The Tim Ferriss Show - #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths

Episode Date: November 21, 2017

Stewart Brand (@stewartbrand) is the president of The Long Now Foundation, established to foster long-term thinking and responsibility. He leads a project called Revive & Restore, which seeks to bring back extinct animal species such as the passenger pigeon and woolly mammoth.Stewart is very well known for founding, editing, and publishing The Whole Earth Catalog (WEC), which changed my life when I was a little kid. It also received a national book award for its 1972 issue.Stewart is the co-founder of The WELL and The Global Business Network, and author of Whole Earth Discipline, The Clock Of The Long Now, How Buildings Learn, and The Media Lab. He was trained in biology at Stanford and served as an infantry officer in the US Army.I really hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did!This podcast is brought to you by Peloton, which has become a staple of my daily routine. I picked up this bike after seeing the success of my friend Kevin Rose, and I've been enjoying it more than I ever imagined. Peloton is an indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. No worrying about fitting classes into your busy schedule or making it to a studio with a crazy commute.New classes are added every day, and this includes options led by elite NYC instructors in your own living room. You can even live stream studio classes taught by the world's best instructors, or find your favorite class on demand.Peloton is offering listeners to this show a special offer. Visit onepeloton.com and enter the code TIM at checkout to receive $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. This is a great way to get in your workouts, or an incredible gift. Again, that's onepeloton.com and enter the code TIM.This podcast is also brought to you by Four Sigmatic. I reached out to these Finnish entrepreneurs after a very talented acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which blew my mind (in the best way possible). It is mushroom coffee featuring chaga. It tastes like coffee, but there are only 40 milligrams of caffeine, so it has less than half of what you would find in a regular cup of coffee. I do not get any jitters, acid reflux, or any type of stomach burn. It put me on fire for an entire day, and I only had half of the packet.People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement right now — this is the answer. You can try it right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim and using the code Tim to get 20 percent off your first order. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you’ll be disappointed.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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subscribed to Five Bullet Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and you can, of course, easily subscribe any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs, you sexy little kittens. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show where it is my job to interview and deconstruct

world-class performers of all different types to tease out the habits and routines, tactics, thinking, philosophies, belief structures that you can use. And this episode, kids, if you're in the car listening to this with your parents, earmuffs, holy shit, what a treat. I am so happy, could not be happier with what you're about to listen to. And it's all because of the guest. And by way of background, when I was in Uzbekistan with Kevin Kelly, and if you haven't heard of Kevin Kelly, you can check out my interviews with him. I have argued for a very long time that Kevin may in fact be the real world, most interesting man in the world. But when I asked him, when we were in the back of a taxi in Uzbekistan, long story, who I should have on the podcast, he gave me a very, very complete list,

but the first two names were Tim O'Reilly and Stuart Brand. And when I've asked Kevin who his mentors are, who he considers mentors, the first name that he brings up is Stuart Brand. So who is Stuart? Stuart is one of the sharpest, most badass guys you will ever meet. And it's kind of like Forrest Gump. He shows up at every possible historical moment you can conceive of. Stuart Brand, at Stuart Brand, is the president of the Long Now Foundation, established to creatively foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years. Yes, that's not a typo. He leads a project there called Revive and Restore, which seeks to bring back extinct animal species such as the passenger pigeon and woolly mammoth.

Stuart is very well known for founding, editing, and publishing the Whole Earth Catalog, which changed my life when I was a little kid when we talked about it. And it also received a National Book Award for its 1972 issue. And on top of that, and we delve into this, Steve Jobs talks about it in his most famous commencement speech. Stuart is the co-founder of The Well and Global Business Network and the author of books including Whole Earth Discipline, The Clock of the Long Now, How Buildings Learn, and The Media Lab. He was trained in biology at Stanford and served as an infantry officer in the U.S. Army. Stuart can cover so many different spheres of expertise and speak intelligently on very, very high concepts, ranging from evolution to the nitty-gritty of designing, say, finite, or I should say rather infinite versus finite games for different groups of people. It's just

so much fun to speak with Stuart and I've been hoping to do this interview for a very, very, very long time. It came together and maybe the caffeine level on my side was right. I think Stuart's always on point, but I'm just thrilled with how it all turned out. So we'll link to everything in the show notes, of course, as usual, that you can find at Tim.blog forward slash podcast, and there will be a lot of links. But I really hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. So without further ado, please meet the one and only and incredible Stuart Brand. Stuart, welcome to the show. Howdy, Tim.

Howdy. I have been wanting to interview you for a very, very long time indeed. And our mutual friend, Kevin Kelly, who I used to say was the real life most interesting man in the world. But I think you may actually give him a run for the money. And it's, I suppose, appropriate that I'm recording this from where I am on Long Island, where I grew up, because at my parents' house, which is right next to me, in the shed, I remember as a child going in to find a single copy of the Whole Earth Catalog. And I would go to the Whole Earth Catalog, I remember exactly where it is in the shed, and I would sit down for

hours flipping around in this incredible tome. And I wanted to thank you for that, first and foremost, because it had a real formative impact on me in my childhood years. Well, that's amazing. I hear that a lot. I'm curious, do you remember any of what particularly got you going through the catalog back then? Yeah, there were a few things. I've actually never told anybody this. So the first was, I want to say that there were geodesic domes or some sort of graphic representations of geodesic domes, which at the time were just very fascinating to me. And my grandfather was a classical sculptor on one side. And so he was very interested in shapes. I wanted

to be an illustrator and a comic book penciler for about 15 years. So anything that represented an unusual, what I felt was an unusual shape in the physical world was very interesting to me. And then this could be a false memory. So please correct me if I'm wrong, but as a, I don't know how old I was, nine or 10 year old, maybe even younger, was there any, not nudity necessarily, but were there any breasts of any type in the Whole Earth Catalog? Because if so, that was probably also a big draw for me. Yeah, there were breasts. There was even a crotch, I think, in the My Body, Myself, which was this wonderful book

that came out on women's health by women. And it was just the facts, ma'am, and graphic and rich. It was a collective in Boston of women who put it together, and it was kind of a revolution of users just taking hold of medicine and revamping how it was thought about. And women were then and probably now especially in need of better facts than they were getting from the male medical establishment. So the answer I gave you I feel like might be very trivial. Do you have any common answers that pop up often

when you ask people that question about what stuck with them or what really grabbed their attention? I suppose it probably depends on the age at which they came across it, but are there certain things that really stick out often for people? Well, the common thing is, wow, you did the Whole Earth Catalog. It really affected my life. You know, I still have the original Whole Earth Catalog,

and then I'll check and see if they mean the very first one that came out in 1968, there were only 1,000 printed, and know what they mean is their first Whole Earth Catalog, which was probably the last Whole Earth Catalog in 1972, so-called. And then I'll ask them, why do you still have it? And there's this wonderful silence. And I've never gotten a good answer. I think it has something to do with a sense of a certain era or a certain period in the

life of that person kind of coming of age and coming into who they were and who they wanted to be and the catalog I guess they felt was some kind of enabler or tipping point from one way of thinking about what they could do to another way of thinking about it. So anyway, a lot of people kept them. There's no end of basements and attics that have all those analogs in them. Now, one fan who comes to mind, and I'm sure there are many who have name recognition, but is Steve Jobs. So he referred to you in his Stanford commencement speech,

which, of course, has become very, very popular. And he refers to the amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, one of the Bibles of my generation. Have you spent any time or did you spend any time with Steve and get an idea of why it had such an impact on him? I did spend time with Steve a few times. And we did, in fact, you can find on YouTube some videos we did together for the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress asked both of us to help promote a new program they were doing. We were both glad to do it. And so we sat down together and did some fun stuff. Library of Congress. The Library of Congress asked both of us to help promote a new program they were doing. We were both glad to do it. So we sat down together and did some fun stuff.

That was also when Steve put out his personal computers or bicycle of the mind that vastly enabled everything. The question I never got to ask Steve was at the end of that commencement speech, what he put out to the Stanford students was what had been on the back cover of the Whole Earth Epilogue, which came out in 73, 74. And it said, stay hungry, stay foolish. And for some reason, that really got Steve. And his commencement talk was wonderful because it was basically about, well, he gives three stories, but the main story is that he's been scared to death by his pancreatic cancer diagnosis and lived, at least for a good and important while. And so from that perspective, he was kind of just giving the students a little bit of a signal

from the other side of a temporary grave. And that's part of what made it such an amazing talk. And his final line, basically, to students was, stay hungry, stay foolish. And the question I never had a chance to ask Steve, even though I did see him for lunch after that talk, was what got him about that. And various people, including me,

have tried to interpret why he in particular was moved by stay hungry, stay foolish. But I think he was putting it out from a position of, at that point, a whole hell of a lot of power and by then also wealth. And he was into issues like the innovator's dilemma of how do you keep your business from clinging to its past so much that it becomes part of the past? And how do you keep revolutionizing your own process,

your own thinking, your own business, your own whatever? And I think he was using, I'm surmising, maybe he was using stay hungry, stay foolish as a sort of a refreshment exercise. What was intended by Stay Foolish? Stay Hungry I feel like I can interpret in a number of ways that I would probably have some consensus on with other people. What about the Stay Foolish?

What was intended by that? Or could you elaborate on that? The back cover of the Holy Sepulchre was a photograph I commissioned that was meant to look like sunrise that a hitchhiker might see on some roadside. It was in relation to a photograph of the Earth at the moment of the sun just coming around, just making a crescent. The limb of the Earth basically is just a crescent of light from the sun. So, you know, that sunrise happening somewhere on earth, and so I wanted to get that from the surface.

But the dawn, someone's eyes must meet the dawn. The dawn hitchhiker is headed wherever the next driver is headed, in a way. And that's a foolish way to get through life. But it's also a randomizing way to get to wherever you're going. I think I was promoting the idea of occasionally staying random. Nicky Case just recently gave one of our Long Now talks where he points out that chaos is an important part of keeping creativity and evolution and everything else going. The story in evolution is what they call fitness landscapes,

and it's a biologist from the 50s. I'm really won over by them. The idea of a fitness landscape is it's a series of hills and mountains. And typically when a species is evolving, it'll evolve to a local optimum. The local optimum might be just the hill that happens to be nearby. It gets better and better and better going up that hill and gets to the peak and then it stays there. But all around it may well be much higher peaks of much greater opportunity, much greater fitness, whatever it may be.

But as long as it's focusing on being really, really good and being on top of the hill it's on, it will never get to those mountains. The only way it will get to those mountains is by being foolish, by trying weird stuff, by being random, by recombinating or mutating sort of down off the hill

a little bit, maybe even down into the nearby valley, which looks horrible, and then trying new things that improve on the new slope they're on, which could well be a higher mountain. So what gets you off the low hill of fitness to potentially a high mountain of fitness is randomness.

That's stay poolish. Has that been a conscious decision on your part throughout your life to insert a randomizing function? Or has it really just been serendipity? No, I'm just wondering. I mean, you've lived so many lives. I've been very intimidated by the interview because I'm like, how the hell? Where should I start? Where's the beginning?

Where's the end? It's very challenging. So I'm just curious if that's something you've thought about as you've made decisions in your own life. As near as I can tell, Tim, my version of randomness is pretty low threshold of boredom. Okay. Can you elaborate? Because the way that works is like with various sports, when they came along, skydiving came along.

