TED Radio Hour - Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

Episode Date: August 25, 2023

Original broadcast date: September 23, 2022. From hippie culture to the first personal computers, Stewart Brand has been key to some of the most groundbreaking movements of the last century. This hour, he reflects on his life and career. TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at: plus.npr.org/tedSee pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading.

From Ted and NPR. I'm Manoosh Zamorodi. And you may have heard of Zellig or Forrest Gump, a character who always seems to turn up at just the right time in just the right place, smack dab at the center of all the action. Well, that is the best way to describe Stuart Brand. Hi, Manous. Hi, Stuart.

Thank you so much for doing this. You may never have heard of him, but he has been right next to even propelling some of the biggest names and movements of the last century. And by the time all the rest of us get there, he's gone on to something else more interesting. He could see into the future that this technology was going to be a huge part of American culture. It isn't so much that he's ahead of it. He's actually creating the future. Brand is nearly 84 years old now, and we wanted to spend the hour with him looking back at how he's, shaped our culture through the years, like with his whole Earth catalog, a counterculture magazine that Steve Jobs once called Google and paperback form.

35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Others credit brand with helping kickstart the environmental movement in the U.S. And later, turning the Bay Area into Silicon Valley, home to the world's most successful tech companies. People who worked with computers were considered magicians. Abram cadabra! His never-ending curiosity continues to this day. And there's a kind of a hunger and foolishness to it.

It's appetite. It's willingness to be ridiculous on the way to something you think might be interesting. And over the last few years, Stuart Brand has taken on new mind-bending projects, like working to bring back extinct animals like the woolly mammoth, and building a clock to ring once a century and keep time for 10,000 years. Humanity has revved itself into a pathologically short attention span and to not think about long ranges of time. Is it best a waste and at worst extreme hazard?

So today on the show, Stuart Brand, a conversation with a controversial cult figure who's always looking at where society is going next and has some big, some say crazy ideas about where it should be going. Stuart, welcome to the TED Radio Hour. Thank you. I want to start by asking you, you have lived an incredible life, but let's go back to the beginning. Tell us a bit about where you grew up, Rockford, Illinois. Did you have visions of what you would be when you grew up?

Oh, yeah, I knew I was going to be a veterinarian. I was the guy that everybody brought injured or young abandoned wild animals too, and I would try to raise them. Oh, and did your parents support that endeavor, or were they horrified? Always supportive, actually, even of the nasty possum I had named Frank, who was a bad attitude about everything. So in the late 50s, you went into the Army Reserve and to Stanford University. where I guess the veterinary dream continued because you majored in biology and your thesis was about the lives of tarantulas. Well, yeah, studying biology, I majored in science, partly to get away from the problem I saw in the

humanities, which was that what was deemed good was based on a judgment call by the teacher or the section leader or something like that. you know, what they thought were the right ways to think about Shakespeare or whatever. And that kind of being driven by opinion was not the case with science. And there you had to actually deal with a reality that often flew in the face of people's opinion. And I like that. I mean, that's so interesting that you say that because it sounds like you gravitated towards knowing what was right or fact or a binary. And I think of what happened next, which was that at the end of college, after you graduated, you started spending time in a very humanities, writerly, bohemian scene living in San Francisco.

That seems like a change. What do you think happened there? Well, I was moving toward where they are creatives were. And there's creativity in science and there's creativity in art. and they're drastically different in a lot of ways, but they're also drastically the same in a lot of ways. There's a kind of a criticism of my family among some folks in Rockford that brands are so contrary if you throw one in the river,

they'll float upstream. And floating upstream, that is looking upstream and thinking upstream is what scientists do. You're always looking for discovery. It's what artists do. You don't want to repeat what any other artist is doing or even what yourself used to be doing. And that was one of the things I picked up from the artists

in the world around San Francisco's North Beaches. Never repeat yourself. Yeah, so you got to San Francisco in the mid-60s, and by this point, you were freelancing as a photographer, but you also started hanging out with Ken Keezy, who, of course, wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, one of my favorite books. And he had this legendary group of friends and comrades, and they called themselves the Merry Pranksters. And you ended up joining.

