hello everyone and welcome back to conversations with tyler today i'm chatting with stuart brand and stewart is an individual who is above all else an individual and who defies summary but think of him as someone who was there early or their first in a multitude of movements including cyber culture psychedelics the importance of native americans and their philosophy the whole earth catalog the entire san francisco
scene the long now foundation and the notion of the importance of durability and the idea of maintenance the idea of bringing back willie mammoth to life and much much more stuart brand welcome no thanks it's a delight and an honor to be here thinking back on your entire life in which ways do you see yourself as a product of the cold war i was in a town that was in rockford illinois that was rated as number seven on the list of the uh
american cities to be destroyed by the soviet union with bombs uh because we built machine tools and they thought that was upstream of american industry and therefore blah blah blah i was younger than 10 by then and so i had nightmares about wandering around in a destroyed rockford where i was the only person left alive so i had a certain built-in apprehension and among things that led to as you may remember i think you're old enough to remember
when the mushroom cloud of the atomic explosion was the sort of symbol of human civilization at that point that was the way global everything thought about itself is the threat of of nuclear annihilation and uh the photograph of the earth from space that came along 68 and 69 70 from the apollo program completely replaced that nuclear cloud with an image of a very hopeful looking earth and it's interesting because i realize now
the earth is sort of being deployed that photograph which was so hopeful and green and better than the mushroom cloud is now evoked a lot in context of climate change and once again it's sort of a an image of threat rather than a promise so am i correct in thinking of you of somehow taking the research environment of world war ii the notion of threat but redeveloping the ideas of the computer and the network forum to put forward
some more optimistic also more decentralized vision of the future yeah i think there's some motivations for all of that and i paid very close attention as i started to pay attention to things to the research library and electronics that was going on at mit and they were studying shannon's version of information they were studying uh how communications electronic communications and then digital communications were transforming humanity basically
and so that was a set of premises this was before we had moore's law but i had a sense of a self-enhancing process that was going to not just change everything once but change it many times that's what exponentials do if they keep going and so i sort of rode that wave of an engineering understanding of civilization that i have to this day and how is it that you became such a decentralist oh god decentralist essentially you're right
um well i'm mainly i think you'll probably see this with the artist that you study um i got a degree in biology from stanford and then was going off to be an army officer but in the course of that i started hanging out with artists in bohemians in north beach in san francisco this is the late 50s early 60s and so my first calling was as a professional photographer that then turned into a so-called creative photographer doing art
and i was doing multimedia with a group called usko in new york and basically took on the role as an artist in the world and that kind of stuck and so my media would change a lot i would start non-profits and sometimes businesses and various things but it was always this um not part of a hierarchical organization and not trying to build a hierarchical organization it was um basically enhancing creativity at the individual level
and so with the whole earth catalog that led to a kind of a lazy libertarianism that i later got over when i worked for governor brown of the state of california but it was um and remember also as a biologist and the evolution darwinian evolution is the most decentralized thing that you can imagine it's way beyond the market economy is something that runs itself and is self-organizing at every level and at every scale and so um i haven't
answered that question before so answering it this time i think i've talked myself into being a darwinian what was the influence of nikos kazantzakis on your thought the greek authors orbit the greek right yes orbit the greek and odysseus the
modern sequel and so on which i think i'm the only person who read um there was a strong committed romanticism there it was also clear in ein rand who i also paid attention to for a while before the preposterousness
of it all took it over but um kazumasaki had this you know sort of commit everything to um to your theory of the world even if it's wrong and i got over that also because that's that way lies madness and also great destruction but it was fun to go down that road with him he's a beautiful writer and thinker in which ways is your thought drawing from america's pre-industrial past well i old enough to have actually lived
uh with uh ice boxes ice is what kept refrigerators cold in michigan in our summers and we used outhouses so a certain extent i'm just you know grounded in midwestern um forest living but also i for some reason picked up a strong through a writer named kenneth roberts a strong identification with new england and kind of traditional new england buckminster fuller later played right into that for me and so all of that has a
kind of grounded continuity uh i was uh you know one of the three guns midwesterners where i started with a bb gun and then got a pellet rifle and then a 22 and then a more serious rifle um so hunting and fishing were part of the world i was in um i didn't do much of either one but that was who we were you wanted to be a good outdoorsman alfred hitchcock's rear window how did it matter for you oh god well you know because of the name james
stewart because he was kind of lanky and laconic um i identified with him my older brother mike i figured it was bert lancaster but i was james stewart and so um two movies that stewart made were rear window where he was uh with grace kelly and he was a photojournalist and that looked exciting and i later became a photojournalist and then also he was in a movie called broken arrow which was the first movie that was
liberal about american indians it was really really well written well researched on churaca apache culture and james stewart there is the guy who connects with indians and when i later married an indian woman lois jennings uh we used to play scenes from that where she's watching him shaving and wondering what the hell he's doing because indians don't shave and uh we just played that stuff out so james stewart was a handy character to
