Be Free, first Hackers Conference in 1984
• The Hackers Conference
• Big History Project
• Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse
• New Games — The Early Days by Bernard Louis De Koven, A Playful Path
• The New Games Book by New Games Foundation
• Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture by Johan Huizinga

Show Notes

• How I was introduced to Stewart’s Whole Earth Catalog (WEC) as a child, and what appealed to me most. [09:15]
• What do people usually remember most from their early exposure to WEC? [12:11]
• Stewart talks about time he spent with Steve Jobs and the question he regrets not asking. [13:49]
• What was intended by WEC’s sentiment of “Stay hungry. Stay foolish?” [16:57]
• Has the randomized course of Stewart’s life been by design or serendipity? [19:52]
• What made Stewart give up skydiving? [23:08]
• How did Stewart emerge from his post-WEC depression, and how does he keep panic at bay today? [30:35]
• Stewart talks about his early experiences with psychedelics — and what made him stop using them. [37:38]
• Stewart talks about his 1966 campaign to NASA (and its Soviet rival agency) for public release of an image of Earth from space. [44:07]
• Stewart’s lessons from R. Buckminster Fuller, Peter Drucker, and Marshall McLuhan. [49:24]
• On influencing civilization by changing its tools rather than the futile pursuit of trying to reshape human nature. [52:11]
• The ongoing debate between artificial intelligence and intelligence augmentation. [54:44]
• The ideas behind The Long Now Foundation and what Stewart aims to accomplish. [56:48]
• Seminars About Long-Term Thinking (SALT) Stewart recommends as an introduction to the series. [59:13]
• Thee woolly mammoth in the room: Revive & Restore’s quest for its de-extinction. [1:10:30]
• What would Stewart say to people fearful of meddling with complex systems — like species de-extinction and climate change reversal? [1:15:09]
• Reintroducing the idea of bioabundance. [1:19:51]
• What Stewart believes environmental purists get wrong about providing for a sustainable future. [1:23:03]
• What’s the secret behind Stewart’s powers of persuasion? [1:27:42]
• How has Stewart made it this far without an archnemesis? [1:30:34]
• Stewart’s favorite failures. [1:32:11]
• What appeals to Stewart about CrossFit training, and how it helped him lose 30 pounds at age 75. [1:34:52]
• Stewart’s thoughts on witnessing the beginning of something big — from CrossFit to Douglas Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos. [1:38:19]
• Caution to anyone who might develop a myopic view of fitness based on one camp’s approach. [1:45:51]
• In what ways does Stewart believe information wants to be free? [1:47:23]
• The rewards of being a pack rat. [1:54:22]
• What class would Stewart like to teach? [1:57:15]
• Stewart’s approach to long-term projects at age 78. [1:59:09]
• On a lifelong fascination with games, and how James Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games has changed Stewart’s thinking. [2:04:37]
• The contrast between goals and pathways. [2:16:45]
• The power of changing one’s mind frequently along the way. [2:22:57]
• Can politicians succeed if they have the courage to change their minds? [2:27:06]
• Books Stewart recommends to someone who wants to learn to think more scientifically. [2:32:31]
• What does Stewart wish he knew when he was my age? [2:35:46]
• Final thoughts on how we might overcome a fear of — and learn to welcome — unintended consequences. [2:38:39]

People Mentioned

• Kevin Kelly
• Tim O’Reilly
• Steve Jobs
• Nicky Case
• Brian Eno
• Arthur Koestler
• John Kerry
• Ryan Phelan
• Richard Rockefeller
• Ken Kesey
• Tom Wolfe
• R. Buckminster Fuller
• Marshall McLuhan
• Peter Drucker
• Steve Wozniak
• Douglas Engelbart
• John Markoff
• Matt Ridley
• Ian Morris
• Jared Diamond
• James Gleick
• Jesse Ausubel
• Geoffrey West
• Milan Kundera
• Danny Hillis
• John Dewey
• William James
• Al Gore
• Craig Venter
• Jerry Brown
• Ralph Gracie
• J.C. Herz
• Bill English
• Alan Kay
• Lee Felsenstein
• Frederic Spiegelberg
• Oliver Sacks
• Jane McGonigal
• James Carse
• Gregory Bateson
• John von Neumann
• Scott Adams

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