Original: Stewart Brand on Starting Things and Staying Curious
From psychedelics to cyberculture, from hippie communities to startup companies, from the Whole Earth Catalog to the Long Now Foundation, Stewart Brand has not only participated in many movements—he has been there from the very beginning. At 83 years old, he says he doesn’t understand why curiosity wanes in older people, and in many ways, it’s the best time to start new academic pursuits.
Tyler Cowen and Stewart Brand discuss what drives his curiosity, including how he became a product of the Cold War, how he became a Darwinian decentralist, the influence of pre-industrial America on his thinking, the subcultural fusion between hippies and young Native Americans, why he doesn’t think humans will go to other planets, his ambivalent approach to inexplicable phenomena, how LL Bean inspired the Whole Earth Catalog, why Silicon Valley entrepreneurs seem uninterested in visual arts, why Los Angeles could not be the home of hippie culture and digital innovation, why libertarians don’t understand government, why we should resurrect the woolly mammoth, why he is now focused on stewardship and institutions, and more.
Tyler Cowen: Hello everyone, welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I’m chatting with Stewart Brand. Stewart is a very special person. He was among the earliest or first to appear in many movements, including cyberculture, psychedelics, the importance of Native Americans and their philosophy, the Whole Earth Catalog, the entire San Francisco scene, the Long Now Foundation, and the ideas of durability and stewardship, and the idea of bringing back the woolly mammoth, among others. Stewart Brand, welcome to the show.
Stewart Brand: Oh, thank you. It’s a pleasure and an honor to be here.
Tyler Cowen: Looking back over your life, in what ways do you see yourself as a product of the Cold War?
Stewart Brand: I was born in a small town in Rockford, Illinois. Because we made machine tools there, it was ranked seventh on the list of American cities to be bombed by the Soviets. They thought it was upstream of American industry.
I was under 10 at the time, so I often had nightmares about wandering around the destroyed Rockford, being the only person left alive. I had an inner fear, part of which you might remember, that the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb was at that time a symbol of human civilization. That was the way the whole world thought of itself as being under the threat of nuclear annihilation.
The Apollo program of 1968 and the Earth photos taken from space completely replaced the mushroom cloud of the atomic bomb with a hopeful picture of Earth. It’s interesting because I now realize that the Earth is being deployed... this photo is hopeful, full of green, better than the mushroom cloud, and now in the context of climate change, it has drawn a lot of attention again.
Tyler Cowen: I think you have somehow re-developed the concept of the WWII research environment, the idea of threat, into a more optimistic and decentralized vision of the future with computers and online forums?
Stewart Brand: Yes, I think all of this was motivated. At that time, I began to closely follow the research library in electronics that was going on at MIT. They were studying what Shannon called information theory. They were studying communication—electronic communication and later digital communication—and how it fundamentally changes humanity. That was a set of premises.
This was before we had Moore’s Law, but I had a feeling that this research would not only change everything but would change many times. That’s the nature of exponentials. That’s also how I understand many things.
On Becoming a Decentralist#
Tyler Cowen: How did you become a decentralist?
Stewart Brand: My goodness, a decentralist? That’s actually right. I think you might have seen this in the artists you’ve studied. I got a biology degree from Stanford and then I intended to become an officer. But in the process, I began to associate with the artists of the San Francisco Bohemia and North Beach. This was the late 50s and early 60s.
My first profession was as a professional photographer, then I became a so-called creative photographer involved in art creation. I did multimedia with a group called USCO in New York, basically playing the role of a world artist. That idea was always there, so my media changed a lot. I would start non-profits, sometimes start businesses and various things, but it was never a hierarchical organization, nor was it trying to establish a hierarchy. It was basically about enhancing creativity on a personal level.
In the Whole Earth Catalog, this led to a kind of lazy liberalism, which I later overcame while working for Governor Brown in California. Also, remember that as a biologist, Darwinian evolution is the most decentralist thing you can imagine. It goes far beyond market economies. It’s a self-running thing that is self-organizing at all levels and scales. I hadn’t answered this question before, so in answering it this time, I think I’ve persuaded myself to be a Darwinist.
Tyler Cowen: What influence did Nikos Kazantzakis have on your thinking? He’s the Greek writer who wrote Zorba the Greek, right?
Stewart Brand: Yes, he wrote Zorba the Greek and The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, among others, and I think I’m the only one who has read them. These works have a strong, firm romanticism. This is also evident in Ayn Rand’s novels, which I was also interested in for a time. Nikos Kazantzakis has this idea of “commit everything to your theory of the world, even if it’s wrong.” I overcame that because it was both crazy and highly destructive, but it was fun to walk that path with him. He was an outstanding writer and thinker.
Tyler Cowen: In what ways has your thinking drawn from the history of pre-industrial America?
Stewart Brand: In the summer in Michigan, ice was what kept the refrigerator cool, and we used outbuildings, so in a way, I was grounded in Midwestern forest living. Additionally, for some reason, I had a strong identification with New England through a writer named Kenneth Roberts. Buckminster Fuller later became that for me as well.
All of this has a grounded continuity. Hunting and fishing are part of the world I live in. But I don’t do much of either; I’m just that kind of person. I want to be a good outdoorsman.
Tyler Cowen: What influence did Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window have on you?