identify with for me and what do you think is the major intellectual influence from native american or indian perspectives on your thought is it the idea of maintenance something else well part of it is that i mean a surprise for me i've been surprised a couple times i was surprised in venice that it was basically an asiatic uh town i was surprised by the indians i was photographing in oregon in 1963 i guess it was um
that it was such a rich and active culture this was not uh people in the past with feathers and teepees this was people in the present they were doing a wild horse roundup they were cowboys not uh you know cowboys and indians are
together and a rather different cowboys than the ones i'd seen the white cowboys tend to be very uh ferociously individualistic and competitive and the indian cowboys i saw were much much more collaborative um and there was a
gentleness a constant humor a welcome to people like me so when i started hanging out i was inspired by that experience to visit a lot of reservations and just hang out with indians i eventually did a multimedia show called america needs indians and that turned out to be become a point of reference for the hippie subculture and it was basically one subculture paying attention to another subculture for inspiration and um
and a sense of identity so the the long-haired convergence as it was called was um a way for the the older indians the the long-haired gentleman uh and the younger indians who were trying to decide who to be because they had a lot of choices are realizing that the continuity of their native culture was a really valuable thing not something to feel bad about or to flee from and that's played out very well so uh indians are way better shaped now
than they were when i first started paying attention or when marlon brando i did before i got to know marlon um he was basically at every place that i went to before i was hanging out with the fish indians in washington uh with the um sort of revolutionary indians in oklahoma and it was regarded with affection and respect by the indians that i met now if i try to place you in the earlier part of your career if i compare you to buckminster fuller
norbert weiner gregory bateson what are the key variables where you disagree with them how should i sum up intellectually that difference um i bought robert weiner i guess first and uh he's held up very well uh buckminster fuller the artists i was hanging out with were paying close attention to him and to marshall mcluhan and um and that he was this amazing uh thinker who sort of re revolutionized revolutionized his whole behavior and
his whole thought patterns around what he thought was a more um productive way to behave and think in the world the only person i know who's that radical with himself is kevin kelly who occasionally takes a notion and just goes all the way down just to see what's there so bucky only really changed himself once but it was an impressive change when i came across gregory basin he was sort of the corrective for um
for buckminster fuller for me because fuller was so totally an engineer uh what what basin would call a kind of an input output approach to understanding and solving everything whereas uh basin was much more he was aware that every system is basically self-referential to some degree which um that's the kind of thing fuller would never take on and hierarchically organized at a very deep conceptual level and uh and that we are always immersed
in the system that we think we're isolating something from and so um gregory was wonderfully dubious about uh engineering solutions about naive intention um and went a little far in the mystical direction for me and so there were later crisis for that for me because i'd kind of gone a mystical route back when i studied comparative religion at stanford and uh that turned out to be eventually non-productive and i think counterproductive often
people go down a mystical or romantic route but that was all stuff that i was kind of working through and i got to know for i got to know gregory bateson very well i never met weiner but i hung out later with people like marvin minsky and other part of the mit intelligentsia who are really still my frame of reference so in 1968 the whole earth catalog you have the view that what the world needs is a photo of the earth appearing to be
one thing what is the photo we need today well it's interesting is the various photos of earth and one of the things i learned early on is people fixed on basically two photographs the earth rise photograph of the moon in the foreground which was powerful because he saw uh in one frame and in one frame of reference a dead planet and a living planet and boy the difference is striking and you're glad that you're on the living
planet it sort of incites you to want to make sure that it stays living um and then there's the so-called blue marble where the uh photograph was taken with the sun behind the spaceship behind the camera and so you see uh there's no crescent there's no gibbous earth it's just a big round earth like people expect which of course is the rarest photograph you can take you have to be right in line with the sun to get that image
and but there were thousands of other photographs of earth soviets took some we took countless ones and eventually i found their drawer at nasa headquarters in washington where they all are i just paged through her and you know picked out these amazing images and started using them in later whole earth catalogs um i i think one of the best things that's happened in this last century is that outside the planet perspective
and uh every astronaut comes back with stories of how amazing it was even though they're trained for and prepared for uh being amazed they are then really amazed by getting out there in the photograph it's just a glimpse of how powerful it is to be off planet and see the planet as a whole so that i think we'll continue as we explore the rest of the solar system uh but mostly with robots sometimes with humans um lately i don't think we're going to
the stars tyler no i think it's too far what do you think i don't think we are either i think it's impossible uh because of the distance because and the wear and tear on bodies even if you freeze them and uh you know physical space is not what is scarce so why not nevada i like to say okay right about space colonies where are you on those right outside the earth i think there will be some but i've not for a long
time been very optimistic about space as the future of progress i just don't see what's the scarce input out there that we really need so if you think well the earth is so crowded we must go elsewhere but if you've lived in new jersey or the netherlands or you know south korea that hardly seems like an imperative exactly um i think i should i think it'll be basically voluntary and um and of interest uh it's you know science fiction can makes