Now, that doesn't count because I stopped doing that because I had a parachute not open. But hang gliding came along. Or snowboarding. Those were two sports. As soon as they showed up, I got into it. And pretty quickly, I just ran out of excitement, up the hill, down the hill, up the hill, down the hill in both cases. And I bailed. I have bailed out of a lot of money is to have a very good idea and then be extremely careful never to have another.

I haven't heard that before. Oh, man. It's true for artists. It's true in business. It's true in all sorts of things. You sort of develop an expertise. You get rewarded for it. And if it really looks like it is one of those mount opportunities, the temptation is just

to keep storming up the mountain. After a while, you can sort of see what the limits are, or you find yourself doing the same mental and physical things day after day after day after day. Meanwhile, other stuff is kind of tempting, or they just show up. A lot of my stuff just showed up. I'm dealing with a biographer now and he's raising some of these same questions. When I thought about doing a memoir, I thought about using a title from Arthur Kessler about astronomers called the sleepwalkers. Those things that I progressed from one

to another, they were not part of any arc of ambition or even narrative arc. They were just sort of what seemed like a good idea at the time based on what was around me. So I think biographies, including mine, consist mostly of circumstance and sequence, and then you map onto that character and any stories or something you tell backwards. All right, so I want to dissect the stories or things that you tell backwards in a second, but first, there's something you

mentioned in passing that I feel like I have to address as sort of a pink elephant in the room that my listeners are going to ask me about if I don't ask you, which is, you mentioned I did skydiving for a while, but then I had a parachute not open. Oh, yeah, that's an easy story. I took airborne training when I was an Army officer. And when I was stationed at Fort Dix, skydiving was just starting to come along as a thing that you could do. The U.S. Army had a skydiving team and things like that. And so this is in 61, 62. We were in New Jersey. Jersey and just a couple of the local guys got together and we started, we would take a military chute and cut gores in the side and then a section out of the back and then

put sort of peg strings up to where the gores were and by pulling on the strings you could sort of steer and it would sort of go forward. And then we'd rent a plane and jump out and do, I don't know, first jump and pull and then five-second delays and so on. And it was great fun. And by then, teaching basic training at Fort Dix was boring for all of the officers who'd been in for a year and a half at that point. So then when I got out of the Army in 1962, there was by then a pretty good amateur skydiving scene going on in Northern California, so I joined that and was jumping on the weekends up near Mount Calistoga in northern Napa Valley. And it was a young and dangerous sport at that time. It was still an army parachute that I'd taken from the army

and that I had adapted, or I guess I'd had guys who were doing adaptations do it. And one of the times I jumped out, and I think I was doing a 10-second second delay and you're sort of counting 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, 4,000. And I got to my count and pulled the parachute. You reach across yourself and pull the ripcord. And then the parachute comes out and there's a kind of sudden stop. And then you have this really pleasant long minute or so glide down to where you're going to try to land on a target. And this

idle was interrupted by the fact that the parachute was not opening. And I could sense there was crap going on behind me. And the great thing about parachute training in the Army is that you go through a lot of stuff of what do you do if the parachute doesn't open. There's a reserve chute, a little stuff together laundry thing on the front of your main chutes on

the back and there's this little chute in the front. And one of the things you're told is if you have to open the reserve, go for it and then turn sideways in the air, because if you're facing straight down in the standard position that you skydive in, the chute will open around you, and besides being dead on arrival, you'll already be in a shroud. So I had this wonderful moment of, oh, suddenly the spotlight is on me. I could see San Francisco in the distance. I'm really facing that direction and sort of had those cosmic thoughts.

And I also had, at that point, eight seconds to live. So, before I would be a greasy spot. And what I found myself doing was what I was trained to do. This is one of the things that persuaded me that training is better than almost any other form of instruction, which is a rotated 90 degrees in the air, reach for the reserve chute, pulled it, it popped out with a terrible jerk, and then I had the somewhat faster cruise

down to the ground without any ability to control it, which was alarming because the wind was taking me towards some power lines. Anyway, I landed, and that was that. But it was late in the day, so I didn't go back up, or maybe I was afraid to go back up. When I did go back up the following weekend, I did a very dangerous jump. I almost hit my head on the step leaving the small plane. I never really stabilized in free fall.

And basically it was a screwed up jump. And that persuaded me that my body was not happy doing parachuting anymore, so I stopped. I think that's a very reasonable conclusion. Oh, by the way, what caused the malfunction was the pilot chute that jumps out of your backpack first and then pulls out the sleeve, which then reveals the parachute. That's how it opens in a less than totally sudden way. That pilot chute jumped out,

and the tether that it was on managed to tie an overhand knot in the bottom of the sleeve. Oh, God. So even if I'd spent my eight seconds trying to undo the tangle, I would have still been tugging at the knot when I hit the ground. Was there any other training or principles that you took from your military experience that ended up being helpful later?

Well, there's a lot of instruction. I was lucky. I took ROTC at Stanford and then did two years active duty as soon as I graduated. And then off I went to Fort Benning to officer's basic training course. And there I got most of the basics of small unit management and leadership that my generation of liberal types mostly did not get. So, you know, me and John Kerry and a few others. And it was, you know, just simple things like, okay, you're responsible for the people in your command.

You're going to critique them to get them doing ever better, especially the sergeants that work for you. And the way you begin a critique is by telling the sergeant what he or she has been doing very well and thank you for that. It's got to be close and it's got to be accurate and well observed. And then you can say, on the other hand, there's I think one thing you could be working on and probably not more than one thing or you overwhelm them and you give them something to work on for improvement and let them know you're going to be watching to see signs of that improvement

which you will congratulate them for when it shows up and then come up with some other item of potential improvement. Just that sequence of telling them what they're doing right before telling them what they're doing wrong. That's the kind of thing that good management instruction does. And it's done at taxpayer expense. Thank you very much. I want to talk about the Holer's catalog a little bit more. And I know that you've probably told many stories about the Holer's catalog, but for those people who are listening who don't have context,

I want to read just a short quote, which is from a piece from The Guardian. So they have a little bit of context. And I'm going to borrow from a couple of different pieces. But the Whole Earth Catalog has been called the Internet before the Internet. And then quoting from this piece, it wasn't exactly a book. It was a how-to manual, a compendium, an encyclopedia, a literary review, an opinionated life guide, and a collection of readers' recommendations and reviews of everything from computational physics to goat husbandry. And it seemed, even as a kid reading this book, that it was the type of project that would take a lot out of a person. So rather than go into the creation of it necessarily, although we could certainly get

into it, I had not been aware that, at least based on some of the reading I did, when you shut down the whole Earth Catalog, what followed was a pretty severe depression. And you and I saw each other not too long ago at TED, where I spoke for the first time on the main stage and decided two weeks beforehand that I would completely redo my presentation and talk about severe depression and how close I came to suicide at one point in college. Would you mind sharing with people a little bit of that period in your life and what you found helpful to regain your footing? Well, I saw that TED Talk, Tim, and what I liked about it especially, and a lot of people liked it, it's doing very well online, was the fear naming aspect of that.

You sort of catalog the things you're actually worried about and then work through on each one, what happens if it actually happens, what do you deal with that, how can you head it off, and sort of take it apart in detail rather than just go along with this sort of blank, I'm too afraid to make this move approach to things. I really like that. It's something I think we're going to find a way to use for some of the people who get worried about the use of genetics in conservation, which is what I do most of the time. Oh, fantastic.

But back then, I think I stopped the catalog partly because I thought it was a good idea to stop something at its sort of peak of success just to see what would happen. It was kind of a feline curiosity. But it wasn't that then I became depressed. I also was eager to shut it down by 1971 because I was depressed. And it was a combination of a marriage probably that was going sour. Great it is. It had been for a few years. And various things that often go on with first-time success.

I didn't know how to, as yet, sort of modulate my work and schedule. So I was living at the office most of that time. How old were you at the time, just to place us? So, you know, it was basically 30, 31, 32, right in there. Got it. And by now, people at that age have been through three or four failures and successes and whatnot. In those days, it was still my first. And I was considered young at the time to be having a national-scale publication of great interest to a lot of people.

It was not money issues. It was a nonprofit, so I was just getting a non-profit salary of $10,000 a year or something like that. The fame part, I think, was not particularly problematic. I mean, as you know, any kind of fame can lead you into a kind of a self-caricature sequence where you wind up being driven around by your image rather than vice versa. But that was not really an issue either. I think it was vacation-less, overwork, and a tough marriage. And a couple of years to get out of it.

And of course it did. Years later, I had another one. They come, they go. I am now a great fan of drugs like Zoloft that can take. In my case, depression had an occasional panic-type attack, and Zoloft is fabulous against panic attacks. So you found that the panic preceded the depression? It was sort of a triggering event or a triggering... Yeah, it was a...

I think one of the elements, I don't know, who knows what triggers what. Sure. Actually, there was a recent trigger in the sense that I had a vertigo experience in the middle of the night when I just turned over to the right and suddenly the bedroom was spinning and my wife, Ryan, is trying to settle me down and we go off to the emergency room and the guy there says, ìOh yeah, itís vertigo. Pretty common. There's a maneuver that you can turn your head in a certain way and then you get the thing that's causing the vertigo that's in your middle ear to go to the right place,

so it doesn't do that anymore. It's a fabulous correction. But at that particular time, it was the first time my brain or my brain body had sort of frightened me like that. And so I was fearful for a year or two after that. And part of that would be kind of panicking at the kind of things that people panic at. Standing around for a long time in public or driving on a bridge, things like that. And Zoloft is great. It just cuts the peak right off of any kind of panic.

And then you realize you don't get scared about panicking. Right, you don't start panicking about the panic. You got it. And then just by taking the peak of fearfulness away, then the whole thing gets under control. So now that we're on the subject of, broadly speaking, pharmacology, I had read that, well, I'd heard someone refer to you, actually it was a hearing, not reading, refer to you as a pioneer, early pioneer in psychedelics,

but that you had stopped. And I'm curious to know why that is and if you could give us any backstory on that. Well, I happened to be in the Bay Area when LSD was first being researched. By then, at that point, still legally, as a sort of a psychological fitness, a way to do psychotherapy, a way to do severely enhanced psychotherapy, which by the way has come around again now. It's kind of fun to see. And I think a lot of it applied. So, you know, using MDMA on post-traumatic stress syndrome and things like that, which our friend Richard Rockefeller was pushing strongly until just before he died. That's good stuff.

But so then these drugs were around a lot. I never actually bought a psychedelic drug. There was so much of it in the 60s at this point that just the marijuana and hashish that people gave me, the LSD that people gave me, the mescaline that people gave me, or the sessions going on that I would join in. And then I joined the Native American Church formally and I went to a number of peyote meetings and then wound up leading one or two as a road man. And it sounds like I was doing all the drugs in the world, but compared to my contemporaries, I was pretty modest. And I did see a few people who thought that the problem that might be caused by bad trips from LSD was to do more LSD.

I was pretty sure that that was not the direction to look for a solution. I had some bad trips and some good trips and wound up the last one was in 1969, the occasion of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters and their bus in New Mexico having a race with the Hog Farm bus and the great bus race. I dosed up on a certain amount of LSD and that was a fun and amazing experience and And also, the last time I did LSD. After that, I continued to do nitrous oxide for a while. Nitrous having the advantage of being completely legal, and an e-tank delivered weekly at my office.