This group traveled all over the U.S. in a psychedelic bus, renouncing normal society. They also did a fair amount of LSD. Just describe it. What was life like for you then? Well, the attraction of the pranksters was they really did. inhabit the raggedy edge. And KZ and the whole group developed a fearlessness, a boldness that I found very attractive. It's the kind of thing that a young person wants to go, you know, where it's dangerous. And that group definitely was

where it was dangerous. It was dangerous in terms of the messing around with drugs we were doing. It was dangerous in terms of having Neil Cassidy be the driver of the bus. And there was a lot going on in the country at that time. JFK had been assassinated. The Civil Rights Movement was in full swing. And you found yourself kind of at the nexus of a huge culture shift that was happening all around the country. That's right. It was mostly still new left at that point. It was Vietnam War was coming on and people were getting worked up about that and organizing. There were hippies around,

and we didn't know that there were 10,000 hippies in the Bay Area until I and Casey and the pranksters put on a thing called the Trips Festival in January of 1966, when LSD was still legal, by the way. The acid test is everywhere in this spaceship, everywhere you are, you're all... And it was a huge event. It became kind of a watershed event. That's when hippies became aware there were so many of them there were a movement. Okay, so this was an event that you organized that wound up being one of the biggest festivals of the era.

In fact, like the Grateful Dead went big because of it. And some people say that the Trips Festival helped mark the beginning of the hippie counterculture movement. I mean, this must have been some party, Stewart. What do you remember of it, if anything? Well, all we were attempting to do and why we called it a Trips Festival was to find all of the really interesting, creative people that we knew in the Bay Area and basically just have a show, three nights at the Longshoreman's Hall in San Francisco, where everybody showed what they had. Various avant-garde artists did their thing. There was a sculptor named Ron Boise, who made these enormous noisy sculptures. you would bang on and pluck it strings

and make a sort of a group music. And it was sort of just the beginning of the kind of dancing that, I mean, I grew up doing the damn foxtrot. And what I loved about the Moheumian world is dancing was just go out in the middle of the floor and carry on with somebody or not and disappear into the music

and see what happened. When the bands were playing, especially, just became this huge bash, everybody on their feet dancing. The kind of thing we see a burning man ever since, for example, is a direct result of people discovering how much fun you could have if you just threw yourself completely and to be part of the performance. So it was a couple months after the Trips Festival that you took LSD on your own

and zeroed in on a provocative question, which was, why haven't people seen a photo of the earth from space? Nowadays, that would maybe be turned into an online conspiracy theory. But that's not what happened. What did happen? What did you do? What was happening was I was reading and listening to Buckminster Fuller in those days. And he was focused on sort of world system thinking.

and I was also a photographer, so I'm always thinking about what are the images that change people's minds. And I was on the rooftop of my place in North Beach in San Francisco with probably a half dose, quarter dose of LSD, just watching the afternoon scintillate. And then pretended to myself that I could see that the buildings downtown, the tall buildings were not exactly parallel. diverged slightly because they were on the curve surface of an earth. And then I imagine myself going to a higher and higher altitude, and that curve would extend and then close all the way around on itself, and you would have San Francisco as seen from space on the surface of a sphere.

At that point, this is 10 years since Butnik. And so it suddenly seemed very strange to me that both the Soviet Union and the United States had been in space for on the order of 10 years, and I could have taken serious photographs of the Earth from space, and apparently hadn't done so. And I just thought, well, as soon as that photograph happens, everything's going to change,

because I knew enough science to know that the way people thought the Earth looked from space was not the way it probably really looked. And the difference would blow their mind in the parlance of the time. And a year or two later, that's exactly what happened. In a moment, Stuart Brand describes how seeing the Earth from space for the first time really did change how people thought about our place in the universe and why it inspired him to launch something called the Whole Earth. catalog. I'm Anoush Zamorodi and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

Friends, before we get back to the show, I want to let you know about TED Radio Hour Plus. When you become a plus listener, you get bonus episodes made just for you with more ideas from TED speakers and you'll go behind the scenes with our producers. What you won't get, though, are those sponsor messages interrupting the show. And that's because you are directly. supporting our work at NPR. So if you'd like to show your support, learn more and subscribe at plus.npr.org slash TED or write in the Apple Podcasts app. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

I'm Minute Zomerode. Today we are talking to writer and futurist Stuart Brand, who helped usher in San Francisco's hippie counterculture in the 1960s. And as we heard before the break, Stewart got somewhat obsessed with wanting to see a picture of Earth from space. Now, remember, this was before the moon landing, when satellites and space travel were pretty new. And Stuart, you became kind of an analog meme, I think it's fair to say, in some ways. You made this big sign and you printed out a bunch of buttons that asked the question, why haven't we seen a photo of the earth from space?