great use of the generation ships and so on but uh kim stanley robinson recently did a book called i think aurora where basically makes your point in my point that uh even if you get people out that far the wear and tear on the social fabric on the biology on everything you cannot isolate a very complex biological system like humans for that long and and expect to get anywhere that's useful so what was the nature of your mother's
interest in space and space colonies she seemed almost obsessed with it yeah she was an ambassador girl who was a liberal in probably a not very liberal town in northern illinois and um she kind of fell in love with the varna von braun and the very early space stuff and so she got all of the willie lay and uh you know the other kind of popular from colliers and saturday evening postmate magazines and and books that came out at that time
lotting going to the moon and going to mars she loved all that stuff and when later in life i got to know an astronaut named rusty schweikert i took and we went to see the movie uh the right stuff my mother and rusty this astronaut went to that movie together and that was a real connection for her to the dream do you think the images of the navy ufo videos will have cultural resonance the way the image of a single whole earth did
oh i don't track on that at all but evidently you do what do you see there i see a very serious puzzle that our military and cia cannot figure out at all i suppose i think there's a a modest chance it's an actual alien drone probe probably not a very interesting drone probe just sent out to follow us and then run away uh i've given that five or ten percent in my estimations but i find it very puzzling it forces me to think about our
world a lot that we could have multiple sensory sources of data measuring an object that moves very quickly and we simply cannot figure out what it is and it dates back to at least 2004 possibly much longer so to simply say oh it's the china or it's laser-induced plasma a lot a lot of explanations just don't quite seem to cut it good well it keeps some mystery in your life i i um there's things like that that i sort of just shrug and adopt a
two-minded approach uh it might be true is it something i can do anything about is it something that's gonna affect me uh if not i'll just you know stay open to uh further news but in the meantime um kind of shrug at it because one of the things you probably notice as you get older you've seen a lot of illusions come and go and i've seen a lot of uh the world is doomed illusions come and go you know y2k when we got all the computers in
there stop because they don't know how to handle the year 2000 and stuff like that uh on and on peak oil and one thing after another so i become a uh trying to encourage a certain sense of perspective and realism about when people say that the world is going to end because of this fat or the other thing um humanity's been around for a long time now the world's been around for a long time now biology is incredibly resilient and robust
and i think the world ending trope is just a waste of mind when you put out the whole earth catalog how much did you think about the font and style of the early editions well i was you know i stole everything um the typeface the windsor typeface i used on the uh the whole earth catalog there's sort of become now the typeface of hippie done apparently when i look at some of the nostalgia stuff that was the l.l bean type font
um that they used as i admired i was building on my father's interest in in mail order catalogs and ll bean was one of the ones we really liked and there was a kind of a straightforward new england honesty about it that i really appreciated and so he would have a leather belt in there for 2.25 and the the write-up on it instead of uh you know this will make you more of a man i just said this is pretty good a little leather belt uh 2.25 cents
and that kind of pragmatic clarity and succinctness uh i took as a model of how to review things in the whole earth catalog do you know what i think of when i see editions of that catalog i wonder how did you manage to typeset the whole thing oh yeah well a couple things made possible uh self-publishing a book that ambitious um and one of them was the ibm's electric composer it was the golf ball uh striker where you could take one golf
ball that had all the letters on it uh in a particular size and font and put on another one italic or whatever and so you could do very complex typesetting with basically a kind of a jumped up electric uh typewriter and so that led us to um really good compositing right there in real time and likewise photography uh getting half tones it was a brand new device that would let you make halftones and lots of times i just clipped stuff
out of magazines and books and just pasted it down and then paste ups um we originally used uh beeswax uh tube in a big old frying pan electric frying pan with melted beeswax and just paste that on the back of something and slap it down on the page and that was how we laid it down how is it that the whole earth catalog ended it was a bestseller had big cultural impact i reached steve jobs why did it stop um
you could have just sold the rights and sold out right i up um i uh the original one was 64 pages and five dollars and the idea was each one would be bigger and cost less and be better and that went on and as you can imagine we were doing this every six months um and that put a pre i didn't know about uh taking breaks or vacations or things like that so i was bearing down pretty incessantly on this thing and getting it
right and getting it better each time and all that and i saw i went down my own kind of asymptotic black hole and uh one writer said uh by the end of the whole if catalon stewart brand was a wreck and i was a wreck uh so
rather than just you know retire and hand it over to somebody else again kind of with an artist impulse i wanted to see what happens if you take a full-blown success and just stop it see what happens my turned out wrong hypothesis was that
others would immediately step into that very obvious opportunity in the market and fill it perhaps better in many different ways that did not happen um but what did happen is as soon as i named the last alert catalog the last live catalog that turned out to be the best possible marketing device you could ever have come up with and uh calling something to last anything turns out to if if it's honest which it was at the time
um it gets people and so that book became bestseller it became uh got the national book award it was a big deal and in fact two different broadway producers got in touch with me saying that they wanted to do a broadway play titled uh the last solar catalog and with you know people playing volleyball between scenes and uh paul simon was gonna write the lyrics and and songs uh i'll ask paul simon that was that was really true he said you know