And nitrous, you do a flash, and if you like the flash, you do a flash, and if you like the flash, you can do another. If you don't like the flash, then you stop. It's a little more self-correcting in that respect. But one day, I just kept flashing. I think I was listening to the Beatles, probably

Sgt. Pepper. The world went away, and then I was on the whole other side of a large room, and my wife was shaking me, saying, you're laughing hysterically. It is laughing gas, after all. But clearly I had gone over some edge with nitrous oxide, so I stopped doing that.

Why did you stop doing... Was the LSD then a matter of the cessation, a matter of legality at that point? Oh, God, no. Well, it could be, but everything was illegal. So, um... I... was illegal. Ken Kesey did this event he called the acid test graduation and partly it was finessing his legal problems but also it was an acknowledgement that you go through the doors of perception that Aldous Huxley talks about

and you're in this cosmic place and then the trip is over and you're back and you go back through and there's the cosmic place and you go back through and you go back and there's the cosmic place and there's terrifying versions and exalted versions but in a

sense it's the same cosmic place. So two things happened. One, I got to sort of recognize that there wasn't a lot of news anymore, and a sort of side effect was I became much more suspicious about mysticism in general, which I studied in college, both Christian mysticism and everybody else's mysticism. And I had a feeling like I'd taken the shortcut into that world, and there wasn't as much there as I had thought and hoped. So I might come back to that. For people who don't know the name Ken Kesey, he's the author of other things, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and then The Pranksters, and the rip-roaring ride that you mentioned also led you to appear, just as a point of trivia, please correct me if I'm wrong,

in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. So just as a side note, because you make these appearances in so many sort of defining cultural works or moments, it's almost like watching Forrest Gump, but with someone who's not Forrest Gump. I mean, it's really astonishing. Well, I'm on the box of chocolates. You know, you really do not know what you're going to get. Approach to things. But yeah,

I got lucky. But partly by choice, I'm in a creative area where I specialize in doing weird stuff in the San Francisco Bay Area. And you run into a lot and wind up connecting with a lot that turns out to be important just by sort of strolling around. Can you tell us about Blue Marble? So can you tell us about the buttons, uh, that you distributed, uh, or I guess you were selling them, uh, way back in the day and give us a little bit of context on.

Okay. The blue marble you're referring to is the look of the earth from space. Yeah. And we're still talking about drugs because I was bored in the spring of 1966 and on my rooftop in North Beach San Francisco I took sort of a half a dose maybe 100 150 micro micrograms micro whatever's oh yeah of Yeah, of LSD. And just had a nice, long, thoughtful afternoon that was colored by having listened to a fair amount of Buckminster Fuller lectures and read his books over the previous months,

where he had said that people assume that the resources of the Earth are infinite, and in their mind the Earth is flat. And if they would just understand that the Earth is really a sphere with a limited amount of surface and resources and everything else, then they would behave better. And then they're stoned looking out at the San Francisco skyline, and imagined to myself that I can see that the buildings are all vertical, but they're not exactly parallel. They diverge slightly because of the curvature of the earth

and sort of the fisheye thing happening in my mind. And then I imagined, well, if I went up a little ways, I would see that even more strongly. I went up further still in altitude, I would have the horizon to close on itself and be an obvious circle. And then I guess I took my mind further out. This is kind of a star maker story.

Olaf Stapleton's story begins this way. And then in my mind, I saw the Earth not only as a circle but as a sphere rotating against a star field. I thought, now that is really the way to see the Earth. But it's weird that we haven't seen that because this is 1966. Sputnik went up in 1956. So the Soviet Union and America had been in space for, at that point, 10 years, and there were no end of photographs of the moon and the beginnings of satellite photography of various parts of the Earth's surface. But nobody had ever turned the camera back on the Earth from one of these remote probes to see what the earth looked like from a

distance and so the kind of lsd concentration which is and we call it a psychedelic meaning mind expanding but i think it's actually a mind contracting drug where you're really focused on your hand or the song that's playing or whatever it is, the fire. I was really focused on, gee, what do I do to make people aware of the importance of the image of the Earth from space? And what I came up with was this concept of a button that you mentioned that would say, why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet? It was sort of put in paranoid terms so that, and it's a question, so that people would

raise the question I had, how come we've been in space for 10 years and this photograph hadn't been made? The implication was that it had been made, and they were hiding it from us. And then I printed those buttons up in the next week and made some kind of posters, and I went and started selling those buttons for 25 cents apiece from a sandwich board at, say, the gate at UC Berkeley, and then at Stanford, and at MIT, and Harvard Square, and Columbia University, and got in the newspapers, the Village Voice. And I sent buttons to various people,

including Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan. I sent them to senators and congressmen and to their secretaries. I sent them to people at NASA. I sent them to people in the Politburo in Moscow. Anyway, it was just a campaign. So then when the photographs from Apollo started to come in, good color photographs of the Earth from the moon missions,

I was sort of proven right that it would make a difference. Indeed, it reframed everything, I think. Up until then in my lifetime, the sort of way you thought about the planet's fate was in terms of the mushroom cloud of atomic bombs. And from 1969, 1970 on, the image now that we think about the Earth's fate where there's no longer mushroom clouds, it's the photographs

of the Earth from outside. You mentioned Buckminster Fuller, and he seems to have been very influential, or had an influence certainly on you in some way. What was most striking about him, or what did you take, what have you taken from Buckminster Fuller? You know, there's a wonderful chapter in Peter Drucker's early memoir, which he called something like Observations of a Bystander. And in it, he has a chapter about the hippie generation and about two of his

friends, which was Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller. And he said, McLuhan and Fuller were these two voices in the wilderness shouting away with nobody listening. And he said both of them would turn up at his door and come in and sort of, you know, rant their various rants at him, and he would patiently listen to them and encourage them and show them the door. And what happened in the 60s is artists that I was hanging out with in New York, a group called Osco, were paying close attention to both Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller, and they were guiding how we thought about being artists. Peter Drucker's perspective was that this was the first generation

to take technology and engineering seriously and seriously as a guide to important, helpful intellectual endeavor that up until then intellectuals had sort of looked down from a great height on. Scientists looked down on engineers, and technology was seen as something that one kind of suffered rather than grabbed and ran with. And he felt that the 60s generation reversed that, that we started to grab pieces of technology and run to our own horizons with them. And we're ready to listen to prophets of that, such as Marshall McLuhan saying the medium is the message,

and Buckminster Fuller saying that if all the politicians in the world died next week, the world would barely notice. But if all the scientists and engineers in the world died next week, the world would cease to function. that was a big part of what the Whole Earth Catalog took on, much more from Fuller than from McLuhan in that sense. Though I later got to know both of them, especially Bucky. There's a quote that I found that may or may not be relevant, but I'd love to explore it a little bit. And that is, I believe, attributed to you. You can't change human nature, but you can change tools,

you can change techniques. And then by so doing, you can change civilization. Is that something you could expand on? And related to that is, do you think of thinking as one such tool that you could change instead of human nature? I'd just love to know where that came from or how it applies in your own mind. That definitely comes directly from Fuller. Fuller said a lot of basic, yeah, that changing human nature is hard, and when you try, you mostly fail, and it's discouraging. Changing tools and technology is relatively easy, and you can enable things. And so we saw that play down in the 70s when the new left was still in vogue and seemingly powerful and personal

computers were coming on. And so here in the Bay Area, you had people in Berkeley demonstrating and saying power to the people. And you had Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak basically saying, power two people. Just provide the tools and the rest will come. That's been a pretty reliable framing. A later version of that that I came up with is my sort of proclamation that science is the only news. All the other stuff, the politics goes in cycles. The fashion goes in very, very tight little cycles.

And even the technology is pretty predictable if you've got a good eye at what the science is up to. So that's, in a sense, moving almost from a grab tools and run with them to tools are arriving all the time, just pay attention. And that's, I think, where most of what we consider progress comes from. Now, does that apply to thinking? And I ask because of the seminars about long-term thinking. Yeah. Well, that's per busted. Okay, I was about to say no.

Clearly I can't do that. I got to hang out with people in the Bay Area at SRI in the late 60s who were doing a thing called augmented human intellect. This was Doug Engelbart and his merry band at Stanford Research Institute. And now that has been played out and so John Markoff came out with this good book a year or two ago called Machines of Loving Grace, which basically is spelling out the ongoing debate between artificial intelligence and basically intelligence augmentation, IA and AI, augmented intelligence. So augmented intelligence, I think, has been going on ever since humans got around to developing language. And that then becomes,

individual intelligence becomes much more social intelligence. I think almost all intelligence is social intelligence anyway. And there's personal computers came along. They were mainly a communication device. They did some calculations, some modeling and games and whatnot. But mainly how they got us was email and then web and then on and on. Social

intelligence is really easily augmented with tools. Now, what do you do with social intelligence? Can you change that? And that's something you're in the business of, and I suppose I'm in the business of to a lesser degree. The idea of the Long Now Foundation is to kind of give encouragement and permission to a society that is rewarded for thinking very, very rapidly, in business terms and, indeed, in scientific terms, to rapid turnaround,

get inside the adversary's loop and move fast and break things. And long-term thinking might be proposing some things you probably don't want to break. They might involve moving slow and steadily. I think climate change is the one that our century, our generation has been handed, is a thing to which there is no quick fix whatsoever. It's a big, slow problem caused by absolutely everybody, and any solution is going to have to be big and slow and caused by approximately everybody. So that's not tool. That's circumstance.

That's situational. But I think what we're proposing is that there are a lot of problems, a lot of issues, or a lot of quite wonderful things in that category of being big and slow-moving. And so I wound up with Brian Eno developing a pace-layered diagram of civilization where there's the fast-moving parts like fashion and commerce, and then it goes kind of slower when you get to infrastructure, and then things move really slow and how governance changes. And then you get down to culture, language, and religion move really, really slowly. And then nature, with tectonic forces and climate change and so on, is really big and slow.

And what's interesting about that is that the fast parts get all the attention, but the slow parts have all the power. And if you really want to deal with the powerful forces in the world, in bare relation to seeing what can be done with appreciating and maybe helping adjust the big slow things. So when you look, for instance, if somebody wanted to start exploring some of the slower-moving layers and topics, you've been curating SALTS, which I referred to earlier. The seminar is about long-term thinking.

And you've released a very affordable book. It's basically a collection of summaries. I think it's $2.99 of many of the talks at this point, which include, I mean, you name it, Michael Pollan, Matt Ridley. It's a very, very long list. Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss. And there you have it, about on meta-learning, which was a lot of fun and is a great honor.

Are there any particular, for people who wanted to perhaps take a break from the perishable goods of so-called news, non-scientific news and fashion and all of that noise, to think about the slower-moving, extremely powerful layers. Are there any talks that you might suggest they start with or any summaries? I'd have to scroll through them, but one that comes to mind is Matt Ridley talking about rational optimism. There's a good one by Ian Morris

on basically how the West sort of won the world for now. It's a sort of Jared Diamond level of understanding of how civilization has moved in relation, really, to the makeup of the planet. Jared Diamond's Sony. Jared gave one of the talks on

and the main one, I think, is his Guns, Germs, and Steel book, though his collapse book also has some interesting stuff to propose. I'd have to go down the list. Do you have some that you particularly like? Oh, well, I'm looking for a shopping list, basically, because I think in the last few months become particularly sensitive to the fact that I've been pulled out by the riptide of noise, I think.