Stewart Brand: Oh my goodness. Because of the name James Stewart, and because he was tall and spoke succinctly, I identified with him. In the film Rear Window, he is with Grace Kelly, and he is a photojournalist. That looked exciting, and later I became a photojournalist.
Then he also starred in a movie called Broken Arrow, which was the first liberal film about Native Americans. The script was good, and it did an in-depth study of Chiricahua Apache culture. James Stewart was the person in the film who connected with the Indians. When I later married Lois Jennings, who is Native American, we often played scenes from that movie, and she would watch him shave and wonder what he was doing because Native Americans don’t shave. James Stewart was a character I could easily identify with.
Tyler Cowen: What do you think is the main influence of Native Americans or Indians on your thinking? Is it the idea of stewardship? What else?
Stewart Brand: Part of it has been a surprise to me. I’ve been surprised several times. In Venice, I was surprised that it was basically an Asian town. The Indians I photographed in Oregon in 1963 surprised me; I guess it was a rich and vibrant culture. They were not people from the past, with feathers and tents. They were people now. They were rounding up wild horses.
They were quite different from the cowboys I had seen. White cowboys tended to be very fierce individualists and competitive. The Indian cowboys I saw were more collaborative. They had a gentleness, a sustained humor, and welcomed people like me. When I started to hang out, I was inspired by that experience and visited many reservations, just hanging out with Indians.
I eventually produced a multimedia show called America Needs Indians. It became a reference point for the hippie subculture. It was basically a subculture looking to another subculture for inspiration and identification. The so-called long-hair convergence was older Indians and young Indians trying to decide who they wanted to be; they had many choices but realized that their indigenous cultural continuity was a truly valuable thing, not something to feel bad about or escape from. And that worked very well.
The condition of Indians now is much better than when I first started paying attention or before I met Marlon [Brando]. He basically went to every place I had been before, hanging out with Indians in Washington, mixing with Indian revolutionaries in Oklahoma. The Indians I met all had good feelings and respect for him.
On Disagreements with Peers#
Tyler Cowen: Now, if I were to try to place you in the early part of your career, comparing you to Buckminster Fuller, Norbert Wiener, and Gregory Bateson, what is the key variable that makes you different from them? How should I summarize that difference intellectually?
Stewart Brand: I first bought Norbert Wiener’s book, which sold very well. Buckminster Fuller—artists I played with were very focused on him and Marshall McLuhan, who was an amazing thinker who completely changed his entire behavior and way of thinking around what he thought were more productive ways of acting and thinking in the world. The only other person I know who was that radical about himself is Kevin Kelly, who occasionally has an idea and then looks down just to see what’s there. Buckminster Fuller really only changed himself once, but it was an impressive change.
When I met Gregory Bateson, he was a kind of correction to Buckminster Fuller for me because Buckminster Fuller was completely an engineer, and Bateson called it an input-output method for understanding and solving all problems. And Bateson was much more than that. He realized that every system is basically self-referential to some degree—which Fuller would never accept—and that there is a very deep conceptual layering organization, and we are always immersed in systems we think we are isolating.
Bateson was skeptical of engineering solutions and naive intentions, and he opened up a mysterious direction for me to explore further, so later for me, cracks appeared. Additionally, when I studied comparative religion at Stanford, I went down a mystical path, which turned out to be ultimately futile, and I think counterproductive. People often go down a mystical or romantic path.
But that’s what I’ve been trying to overcome, and I started to understand Fuller. I know a lot about Gregory Bateson. I never met Wiener, but later I was around people like Marvin Minsky, who is another part of the intellectuals at MIT, and he is still my reference point.
Tyler Cowen: In the 1968 Whole Earth Catalog, you thought the world needed a photo of Earth. What photo do we need today?
Stewart Brand: At that time, there were all sorts of interesting photos of Earth. One thing I knew early on was that people were basically impressed by two photos: one was the “earthrise” photo with the moon in the foreground, which was powerful because you saw a dead planet and a living planet in one photo, and the difference was astonishing; you were glad you were on the living planet, and it inspired you to want to make sure it stays alive.
Then there was the so-called “Blue Marble” photo, taken when the sun was behind the spacecraft and behind the camera. It was a big round Earth, just as people expected, and it was certainly one of the rarest photos taken. The camera had to be aligned with the sun to get that image.
There were thousands of other Earth photos. The Soviets took some; we took some. Eventually, I found those photos at NASA headquarters in Washington. I just flipped through and picked out those stunning images and started using them in later Whole Earth Catalogs.
I think one of the best things that happened last century was the perspective from outside Earth, which every astronaut comes back and tells us how amazing it is, even though they were trained and prepared for wonder. Then they were really surprised to be out there.
That photo is just a microcosm of how powerful it is to see the whole Earth from space. I think this will continue as we explore other parts of the solar system, mainly with robots, sometimes with humans. Recently, I don’t think we can go to other planets, Tyler.
Tyler Cowen: Why not?
Stewart Brand: I feel it’s too far. What do you think?
Tyler Cowen: I also think we can’t go. I think it’s impossible.
Stewart Brand: Is it because of the distance?
Tyler Cowen: And the physical toll, even if you freeze the body. Physical space is not scarce, so why not Nevada, I guess.
Stewart Brand: Well, what about space colonies? What do you think?