went away like things do so um but i was i was on a real downward slope i had a marriage uh falling apart my fault and uh so i was it was a wreck for a few years why aren't the top entrepreneurs of silicon valley more interested in the visual arts you have been your entire life but it seems they are not why is that i have no idea um hippies in general were not very good on the visual arts except for comics robert crum and so on um
we were terrific on music i'm not no good on music at all but i was trained as and then worked as a graphic photographer i studied graphic design uh i'd even studied magazine design back at stanford and then took a bunch of classes afterwards at san francisco state college and in the san francisco art institute so um i think the exception there is is steve jobs who would basically study visual design somewhat at reed college and uh
and when he became fascinated by design as design that really played out with you know apple and i'm glad i got apple stock because i knew steve jobs so what do you think is missing in silicon valley because of this lack of interest in the visual arts jobs aside um well you and i both know patrick collison and i i see patrick as a kind of uh uh whenever anybody says something kind of disparaging about silicon valley and tech
bros and so on i think patrick can think well that's bull because he's sort of though personally the one i know of the current set um you know i've had some uh people who said who got in touch and said admiring things like mark andreessen and uh jack at twitter and um chris cox at facebook um so i i'd feel some personal connection there but uh what i'm jibbering about here is i have no theory of silicon valley at all tyler what's yours
well stripe press books are beautiful i would stress that but maybe maybe there's something about the engineering mindset that in some ways runs counter to the aesthetic mindset that's interesting they may come together with psychedelics but not in the arts okay i think i sort of buy that um and and that would be a program for i think engineering and you see a fair amount of it at mit uh of trying to keep their engineers from being too
uh mentally siloed uh and to just solving problems with numbers now you first took lsd if i understand correctly as part of a military experiment well not the military but there was probably military money in it
uh what led you to take that plunge someone said do this it wasn't a known thing back then why did you do it i wouldn't have done it um well you know i was young and careless i was jumping out of airplanes and climbing things and doing all the
uh dangerous stuff that uh you do when you're young and witless um but that one i think was an outgrowth of the bay area mid-peninsula tea groups that developed um the kind of confrontational uh personal interaction in group sessions that developed in the 50s at stanford and in that area and that led to a a very transformational approach to ideas of human potential and so on uh when excellent institute got started i had already been doing
seminars of my own with students from stanford at slate's hot springs that later became excellent and got to be friends with mike murphy when he was uh he and richard price were starting excellent institute and so all of that human potential stuff was looking at uh religion looking at meditation looking at drugs um we were you know reading about aldous huxley and what he got from peyote and i was hanging out with peyote
indians a lot um increasingly in the 60s and so friends in the sanford area said there and lsd was just starting to turn up and then there was it was still legal um through the early 60s and there was a so-called therapeutic model which is now completely revived um it's interesting that it had to go through a long hiatus of that psychedelics can be useful as a as mental uh in significant personal therapy um and and the idea then was remember
before that when psychoanalysis first came along uh all the anthropologists felt they had to get psychoanalyzed and uh this was sort of a similar thing that okay there's this new therapy and uh it's supposed to be used on sick people but if it works for sick people let's try it on healthy people and see if it makes them even healthier and so that was kind of the theory we were going on um as it happened in that set and setting
as they said of a therapy i basically flunked out it was just a not very pleasant long episode but later on i had personal lsd experiences that were transformative including one that got me going on what a difference the photograph of the whole earth would make as you know san francisco is a relatively small city so why did it and not los angeles become the center of hippie culture that's a fair question um
los angeles never had 49ers los angeles never burned to the ground and so san francisco you know the phoenix city they still say sometimes has a um waves of boom and bust uh it's not particularly infrastructural los angeles is completely based on oil and uh and then water infrastructure and uh major shipping even more than the bay area um and there's a frivolousness uh that the bay area is good at uh it has two universities of
significance for stanford and cal and um uh i mean so does la but la does not feel like a college intellectual world whereas san francisco somewhat does and so silicon valley really is an outgrowth of of the industrial park at stanford uh that was invented by one guy so and then those things as you know take off economically they feed themselves and then they become their own storm system um there's a lot of people like me from
midwest that come to places like california and and um one of the things that i sort of saw because i spent time on the east coast and prep school and then in new jersey as a military officer and then a lot of new york is an artist and
the sense i got is that people go to new york and la to be successful and uh you know if you can make it in the big apple you can make it anywhere that sort of thing nobody says that about san francisco they never have and
i bet they never do um people go to san francisco to be happy by and large and uh and then that leads to this sort of uh devil may care creativity which is actually good for business startups of certain kinds especially ones that have a low threshold like anything digital or anything online and uh so screwing around is not only possible but encouraged and screwing around is the way you discover uh new useful things in the world i
think so um i knew by the time i graduated from stanford that i wanted to stay in the bay area i went away to be in the army and then i came right back what was the creative peak of jefferson airplane i have no idea you didn't know them well no who i knew was a grateful dad pretty well uh you know the trip festival that i organized with uh mary pranksters with ken casey's group um grateful daddy just renamed themselves
