Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish

0:00This message comes from WaterAid. Imagine having no clean water to drink, cook, or clean. That's the reality for one in four people worldwide. You can change that. Donate now and your gift will be matched at wateraid.org slash podcast. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you. You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?

0:41And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And you may have heard of Zelig or Forrest Gump, a character who always seems to turn up at just the right time in just the right place, smack dab at the center of all the action. Well, that is the best way to describe Stuart Brand. Hi, Minouj. Hi, Stuart. Thank you so much for doing this. You may never have heard of him, but he has been right next to even propelling some of the biggest names and movements of the last century. And by the time all the rest of us get there, he's gone on to something else more interesting.

1:27He could see into the future that this technology was going to be a huge part of American culture. It isn't so much that he's ahead of it. He's actually creating the future. Brand is nearly 84 years old now, and we wanted to spend the hour with him looking back at how he shaped our culture through the years, like with his whole Earth catalog, a counterculture magazine that Steve Jobs once called Google in paperback form. 35 years before Google came along, it was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. Others credit Brand with helping kickstart the environmental movement in the U.S.

2:07and later turning the Bay Area into Silicon Valley, home to the world's most successful tech companies. The people who worked with computers were considered magicians. His never-ending curiosity continues to this day. And there's a kind of a hunger and foolishness to it. It's appetite, it's willingness to be ridiculous on the way to something you think might be interesting. And over the last few years, Stuart Brand has taken on new mind-bending projects, like working to bring back extinct animals like the woolly mammoth, and building a clock to ring once a century and keep time for 10 ,000 years.

2:50Humanity has revved itself into a pathologically short attention span. And to not think about long ranges of time is at best a waste and at worst an extreme hazard. So today on the show, Stuart Brand, a conversation with a controversial cult figure who's always looking at where society is going next and has some big, some say crazy, ideas about where it should be going. Stuart, welcome to the TED Radio Hour. Thank you. I want to start by asking you, you have lived an incredible life, but let's go back to the beginning. Tell us a bit about where you grew up, Rockford, Illinois. Did you have visions of what you would be when you grew up?

3:38Oh, yeah. I knew I was going to be a veterinarian. And I was the guy that everybody brought injured or young abandoned wild animals to, and I would try to raise them. Oh, and did your parents support that endeavor or were they horrified? Always supportive, actually, even of the nasty possum I had named Frank, who was in a bad attitude about everything. So in the late 50s, you went into the Army Reserve and to Stanford University, where I guess the veterinary dream continued because you majored in biology. And your thesis was about the lives of tarantulas. Well, yeah, studying biology, I majored in science partly to get away from the problem I saw in the humanities, which was that what was deemed good was based on a judgment call by the teacher or the section leader or something like that.

4:40what they thought were the right ways to think about Shakespeare or whatever. And that kind of being driven by opinion was not the case with science. And there you had to actually deal with reality that often flew in the face of people's opinion. And I liked that. I mean, that's so interesting that you say that because it sounds like you gravitated towards knowing what was right or fact or a binary. And I think of what happened next, which was that at the end of college, after you graduated, you started spending time in a very humanities, writerly, bohemian scene living in San Francisco. That seems like a change.

5:28What do you think happened there? Well, I was moving toward where the creatives were. And there's creativity in science and there's creativity in art. and they are drastically different in a lot of ways, but they're also drastically the same in a lot of ways. There's a kind of a criticism of my family among some folks in Rockford that brands are so contrary. If you throw one in the river, they'll float upstream. And floating upstream, that is looking upstream and thinking upstream is what scientists do. You're always looking for discovery. It's what artists do. You don't want to repeat what any other artist is doing or even what you yourself used to be doing.

6:15And that was one of the things I picked up from the artists in the world around San Francisco's North Beaches. Never repeat yourself. Yeah, so you got to San Francisco in the mid-60s. And by this point, you were freelancing as a photographer. But you also started hanging out with Ken Kesey. who, of course, wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, one of my favorite books. And he had this legendary group of friends and comrades, and they called themselves the Merry Pranksters. And you ended up joining. This group traveled all over the U.S. in a psychedelic bus, renouncing normal society. They also did a fair amount of LSD.

6:59Just describe it. What was life like for you then? Well, the attraction of the pranksters was they really did inhabit the raggedy edge. And Keezy and the whole group developed a fearlessness, a boldness that I found very attractive. It's the kind of thing that a young person wants to go where it's dangerous. And that group definitely was where it was dangerous. It was dangerous in terms of messing around with drugs we were doing. It was dangerous in terms of having Neal Cassidy be the driver of the bus. And there was a lot going on in the country at that time. JFK had been assassinated. The civil rights movement was in full swing.

7:46And you found yourself kind of at the nexus of a huge culture shift that was happening all around the country. That's right. It was mostly still New Left at that point. It was Vietnam War was coming on and people were getting worked up about that and organizing. There were hippies around. And we didn't know that there were 10 ,000 hippies in the Bay Area until I and Casey and the Pranksters put on a thing called the Trips Festival in January of 1966, when LSD was still legal, by the way. The acid test is everywhere in this spaceship. Everywhere you are, you're all acid testing. And it was a huge event.