Tyler Cowen: I think there will be some space for human exploration beyond Earth, but I’ve been somewhat pessimistic about the prospects for space development for a long time. I just don’t understand what the truly scarce resources are that we need. If you think, “Well, Earth is so crowded, we have to go elsewhere,” but if you live in New Jersey, the Netherlands, or Korea, that doesn’t seem necessary.
Stewart Brand: That’s right. I think I agree. I think it’s basically voluntary and interesting. Science fiction has made great use of generation ships, etc. Kim Stanley Robinson recently wrote a book, I think it’s called Aurora, and he basically made your and my point: if you take people that far, the wear and tear on social structures, biology, and everything—you can’t isolate a very complex biological system like humans for that long and expect to get anywhere useful.
Tyler Cowen: What was the nature of your mother’s interest in space and space colonies? She seems almost obsessed with it.
Stewart Brand: Yes, she was a Wasa girl in a town in northern Illinois that might not have been very free, and she was a liberal. She fell in love with Wernher von Braun and early space things, and she got all the Willy Ley and other popular magazines like Collier’s and Saturday Evening Post that praised the moon landing and Mars landing at the time. She loved all of that.
Later, I met an astronaut named Rusty Schweickart. We went to see the movie The Right Stuff (1983). My mother went to see that movie with the astronaut Rusty. For her, it was a real connection to her dreams.
Tyler Cowen: Do you think the images from the Navy UFO videos will resonate culturally like the images of “the whole Earth”?
Stewart Brand: Oh, I don’t know, but obviously you know. What do you see there?
Tyler Cowen: I see a very serious puzzle that our military and CIA can’t figure out at all. I think the likelihood that it’s a real extraterrestrial drone is low. It wouldn’t be a very interesting drone, just sent out to track us and then escape. I think the odds are 5% or 10%, but I find it very puzzling.
It forces me to think a lot about our world, where we might have multiple sensory data sources to measure a very fast-moving object, and we can’t figure out what it is. This goes back at least to 2004, maybe longer. Simply put, it’s either the Chinese or laser-induced plasma—many explanations seem to not clarify things.
Stewart Brand: Good. It retains some mystery in your life. Some things are like that; I just shrug and take a two-minded approach. It could be true. Is there anything I can do? Will it affect me? If it’s not true, I remain open to further news, but at the same time shrug it off because as you get older, one thing you might notice is that you’ve seen many illusions come and go.
I’ve seen many “end of the world” illusions come and go. The millennium crisis (Y2K)—when we had computers, they would stop working because they didn’t know how to handle the year 2000. Things like that keep happening—peak oil, one after another. When people say the world will end because of this, that, or the other thing, I’ve become a... trying to encourage some viewpoint and realism.
Humanity has been around for a long time. This world has existed for a long time. Biology has incredible resilience and vitality, and I think the end-of-the-world talk is just a waste of mind.
On the Design of the Whole Earth Catalog#
Tyler Cowen: When you launched the Whole Earth Catalog, how much thought did you give to the fonts and styles of the early versions?
Stewart Brand: I stole everything. The font I used in the Whole Earth Catalog was Windsor—obviously, when I saw some nostalgic things, it had become the font of hippie culture. That’s the font they used at L.L. Bean. I was building on my father’s interest in mail-order catalogs, and L.L. Bean was one of our favorites. The catalog had a straightforward New England honesty that I really appreciated.
For example, there would be a belt for $2.25. The catalog didn’t introduce it by saying, “This will make you more of a man”; it just said, “This is a pretty nice little belt for $2.25.” That kind of pragmatic clarity and simplicity, I took as a model for commenting on things in the Whole Earth Catalog.
Tyler Cowen: Do you know what I thought of when I saw the Whole Earth Catalog? I wondered how you laid it out.
Stewart Brand: Oh, there were a few things that made it possible to self-publish such an ambitious book, one of which was the IBM Selectric typewriter. The typewriter had all the letters in specific sizes and fonts, and then you could switch to italic or other fonts. You could do very complex typesetting with an electric typewriter. This allowed us to do good synthesis in real-time.
The same was true for photography. Getting halftones—there was a whole new device that allowed you to make halftones. Many times, we just cut things out from magazines and books and pasted them down. Then there was the paste-up—initially, we used a big old electric frying pan, with beeswax and melted beeswax, and we just stuck it on and then pasted it onto paper. That’s how we laid it out.
Tyler Cowen: How did the Whole Earth Catalog end? It was a bestseller and had a huge cultural impact on Steve Jobs. Why did it stop?
Stewart Brand: Yes, I messed it up. The original version was 64 pages, $5, and the idea at the time was that each one would be bigger, cheaper, and better. It just kept going like that; you can imagine we did it every six months. I didn’t know about breaks or vacations or anything like that, so I just kept doing it, trying to make it better each time, and so on. I fell into my own progressive black hole.
One writer said, “At the end of the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand completely collapsed,” and I was pretty much a wreck at that time. I didn’t want to retire and hand it off to someone else, and similarly, with the impulse of an artist, I wanted to see what would happen if you achieved full success and then stopped to see what would happen. The result was wrong. My assumption was that others would immediately step into this very obvious market opportunity and fill it, perhaps better in many different ways. But that didn’t happen.