from the warlocks and they really took over the three-day show that we did uh people just wanted to dance their guts out all night long and uh their dad had the way to do that all the other artistic stuff that i brought in there was sort of interesting uh flippery but the the dead really uh won the day and so um that's how i got to know them early on and and then stayed somewhat in touch through the years what did you learn from david crosby
not a thing uh you know i loved his songs um we apparently had this conversation i guess you've been reading john markoff's biography of course yes it's a good book and what i remember is being shamefully out of it when i talked to david crosby um people would show up it's a whole truck store uh where we had this kind of retail outlet for whole life catalog stuff and uh wanted to chat with me and like philip morrison a fantastic book
reviewer scientific american showed up like that and um david crosby showed up like that i guess you romney must have brought him so wavy gravy and um lost to me maybe david remembers the conversation what is it about the early days of san francisco culture that most people still do not know which early days there's a lot of them say the 1960s hippie days um i don't think people know the extent to which the mob uh took over um
at first pornography there was some really really creative pornography coming out of basically hippie artists having a good time and turning the camera on uh and then the you know the the whole dope culture no hope without dope uh everybody was um selling or buying uh marijuana and these other drugs from each other and then one of the guys named super spade um was his arms and legs cut off and his torso was hung out by uh
ocean beach from a tree this sort of knowledge of well those amateur days of uh drug sales are gone now and the uh the big time players are here in town and do not with us uh so that was the end of that and everybody's been selling dope and sort of learned a little bit of business from doing it uh then went into business legitimate business and they were good at it and so hippies became basically a very good commercial startup folks
um partly because of that sequence of experiences is clint eastwood's dirty harry a good movie i don't remember clint eastwood is an incredible movie director except for this last one you know it shows san francisco and i think 1971 and the city is supposed to be falling apart maybe in some ways it is but what's striking to me is how much cleaner san francisco was than the now and also how few new buildings have been
put in it looks almost like the same city except for parts of downtown oh that's interesting you saw it again recently is that what happened about a year ago during pandemic he gave it another watch well it was a good
and i think respectable dialogue that was set in motion between a kind of conservative approach and a uh probably excessively liberal framing that was going on at the time in the bay area and so uh you know make my days became a kind of a
conservative line now given your long history with san francisco do you think you see its current problems differently since you know so much of the past um i think i don't see them clearly enough i think patrick has a lot better colors and has a lot more substantial to say on this issue because he's in the thick of he's got to figure out where his workers live and where his point of place of business is and so on
i think a major shift that occurred is the to me completely understandable retreat from silicon valley from the mid-peninsula i lived there when we were doing the whole earth catalog it's actually a kind of a horrible place to live compared to marin county where i am now um and kind of being north of golden gate and silicon valley being south of san francisco and so with salesforce uh with twitter with these various um
web organ web-based organizations that moved into the city and built their headquarters there and tried to um house all the workers there and so on that is a discussed with suburban uh working and living and a seeking out of of downtown uh
you've seen it in seattle with amazon you know staying in downtown seattle and so on and because i've been thinking about writing about researching about cities from about 1998 on um that all seemed completely sensible
to me since cities are highly uh central they they attract talent they attract all these things and you know so jeffrey west's book scale and the studies going on santa fe institute on how cities accelerate everything um are the major economic engines of of any region and any culture they're in um if you're ambitious and talented you're gonna go to town and uh in the bay area town is san francisco still now in the last two decades or maybe
even a bit more you've become very interested in this idea of the long view there's the long now foundation trying to take a very long-term perspective on things this attempt to build a clock that will last for 10 000 years uh but if i look at your own career a lot of the most influential things you have done have been quite finite so you ended the whole earth catalog the merry pranksters with ken kisi right that
ended a long time ago uh the online bulletin boards you were a part of which were very important for the early years of the internet uh those in their earlier form those are gone so why seek durability if your own influence has typically come through the supposedly transient well some of us just getting older um and and uh and i developed when i was studying buildings and then later writing about civilization and this kind
of pace layered understanding that that part of what makes a dynamically um self-stabilizing and learning system is that some parts of anything complex and dynamic move very fast and some parts move very slow and we tend to pay attention to the fast parts like fashion and commerce and not pay attention to the really powerful parts like nature and culture and once i sort of had that perspective and plus i'd been a professional futurist for
20 years with global business network where i saw that people doing scenarios would treat 25 years is very long time frame uh military we did scenarios for would sometimes go out 50 years and uh i thought you know that's considering the level of stuff going on changes going on it's understandable people who pay attention to the short term but meanwhile these basic dynamics of the really slow stuff is where the power is um
calls for a reorientation of focus and um so when danny hillis computer scientist mit who i've gotten to know at the media lab uh wrote an email saying i'd like to build a clock the scale of stonehenge that keeps very long-term time
and ticks once a century and bongs every thousand years um he would sent that out to everybody new but nobody responded to me and i responded said let's do it i think because of the stuff i just mentioned there's a realizing