And so I'm actually looking for a homework list from you more than anything else. Well, I'm looking at the seminar's homepage at the Long Now Foundation, and we've done, I guess, 120, 130 of these talks now, and they're about as long as this broadcast. They're 90 minutes in a sense, so it's long form. It's like long-form TED Talks. They're illustrated, so there's really good edited videos of them. But a lot of people use the iPod, I'm sure, as they do with your stuff

when they're writing to work or something like that. But just some of the recent ones. Jim Glick did a version of his book, Time Travel. Some of the most cogent thinking about time that I think we've seen

in a long time. Kevin Kelly has done two or three now. Jesse Ausible did one on how nature is rebounding. It's not widely known that we're pretty much at peak farmland now, and that's fantastic. As more and more of these bat-grown or lab-grown synthetic meats come along, I think we'll start to have fewer of the landscape being given over to grazing, which will then free up a lot of nature, which is where I like to see things happening. Jeffrey West, his book, Scale, he did a talk version of that, which is fantastic, particularly he focused on cities

and how cities are quite different from businesses in the sense that as they get bigger, they become even more innovative, whereas when companies get bigger, they become less innovative. And he's a theoretical physicist who has developed a scale, a logarithmic scale model of understanding of how that happens and why that is the case.

Stuff like that. So these are, I need to immediately after we're done talking, jump back in because I've been feeling a deep hunger for revisiting and while visiting for the first time, a lot of these. You mentioned... Say why? Because you're tired of the daily melodrama in the White House or what? I'm tired of daily melodrama, period. I think that whether it's self-manufactured emergencies or anxiety or shiny objects that are distractions, I've actually, and I don't want to take us too off the behind the curtain in a perception and the doors of perception and really trying to pull back from... I was just chatting with Tim O'Reilly about this, actually,

but if we were to look at, say, reality and then one abstraction of that being our personal experience as perceived through the senses and then language and additional abstraction on top of that. I've been trying to return to, I hate to use this term, but I'm not coming up with anything better on the spot, source or the layer of least abstraction to study that to the extent possible, because I think it informs everything else that's upstream. So there's probably a book or two that are speaking to you at this point. What are they? Well, I will tell you that I've been reading...

So there are books that are speaking to this, but they might not be what people would expect. They're actually not nonfiction. I think I've tried to look in nonfiction for answers, but there is a very kinesthetic feeling of greater truth, which will make certain rationalists out there just drop their jaws open. But I've spent my whole life operating out of my prefrontal cortex and using spreadsheets and

pro and con lists and so on. And I think that for a long time, I've used my emotions or intuition or feelings as a liability and distraction and nothing else. And I've come to believe otherwise. So I've actually spent a lot of time reading certain poetry, which is very much not anything who grew up with me would associate with me, but also reading highly autobiographical fiction that questions the nature of perception. For instance, Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is, I think, just a tremendous, tremendous work that it uses hilarity and absurdity to teach a lot. So that's one that comes to mind because I literally just finished it yesterday and it's sitting on my table. But what

books are you drawn to right now? I'll come to that. I want to say a little more about what you're talking about is taking comfort in the larger frame, the longer frame. Apparently there's some research

done on this a few years back. Danny Hillis has referred to it. I've never seen the actual frame. Apparently there's some research done on this a few years back. Danny Hillis is referred to it. I've never seen the actual research. But when people are doing something they care about for a long-term institution they care about, it might be a church, it might be a branch of military they're in, it might be the U.S. government, it might be a species they're in, might be the U.S. government, might be a species

they're dedicated to, they take comfort in engaging the time frame of that institution or thing. And I think one of the comforts may be when you're dealing with an institution

that's lived longer than any human or a natural institution that's lived longer than any human or a natural system that's obviously been longer even than humans themselves have been around. And you extend your mind back through the narrative, the sequence of events, the story of that thing. And then you extend it forward. When you extend it forward,

you go by a thing which might otherwise obsess you, which is your own personal death. Denial of death is a big event and things that sort of finesse death without denying it by taking on the life of something that lives longer than you do.

People get this from their children and grandchildren, obviously. That's why the loss of a child is harder on a parent than any other thing, I think. But this is a place that people like to abide from time to time. And it also feels like the opposite of the daily melodrama, which has its own attractions, God knows.

And just part of balance, I think, is having this other frame of reference. And some get it from religion, some get it from Vipassana meditation, and some get it from cleaving to a long-term thing, a species or an institution. I think that's one of the reasons that the Long Now Foundation, which is kind of a strange thing that would be successful, all it's doing is saying, long-term thinking is probably good. Let's build a 10,000-year clock and see if that helps. And a surprising number of people say, oh, good idea, and then want to engage in some fashion, either by listening to these talks or becoming members,

or eventually when the clock is finished in a few years, going and hanging out with the clock. In my case, I'm trying to bring back Woolly Mammoth, and that's going to take a couple of centuries. So I'll just get a start on that one. I'm 78. That's comforting. There's so many different directions we could go with this.

I know. I can see them branching out in your mind. I know. The dendrites of possibilities are branching out, and I think I'm going to go, much like the parachute not opening. I feel like for the people listening, I have to address the woolly mammoth. So, so that, so thank you for that easy option. And I, I, I shouldn't assume, but I will. If, is this related to Revive and

Restore? Yeah. Revive and Restore is an organization that my wife, Ryan Phelan, runs that we've been working on for almost five years now to basically bring genetic technology to wildlife conservation. And the general term for what we do and the sub-discipline that's opening up in conservation biology is called genetic rescue.

And mainly you're focusing on other genetic workarounds for inbreeding, depression, and small populations that one would like to have come back to be large populations. Maybe there's a small group of California condors left and capture breeding and then you want to get them back out to the wild, which has now happened. And the genetic monitoring of that helps with the breeding program, for example. Head off diseases to maybe dial down severely destructive invasive rodents on ocean islands for example things like that you can do with genetics in that case maybe with gene drive which is a very aggressive form of genetic intervention and then the extreme case

is because we now have recoverable DNA from animals that have gone extinct whether it's just a hundred years ago like the passenger pigeon or several thousand years ago like the woolly mammoths. And if there are close relatives of those extinct animals that are still living, they have working genomes. In the case of the woolly mammoth it's Asian elephants. Then you can contemplate, or in our case, working with George Church at Harvard, begin to apply the taking of the most mammothy of the mammoth genes, identifying them, and using editing tools like CRISPR,

move those genes basically into the genomes of living elephant cells, moving in the direction of eventually being able to get a cell with a nucleus that is basically a woolly mammoth genome, and then getting that into living Haitian elephants who can then give birth to woolly mammoths. Obviously this will go through many steps and then move from there to the standard reintroduction techniques of wildlife conservation to get the woolly mammoths up to a population that is self-sustaining, has enough genetic variability that they will not get into an inbreeding bottleneck, and start the process of reintroducing

them to their wild, which was the far north, where there's not a lot of people, so they'd be able to perhaps prosper pretty well. And eventually, the rest of that story is the woolly mammoths could be part of the revival of what used to be called the Mammoth Steppe, which is the grasslands of the far north that was once the largest biome on Earth. But when humans got through all of that biome

and killed off all of the large megafauna, except for the musk ox. That grassland turned into tundra and boreal forest. Mammoths would be helpful as we bring back the various grazers to the far north, like the musk ox and maybe the lowly rhinoceros. Mammoths were good, as elephants were good, all over the world. Everybody had elephants. And what they're good at is knocking

down trees. And knocking down trees is good because it turns a closed canopy forest into a mosaic, and a mosaic ecologically is a much richer environment for all kinds of species as we see in parts of Africa that have these animals.

And the far north could be like the Serengeti is now. So that will take a while, but I think we'll probably do it. So to those people who feel fearful of some of what they perceive as implications of this. To someone who might say, for instance, we couldn't have predicted when we were eliminating these species or we didn't predict the downstream effects, how can we be confident in predicting the consequences of reintroducing, say, megafauna like the woolly mammoth? What is the response to that?

Well, that statement, that analysis, is usually based on the, and you see this also with the climate, this is a system so complex that we don't understand it, and if you screw around with a complex system, you'll have unintended consequences that you'll just hate. If that approach were completely adopted there would be no human medicine because for sure the human body is a very complex system of which we have at best partial knowledge.

We screw around with it all the time and that's why I and any number of people who are still alive because medical interventions were made that we had reason to think might work out and thanks to a lot of science over a lot of time and a lot of failures, they do work out. So what you do with a complex system you don't completely understand is you tweak it and see what the tweak does. And tweaking is good because it's probably not going to cause a major change. It will cause a small local change. You can see how it works. And ecology is not a predictive science, but it is a great observational science. And so, like with the human body, you do these experiments, see what happens, and then build on your successes

and work around your failures, kind of normal. And I should say, I'm taking a devil's advocate position. There are also some, there are observational data sets that you can pull from that don't involve genetic rescue incorporating something like CRISPR, but say the reintroduction of wolves to certain parts of Yellowstone and how that affected, say, elk or deer populations, which affected grazing, which affected ultimately the paths of rivers and so on. I mean, it's fascinating. There's some really engaging video that discusses that. Now, is the woolly mammoth a... How much of the interest in the woolly mammoth specifically is about an input that has a very strong output, say, ecologically versus just a fascination with the woolly mammoth?

There's no end to fascination with the woolly mammoth because there's no end to fascination with elephants, as there well should be. Anybody who's really spent time with elephants falls in love with elephants. In Asia, the Asian elephants have been a partially domesticated animal for a long time. The fact that it is still endured along with the fact that about 100 people are killed by elephants in Asia every year. It suggests that not only are they useful, they are loved. In Africa, they don't kill people quite as much, but there's a certain amount of death and destruction that happens with them there. So let's have an open mind about that there's downsides as well as upsides for having an elephant in your life. But humans and elephants have lived together for a long time, and mostly we know how to do that. And they are safest for themselves and for us when they are in wildernesses that they pretty much own.

And the far north, the Arctic and subarctic regions would be swell for that in terms of woolly mammoths. I think I went so astray from your question, I lost track of what it was. Oh, that's okay. I think the question was how much of it was a strategic decision for the impact the woolly mammoth could have versus a personal interest or passion for the woolly mammoth that is unrelated to its impact if reintroduced. Well, there's a scale issue here, which as a lifelong conservationist I'm concerned about, which is we hear about biodiversity a lot, but I want to reintroduce the idea of bioabundance.

And one of the important plants that's being brought back genetically is the American chestnut, which used to be one quarter of all the trees in the eastern deciduous forest, wherever you are. And then a blight came along from Asia that killed them. Basically, they're evolutionarily still around, but ecologically they're extinct. But a workaround was found to make American chestnuts that are now completely blight-proof, and those are being bred up, and because they're a food plant, people eat chestnuts roasting on the open fire.

They are going through the government regulation process, but they're getting back into the wild already. And what they will do is not just introduce one tiny element of biodiversity in the eastern forest. They will introduce food that comes raining down, sweet nuts that everybody eats, including humans. And when they all died off, the animals that lived on those nuts had to start making do with acorns, which happened only from time to time, and they're bitter. So the richness of the eastern forest will be made much more bioabundant as these trees come back.