But the fact is, when I named the last Whole Earth Catalog the Last Whole Earth Catalog, it became the best marketing I could think of. Anything you call “the last”—if it’s honest, as it was at the time—will attract people. That book became a bestseller. It won the National Book Award. That was a big deal.
In fact, two different Broadway producers contacted me, saying they wanted to make a Broadway show called The Last Whole Earth Catalog, and have people play volleyball during intermission, with Paul Simon writing the lyrics and songs. I later asked Paul Simon, “Is this real?” He said, “Yes, yes.” As usual, it fell through. I was really on a downhill slide. My marriage fell apart—that was my fault—so for a few years, my life was a mess.
Tyler Cowen: Why are top entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley uninterested in visual arts? You’ve been focused on this your whole life, but they seem not to be. Why is that?
Stewart Brand: I don’t know. Generally, hippies haven’t been very good at visual arts, except for comics—Robert Crumb and so on. We were great at music. I’m not at all knowledgeable about music, but I was trained as a graphic photographer, and then I started working. I studied graphic design. I even took magazine design classes at Stanford, and later took many classes at San Francisco State University and the San Francisco Art Institute.
I think Steve Jobs is an exception; he basically studied visual design at Reed College. When he became obsessed with design as design, that really played out at Apple, and I’m glad I bought Apple stock because I knew Steve Jobs.
Tyler Cowen: Besides Jobs, what do you think Silicon Valley is missing due to its lack of interest in visual arts?
Stewart Brand: You and I both know Patrick Collison; I think Patrick is a... Whenever someone says something derogatory about Silicon Valley and tech bros, I think of Patrick and then think, “Well, that’s nonsense—”. Personally, he’s the person I know right now. I’ve been around some people who have said some admirable things, like Marc Andreessen and Jack Dorsey, and Chris Cox from Facebook, so I have some personal connections with everyone. What I’m rambling about here is that I don’t have any theory about Silicon Valley, Tyler. What’s your theory?
Tyler Cowen: The books from Stripe Press are great. I want to emphasize that, but perhaps the engineering mindset is in some ways at odds with the aesthetic mindset.
Stewart Brand: Well, that’s interesting.
Tyler Cowen: They might have emerged with psychedelics, but not in the arts.
Stewart Brand: Well, I kind of believe that. I think it’s an engineering project; at MIT, you can see a lot of those projects trying to keep their engineers from solving digital problems in a mentally isolated way.
Tyler Cowen: If I’m not mistaken, your first experience with psychedelics (LSD) was as part of a military experiment.
Stewart Brand: Oh, not the military, but there might have been military money.
Tyler Cowen: What made you decide to do it? Someone said, “Do this.” It wasn’t well-known at the time. Why did you do it? I wouldn’t do that.
Stewart Brand: Oh, I was young and reckless at the time. I jumped out of airplanes, climbed all sorts of things, doing dangerous things that young, ignorant people do. I think it was a product of the Bay Area’s Midpeninsula T-groups, which developed confrontational personal interactions in group meetings. This was developed at Stanford and in that area in the 50s. It led to very transformative approaches to ideas like human potential.
When the Esalen Institute was founded, I was already hosting seminars with Stanford students at Slates Hot Springs and became friends with Mike Murphy, who was co-founding the Esalen Institute with Richard Price at the time. All of this human potential stuff was studying religion, studying meditation, studying drugs.
We read about Aldous Huxley and the information he got from peyote, and I often hung out with peyote Indians, and more so in the 60s. Friends in the Stanford area said psychedelics were just starting to appear. By the early 60s, it was still legal, and there was a so-called therapeutic model that has now completely returned.
Interestingly, psychedelics can be useful as psychotherapy—in important personal therapy, it went through a long interruption. Remember before that, when psychoanalysis first appeared, all the anthropologists felt they had to undergo psychoanalysis. It was similar: “There’s a new therapy that should be used on patients, but if it works for patients, let’s try it on healthy people and see if it makes them healthier.” That was our theory.
As happens in therapy, I was basically eliminated. It was just a long, unpleasant interlude. But later, my personal experiences with psychedelics were transformative, including reminding me of what a photo of the whole Earth could bring about.
On San Francisco and Hippie Culture#
Tyler Cowen: As you know, San Francisco is a relatively small city. Why was it, and not Los Angeles, that became the center of hippie culture?
Stewart Brand: That’s a good question. Los Angeles never had the “San Francisco 49ers” (the NFL team). Los Angeles was never burned down. San Francisco—they sometimes still call it the Phoenix City—has gone through wave after wave of boom and bust. It doesn’t have a particular infrastructure. Los Angeles is completely based on oil, then water infrastructure and shipping, even more than the Bay Area.
The Bay Area has two important universities, Stanford and the University of California. Los Angeles has them too, but Los Angeles doesn’t feel like a world of university knowledge, while San Francisco feels somewhat like that. Silicon Valley is indeed a product of Stanford’s industrial park, invented by one person. Then, as you know, it took off economically. They supported themselves, and then they became their own storm system.
There are many people like me who came from the Midwest to places like California, and one thing I saw—because I spent some time in a prep school on the East Coast, then was an officer in New Jersey, and then an artist in New York—my feeling was that people went to New York and Los Angeles to succeed. If you could succeed in New York (the Big Apple), you could succeed anywhere—something like that. No one said that about San Francisco. They never did; I bet they never have.