And then you went around to different college campuses and just like handed them out. So, I mean, what did people think? Did they think you were a crackpot? Or were they actually like, huh, this is kind of interesting. How did people respond to you? I can't say why. It just seemed like the obvious thing to do. But what I had acquired by then was the habit of you have a good idea.

and if you're not burdened with a job, which I wasn't, and you just start to work on your cool idea and see if there's anything to it and see if you continue to be amused by it or if other people are. And so I stood in these places where there are young people with open minds and also teachers, many of them involved in astrophysics and space program and so on.

and the ones who were interested would come up and say what's going on. And I'd say, well, you know, what do you think it'll be like when people really look in the big mirror? So it became just a way to have public discussion on the question of photograph of the Earth from space. So not too long after NASA actually did take a picture of the Earth from a satellite and share it. And it was the first time the public saw a picture of the whole. whole Earth. What impact did it have on people? So I think the photograph that really got people was the Earthrise photograph from Apollo 8 going around the moon and recording the lunar surface in the foreground and the earth in the background. And because they were in a big hurry when they

took that picture, the horizon is not exactly level. So there's a kind of an interesting, unstable urgency to it as a photograph. And the contrast between the extremely dead, boring-looking gray, brown planet in the foreground, the moon, with this vivid, scintillating, bright blue living, but distant and kind of small in the enormity of black space, that contrast is what got people,

dead planet, live planet. And we're on the live one. And then that raised this question. Now that we've seen that, what does that mean? What do we do with that? So we're talking about the late 60s here. And that's really when a sort of new consciousness about the environment, this understanding that we are shepherds of the Earth.

You put a picture of the planet on the cover of a magazine that you started publishing, that you called the Whole Earth Catalog, it became a cult read, and it made you pretty famous in the U.S. You on late-night talk shows, but for those who are not familiar with it, what was the Whole Earth Catalog? What was in it? The Whole Earth Catalog was a very tightly selected and edited collection of tools, of tools and ideas.

So the important subtitle of the Whole Earth Catalog was access to tools. And it was trying to give you enough of a sample that you can make your own decision. We didn't sell the things in the catalog. It was just a catalog of stuff that we were pointing out. We were a pointer, not a seller. And it was like, here's where to get the best kerosene lamp. And here's where you can buy instructions to build your own dome on your commune if you wanted. It was all kinds of things, right?

Do you remember one thing in that catalog that's standing out to you right now? There were things like the snugly baby carrier, which was just sort of a wrap and attached the baby to the front of the woman and the pleasant way for both the baby and the mother. You know, happy baby food grinder was you could grind your own baby food. Something or other jug and bottle cutter was a device that you could put in any bottle and turn it into a glass. This was somehow seen as we didn't call it ecological yet,

but a whole lot of being a hippie was living as cheap as possible, whether or not you happen to have means of your own. And so all the creativity went into learning how to dumpster dive and how to find roadkill that was fresh enough. You could cook it and eat it. or make a hat out of it or something. Okay, so in 2005, many years later, Steve Jobs gave a commencement address at Stanford University

where he talked about how inspired he was by the catalog when he was younger, especially by the way it ended. Let's listen. Stewart and his team put out several issues of the Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road,

the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words, stay hungry, stay foolish. It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay hungry, stay foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. Stay hungry, stay foolish.

words for some to live by, but Stuart, you stopped publishing the whole Earth catalog regularly in the middle of the 70s. And now we are coming to a part of your biography that I just don't quite get. So you get introduced to another subculture in California at that point. It definitely wasn't mainstream yet. The world of computers and hackers. But with the back to the land movement, the hippies, they were not. not into technology. So what was going on that kind of sucked you in? It had been coming for a long time in the sense that, in 62, I happened to see at the

computation center in Stanford when I was getting a tour. I saw young, what you later called them, hackers, young programmers playing space war and absolutely filled with glee. and I thought out of their body into the computer and these little dueling spaceships on the first interactive computers. So 10 years later, we're up to 72 now, 73, when I'd stopped the catalog, the guy who ran Rolling Stone magazine, Jan Wetter,

invited me to write something for them. I thought, great, I get to be a journalist. He said, what do you want to write about? I said, well, actually, I think something is going on with computers. And I wound up reporting on things going on at Xerox Park, which was the Research Center in Palo Alto and at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, where Space War had moved right along in 10 years, and it was an even more interesting game.