The same is true, as you mentioned, with bringing wolves back to Yellowstone. The same is very much true bringing beavers back to Scotland and now to England. They've been reintroduced in Sweden. And they are what are called ecosystem engineers that make ponds, that cut down some of the trees, that make a whole rich environment

for lots of other species along with themselves. And I would like to, everybody who's been on safari in Africa, whether it's South Africa or Kenya or Tanzania, has had the experience of wildlife on the land where, my God, there's hippos and giraffes and rhinos and lions and elephants

and a lot of big animals moving around and dealing with one another. Wildebeest and huge herds like American bison used to be in the U.S. And the whole world was like that. It's just a remnant in Africa of what the entire world was like. I think a whole lot of the world can be that, again, with the large animals. And that's sort of my long-term goal. As it happens, one of the largest of the land animals is woolly mammoths, and it looks like they're a relatively straightforward one to bring back.

So there you have it. One big animal. Mammoth is a good place to start. Thank you. That's extremely helpful. And I'd love to expand from that to a discussion of, for lack of a better term, environmentalism in general. And this is a quote, feel free to correct it because often quotes are misquotes

but his, that's you Stuart his own big idea is that the best approach to the issues he discusses is pragmatism, he fleshes it out by example rather than by discussing its philosophical defense by John Dewey or William James, he reckons it is an engineer's approach, accepting whatever gets results. For environmentalists, he suggests it means not a shift in ideology, but discarding ideology completely.

And the part that grabbed my attention here is the, it means not a shift in ideology, but discarding ideology completely. And I was wondering if you could talk a bit about that and what you mean by it. I was part of the creation, I guess, of the so-called modern environmental movement in the 60s and 70s. And a couple of things got brought into the environmental movement kind of by proximity and osmosis. So there was a leftist perspective that came in from the new left at the time. And so a lot of the environmental movement was sort of knee-jerk, anti-corporate, anti-business.

And there was a lot of romanticism that came from the hippies of back to the land and a lot of that kind of stuff. And that romanticism turned into a certain amount of anti-technology and even anti-science. To be one with nature is to dissolve yourself in the nature that is already there and don't fuck with it. And any kind of intervention or any kind of reliance on technology was regarded as a, quote, techno-fix and therefore contemptible.

That set of framings kind of got set in concrete and greatly outlived their usefulness and started to get away. So in 2010, I came out with a book that was basically about the rise of equal pragmatism that I called Whole Earth Discipline. And it was looking at things that I thought looked like environmentalists just had it wrong. We had it wrong that genetic engineering was a bad thing in agriculture. GMOs were thought to be bad, starting with the friends of the earth and then spreading from there.

I saw how that happened at the time. Nuclear was thought to be bad and when climate change came along and it was shortest cut to being able to really really reduce emissions of greenhouse gases it was discounted for reasons left over from an earlier time uh... cities uh... were taken as the problem rather than the solution, but when you look at the demographics,

cities are the solution. They're the greenest thing that humans do. And geoengineering of intervening in the climate directly to buy ourselves more time to cut down on emissions was taken as some kind of profound abomination. And as Al Gore told me, Brand, you want to experiment with the whole planet? Don't do it. Well, again, this is like we were saying about what we do with ecosystems. You tweak things and see what works and then go in the direction of what works and avoid

what is not working. So I think the environmental movement, to the extent that it can't even be called a single thing anymore, is catching up to the real world. And that's taking a whole lot longer than I would have liked. But I think reality, especially in terms of climate, is just going to keep hammering us. Well, it seems to me that looking at the projects you're currently involved with,

looking at the projects that you've been involved with, you're very good at enlisting the help and collaboration of other people. And I asked Kevin, Kelly, if there were any particular questions or topics or facets of your life that might be fun to explore. And one of the bullets that came back was, very few humans have ever turned down a request by Stuart. How is he so persuasive? And I'll just, I'll leave it at that. I don't know how to really dig into that. So I can try, but let me just keep it general. Why does

Kevin have that perception of you, and why are you, if that's the case, so effectively persuasive, do you think? I don't know. I get no's. I don't ask that much. Basically, I invite people to give these seminars about long-term thinking, and it's kind of like being invited to give a TED Talk.

It's not that hard to say yes yes because you'll get a nice audience for being invited to be on on this show I do run into a fair amount of people who feel one form another of kind of gratitude and maybe admiration for the Whole Earth Catalog back in the day. And so a number of years ago when I asked Craig Ventor to give a self-talk, I was surprised to hear him sort of leaping into saying yes. And it turned out he's of a generation who got his twig bent by the Whole Earth Catalog and felt good about payback. So a certain amount goes with that. Other stuff has to do with just being around and kind of being public

for decade after decade. You get kind of known and recognized enough where you don't sort of have to establish your bona fides over time because that's already been done. I don't think it's more profound than that. Well, at the same time, though, I could say you've been in the public and met many, many, many, many, many people, interacted with a huge group of individuals. When most people have that much interaction over a long period of time,

sometimes you make mistakes, maybe people meet you on a bad day. You don't seem to have, and this is maybe a strong wording, but you don't seem to have, and this may be a strong wording, but you don't seem to have any known enemies, if that makes sense. I've never heard someone attack you, and maybe that's just because I haven't come across it. Why do you think that's the case, and even if that isn't the case, why is that the perception? Well, I'm not powerful or rich, so the enemies that go with position of power, there's nothing to resist, and the resentment that goes

with a certain kind of wealth is not there either. I've certainly had people who've strongly opposed me on certain things, sometimes publicly. Mostly, I think that my successes have been public and my failures have been private. So from the outside, it looks like lots of good things. I don't really know. I've not been associated, I guess, with things that I later wished that I hadn't been, or that other people wished that I had not been. And so the main politician that I've worked closely with is Jerry Brown.

Well, neither he nor I are suffering from his reputation in that respect. So my associations have worked out very well, and I guess I'm lucky. Do you have any particular failure that you could share which greatly informed your life after you experienced it or something that could be something that set you up for later success or just a failure that taught you a lot in some way or another um i failed to finish ranger training in the Army, and I quit partway through after the sort of early getting-into-it stuff. Ranger training is much harder now than it was then. Airborne training and jump training is pretty much the same now than it was then. But it was five weeks, six weeks or something, pretty intense stuff. And about halfway through,

after having finished the five-mile run part and saving myself from drowning in 32-degree water weighed down with ammunition bags and all of that, one day I just quit. And I think what I told myself was that it was January or February at Fort Benning, which I think the South is nice and warm. It was freezing cold and we were out in it. I was thinking I was not learning much because it was so cold. That was a stupid excuse. I gave myself to quit. It's like all of these intense military trainings that SEAL

do or DELTA or any of those guys do. If you say, I don't want to do this anymore, you are gone in about 30 seconds, which is the right thing to do. What I learned from that is don't quit anything for a snap decision reason. I quit lots of stuff, including many successes, but I don't do it on a snap decision anymore. a project or anything that you were involved with later where you had the impulse to quit and what was behind it and then what you did instead? I'm making noise because I'm trying to avoid radio silence here while I ponder if there's something I wanted.

I could also come back to that and buy some time if you like. Sure, let's buy time because I'm not getting anything immediate. All right. So I'm going to buy time since we were talking about physical training. To confirm one thing, which is you're, are you currently 78? Is that right? Correct. Okay. And you do CrossFit you currently 78? Is that right? Correct. Okay. And you do CrossFit twice a week?

That's correct. All right. Now, I guess two questions related to CrossFit. One is because you seem to thrive on variety. And like you mentioned, you get bored of, say, snowboarding because it's up, down, up, down, up, down. Right. What appeals to you about CrossFit, number one? And then, number two, do you have any favorite exercises or workouts? Oh, good God. Well, the main, in relation to getting bored, the wonderful thing about CrossFit, for me, among other things, is that it's a

different set of exercises that you encounter every single time. So I've been going for two, two and a half years now, and I do not look online to see what the workout is going to be. I show up and I have my jumper open rope and I'm going to do whatever's there that day. And it's always different. And that plus, because you're doing it with other people in a competitive mode, there's a social aspect to it. And there's going to be a different group of people in the two days a week I go. Some of the same, you know, hi Nick, hi Casey, and some that are different.

And the competitive aspect that you're going against time and keeping score helps keep it interesting. It's a very impressive product, a genius program in terms of getting rid of a lot of the spurious stuff of gyms. So there's no machines, there's no mirrors, there are rowing machines, but that's it. There's free weight work, and the free weight work is not only straightforward strength, but the coordination to manage free weight so you don't have the machine doing the managing part for you. And it made a huge difference for me when I started at 75. Suddenly I was, within a few few months 30 pounds lighter.

And I'm 157 pounds now, which is the weight I was when I started the Whole Earth Catalog at the age of 30. And then you stand different, as you know, when you work out. And one of the things I learned to appreciate in the military was being able to stand like you mean it. Stand like you mean it, you've got to be fit. And that just makes all the difference. My own sense is that, certainly for males and maybe for anybody,

having a certain amount of fitness and strength makes you proud, and being proud is the most reliable source of happiness that I know. So the CrossFit is fascinating to me on many different levels. And well, no, I had my first CrossFit workout in, uh, 99 or 2000.

I want to say it was around 2000 in Mountain View at a half Gracie jujitsu Academy, where a number of the guys were going to Santa Cruz to train with a bunch of the original CrossFit crew. And it's morphed a lot over time. But I remember in that year and maybe the year after how many people talked about how there was no demand for yet another group exercise program. And it made me think of how Starbucks was turned down by many, many, many, many, many different investors who said, really? Another coffee chain? Nobody needs that. And this leads me to want to ask you about,

and I would love for you to describe it a little bit for people who are not familiar with it. You mentioned a name earlier on, which was Doug Engelbart. And you were present for what has been called the mother of all demos. And I'd love for you to describe for people what that was and what the experience, uh,

and feeling was for you and other people in the room. Because what I don't know, because I haven't read much about it is if, if people realized the implications of what they were witnessing. Um, is if people realized the implications of what they were witnessing. So if you could kind of take it from here and tell us the story, that would be great. Yeah, so beginning with Starbucks and CrossFit, the difference between a good idea and good execution, or even a bad idea and good execution or even a bad idea and good execution

the execution on CrossFit was impeccable and you being there at the start of it is impressive the there's nice book on it by JC Hertz called learning to breathe fire which pretty much tells the story of how CrossFit came about. And the title refers to that, something I saw in the military and learned to appreciate there when I taught basic training, which is if you can take people and force them beyond, get them in a situation where they go beyond their expectations of what they're capable of, the world opens up for them. And that's one of the things that we did with basic training. And I would see these trainees come in from Brooklyn and so on.

We would push them, and they would discover that there was so much more that they could do with their bodies and under certain circumstances with their minds than they thought and and then they you know they started to grow toward infinity with that realization so CrossFit does that for a lot of people it's quite intense and that intensity as you know once you realize you can do stuff that you didn't think you could do, then things open up. So the mother of all demos was a 1969

Vault Joint Computer Conference. And this was a demonstration where a group at SRI that I got to be part of as a sort of advisor and filmer, showed the results of about three or four years of work doing what Doug Engelbart called augmented human intellect. And he was using mainframe and many computer capabilities to interactive text, Windows, they developed, his leading engineer, Bill English, developed the mouse.

And he gave a demo that was about an hour and a half long in San Francisco that is the greatest high wire act you've ever seen because they had developed... The computer that was running the demo was not in San Francisco. It was 30 miles south in Menlo Park. And Bill English had developed the microwave capability to get the data flowing back and forth

between San Francisco and Menlo Park so that the computer-generated demo was happening. Well, that was a very tin cans and string kind of connection. And so getting it to the edge of capability and then maintaining it for an hour and a half was astonishing in its own right. So Bill English was in the room and was in Doug Engelbart's ear. He is on the stage and also on the projected screen, and his face is being cut in and out of the visuals that he is working.