Overall, people went to San Francisco for happiness, which created a kind of reckless creativity that was actually beneficial for certain types of startups, especially those with lower barriers to entry, like digital or web companies. Messing around was not only possible but encouraged, and I think messing around is a way you discover new and useful things in the world. When I graduated from Stanford, I knew I wanted to stay in the Bay Area. I went into the military and then came right back.
Tyler Cowen: When was the creative peak of Jefferson Airplane (the psychedelic rock pioneers based in San Francisco)?
Stewart Brand: I don’t know.
Tyler Cowen: You don’t know them?
Stewart Brand: Well, I don’t know them. I know the Grateful Dead very well. I was involved with Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters’ Trips Festival, and the Grateful Dead—they had just changed their name from the Warlocks—took over our three-day show. People just wanted to play jazz all night. The Grateful Dead had a way of doing that. The other art I brought was interesting, fun, and flashy, but the Grateful Dead really won the day. That’s why I got to know them early on and have kept in touch over the years.
Tyler Cowen: What did you learn from David Crosby?
Stewart Brand: Nothing. I like his songs. Obviously, we’ve talked about this. I guess you’ve been reading the biography by John Markoff?
Tyler Cowen: Of course, yes. It’s a good book.
Stewart Brand: I just remember feeling embarrassed when I talked to David Crosby. People would show up at the Whole Earth Truck Store—we had a retail store for Whole Earth Catalog merchandise there—and want to chat with me. Philip Morrison, the book reviewer for Scientific American, showed up like that. David Crosby showed up like that too. I don’t remember—maybe David remembers that conversation.
Tyler Cowen: What is something about the early culture of San Francisco that most people still don’t know?
Stewart Brand: Which early days? There were many days.
Tyler Cowen: Let’s say the hippie era of the 1960s.
Stewart Brand: I think people don’t know the extent to which the mob took over. The initial pornographic works—there were some very, very creative pornographic works coming from hippie artists who were having fun and opening up cameras. Then there was the drug culture. “No hope without dope.” Everyone was buying and selling marijuana and other drugs from each other.
Then one guy named Super Spade—his arms and legs were chopped off, and his torso was hanging from a tree at Ocean Beach. Those amateur drug dealing days are long gone; the big players have come in and said, “Don’t mess with us.”
That’s how it ended. Every person who had ever sold drugs and learned a little business experience from it later started a business—legitimate businesses—they were good at it. Hippies basically became very good entrepreneurs, partly because of that series of experiences.
Tyler Cowen: Is Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry a good movie?
Stewart Brand: I don’t remember. Clint Eastwood is an incredible film director, except for the last one.
Tyler Cowen: I think it showcases San Francisco in 1971, and the city should be falling apart. Maybe in some ways it was, but what shocked me was that San Francisco at the time looked much cleaner than it does now, and there were very few new buildings. It looked almost like the same city, except for parts of downtown.
Stewart Brand: That’s interesting. Did you see it recently? Is that so?
Tyler Cowen: About a year ago, during the pandemic, I watched it again.
Stewart Brand: I think it’s a good, respectful dialogue that unfolds between conservatism and what was perhaps overly liberal at the time in the Bay Area. “Make my day” became a conservative line.
Tyler Cowen: Now, considering your long history with San Francisco, do you think you have a different perspective on its current problems because you know so much about the past?
Stewart Brand: I feel I don’t see clearly enough. I think Patrick Collison has more substantive things to say on this issue because he is in the thick of it. He has to figure out where his workers live, where his business locations are, and so on.
I think a major shift that has happened is, for me, the retreat from Silicon Valley and the Midpeninsula is completely understandable. When we were doing the Whole Earth Catalog, I lived there. Compared to where I am now in Marin County, it was actually a terrible place to live—Marin County is north of the Golden Gate, and Silicon Valley is south of San Francisco.
Salesforce, Twitter, these various web companies have moved into the city and set up headquarters there, trying to get all their employees to live there, and so on, which makes people hate suburban work and living and want to get out of downtown. In Seattle, you’ve already seen what Amazon staying in downtown Seattle looks like, and so on.
Because I’ve been thinking and studying urban issues since 1998, all of this makes complete sense to me. Cities have a high degree of centripetal force. They attract talent. They attract all these things. In Geoffrey West’s book Scale, and in research done at the Santa Fe Institute, how cities accelerate everything is the primary economic engine of any region or culture. If you have ambition and talent, you will go to a town, and in the Bay Area, that town is still San Francisco.
On Long-Termism#
Tyler Cowen: Now, over the past twenty years, or even a bit longer, you’ve become very interested in this long-term perspective. With the Long Now Foundation, trying to look at things from a long-term perspective, trying to build a clock that can last ten thousand years. But if I look at your own career, many of the most influential things you’ve done are quite limited.
You ended the Whole Earth Catalog. The Merry Pranksters with Ken Kesey—that ended a long time ago. The online bulletin boards you were involved in, which were very important to the early forms of the internet, have all disappeared. If your own influence is typically achieved through so-called ephemeral impacts, why seek permanence?