But also, the ARPANET was just starting to happen, what became the Internet later on, and robotics was starting to happen, so there were robots wandering around the laboratory. And I just reported on all of that in 72. The opening line was, ready or not, computers are coming to the people. I mean, you were one of the first people who even used the phrase, personal computer publicly.

That's true. I did that in a follow-up version of that article. So you saw the direction that computers were going. you saw before a lot of people did that this was going to completely change the world. And you decided to jump in to throw yourself into the forefront of that conversation. In 1984, you threw yet another legendary event, the Hackers Conference, where you brought together all these incredible minds. I mean, the top engineers and programmers, they were all there.

And there are people who say that if in the 70s things were kind of bubbling along when it came to tech. This event really kicked off the computer revolution. As you get this ever-expanding library with millions of people online simultaneously, they will all be able to publish simultaneously, add things, annotate, make links, and we hope live in a freer environment than we live in now. I mean, on the one hand, it feels strange to me that, like, you go from this back-to-land movement to being in the midst of computers and high-tech stuff. But I guess what was similar with both of them,

is this indie sort of spirit that there was. It was about, if before you were about making tools available to everyone, this was about making information available to everyone. It was the ideas of creating a digital utopia. Well, once computers became personal, they flipped from being seen as these machines of oppression to machines of liberation. because the individual could grab it

and then run with it toward whatever horizon they thought most interesting and they were not only using it, they were programming it. And so again, sort of like the trip's festival that everybody is a performer with personal computers, everybody's a creator. So that this was an unleashing

of the most powerful tools that individuals had ever had. Stuart, it feels like if there's one thing that is a constant throughout your life, it has to be that you get restless because a few years after immersing yourself in computers in business, you pivoted yet again and you started another organization and you called it the long now. Basically, this is a nonprofit dedicated to getting people, getting all of us to think more long term about the future. Why did you think people needed this? Well, my sort of opening line of what is the Long Now Foundation for is that humanity has

revved itself into a pathologically short attention span, and that thanks to science, we know a whole lot more about the long-term past and have a lot more knowledge about the systems who are going to be functioning into the long-term future than we've ever had before. And so to not act on that knowledge is at best a waste and at worst an extreme hazard. And kind of the signature project of the Long Now Foundation is this massive clock that you're building, a clock to keep time for 10,000 years. It ticks just once a year and bongs just once a century. And the goal of the project is to encourage us to think about our connection to the centuries to the millennia ahead of us.

You actually gave a TED talk about the clock in 2004. Let's listen. For 10 years, I've been trying to figure out how to hack civilization so that we can get long-term, thinking to be automatic and common instead of difficult and rare or in some cases non-existent. It would be helpful if humanity got into the habit of thinking of the now not just as next week or next quarter, the next 10,000 years. And the last 10,000 years, basically civilization's story so far. So we have the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco. It's an incubator for about a dozen projects all having to do with continuity over the long term.

Our core project is a rather ambitious folly, I suppose a mythic undertaking, to build a 10,000-year clock that can really keep good time for that long period. And the design problems of a project like that are just absolutely delicious. How do you house an eventual monumental clock like this so it can really tick, keep good, safe time beautifully for 100 centuries.

So here we are now, Stuart, 20 years later, where's the clock? Clock's in a mountain in West Texas. And nearing completion, it will be operational and should be visible by later in this decade. How do you explain the purpose of the clock to people who might think it's a ridiculous way to spend time and money? I mean, you called it to follow yourself when we have so many problems on Earth right here and right now. It's art. It's land art. In this particular case, it's a machine. It's a great big mechanism that all by itself, just using the energy and the difference between the cold night and hot day, drives a genuine clock to keep very good time. and it also has chimes designed by Brian Eno. Jeff Bezos paid for it and also participated in the design.