He's showing how you can create text, change text, make various files, move the files around, connect them to other people. He's showing the mouse. He's showing a keyboard he developed. It's a one-handed keyboard. And all of the time that he's going through his spiel, which we had rehearsed once or twice, but it was basically him just telling a play out of the work that he and the team had been developing for three or four years.

It was hanging over the raggedy edge the whole time. Every now and then Bill would whisper into his ear, we lost signal from Menlo Park, fake it for a while. And Doug would just launch into some encomiums for the people that he worked with and holding forth on that while his computer came back up. It really was an awesome demo. I was not in the room. I was in Menlo Park filming

that parts of the action. And hands on keyboards and what was on the screen. Stuff like that. So at the end of it, I was just hearing the voice of a person who was in communication with Bill English who was in communication with Doug on the stage.

And then everything kind of wound down and we're looking around and said, over, yeah, it's over. Well, did they like it? Oh, just a second, I'll check. And it turns out that in the room there had been a standing ovation and minds blown and Alan Kay

redirecting his entire career and various people getting completely knocked out and blown away by it all. Uh, but down in Menlo park, it was, uh, Hatcher came back. Um, yeah, apparently they liked it. Good night, everybody. So we just, we just all wandered home. Oh, wow. Just another day in the office. Let's go get some pizza. Thank God it's over.

Yeah, basically, you know, we'd worked hard and it's done now. Phew. All right. So I want to mention one thing about, just to come back, because I feel a duty just to say one more thing about CrossFit, which is there are a lot of incredible things and benefits associated with CrossFit. I think there

is a risk that people should be aware of, which is the ideology of our way is the only way. So there is a bit of a culture of intolerance around some people who practice CrossFit. And so I would just caution people to be aware of that so that they don't develop a myopic approach to fitness. And I know a lot of people who are involved with CrossFit, but I've also, for instance, after one podcast I did, and the headline of which was

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of CrossFit, had the founder of CrossFit reach out to schedule a phone call. And I thought it was going to be, because the podcast was very complimentary, that it would be a conversation about maybe doing something on the podcast or something else. And instead, it was this very sort of threatening call because of the headline, even though they had not listened to the audio. So I would just caution people about anything that paints a very black and white picture that is us versus them.

That would just be my cautionary tale. On the mother of all demos, and moving back into tech a little bit though, I would love to talk about the expression, information wants to be free. Can you comment on this phrase that is attributed to you, information wants to be free, and also, if it is the entire quote, because I've read that it is not. So if you could elaborate on that a bit,

I would certainly love to hear it. Well, it keeps coming up from time to time because there is a paradox out there of information, especially on the web, just swarming around. And should there be paywalls for scientific journals? And my feeling on that is there should not, by the way. But you can see why Elsevier and other organizations that have paywalls about scientific journals are reluctant to take them down because they are extremely remunerative for those organizations. But I think they are bad for science. So that's a current application of this particular argument. The statement I made goes back to 1984 when Kevin Kelly and I and Ryan Phelan organized

a thing called a hackers conference. It turned out to be the first hackers conference. That particular thing has carried on year to year since then. And one of the people who came to the hackers conference was Steve Wozniak, along with a lot of the great hackers at the time, and Lee Felsenstein, and the best reporter of all of that material, John Markoff, was there, and, and, and. It was great. There's a good video on it you can find online.

But in the course of it, there were a lot of kind of public discussions of the issues at the time being talked about. One of them was freeware, shareware, and then regular commercial products. And Steve Wozniak was making the point that copy protection was a big question that was going on around because copy protection would be put on software so you couldn't easily copy it and give it to your friends. But on the other hand, the copy protection then made it much less convenient to use as a tool, and that was a real debate. And Steve Wozniak was saying quite right. Look, an engineer puts a couple of years' work into one of these things. He or she, it was mostly he in those days, should get some kind of remuneration, so it needs to be commercial.

And I apparently replied, that's right, information does want to be expensive, but information also wants to be free. And as it gets easier and easier to copy anything that's digital and distribute it equally easily, that debate is going to go on forever that information wants to be free and it wants to be expensive. And information, everybody knew that information should be expensive. That was the standard commercial model. But the things that digital capabilities were bringing was that there could be vast quantities of information moved around freely.

So information wants to be free became kind of a slogan or a motto or something at the time, a bumper sticker, a shortcut to dealing with a large phenomenon that was happening. But the rest of it really was, and information wants to be expensive. And that relationship is not contradictory. It's paradoxical in the sense that the more the one, the more the other. And the more information wants to be free, the more it wants to be expensive because there are that many more values to accrue to very large audiences, etc.

It's a debate which is permanent. It's kind of like the debate itself around the term hacker. Is a hacker a good guy or a criminal? And the answer is both. And information will continue to be a source of major commercial activity and a source of huge free available stuff. So my rule on Twitter is when I link to something, I only link to stuff that's not behind paywalls that you can go look at it itself. And probably once you get there, that source will show you whatever I link to and they'll beg you to subscribe and pay for their service.

And you might do that. Yeah, I was mystified recently. I'm not going to mention the outlet because I might actually get it wrong, but it was a mainstream scientific publication that was only promoting articles in its Twitter account, and they were all behind a paywall. Yeah, I think that's kind of crazy. And it drove me nuts. It's tricky.

I mean, you have publications like New Scientist, which is not really a strict scientific publication. It's a very good publication. But they paywall all their stuff, and as a result, I think they have a much smaller audience. Things that look like they'll be... want to be widely read by the public from Nature or Science magazine often get out from behind the paywall. And that's good for science, it's good for public understanding of science.

I think it's ultimately good for the publications because people realize there's lots more good stuff where that one came from. Well, no, exactly. I mean, if you're trying to get someone hooked on a drug, whether that is a pharmaceutical or really good information in a curated and edited magazine, it behooves you to give them a sample if it's really good enough to be addictive. So if you have a social account where you're only sharing things behind a paywall, there's no conceivable sort of user behavior that I can think of where they go click on a headline

expecting to read an article, they don't get the article, and then they're asked to pay for it. By and large, not. Every now and then, you're so desperate, you pay the $29.95 or whatever it is to see the thing, but you're angry. I would love

to... I suppose this is actually perhaps a good segue from angry or frustrated. A lot of people suffer from clutter, and I have heard that even at the height of paper, so before most things or many things were digitized, that you had a completely clean desk and that that is also true of your inbox.

Where did you hear that? Well, I don't want to incriminate anybody if it's not true. Do it. Tell me. I'll track them down and wonder what happened. So is that not true? Is that not accurate? It's not accurate. Okay, alright. Alright, well then we can skip that if it's not accurate. But if you have any organizational rules or principles that help you to keep your life in order or projects in order, maybe

that's a graceful lateral move from what I guess is incorrect. Yeah, I think whatever systems I use are half crap. I have been rewarded for not getting rid of stuff, which is that the guy who's actually suffering the most now, by the way, is John Markoff, because he's the guy who took on trying to write a biography of me. It's a fun book project where I get to sort of help in the research, but I don't have to do any of the work.

But the poor guy is overloaded with material because I've led a relatively stable and continuous life in the Bay Area. Some of my interesting stuff I just threw into boxes. Now I gather 70 linear feet at Stanford in their archives, and they've got probably another hundred plus feet of my papers yet to come, notebooks that I kept every day, not every day, but that I've written in since I was in college and all that stuff. So having enough storage space to throw the interesting stuff with a remote idea

might be eventually interesting to go back to. Turned out to, which is a cluttering, not a decluttering move. The decluttering move is to get the hell rid of it. But anyway, it gives poor John lots to work with. And I think a result there is that he'll be able to tell a more accurate and probably less interesting story of me.

Whereas if there was none of that stuff, it would all be hearsay, and hearsay is way more interesting than real things. If you were teaching a let's say a freshman seminar in college, Stanford, wherever, you could take your pick, Berkeley, doesn't matter. You could teach anything you wanted. You could have a class size of any size.

What would you teach and why? I don't think Western Civ is taught anymore. It would be probably called Global Civ now, but it was a required course freshman year in 56 at Stanford for me. And it's a great thing to begin a college undergraduate education with, sort of the overview of civilization so far. And there was also a very good course on comparative religion taught by Frederick Spiegelberg that I took. And those two things are framing that I'd love to see more of. I don't think I'm qualified to teach a thing like that. But any person who takes on teaching something like that

has got some wonderful research to do. And you have a concept like Big History now. Big History is basically everything from the Big Bang to this week put together in one somewhat coherent narrative. And that's the kind of thing I think is helpful to have out there. I'm not a very good teacher. I can occasionally give an okay lecture, but teaching is a real talent as well as skill, and I have neither the talent nor the skill.

Well, let's just pretend, though, that you had the talent and the skill, but as you put it, you weren't qualified to teach Western civilization, but that if someone were to, they would have some wonderful research to do. Let's just pretend that, say, Stanford reaches out to you at some point after this podcast, and they say, great news, we would be honored if you would teach a class on Western civilization, you have time to prepare, and they caught you in a moment of weakness, so you agreed. If you had, say, a few months to prepare for that, how would you go about researching it?

What would you read? Who would you talk to? What would your approach be? Well, Tim, this brings up another issue that I think not so many of your guests get into, which is at the age of 78, how many months do I have to prepare anything? My health is great, but the actuarial tables are pretty clear. And I find myself not taking on long-term commitments as much. There's a book I'd love to do.

It's called How to Be Rich Well. And that would take three or four years of serious research and then probably two years of writing. And that's not actually what I want to do at the age of 78, with who knows how much time. So Kevin Kelly has probably put it to you, but he's put it to various people in a similar mode, which is that we've both discovered that as you move from project to project in your life,

the projects that look like they're... I mean, you start projects all the time. Most of them don't take. But the ones that take, that you find that you continue to be interested in, there's starting to be enough other people interested in that the thing kind of makes circuit with the world. They're starting to come to life. To follow through on it and make it really come to pass

and be a thing in the world, it's going to take about five years, give or take. And at various times in your life, you have a sense of how many five years is left you might have. And once you get into your 70s, that becomes a number of fingers on one hand kind of thing. So one is not quite as, oh yeah, I guess I'll really take on that huge five-year commitment that I may not live to finish, just given the way the statistics fall. So that's a different answer to your question.

But there's very good stuff in that line from Oliver Sacks in his last year when he was writing like mad the whole time that he knew he was dying. And I haven't read it all, but I saw glimpses of it. He would say things like, there's some subjects I find I'm not interested in anymore because I really can't do anything about them, such as climate change. And, you know, stages of life is life extension folks are working away. But meanwhile, mostly we're working with a finite resource here. And so that's part of life management is what you're doing with the time you've got.

Kevin Kelly has a clock on his computer that is counting down to the day he dies according to the current actuarial tables. He knows how many hours more he's going to live and acts accordingly. How do you choose your commitments now? How do you filter what to say yes to or what to say no to? Well, there's a shift, I think, in most people's careers

that actually are having a career if it involves responding to opportunities. In an early career, the algorithm is yes and less no. You get invited to do something, of course, probably. So you say yes and then you find out if it's actually maybe not such a good idea. But at a certain point, that flips into no and less yes. And so I get invited to give a talk now. It's pretty much no unless yes. I'm not trying to build a career.