Stewart Brand: Well, some of it is just aging. In my studies of architecture and later writing about civilization, I developed this layered understanding. Part of what constitutes dynamic self-stabilizing and learning systems is that certain parts of any complex and dynamic thing move very quickly, while certain parts move very slowly. We tend to focus on the fast parts, like fashion and business, and not on the truly powerful parts, like nature and culture.
Once I had that perspective, combined with my twenty years as a professional futurist at the Global Business Network, I saw that when people do envisioning, they take 25 years as a long time frame. In the military, we do some scenarios and sometimes consider 50 years. And I think, given the level of things happening and the changes occurring, it’s understandable that people focus on the short term. But at the same time, the basic dynamics of those very slow things are where the power lies and need to be re-centered.
Then, I received an email from Danny Hillis, a computer scientist at MIT whom I met at the Media Lab, saying, “I want to build a clock the scale of Stonehenge that keeps very long-term time and ticks once a century and bongs every thousand years.” He sent it to everyone he knew, but no one responded except me. I responded, “Let’s do it.” I think it was because of those things I just mentioned.
Danny’s idea was that throughout the 80s and 90s, everyone referred to the future as the year 2000. Danny grew up during that time, and he said, “In my whole life, the future has been shrinking every year.” That doesn’t seem like a healthy mindset for a civilization that wants to be healthy. So the idea of coming up with a very durable, essentially perpetual motion clock.
By the way, this clock is not meant to be built. It’s already built. In the mountains of Texas, Jeff Bezos’s project is nearly complete. It’s not a perpetual motion machine; it uses the day-night temperature differential of the mountain it’s in, and then uses air bags to provide energy to keep the clock running for thousands of years.
Tyler Cowen: Would a young Stewart Brand, say in his 20s, be disappointed by the future that’s coming?
Stewart Brand: Mixed feelings. I think a lot of things are developing very well. As a biologist, I’m glad to see biotechnology finally reconnecting with field biology and conservation biology. I’m involved in co-founding Revive & Restore, using biotechnology to help wildlife projects. The work in this area is going well.
Overall, when I’m optimistic about something, it turns out I’m right, and when I’m pessimistic about something, I’m often proven wrong, which keeps optimism alive. Now, the political dilemmas in America worry me; I don’t know what to do. I can see that cyber warfare will play out in some ugly ways, and it has largely already happened.
Aside from focusing on the long-term framework, I don’t see automatic solutions to these two issues or solutions I can help with. At Long Now, we describe it as the past ten thousand years and the next ten thousand years. There’s a one-hour-long “now,” a two-week-long “now,” and you’re in the middle, and then there’s a longer “now” that lasts for 20,000 years. I think human civilization is gained in action. This perspective is the foundation for thinking about all issues.
Tyler Cowen: Do you often look for ideas and inspiration in science fiction?
Stewart Brand: Yes, Neal Stephenson’s new book, Termination Shock, is excellent at describing what it really means to implement Earth engineering plans. Neal has done outstanding research on this, better than most people in the industries I know. Similarly, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future is also excellent. It’s a brilliant study of what humidity and heat mean for human survival in places like India, and then expressed in politically savvy language.
This is some of the best thinking going on in society, and science fiction always opens the door to thinking about the future in creative ways. Marvin Minsky, whom I knew at MIT, always quoted Isaac Asimov, who simply said, “Look, these are artists who thought about this stuff a lot, and I paid close attention.” I have the same feeling.
On Governance#
Tyler Cowen: How did your year working with California Governor Jerry Brown make you less of a liberal? Isn’t California’s governance a mess?
Stewart Brand: No, California’s governance has been very good, both in the past and now. What I learned is that the liberals I know—they gathered around the Whole Earth Catalog because in a sense, the catalog said... just after Jack Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country,” we said, “Don’t ask what your country can do for you. Do it your damn self.”
So, there’s a do-it-yourself ethos, which for many people meant “screw the government.” Then, the whole hippie era was anti-establishment, much of it played out politically in the New Left, and so on. Working in the governor’s office in Sacramento, wearing a three-piece suit, one of the first things I started was a water atlas of California, and then we launched a study from the governor’s office to complete that book, which was actually quite beautiful and had some influence.
As you know, California is a water civilization, and we can move water around at will. That’s why agriculture became the main activity here. It made Los Angeles possible, and so on. I saw the people in the water department. I saw what they did all day, and we would show up and say, “Listen, we need some data on the Smith River, which is the only river in California without a dam. What’s the flow pattern of that river, and how deep are your records?”
Someone’s deputy would say, “We thought you’d never ask.” For decades, they had been carefully preserving that data and trying to connect it with other things and keeping the data updated in different computer systems. What those people did was low-paid, high-quality, selfless work.
In the governor’s office, you always knew who the Republicans were, who the Democrats were, why, and all that. In the departments, no one knew, and no one cared. Republicans and Democrats were scattered throughout the system, and that was part of the morality; this part of government shouldn’t be politically divisive.
I finally understood the perspective now being vilified as the deep state, and the deep state, at least in California, is impressive. I’m not very interested in who the governor is. I basically said, “Well, as far as I know, Jerry is a good governor.” But then Schwarzenegger was a pretty good governor. Reagan was a pretty good governor. I realized Donald Duck could be governor, and that wouldn’t be the end of a state.
Trump ultimately proved that you can find a person—in this case, as president—who can be genuinely destructive, and the deep state is not as successful in solving that problem as it usually is, but that reflects a whole bunch of other things, frankly, I don’t understand.