8:31It became kind of a watershed event. That's when hippies became aware there were so many of them, there were a movement. Okay, so this was an event that you organized that wound up being one of the biggest festivals of the era. In fact, like the Grateful Dead went big because of it. And some people say that the Trips Festival helped mark the beginning of the hippie counterculture movement. I mean, this must have been some party, Stuart. What do you remember of it, if anything? Well, what we were attempting to do and why we called it a Trips Festival was to find all of the really interesting, creative people that we knew in the Bay Area.

9:15and basically just have a show three nights at the Longshoremen's Hall in San Francisco where everybody showed what they had. Various avant-garde artists did their thing. There was a sculptor named Ron Boise who made these enormous noisy sculptures that you would bang on and pluck at strings and make a sort of group music. and it was sort of just the beginning of the kind of dancing that um i mean i grew up doing the damn foxtrot and what i loved about the bohemian world is dancing was just go out in the middle of the floor and carry on with somebody or not and disappear into the music and see what happen.

10:07When the bands were playing especially, it just became this huge bash, everybody on their feet dancing. And the kind of thing we see at Burning Man ever since, for example, is a direct result of people discovering how much fun you could have if you just threw yourself completely into being part of the performance.

10:33so it was a couple months after the trips festival um that you took lsd on your own and zeroed in on a provocative question which was why haven't people seen a photo of the earth from space nowadays that would maybe be turned into an online conspiracy theory but that's not what happened what did happen what did you do what was happening was i was reading and listening to Buckminster Fuller in those days. And he was focused on sort of world system thinking. And I was also a photographer, so I'm always thinking about what are the images that change people's minds. And I was on the rooftop of my place in North Beach in San Francisco with probably a half dose, quarter dose of LSD, just watching the afternoon scintillate and then pretended to myself that I could see that the buildings downtown, the tall buildings, were not exactly parallel.

11:41They diverged slightly because they were on the curved surface of an earth. And then I imagined myself going to a higher and higher altitude and that curve would extend and then close all the way around on itself, and you would have San Francisco as seen from space on the surface of a sphere. At that point, this is 10 years since Sputnik. And so it suddenly seemed very strange to me that both the Soviet Union and the United States had been in space for on the order of 10 years, and they could have taken serious photographs of the Earth from space. And apparently hadn't done so. And I just thought, well, as soon as that photograph happens, everything's going to change.

12:35Because I knew enough science to know that the way people thought the Earth looked from space was not the way it probably really looked. And the difference would blow their mind in the parlance of the time. And a year or two later, that's exactly what happened. In a moment, Stuart Brand describes how seeing the Earth from space for the first time really did change how people thought about our place in the universe and why it inspired him to launch something called the Whole Earth Catalog. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

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14:48Find TED Talks daily, wherever you listen.

15:17at NPR. So if you'd like to show your support, learn more and subscribe at plus.npr.org slash TED or write in the Apple Podcasts app. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. Today, we are talking to writer and futurist Stuart Brand, who helped usher in San Francisco's hippie counterculture in the 1960s. And as we heard before the break, Stewart got somewhat obsessed with wanting to see a picture of Earth from space. Now, remember, this was before the moon landing, when satellites and space travel were pretty new. And Stewart, you became kind of an analog meme, I think it's fair to say, in some ways.

16:06You made this big sign and you printed out a bunch of buttons that asked the question, why haven't we seen a photo of the Earth from space? And then you went around to different college campuses and just like handed them out. So, I mean, what did people think? Did they think you were a crackpot? Or were they actually like, huh, this is kind of interesting. How did people respond to you? I can't say why. It just seemed like the obvious thing to do. But what I had acquired by then was the habit of you have a good idea. And if you're not burdened with a job, which I wasn't, you just start to work on your cool idea and see if there's anything to it and see if you continue to be amused by it or if other people are.

16:53And so I stood in these places where there were young people with open minds and also teachers, many of them involved in astrophysics and space program and so on. And the ones who were interested would come up and say, what's going on? And I'd say, well, you know, what do you think it'll be like when people really look in the big mirror? So it became just a way to have public discussion on the question of a photograph of the Earth from space. So not too long after, NASA actually did take a picture of the Earth from a satellite and share it. And it was the first time the public saw a picture of the whole Earth.

17:39What impact did it have on people? So I think the photograph that really got people was the Earthrise photograph from Apollo 8 going around the moon and recording the lunar surface in the foreground and the Earth in the background. And because they were in a big hurry when they took that picture, the horizon is not exactly level. So there's a kind of an interesting, unstable urgency to it as a photograph. and the contrast between the extremely dead, boring-looking, gray-brown planet in the foreground, the moon, with this vivid, scintillating, bright blue living, but distant and kind of small in the enormity of black space, that contrast is what got people dead planet, live planet, and we're on the live one.