danny's framing of it was this was all through the 80s and 90s everybody referred to the future as the year 2000 and danny was growing up during that time and he said so for my entire life the future has been getting shorter by one year per per year that does not seem like a healthy frame of mind for a civilization that wants to be healthy to have and what could pop through that membrane of the year 2000 uh and so coming up with the idea of a
very durable basically um perpetual motion machine of a clock uh the clock by the way is not trying to be built it is built it's almost completed in texas on jeff bezos's mountain range um the uh it's not a a perpetual motion machine in the sense that it takes a temperature difference on the very high mountain it's on uh between night and day and runs a air bladder that then provides energy that keeps the clock knowing what
time it is for thousands of years would the younger stuart brandt say in his twenties be disappointed in the future that has come to pass huh um mixed bag uh a whole lot of stuff uh developed uh fantastically i think um as a biologist i love seeing biotechnology finally re-link with with field biology on conservation biology i'm involved in that doing a co-founding revive and restore to use biotech for the help of conservation wildlife projects
[Music] so that's played out pretty well by and large when i was optimistic about stuff i turned out to be right when i was pessimistic about stuff i turned out to be wrong often enough that it has kept optimism alive um and right now the political conundrum of the united states has me worried and i don't know what to do about it and i can see that cyber war is going to play out in some ugly ways and already is to a large extent
and i don't see automatic solutions to either of those or ones that i can help with except that focusing on long-term frame the long now we describe it as the last 10 000 years in the next 10 000 years so there's you know there's the now that is an hour along the hour now that is two weeks long they are in the middle of and then there's the uh somewhat longer now that is 20 000 years long and i think human civilization has
earned and needs uh the perspective of that is a foundation for our thinking about everything do you look much to science fiction for ideas and inspiration or not um yeah i mean uh the the the new steele newtons and neil stephenson um termination uh shock is brilliant in terms of um really playing out the geo engineering schemes that are out there uh neil did fantastic research on it uh better than most people i know including
many professionals um and likewise kim stanley robinson uh with the ministry for the future um again beautiful research on what overheating uh wet bulb high temperatures can mean for for human survival in places like india uh and then playing that out in kind of politically astute terms uh this is some of the best thinking going on in society and science fiction has always opened that door to thinking about the future in creative ways
um marvin minsky who i knew at mit uh was always quoting isaac asimov and uh and he just said look these are artists who thought about this stuff a lot and i pay close attention i feel the same how did your year working with california governor jerry brown make you less libertarian hasn't california governance turned out to be a big mess no the california governance was and and still is pretty damn good what i learned is that
the libertarians i knew and and they sort of clustered around the whole earth catalog because and since all of catalog was saying you know this is right after jack kennedy said ask not what your country can do for you um ask what you can do for your country uh we sort of say that's not what your country can do for you do your damn self and so there's a do-it-yourself thing that translated for many you say uh screw the government
and then the whole hippie period was uh counterculture and a lot of that was uh played out politically in the new left and so on so um working for in in the governor's office in sacramento and wearing a three-piece suit um i one of the things we started was uh that i started was a a water atlas of california um and and then the research that was that we set in motion uh from the governor's office to bring about this actually
quite beautiful and somewhat influential book um california is a hydraulic civilization as you know we move our water around and that's what makes agriculture the main event here it's what makes los angeles possible and so on and so forth i saw the people at the water resources department i saw what they did all day and we would show up saying look we need uh we need some data on the smith river which is the only on dan smith only on
dan river in california and uh you know what's the patterns of flow in that and uh how how deep your records go and uh somebody's uh deputy assistant would say we thought you'd never ask and they had been you know carefully keeping this data and trying to correlate it with things and keep it up to date in the various computer systems and so on for decades and the low paid high quality selfless work that these folks were doing um
and in the governor's office you always knew who was republican who was a democrat and why and all this kind of stuff down in the departments nobody knew nobody cared uh there were republican democrats scattered throughout the whole system and it was part of the ethic of that part of government to just not be um political in in the uh divisive sense at all and and so i was seeing something that the libertarian folks i knew
knew nothing about and were not the slightest been interesting they weren't actually interested i think you're as somewhat of a libertarian or interested in how government works most of the ones i knew were not
and they were interested in how election works and they thought the absurdities that they saw in elections and electioneering was government and it's not um and so i finally got the perspective of what of you know what is now vilified as the
deep state and the deep state at least in california is damned impressive and so i came out being uh way less interested uh and who was the governor i basically came out saying well jerry's a good governor as near as i can tell but then later arnold schwarzenegger was a pretty good governor um reagan had been a pretty good governor and the realization i had is donald duck could be governor and it wouldn't be the end of the state
you know trump finally proved that you could have uh somebody as a president in that case it could be really destructive and and the deep state was not as successful as it usually is of working around it but that's you know reflective of a whole bunch of other stuff going on that i do not um comprehend frankly now you've written a good deal about architecture do you view the forthcoming smart home as a blessing or a curse