Tyler Cowen: You’ve said a lot about architecture. Do you think the upcoming smart homes are a blessing or a curse?
Stewart Brand: It will be bad. The Internet of Things is making things more convenient and easier to use, but for decades, people have been trying to make homes smart. I think in the coming decades, we will increasingly discover which things can be handed over to robots and which things cannot, and there will be many things that will surprise us. It’s great that robots can do that.
Frankly, I love Tesla’s autopilot. I’m not using it to drive from here to there. I use it so I don’t have to pay close attention to traffic; I just need to pay attention to what’s around, which is very different.
However, trying to coordinate a whole bunch of things around convenient convenience—it’s a long process, ultimately needing to program everything to make it work properly. Just like those remote TV remotes. There are too many buttons, and people end up learning three buttons that can do the main things, ignoring the others.
Then the younger members of the household will categorize them, become proficient, and then the next generation will face too many choices they don’t know about, and they’ll have to ask their kids how this complex thing works. I think the pursuit of complete convenience is endless, and I think, generally speaking, in personal life, pursuing simplicity rather than robotized complexity will make people happier.
Tyler Cowen: If we wanted more organically developed architecture in a Hayekian way, what could we do?
Stewart Brand: Repeat the first part of that question.
Tyler Cowen: If we, as true Hayekians—I’ll use that phrase—think in Hayekian terms—
Stewart Brand: Okay. Hayek, all right.
Tyler Cowen: —would emphasize the dynamic characteristics of decentralized social evolution. If we want our buildings to be more like organically evolved buildings, changing with the times according to some beneficial decentralized mechanisms, what should we do to achieve that?
Stewart Brand: Well, I wrote a book called How Buildings Learn, which might be my best book and certainly the most successful. It’s now considered a classic, taught in classes, and so on. Basically, a building is not something you finish. A building is something you start. Buildings are a continuous process, and they have a continuous dialogue with their users, their uses, and their status in the real estate market, etc.
Professional high-concept architecture is allergic to all of this, hoping it’s a work of art or iconic or something else with a specific look, hoping its function can be realized.
Often, the best buildings are those that are truly durable, like the old brick factories on the East Coast or some of the slanted concrete spaces I call low-end buildings. For example, when I was at Stanford, there were temporary buildings left over from WWII. At MIT, Building 20 of the Rad Lab was where many real innovations in science or engineering courses occurred. Things happened in Building 20.
Because those were buildings no one cared about, you could do anything you wanted there. You could adjust the building based on whatever research you were doing, and it was cheap. You could put things together, take them apart, and let them fill the space. Because your startup was cheap, you didn’t need to over-invest to reach your goals.
Over time, adaptable buildings are basically built for certain reasons and then remain strong over time and different uses. In this book, I summarized various things that have these qualities and those that do not.
I have a chapter on maintenance because buildings are the things we build that need the most maintenance and the least maintenance. So there’s a continuous dialogue between maintaining and abandoning, and then property values cycle back and forth, etc. To your question, what makes them more adaptable, I don’t have a short answer, but truly understanding how buildings perform over time will certainly help.
Tyler Cowen: Why does Japan fascinate you so much?
Stewart Brand: I think Japan is the advanced material culture of the world. How to package five eggs or something like that is a very interesting craft problem, and I’m currently focused on Japan because my friend Kevin Kelly, who has traveled all over Asia, including Japan—he said he looked and looked in Japan and couldn’t find a broken roof tile.
Attention to detail, attention to the essence of materials, that’s what the Japanese excel at. On the other hand, there’s a lot of bad stuff in Japanese culture. The cities are a mess. Most of those buildings are built haphazardly.
I first fell in love with Japanese architecture through a book, Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings, written in 1896 by a New Englander. He just detailed traditional Japanese homes and entryways, the use of tatami, the relationship with gardens, the benjo (toilet), and the bath. Its aesthetic practicality amazed me. In fact, I lived in a house in Kyoto for a year, and it was wonderful. The craftsmanship in Japan is very nice.
Tyler Cowen: When will we resurrect the woolly mammoth? What’s your estimate?
Stewart Brand: Certainly in this century, I think we will have something like the woolly mammoth back. I hope to see them return to the grasslands of Siberia and northern Canada, continuing to graze... the so-called mammoth steppe, which was once the largest biotic community in the world, stretching into the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions.
Climatically, it’s more stable, but mainly, it’s the Serengeti of the North. Compared to now, there were endless large animals and an incredibly rich animal and plant ecosystem. In this case, humans—partly due to climate, but mainly humans—got rid of them by killing and eating all the megafauna. This kind of thing has been happening.
When they come back, they will bring back a richer mosaic landscape like African elephants and rhinos, and by the way, the climate will be more stable.
Tyler Cowen: What’s stopping us from doing this in the next 20 years?
Stewart Brand: This could happen in the next 20 years. An organization called Colossal has decided to invest significant commercial funds to collaborate with Harvard’s George Church and other institutions dedicated to extracting genes from this already extinct mammal. Now we know what those genes are through ancient genetics, and we will implant them into the genome of Asian elephants to begin restoring the mammoth’s blood system, thick fur, and other capabilities, allowing elephants not only to survive in the far north but to thrive.