There's a certain amount of work and travel and updating the slides, whatever the hell it may be. And there's other things I want to put my time on. But people who don't make that shift, you'll find them get into a kind of a crazy point. Maybe you've been there of trying

to move ahead on every opportunity that presents itself. And they're all good, but in combination they are absolutely lethal. Try to take them on more than the right number at the same time. And then you're no and less yes. The criteria for saying yes change at the beginning.

They're pretty relaxed, and then they get more and more constrained as time goes by. So you mentioned a word that I want to grab onto, which is, is finite. And there is a book that has in the last two years, it's very, it's very odd. Maybe it's selective attention, kind of like when you buy, say, a new jacket or a new car, and suddenly it seems like everyone is wearing the same jacket or driving the same car. Chances are it hasn't happened overnight. You just have more attention towards it. But there's a book that originally came to my attention through Jane McGonigal, who's brilliant and amazing. And this was about two years ago. And it has increasingly been sort of entering my

life from different directions. And that is James P. Karst's Finite and Infinite Games. Oh, good. So could you please tell people about this book and how it has affected your thinking. Or just the principle, or the distinction between a finite and an infinite game. I got really interested in games back in the early 70s, and in fact organized a thing called the New Games Tournament. The idea I had there was that I actually began with my mentor at the

time, a psychologist, biologist, anthropologist named Gregory Bateson. And for some reason we were talking about theory of games and the way it was being played out in terms of the nuclear standoff of the Cold War. He said theory of games is brilliant. He actually knew John von Neumann who came up with it. And he said the problem with the theory of games is it doesn't have a theory about how you change the rules of the game. And I thought that was a profound thing to say and a profound thing to ponder and maybe act on.

And then I got myself noticing the way I as a kid played games and the way kids in general play games, if they're not carted off to Little League and soccer practice and all that stuff is that when they play games, they're changing the rules all the time. And so stickball is sort of a version of baseball that depends entirely on how many people you've got in the street and the nature of the street and what you're going to be able to use as first base and stuff like that. And kids are more easily bored than anybody, and so they'll be playing a game and it's going along, and it gets kind of boring.

And so somebody says, you know, what if we play volleyball where instead of the way you usually play it, we play it where let's see how long we can go. Usually the usual rules, only the deal is see how long we can go before the ball hits the ground. And it turns from a competitive into a collaborative game. So I set up New Games Tournament as a public place where a bunch of strange games would be provided. I provided a six-foot-high earth ball that people invented various games around. It's a big push ball that crowds of people can interact with. We got a huge ship saucer and a tug-of-war that went across kind of a canyon where it was a 300-foot ship's hawser and a couple hundred people on each side.

And it was a Le Mans start, so I had a starter pistol, and both sides had to stand off 10 feet away from the rope and fire the pistol. They both run to the rope and start pulling. And, of course, they're pulling across the canyon so the team that's starting to lose are finding themselves dangling over this. That was really just in the Royal. But they're dangling in space. And then

bystanders would feel sorry for them and then join the team that was about to lose and help pull the other direction. And those guys would start to lose and bystanders would help them and go back and forth. This kind of emergent property of uh kind of freely uh shaping games uh really really interested me so this is and we had a number of such things there. I invented a few games. Some of them were semi-violent. What would be an example of a semi-violent game?

One that was called Slaughter. I developed this for the War Resisters League. This was during the resistance to Vietnam War. The War Resisters League knew that I was doing public events, and they asked me, like the Trips Festival, they asked me would I do a public event for them? So there's an ex-military guy who's being asked to these people who want nothing to do in the military to advise them on what kind of event to have.

And I said, well, you guys need a war in the worst way. But it can be war in your terms. And so we sort of came up with a series of public events that we did at various campuses in the Bay Area that had among other things some kind of war like games

and what I invented was called Slaughter it's what I knew from hanging out with American Indians and others is that really physical games that involve both sexes is really good for young people because you get to do a lot of kind of, we're not allowed to say grab ass now, but it's physical sweaty interaction that is not explicitly sexual, but everything is sexual at that age. And so it's like dancing, only competitively, and a little more freeform.

So the game I invented for these were resistors who I thought were not in their bodies sufficiently, or probably getting late enough, that this game would involve very, very physical interaction. And what we did was we get a pretty large wrestling mat, maybe 20 feet by 20 feet, and it was played on your knees, because one of the things I realized is that people standing up can take their interactions are too violent and falling down hurts and so on.

And the deal was that there's two teams, be it shirts or non-shirts or socks or non-socks or whatever, and they're on their knees and there's a starter gun and they go at each other and the deal is to you can kill the other players by wrestling them off the edge of the mat and head slaughter. And immediately people start coming up with all sorts of strategies of teaming up and trying to stay out of the fray and lasting longer and various things you can imagine people doing. And the deal is once any part of your body goes over the edge of the fray and lasting longer and various things you can imagine people doing. And the deal is once any part of your body goes over the edge of the mat, you're dead and you turn into a referee.

And so the people who have been killed are immediately out there saying, ah, you're out, tap, tap, you've got to leave. And I threw in some other complications of medicine balls that had to be put in baskets and things like that. So it had the advantage of being intensely physical because people really are having to grab and wrestle each other and move them to the edge of the mat and simultaneously deal with defending a basket and moving their ball into the other team's basket. Where is it now?

And there was an overwhelm, an intensity and an overwhelm that is ideal because you get out of your body with that much intensity and that many things to think about at once. So that was Slaughter. And what was the, did you observe any particular effect on the group from playing this game? They loved it. They loved it. They fucking loved it. Of course, these war resistors were dying to have physical combat.

And in a way that clearly was not killing anybody. It's not even hurting anybody. We had t-shirts that said, play hard, play fair, nobody hurt. And in a way, that was a better thing than war. It was kind of a competitive situation

where you play hard, play fair, nobody hurt. So it worked out well. And all of this is leading up to why a book called Finite and Infinite Games, as I think of fundamental interest, is gamification, thinking things in game terms, designing things in game terms, is one of the profound things that civilization has done for a very long time. And it's a way of organizing physical and mental behavior, often in combination, that is just wonderful. And along with the James P. Karst book, the other book is Homo Ludens by Huizenga.

And Homo Ludens basically says, man the player, games is what we do. Well, here Karst takes apart the games that are win-lose, like elections, to the games that go on forever, which is democracy. And you need them both. And within any election, everybody's got to go by the rules that they've agreed to. But within democracy, you're always looking for, okay, we've got a problem with the rules, or we're bored with the rules,

what's an improvement that we can make? And the infinite game is the infinite improvement of the games we play. And that's civilization's story. Right now, in democracy, we're thinking about should we change the rule about electoral college versus popular vote? And we're talking about changing the rules

of how to prevent gerrymandering from being such a distorter of the electrical process, and so on. I think the more people are comfortable with the idea of constantly improving the games we play and the techniques of doing that, and the freedom to do that, and the sense that it goes on indefinitely, the better off we are. And as Karst might say, playing with the rules, not just within the rules. Yeah. But you've got to do both. No, right.

One of the points he makes is within a game there's a boundary. There's going to be rules. Players of the game need to agree on the rules. And you see kids do this all the time. They play a game, sort of not so interesting. Somebody says, well, let's do it so-and-so way. Nah, that's not. And then there's an argument.

And all the argument, okay, we'll try it that way. And if it works and they like it, then they'll keep it. And on it goes. So there's the game and then there's the argument. And that combination is part of the story. Is the contrast that you've, I believe you've made before, between goals and pathways related to all of this? Or is it maybe a separate topic that I'd still nonetheless

love to hear you expand on a bit in this? Yeah. Whether it's related to any of your projects, right? The whole earth catalog or anything else I've, I've read that, you know, goals are not that interesting to you, but pathways are. And I would be, as someone who has traditionally been very goal-focused, but has in recent years changed my thinking about how I select projects to be maybe less explicitly singularly goal-focused. I would love to hear your distinction between the two, goals and pathways. This comes down to a lot of the career theories that one hears out there. Follow your passion. Figure out what you want to do in life.

Major in it. Get a graduate degree in it and go do it. That, I think, really works for people who have a clear idea that they want to be NX. But I kind of buy that that's only for some people. A lot of us have no idea what we want to be, or it turns out, I wanted to be a firefighter. I fought a forest fire briefly in Michigan when I was young, and I was going to go to the University of Idaho in Moscow and go ahead and get a Ph.D. in firefighting. Unfortunately, I had a teacher in prep school who said,

you could go to someplace else like Stanford for your undergraduate degree, and then if you want to get a Ph.D. in firefighting, go to Idaho. That hadn't really occurred to me. So, you know, he saved me from probably a pretty limited fate of going to the University of Idaho versus Stanford in that case, which I had the option of both. I got to prep school and then to college and realized that nearly everybody there was smarter and more capable than me. And a lot of them knew exactly what they were planning to do. They were going to be lawyers and biologists and physicists and whatnot.

And I adopted my older brother who had gone to Stanford. Mike had gone there eight years before me and he knew some of the best teachers there because he'd stumbled into them or heard about them. And he said the way to get the best out of college is to find out who the

really good teachers are and then get a major that limits you the minimum and then go to all the good teachers. So then get a major that limits you the minimum and then go to all the good teachers. So I did that. And one of the things that got for me was a sort of a wider range of many expertises than I would have gotten otherwise. And then when I got out of Stanford, I started taking courses at the San Francisco Art Institute

and San Francisco State College in various skills that I wanted to get in design and in photography, among other things. And so by the time I was 22, I probably had eight different ways I could have made a living with skills that I had acquired, from being a logger, choker setter, to being an infantry officer, to being a field biologist, to being a commercial photographer, and various other things. Most of those things I did not do. In fact, the things that I had trained to do, the only one that really played out was six or eight years later when I started the Whole Earth Catalog.

I had taken some courses in writing and in magazine design, actually, way the hell back at Stanford. And so when I wanted to start what was the magazine all earth catalog I ignored the advice had been told which it takes a million dollars to start a magazine and I started with ten or twenty thousand dollars but I had the skills so you know the general rule there is just keep on acquiring skills. And the way they add up lets you do things that turn up that you discover you really want to do that you did not know that before,

but now you can do it. Mm-hmm. So that is, when I mentioned that I had changed how I was approaching choosing projects, it's actually very similar in the sense that Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, refers to, I suppose, in place of pathways, he would talk about systems thinking, which is in some ways a little confusing, but effectively choosing projects based on the skills and relationships that you develop so that even if said project fails over time, you are accumulating skills and relationships so that when, like you said, an opportunity presents itself that you couldn't possibly have foreseen and pegged as an objective or a goal, say, three years before, you are ripe to take advantage of. I'm sorry, go ahead.

That's it. I'm agreeing with you. So we could talk for hours, but I want to be respectful of your time and wrap up shortly. So you just agreed with me, and that's actually a perfect segue because you agree and then disagree and seem very flexible in changing your viewpoints and changing your mind, and you do this publicly, this is uncommon in a lot of worlds.