well it's always been a curse the um the internet of things is making stuff a lot more convenient a lot more uh handy and um but people are banging away on on making home smart for decades and decades um i think that one of the things we'll be figuring out increasingly for the next few decades is um what things to hand over to robots and what things not to and there'll be lots of stuff that surprises it it's just great that robots are doing that
um frankly i i love the uh autopilot on the tesla i drive um i don't use it to get all the way from here to there i use it so i don't have to pay close attention to traffic just peripheral attention and the difference there is fantastic but trying to get a whole bunch of things coordinated around shortcut convenience that is kind of a long cut to finally to program it all so it works it kind of winds up like those uh
remote clickers for television have too many buttons and people finally learn the three buttons to do what they mainly want and pay no attention to the rest um and then you know the younger members of the family sort them all out and become adept at it and then uh the next generation of of uh excessive choices comes along and they don't know and they've got to ask their kids how the hell does this complex thing work so i think there's a
kind of an endless quest for complete handiness and i think generally people who go for simplicity rather than robotize complexity in terms of personal living are happier and if we in proper haiki and fashion want more of an organically evolving architecture what can we do to get there well i wrote a whole book called how buildings learn um it's probably my best book and certainly most successful um it's now treated as a classic and taught in
classes and so on and it's basically that um a building is not something you finish a building something you start the building is ongoing process that is in um perpetual dialogue with the user the users of the building and the uses of the building and it's standing in the real estate market and so on and professional high concept architecture is sort of allergic to all of that and they want to make work for our signature piece of
something or other with the you know the look of that particular uh architect and and um they hope that the function will work out so um the buildings that tend to go best are ones that are really durable like the old brick factories of the east coast or some of the tilt-up concrete spaces on what i call long road buildings for example at stanford when i was there there were temporary buildings left over from world war ii and at mit the the rad
lab the building 20 was where most of the real well much of the real innovation that happened in curriculum in science uh in engineering happened in uh in the trailers it happened in the in building 20 and because those were buildings that nobody cared about you could do anything you wanted in there you could adapt the building to whatever kind of research you were doing uh and it was cheap and um you could throw things together
and have them fall apart and not care or have them take over uh the world and uh because you'd started cheap they were you know able to get there without having to over invest and so um buildings that adapt well over time are basically built strong for certain reasons and then stay strong as the decades go by and the different uses go by in the book i wound up sorting out various things that have those qualities
and things that don't i had a chapter on maintenance because everything buildings are sort of the most maintenance needing and maintenance defying things that we build um and so there's a constant dialogue between keeping up with that and letting it go and then cycles of real estate value to go in and out and so on and so forth i don't have a short answer to your question of what makes them more adaptable but really looking at what buildings you
over time sure helps why does japan fascinate you so much they're the most advanced material culture in the world i think you know how to wrap five eggs and things like that are a matter of enormous interest in craft and i'm paying attention to them now because um my friend kevin kelly who's traveled all over asia and including all over japan he said he's looked and looked for a broken roof tile in japan and he
can't find it um and there's an attention to detail of um caring about the physical essence of stuff that um the japanese are surpassing it on the other hand you know there's a lot of so screwed up in japanese culture the cities are massive buildings most of them are kind of haphazardly built i first fell in love with japanese architecture through a book written by a japanese home in its surroundings 1896 by a new englander
and he just spelled out the traditional japanese home and the genkan and the use of the tatami mats and relationship with the garden and the banjo and all their stuff the bathroom and um the the aesthetic practicality of it just
knocked me out i actually got to stay in the house like that in in kyoto uh for uh for a season uh one year and it was fantastic so uh japanese craft at its best it's just the best there is in what year will we bring back the
woolly mammoth what's your point estimate certainly in this century i think we'll have uh what it looks like and acts like woolly mammoths back uh i would like to see them back in large herds in the in the siberian and in the northern canadian steps doing their old job of of eating the grass and therefore causing the grass grazers make grass and so the the so-called mammoth step which was once the world's largest biome
reaching all the way across the around the north pole in the arctic and sub-arctic um climatologically is much more stable but mainly it was it was the serengeti in the north this was where um you know those endless large animals in an incredibly rich uh animal and vegetable ecosystem compared to what's there now uh that's a case where humans to some extent climate but mainly humans got rid of all the megafauna by killing them and eating them
and uh that keeps happening and as they come back they will the way the elephants and rhinos and whatnot do in africa they will bring back the mosaic landscape that is drastically richer and by the way much more stable in terms of climate and what's stopping us from doing this within the next say 20 years um it might happen the next 20 years uh the outfit called colossal has decided to put in uh serious commercial money
uh with george search at harvard and others that are working on on bringing uh [Music] genes from the extinct mammals so we know what they are now because of paleo genetics and uh putting them into um asian elephant genomes and start bringing back the um the arctic capability of of you know the blood system and the thick hair and the rest of it that that makes it possible for elephants who uh not only survive but thrive in the far north