I visited it a couple times. It is intended to be mythic, and I think it achieves that. I can only imagine the sense of smallness one must feel as a human who will live less than a century compared to this timelessness that you are capturing with the project. But I have to say, one thing that sort of seems like a paradox to me is that, as you said, one of the biggest supporters of the long now clock is Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, the sort of king of our on-demand consumerist society. And many people blame him for exactly the problems you're hoping to solve even just a little bit

with this project. Good Lord. I think that's completely misplaced. Really? I'll talk about access to tools and ideas, and that's where I buy most of my stuff, don't you? I really try not to, Stuart. I mean, I take a lot of issue with warehouse conditions,

how much they pay their workers, how they undercut small businesses, and people willing to buy things just because they can so easily. It just, I take a lot of, I have a lot of problems with Amazon. Okay. Let's see, do I have problems with Amazon? I mean, climate change also. Well, I got, I got, because I knew the guy who started it and knew who I got to know

because his very first hire besides his wife was a guy who used to work at the Whole Earth Catalog. So I got to know Bezos very early on. And when they went public, it was sort of considered a really risky thing to put money into, you know, Amazon.toast, as some we're calling it. But I wished them well and was buying books from them then. So I bought a little bit of stock in the very beginning. And then, you know, watch you get threatened for a few years. And now I'm very glad to have it. The thing I'm having to keep saying from the beginning with the Internet is that, you know,

it was always a mixed bag. And yet somehow things proceeded and became okay. By and large, what we've got is much wider capabilities and communication opportunities than we had before. And we seem to be blaming the folks who provided that because they got big. We got big because we used them. Yeah.

But look, this is a debate. All of these things are negotiations. that go on and they're important, and they never quite finish. You solve one set of problems, and another set comes along and see even stronger. And that's just how it goes over time. All right, agree to disagree. I'm going to send you an article that I wrote. I hope that's okay.

Oh, good. Yes, please. Thank you. Coming up more from my conversation with Stuart Brandt about the big ideas filling his mind today, projects he's working on like bringing the woolly mammoth back to life. I'm Manus Shumeroody, and you're listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR. We'll be right back. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR.

I'm Manoosh Zamoroti. Today on the show, a conversation with futurist Stuart Brand, who has had quite a few pivots in his life, from a stint as a photographer and journalist to starting the first hackers convention and then the Long Now Foundation. And for the past decade or so, Stuart has gone in yet another direction, this time to a project straight out of science fiction, the possibility of bringing back extinct species.

Here he is talking about it on the TED stage in 2013. Now, extinction is a different kind of death. We didn't really realize that until 1914, when the last passenger pigeon, a female named Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo. This had been the most abundant bird in the world. It had been in North America for six million years, suddenly wasn't here at all.

Carolina parakeet was a parrot that lit up backyards everywhere. He was hunted to death for its feathers. There's a bird that people liked on the East Coast called the Heath Hand. It was loved. They tried to protect it. It died anyway. A local newspaper spelled out. out, there's no survivor, there's no future, there's no life to be recreated in this form ever again. There's a sense of deep tragedy that goes to these things. And it happened to lots of birds that people loved. It happened to lots of mammals. Another keystone species was a famous animal

called the European oryx. And the oryx was like the bison. This was an animal that basically kept the forest mixed with grasslands across the entire Europe and Asian continent, from Spain to Korea. The extinction still go on. There's an IBEX in Spain called Bucardo, one extinct in 2000. There was a marvelous animal, a marsupial wolf called the Philocene, Tasmania, south of Australia, called the Tasmanian tiger. It was hunted until there were just a few left to die in zoos. Sorrow, anger, mourning, don't mourn or organize. because the fact is humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years. We have the ability now, and maybe the moral obligation, to repair some of the damage.

Most of that will do by expanding and protecting wildlands, by expanding and protecting the populations of endangered species. But some species, that we killed off totally, we could consider bringing back to a world that misses them. I think it's time for the subject to go public. What do people think about it? Do you want extinct species back? Do you want extinct species back?