Coincidentally, Asian elephants have lived in Canada; they love to break through the ice in ponds to swim. They can’t get through the long Arctic night, but they’ve adapted to the cold. When you’re big and strong, cold is not a harsh thing. I think bringing back herbivores and megafauna to the far north is practical and beneficial. There’s already been work done in a place called Pleistocene Park in northeastern Siberia.
On the Stewart Brand Production Function#
Tyler Cowen: Finally, I have a few questions about the Stewart Brand production function. Are you ready?
Stewart Brand: Sure.
Tyler Cowen: Now, you’re over 80, right?
Stewart Brand: Yes. I’m 83 this year.
Tyler Cowen: How do you manage to stay so sharp?
Stewart Brand: Family influence may be significant. That’s the main thing.
Tyler Cowen: What will you do after that?
Stewart Brand: After that... frankly, I don’t understand those who stagnate intellectually as they age. The older you get, the better you can control your time, and you have more insight into how to do things, how to achieve goals, who to call when there’s a problem, and so on. Therefore, your ability to investigate things, especially now with the internet, has been increasing. Why would you let curiosity fade?
Many people don’t. You may have noticed that the 70-somethings you know are different from the 70-somethings you knew when you were young. The 70-somethings of the past settled down to play golf or something else. Perhaps a large group of 70-somethings and 80-somethings you know are working hard, in some cases just getting on track. That’s a change that has happened in my lifetime. It’s entirely enjoyable, and as far as I know, that’s permanent. I think that’s where we are now. People will live longer and healthier.
Health span, as it’s now called, does not refer to lifespan—health span means the time you can truly engage, be productive, and be vibrant. I think this is very good for long-term thinking because older people have a longer “now.” Their future may be shorter, but their past is long. They’ve seen a lot of things come and go and have seen many skills they might have time to learn and can now deploy.
All of this makes the kind of intellectual life that seems to enrich both of us. As long as your genes support your brain cells, no matter what drugs or other medical treatments we use, I can continue in ways that would have been impossible a century ago. So that’s the issue. We’re living longer, and we’re looking for ways to keep our bodies and brains functioning better and longer. Why not take advantage of that?
Tyler Cowen: How does philanthropy keep you creative?
Stewart Brand: I’m not very good at that. I now know some philanthropists who are very good at philanthropy, and I know I’m not good at it. Once, a guy who got into philanthropy because he founded eBay said to me, “If you like, I can try to find some good things I know of that maybe you don’t, and it would be good to put your money into.” He said, “Sure, great. Here’s X amount of money. Go ahead and make good things happen.”
I worked on that for about six months but completely failed. I’m not good at that. I’d like to see more truly creative philanthropy. That’s also another thing I think you and Patrick Collison are doing—like what you’re doing with the Fast Grants project—can help drive more creative philanthropy.
One thing I’ve noticed in my life is that philanthropy should be the most creative thing. It has to be more creative than government. It has to be more creative than anything business entities can do. If it’s not, it’s a waste because, especially in America—we are the most creative society in the world, but its creativity hasn’t reached the level it should.
Tyler Cowen: Last question: how do you decide what to focus on?
Stewart Brand: Well, it’s a bit different from Kevin Kelly. When you have Kevin Kelly on, he’ll tell you it’s what he sees that others aren’t doing, that only he can do, and then he’ll pay attention to those and try to make some useful things happen.
I don’t care much about what others are doing. What I’m looking for are those things that, in Gregory Bateson’s terms, make circuits with the world. You see some of that in software development, where people talk about minimum viable products; you start to get a user base you can grow with, develop your product to make it truly useful for them.
Amazon talks about minimum lovable products; it’s not only useful but delightful, and then you don’t let anything into the world unless it adds to its lovability.
I was a bit early in that process. I was just feeling around for those things that felt overlooked. The Whole Earth Catalog—DIY was something for those retired middle-aged gentlemen—it was something they did in their garages and was looked down upon. The catalog was looked down upon. Basically, I just transformed those two overlooked things into something powerful.
Similarly, now I’m focusing on maintenance, partly because I notice that neither I nor others want to think about maintenance because it’s a drudge, it’s a hassle, it’s a problem. It doesn’t have short-term economic value, and, and, and... because at the Long Now Foundation, we’re seeking to be a long-term institution to keep the clock running.
This is based on noticing the differences between Stonehenge, the Egyptian pyramids, and the Ise Grand Shrine in Japan. No one knows what Stonehenge was really for. We know a lot about the pharaoh’s religion in the pyramids, but it’s dead. However, the Ise Grand Shrine, which expresses Japanese Shinto culture, is as vibrant today as it was 1500 years ago; it’s the beating heart of Japanese culture. What’s the difference?
I think the difference is maintenance, and it’s institutionalized. We have more respect for institutions and are trying to understand their institutions. Alexander Rose, the director of the Long Now Foundation, is actively funding and pursuing research on the longevity of institutions. What really makes them work? What allows them to win longevity and maintain longevity in a changing world?
Well, I think the whole concept of maintenance is embedded in all of this, so I’m now spending all my time in this room with all these books, sorting out how to think about general maintenance issues.
Tyler Cowen: Stewart Brand, thank you very much.
Stewart Brand: Thank you. This has been fun.