I wish it were common, especially in politics. Yeah, so how did you develop this, or what is the self-talk that allows you to do that so readily? I was trained as a scientist, as a biologist at Stanford. That was a relatively low-requirement major when I was there. It was one of the reasons I took it, but I also knew I was interested in low-requirement major when I was there. It was one of the reasons I took it. But I also knew I was interested in biology quite seriously. And the thing about training as a scientist is science is the only news. It is going to keep changing, and you will be taught something is probably the case and then you learn often

within a year or so, well, actually, we're wrong about that. And the people who were strong proponents of that have been exposed to the results of the people who thought they were probably wrong and it turns out they were wrong. And whether or not they've admitted it, everybody else knows it, and so let's move on. And so that moving on as a result of results, as a result of trying stuff, experiments, or observation, or whatever, with various hypotheses, you start to get used to the idea that all your opinions are hypotheses, you start to get used to the idea that all your opinions are hypotheses and

some of them play out and some don't. But as you say, that's not a standard mode of public discourse. So I think it's helpful for when somebody changes their mind about something to spread the word that you know they're they're pleased now I realized lots of times somebody's going to go from one crazy belief to another and the 60s and 70s we saw people buy into a lot of mystical frameworks and gurus and whatnot, and they would move from one to the other.

But then I think you can go up a level and suggest, well, if you're moving from guru A to guru B and then to guru C, does that suggest that maybe, for you, gurus are a waste of time. And so there's various levels of being wrong and acknowledging it and deciding what to do about that. In some cases, you know, doubling down is the right thing to do because you really think there is something there even though at the first round it doesn't look like it's for sure there. So you double down a few times, and maybe if you get punished enough for that, you'll

decide that doubling down is no longer the right thing to do for you. But I think with politicians, I would love every politician to have pretty good answers to the question of, sir or ma'am, in the course of your public service, and thank you for doing that, what are some things that you noticed you were wrong about and had to change your mind about? And tell us about that. And if they say, as I've always said, I'm never wrong. You know not to waste your time with them. Yeah. Scott, such an important question. What is, given the game, so we're talking about finite and infinite games,

and I don't want to take us too far into political land, because it would be a full night. It becomes instantly dated right now. Whatever we say politically is going to be out of date tomorrow. Right. So I want to focus more on the game that politicians have chose to play. What is – now, is it possible to be an effective politician while still answering that question honestly? I guess there are probably examples of people who have answered that honestly, but then

there are people who answer it honestly and get labeled a flip-flopper or whatever you might call it, and that's used as ammo against them in, say, elections of various types. So is... Well, I think a shiny example of mind-changing that we have in California is Governor Jerry Brown. And I was on his personal staff in his first term, back when he was the youngest governor, and I've kept a little bit in touch with him now that he's our oldest governor.

And I remember, so I would be part of the entourage and we'd go to some public event like Space Day or something like that which I helped initiate and organize and there outside the event would be the usual protesters about one thing or another and I would find myself trying to get Jerry in. We're almost late. Come on, let's keep moving. And then he would see the protesters, and then he would veer off and

go over and talk to them. And we're rolling our eyes. But here's how he would talk to the protesters. He'd go over to whoever it looked like was being a spokesman. Maybe they had the loud hailer or something and say, glad you're here. What's on your mind? And they would start to say their trip. They would listen for a bit. They'd say, I think I got it. Let me see if I

got it. And then he would say back to them their stance, often better than they had stated it. And you would see them just melt because the thing they wanted to have happen was for him to be aware of their position and to understand it.

And he just showed that he'd done that. And then they had the further hope that since it was known that Jerry occasionally changed his mind and his policy on things, that not only had he heard their position, he might even adopt it at some point. And so he could always engage and diffuse opposition with the fact that he could be persuaded out of a position that he had publicly taken. This made him not a good speaker, not a charismatic

character for the longest time, basically an introvert in public life. And yet that characteristic as much as any other, he did a lot of good policy, he was very bright and eventually a very capable politician. But that characteristic, I think, opened him up to a very successful political career. And I think he came into it partly because he is kind of a contrarian. He likes to go against the flow. And this would be a case where he grew up in a political family with Pat Brown, his father. And there were things about the way politics were done that he didn't approve of. That was one of them.

So he just went against it and won big. Now, for somebody who's thinking of going into politics, which I would encourage anybody to do. Jerry Brown is one good example. The other, to me, most wonderful example is Theodore Roosevelt. And there's a three-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt, by an author whose name is escaping me, that is totally inspiring. This is an individual with modest gifts who basically set out on your kind of self-improvement project early on. He was kind of a weak kid. He was born to do money and got himself out of the strictures of that, became a rancher out west and all the rest of it, and kept reinventing himself and helped reinvent America in profound ways that he wanted to take on his kind of self-project and also take on public service in the way that he did.

So, you know, one of the campaigns these days is to get more scientists and engineers going into not just appointed politics, but elective politics. And I'm all for it. I think it's what needs to happen. Is the three-book series by Edmund Morris? That's the one. All right. It's beautifully written, beautifully researched, and an astounding subject.

All right. That is on my immediate shopping list. If someone listening, not planning to go into politics, does not have, let's assume it's someone who has no scientific training, so to speak of, like yours truly. I do not. I'm not a trained scientist. Well, I don't know. I mean, I'm not a formally trained scientist. In any case, are there any books that you would recommend that people could use to help train themselves to think more scientifically and therefore be less hell-bent

on holding on to strong opinions when given new information? Wow, what a very good question. And I wish to hell I had an immediate answer to it. Probably some of the biographies of good scientists. Edward O. Wilson wrote a rather wonderful memoir called Naturalist about his becoming one of the great biologists of his time. And this is a guy who revolutionized the field of biology

five or six times personally. What was the name again? It's called Naturalist by Edward O. Wilson. Edward O. Wilson, got it. Yeah. And he was one of my inspirations as a biologist. And then I later got to know him when we worked together on a couple of projects, and it was just awesome to do that.

And this is a guy who's won the Prelitzer Prize twice, so you're in the hands of a very good writer. Writings by Freeman Dyson are excellent on the house science actually works they're mostly collections of essays uh... one of his books is called infinite in all directions which is uh... the right kind of frame to happen relation to the universe and science can get you there tested for him

uh... the fine men uh... surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman. You know, I was going to bring it up. Yeah, those work very well. Such a great book. This was one of the great science teachers, as well as one of the great scientists. And sort of watching him think is just good across the board. Feynman talks about, in many ways, how his father taught him how to think and how to question authority, and it's just fantastic if people can track that down also. But surely

you must be joking, or surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman is such a wonderful read. Yep. So, once like that, and it's a good question to keep going, I think, you know, ask it of any people with a science background, you get on your series here I will and last maybe second to last question I just turned 40

recently, which has led me to think a lot about maybe rules I've set for myself or trajectory and many other things just to reassess. It wasn't a crisis of any type. I feel good about it, but I'm trying to ponder many different things. What do you wish you knew at age 40? Or is there any advice that you would give me or a 40-year-old? Of course, you know, their specifics would be helpful, but anything you wish give me or a 40-year-old? Of course, their specifics would be helpful,

but anything you wish you knew or that you would emphasize for me or someone who just turned 40? I think there's still plenty of time is not a thing which comes completely to mind at age 40. I think you may think it's all downhill from here, or there's only so much time left. And some of the things that go with I'm no longer young and things are no longer infinite in all directions. They're starting to be finite in all directions.

But there's plenty of time. And to some extent, time compresses as your age increases. I remember when my mother was in her 80s, I said, what's time like for you? And she said, years are like fence posts, just whipping. extent time compresses as your age increases. I remember when my mother was in her 80s, I said, what's time like for you? And she said, years like fence posts, just whipping by. And I certainly feel that at 78. I feel like I'm spending all my time clipping my fingernails and going to get another goddamn haircut. And yet the thing which expands as time goes by, which is you don't have to re-derive a lot of stuff from first principles. You've already got a number of things squared away. You've got a number of friends you can count on. You've got a number of skills that you can deploy.

And so when you do take on something new, it's not like when you were 22, where you have to sort of create the whole world to do it in. You've got a lot of skills. And so, in a way, time is compressed for you in terms of your abilities. And that'll continue as long as your brain functions. And then that dials down and then you're presumably got to deal with, you're going to deal with your sensations are still pretty intense and get value from them. Do you have any last recommendations, thoughts, or questions

that you'd like to leave with the people listening to this? Or any request or ask of the people listening to this? I keep running into versions of something we came across a couple times in this discussion, which is people worrying about unintended consequences often of new technologies or of some new regime or practice, whatever the hell it may be. And then often it'll be in the mode of don't even explore that area

because unintended consequences will occur. And I think the mode should be, well, of course unintended consequences will occur. And I think the mode should be, well, of course unintended consequences will occur, and maybe it's even worse, and this is in your version of defining your fears. Think about what the consequences that you're worried about are, and meanwhile, watch while the thing goes ahead and tries,

or go ahead and try it yourself. And watch for those things that you're worried about. And also watch for surprises. Lots of unintended consequences are surprising. And then you watch for ones that are surprisingly good as well as ones that are surprisingly bad. As I can tell in most cases, you've got kind of an even split. With the expectation that the ones that are surprisingly good, you can not only stop worrying about the things you were worried about and associated with that, you can build on them.

And also the ones that are surprisingly bad, that may indicate, well, okay, that whole pathway is not so good after all, let's shut it down. Or are there workarounds? And basically it's trying to flip from being fearful about unintended consequences to being welcoming about situations that might have unintended consequences. I love that. And it makes me think of, on top of that,

recognizing that with everything you do in almost every moment, there are unintended consequences. Yeah, exactly. Weird shit happens. At all times. And that it draws for me a parallel with, and I may be misattributing this, but I believe at one point I read about Andy Grove and in his management approach

would recognize that whenever you created an incentive, you would simultaneously create a perverse incentive or an incentive to do things that were undesirable, right? So perhaps you're, I'm making this up, but you create a commission structure for people who bring in a certain dollar amount of advertising revenue. And you could ask yourself in advance, what might the

sort of perverse incentive there be? And it would be to get someone to spend a lot of money up front, which could lead to advertiser disappointment because it's front-loaded and then a high churn rate. And so how can you, when you have a metric for what you desire, what metric could you look for or create to track what you don't desire? And it could be, say, a high churn rate. So if you're thinking of assumption number one, there are always going to be unintended consequences to any material action. So how can you measure them? How can you track them? I think it's so important, uh, we just mentioned, uh, well, Stuart, it is such a joy and such an

honor to have a chance to spend more time with you, uh, on the phone like this and in conversation. It's, it's so much fun for me. And, uh, is there any particular place that, uh, people can check out that you'd like them to check out online or places where they could say hello to you on social media okay I'm on Twitter Stewart brand and the long now foundation is a website long now org that has all sorts of things that we have a bar in San Francisco. I think there's relatively few nonprofits that have a bar, but we do. Fort Mason, people are welcome at, and all sorts of things are there. That's The Interval?

Yeah, that's The Interval. That was TheInterval.org. Then ReviveRestore.org is the place where the genetic rescue projects i'm talking about are going on we started that within long now as a project and now it's gone independent as its own 501c3 charging ahead with saving various species and various ecosystems genetically genetically. Well, Stuart Brand, thank you so much. I really appreciate all the time. I've learned a lot.

I've taken many, many notes as I hope other people have. So I just want to express my gratitude for you taking the time. Well, you make it fun for your interviewees, so keep up the good work.

All right. And to everybody listening as always, and this is going to be one hell of a set of show notes. You can find links to everything that we've talked about in the show notes at Tim.blog forward slash podcast for this episode and every other episode. And until next time, and as always, thank you for listening. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off.

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