uh as it happens asian elephants already live in canada and like to break through the ice in the pond to go swimming they wouldn't make it through the long arctic night but they already like the cold when you're big and massive uh cold is that not that harsh an event so um i think bringing grazers and megafauna back to the far north will be practical and beneficial it's already going on at this place called pleistocene park
in far northeastern siberia to close i have just a few questions about the stuart brand production function are you ready sure now you're well into your 80s correct correct i'm 83. so what is it you do to stay so sharp um uh pick parents with jeans to make that possible that's the main thing and what do you do after that and after that i frankly i don't understand people who go quiescent intellectually as they get older um
it you know as you get in a way getting older uh you get more control of your time and you have more savvy on how to do things and how to make things happen and who to call when you have a question and all that stuff um and so your ability to investigate stuff and especially with the internet now is going up all the time and uh you know why would why would you let curiosity fade um and and many don't you've probably noticed that
people you know in their 70s are different from people that you knew in their 70s when you were a little kid when they kind of you know whichever they were settling down to play golf or whatever it was and probably a whole lot of people you
know in their 70s and 80s are hard at it in some cases just hitting their stride and that's a change that has occurred in my lifetime um that is a total treat and as nervous i can tell that one is permanent i think that's
with us now people will live longer and uh and thrive longer the health span is now being referred to instead of lifespan and health span meaning uh how long you can be really engaged and productive and alive to things so and i think that's very good in terms of long-term thinking because people are older are halfway longer now their future may be getting shorter but their past is uh personal and significantly long
they've seen a lot of stuff come and go and they've seen a lot of um skills that possibly they had time to pick up that they can now deploy and all of that is uh makes at least a kind of intellectual life that we both seem to enjoy uh that much richer and so long as your genes are supporting your brain cells and whatever other medications and stuff we can do i mean medically i'm it's possible for me to carry on in ways that would not have
been possible a century ago so um there you have it we are we are living longer and we're finding ways to keep the human body and human brain functioning better longer so um why would you not take advantage of that how is giving away money kept you creative um i'm not that good at it um uh there there i've now gotten to know a number of philanthropists who are really good at it and i know that i'm not um and at one point um
i uh there was a guy who was getting into philanthropy because he started ebay and uh and i said uh you know if you like i can try to find some good things that i know about that maybe you don't that would be good to put your
money into he said sure fine here's uh you know x amount of money go ahead and make good things happen and i worked on it for about six months and just failed utterly um i was not good at that so i would love to see a whole lot more
really creative philanthropy uh this is another thing that i think you and patrick collison uh like you've done with your fast grants can help move um much more creative philanthropy one of the things i've noticed all my life is that philanthropy should be the most creative thing going it's got to be more creative than government it's got to be more creative than anything that the commercial entities can do and um that it is not
it's just a waste because especially in america where most philanthropic society in the world and yet it's not as creative as it should be last question how do you decide what to pay attention to well it's a little different than kevin kelly's when you get kevin kelly on he'll tell you it's um what he sees that nobody else is doing that only he can do and then he'll pay attention to that and try to make something useful happen i'm
uh i don't care as much about whether other people are doing something uh what i'm looking for is things that will in gregory bateson's terms make circuit with the world um and and you see some of this in in software development where people talk about the minimum viable product and you start to get a user base that you can co-evolve with and develop your product so it's actually being used for them and amazon talks about the minimum lovable
product where it's not only useful it's compelling and and that you don't let anything into the world unless it has its lovability or quality to it i'm a little earlier in the process of i'm just feeling around for things that that feel like they're overlooked uh with the whole earth catalog do it yourself with something that uh elder you know middle-aged gentlemen who'd retire is what they were doing in their garage um
and was kind of looked down on catalog so you kind of look down on and basically i just took those two things that were regarded with disdain and turned them into something that was that turned out to be powerful likewise right now i'm focusing on maintenance um partly because i noticed in myself and everybody else a reluctance to think about maintenance because it's a chore it's a nuisance it's a problem there's
no kind of economic uh short-term value in it um and and and uh because with the long now foundation we're looking at becoming a long-term institution to sort of stay with the clock um that's based on noticing the difference between stonehenge the egyptian pyramids and the ise shrine in japan where nobody knows the hell the pyramid what the stonehenge was really for um and we know a lot about fahrenheit religion with the pyramids but it's dead
as a doornail and yet you say shrine expressing shinto culture in japan is as alive today as it was uh 1500 years ago and it is the bigging heart of japanese culture so what's the difference in uh the differences i guess maintenance and it's uh institutionalizing um we've got a lot more respect for institutions and trying to understand their institutions and alexander rose the director of the long now foundation is uh
actively funding and pursuing the study of longevity in institutions what actually makes it work which makes them earn their longevity and keep it uh in a changing world uh well the whole concept of maintenance i think in the is in the thick of all of that and so um i'm spending all my time now in this room with all these books um sorting out how to think about maintenance in general stuart brand thank you very much thank you sir that was fun you