All right, so walk me through this, Stuart. How is de-extinction supposed to work? So what's called ancient DNA, basically DNA from dead animals, dead in museums or dead in the ground. You can actually basically reassemble from the zillion fragments a very good sense of what the original genome was. And if you can compare it to a closely related living animal, you've got a structure where you can really make it

not only approximate the original reality, but you can think about editing some of those genes into the relative and potentially move them in the direction of the extinct animal. And so you adjust the genome of Asian elephants, who are the closest living relative of Willie Manus and begin to get an elephant that could once again re-inhabit the Manus step of northern Eurasia and Northern America. I mean, once again, you are taking an idea that is sort of niche and bringing it to the general public, giving it a name, calling it the extinction.

What do people think about it? I think so long as it's a theoretical idea, the argument is not as substantial as one would like. and so we've now done cloning of endangered species, two of them, Shibolsky's horse, which is the true original wild horse, and the black-footed ferret, which is America's most endangered mammal. These animals are not extinct, but both of them were running out of the genetic variability. They needed to have a really healthy genome. And by cloning some animals whose cells were preserved 30 years,

years ago, we're able to re-enrich the genome. And that's a piece of the kind of thing we're talking about with the extinction. But I want to go back to the more, I don't know, sexy and divisive example that you've been associated with, which is this idea of bringing back the woolly mammoth. I just watched the documentary about your life. And you've actually seeing frozen woolly mammoth bodies, right? Yeah, the trunk in Siberia is amazing. What was that like? I mean, where are these bodies kept?

Just tell me about that experience. Okay, so the man of step once upon a time was like the Serengeti. The northern grasslands, that's what a step is, were maybe the largest biome in the world. And it had cave bears, it had all kinds of grazing animals, which were making them grasslands actually work, muscoxen and woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceros. And then humans show up.

And all of those megafauna disappeared. And so that's what happened. to the large animals of that terrain and it turned into tundra, and now the tundra is busy melting, and this is very bad for climate. So what one would like is to bring the grasslands back, and that's what this outfit called Placistocene Park is in the process of proving you can do.

And you've visited this area, right, in Siberia? I did visit there, and that's great fun. So in Yakovsk, which is the sort of largest city in that enormous region, they have freezers full of well-preserved mammoth flash from on the order of many thousands of years ago, mostly more than 6,000 years ago and older. I mean, talk about mind-blowing, huh? Yeah, and so these are like museum specimens. So it's not frozen in the sense that's cryopreserved, and you can just take the DNA and bring it back to life. But you've got a lot to work with.

On the project, to eventually bring back a cold-adapted elephant. Now, elephants used to be on every continent except Antarctica. They were a real keystone species, or even what are called the bioengineers, in the sense that they knock down trees, they're good at that. And so they keep the landscape of mosaic. And mosaic is the richest possible landscape you can have where there's shrublands, woodlands, grasslands, all mixed closely together

and all changing around one to another. And so everywhere that elephants were, you had a much richer ecology than you have where you don't have elephants anymore. And this was particularly the case way the hill up north. So, you know, part of what's taken over that terrain is the forests of very boring, unecologically rich conifers that are not the kind of rich forest that you want. Okay, so say this place in Siberia called Pleistocene Park can, in theory, support woolly mammoths again. Mm-hmm. I mean, Stuart, come on, didn't we learn our lesson from Jurassic Park?

We don't know how nature will react to being manipulated, at least not to this extreme, right? Yes, we do. We do know. To this extreme? Okay, so Jurassic Park. The line that everybody quotes is, oh, my God, watch out. Their character says, life finds a way. You're implying that a group composed entirely of female animals will breed? No, I'm simply saying that life finds a way.

is actually how reintroduction of animals, which is done all of the time by wildlife biologists, it succeeds because life finds a way. So when the apex predator of wolves was brought back to Yellowstone Park after a century of having been hunted out of existence, it turned out not only good for the wolves, it turned out good for the whole ecosystem.

The rivers became richer, and so on. Same thing is happening with beavers, reintroduced from Europe. They've been gone for 400 years from Scotland. They were brought back, and Scotland instantly got ecologically richer to the point that England is now doing the same thing. So we have every reason going through all of those stages with the extinct creatures will be exactly like the reintroductions that are done now all the time. So, okay, so let's say you can convince people that maybe the extinction isn't dangerous and that it might be one way of helping solve climate change.

Let me focus on that. It isn't me or anyone else convincing people, it's success convincing people. We've learned us over and over again, especially in conservation biology, that what is persuasive is a successful outcome. And to get to that, you have to go through the process of you're not sure if it's going to be a success. With all these cultural shifts that we've discussed over the last hour, do you feel that you helped make them happen?

Or were you really just very good at understanding how to explain them to people on a broader scale? gathering the key people together, giving these subculture's names, and sort of making them feel inevitable. Yeah, there's some of that. Basically, minutia is what I do. And I see what I think is an interesting area. It feels like a problem area that I might be able to have some ability to help. Then I'll think about what's the mode that might do that. Like with the image of Earth, a button campaign seemed like the right thing.

to do. Each time I get one of these problem areas or opportunity areas, I think about, you know, is this one for a book and an event or organization? It sounds like having a good time to you is following your curiosity. Yeah, I think that's right. And where are the interesting problems? That question turns out to keep some very easily bored people fascinated. Stuart, I've read that people, young entrepreneurs especially, love to ask your advice. And I've heard that they ask you one particular question, how do you stay so creative? Is that true? Is that the number one question you get asked? No, it's mostly about, you know, how did that work back in the day in the Bay Area in the 60s and 70s and 80s?

And is it working now? And how do you get the best benefit of the best? Bay Area. And the thing I point out is San Francisco area is a little different than Los Angeles or New York in the sense that people don't go to San Francisco to succeed, or at least not most of the time, they go to San Francisco to be happy. And that keeps them loose enough, focusing enough on trying stuff, low threshold of success and comfort in moving on changing communities, changing disciplines that you work in, having a good time. So not to end on a morbid note, but you do think a lot about the future, Stuart. May I ask what you want to happen after your death? Do you want to be an AI version of yourself

to, I don't know, live on in the metaverse? Or are you going to have your body cryogenically frozen so we can de-extink you? Like, what are you going to do? I have picked a nice place to be planted, and I like the idea of being planted intact. It's one of those sort of semi-organic gray guides where you don't have yourself a waterproofed crypt. You have some kind of wood or otherwise biodegradable coffin

and unbiodegradable. So I can't imagine doing anything cryogenic and you never know. What if we contribute this conversation to like the database that's compiling everything you've ever said so that they could make an AI version of you. Oh, gosh. You know, anybody who wants to become a scholar at that. And, you know, it gives them freedom. They can pick and choose whichever version of the character they think they're studying they want. Oh, okay.

So like we could just hang out with 1966. Stewart. Yeah, sure. Why not? There's a book that's an extremely comprehensive biography of your life. There's a documentary coming out, also very comprehensive.

There is something about you that fascinates people, Stuart. And I guess I'm wondering, if you had to pick one, what do you hope your biggest legacy is? It's hard to know. Legacies have their own life. One of the things I was surprised by in biographies is,

because I didn't really pay attention to it, that reviews of biographies are usually a review of the subject, more than the book itself. And so, boy, have I been getting mixed reviews out there from paying no attention to this Zen Playboy to, you know, here's the key to understanding the last 50s. years, they're all looking at the same book. You're complicated, Stuart.

No, it's just what people do. So, you know, we held a 50th anniversary of the Whole Earth catalog, and we printed up a T-shirt for people that said, still hungry, still foolish. And I put it on the back of the Whole Earth epilogue in 1973. What did I mean about at a time that I was, it's appetite, its willingness to be ridiculous on the way to something you think might be interesting. But everybody has your own reading, I guess. Stuart Brand, thank you so much.

Well, thank you. This was great. Stewart is currently working on his seventh book. It's called The Maintenance of Everything. And he's writing about maintaining, well, everything. thing, from sailboats to civilizations. And you can see all of his previous TED Talks at TED.com. And if you want to learn more about Stuart Brand and all the ideas that we talked about, check out John Markoff's biography, Whole Earth, The Many Lives of Stewart Brand,

and the documentary film, We Are As Gods. Many thanks to them for their help, too. Thank you so much for listening to our show this week. It was produced and edited by Rachel Faulkner, Katie Simon, And me with help from producers Katie Montalione and James Delahousie. Our production staff at NPR also includes Sanaz Meshkampur, Fiona Gehrin, Matthew Cloutier, Catherine Seifor, Julia Carney, and Beth Donovan. Our theme music was written by Romteen Arablewe. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Feelin, Michelle Quint, Sammy Case, and Danielle Bella Rezzo.

I'm Minouche Zamorodi, and you've been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.