18:36And then that raises the question, now that we've seen that, what does that mean? What do we do with that? So we're talking about the late 60s here, and that's really when a sort of new consciousness about the environment, this understanding that we are shepherds of the Earth. You put a picture of the planet on the cover of a magazine that you started publishing. that you called the Whole Earth Catalog. It became a cult read, and it made you pretty famous in the U.S. You were on late-night talk shows. But for those who are not familiar with it, what was the Whole Earth Catalog? What was in it?

19:20The Whole Earth Catalog was a very tightly selected and edited collection of tools, of tools and ideas. So the important subtitle to the Whole Earth Catalog was access to tools. And it was trying to give you enough of a sample that you can make your own decision. We didn't sell the things in the catalog. It was just a catalog of stuff that we were pointing out. We're a pointer, not a seller. And it was like, here's where to get the best kerosene lamp. And here's where you can buy instructions to build your own dome on your commune if you wanted. It was all kinds of things, right? Do you remember one thing in that catalog that's standing out to you right now?

20:08There were things like the snuggly baby carrier, which was just sort of a wrap and attached the baby to the front of the woman in a pleasant way for both the baby and the mother. You know, happy baby food grinder was you could grind your own baby food. or something or other jug and bottle cutter was a device that you could put in any bottle and turn it into a glass. This was somehow seen as, we didn't call it ecological yet, but a whole lot of being a hippie was living as cheap as possible, whether or not you happen to have means of your own. And so all the creativity went into learning how to dumpster dive and how to find roadkill that was fresh enough.

21:01You could cook it and eat it or make a hat out of it or something. OK, so in 2005, many years later, Steve Jobs gave a commencement address at Stanford University where he talked about how inspired he was by the catalog when he was younger, especially by the way it ended. Let's listen. Stuart and his team put out several issues of the Whole Earth catalog. And then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words, stay hungry, stay foolish.

21:49It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay hungry, stay foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. Stay hungry, stay foolish. words for some to live by. But Stuart, you stopped publishing the Whole Earth catalog regularly in the middle of the 70s. And now we are coming to a part of your biography that I just don't quite get. So you get introduced to another subculture in California at that point. It definitely wasn't mainstream yet. The world of computers and hackers. But with the Back to the Land movement, the hippies, they were not into technology. So what was going on that kind of sucked you in?

22:37It had been coming for a long time, in the sense that in 62, I happened to see at the computation center in Stanford when I was getting a tour, I saw young, what do you later call them hackers, young programmers playing space war, and absolutely filled with glee and I thought out of their body into the computer in these little dueling spaceships on the first interactive computers. So 10 years later, we're up to 72 now, 73, when I had stopped the catalog, the guy who ran Rolling Stone magazine, Jan Winter, invited me to write something for them. I thought, great, I get to be a journalist. He said, what do you want to write about?

23:27I said, well, actually, I think something is going on with computers. And I wound up reporting on things going on at Xerox Park, which was the research center in Palo Alto, and at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, where space war had moved right along in 10 years and was an even more interesting game. But also the ARPANET was just starting to happen, what became the Internet later on. And robotics was starting to happen, so there were robots wandering around the laboratory. And I just reported on all of that in 1972. The opening line was, ready or not, computers are coming to the people.

24:14I mean, you were one of the first people who even used the phrase personal computer publicly. That's true. I did that in a follow-up version of that article. So you saw the direction that computers were going. You saw before a lot of people did that this was going to completely change the world. And you decided to jump in to throw yourself into the forefront of that conversation. In 1984, you threw yet another legendary event, the Hackers Conference, where you brought together all these incredible minds. I mean, the top engineers and programmers, they were all there. And there are people who say that if in the 70s things were kind of bubbling along when it came to tech, this event really kicked off the computer revolution.

24:58You get this ever-expanding library with millions of people online simultaneously. They will all be able to publish simultaneously, add things, annotate, make links, and we hope live in a freer environment than we live in now. On the one hand, it feels strange to me that you go from this back-to-land movement to being in the midst of computers and high-tech stuff. But I guess what was similar with both of them is this indie sort of spirit that there was. It was about, if before you were about making tools available to everyone, this was about making information available to everyone. It was the ideas of creating a digital utopia.

25:40Well, once computers became personal, they flipped from being seen as these machines of oppression to machines of liberation. Because the individual could grab it and then run with it toward whatever horizon they thought most interesting. And they were not only using it, they were programming it. And so, again, sort of like the first festival that everybody is a performer, with personal computers, everybody's a creator. So that this was an unleashing of the most powerful tools that individuals had ever had. Stuart, it feels like if there's one thing that is a constant throughout your life, it has to be that you get restless.

26:33Because a few years after immersing yourself in computers, in business, you pivoted yet again and you started another organization and you called it The Long Now. Basically, this is a nonprofit dedicated to getting people, getting all of us to think more long term about the future. Why did you think people needed this? Well, my sort of opening line of what is the Long Now Foundation for is that humanity has revved itself into a pathologically short attention span. and that thanks to science, we know a whole lot more about the long-term past and have a lot more knowledge about the systems that are going to be functioning into the long-term future than we've ever had before.

27:26And so to not act on that knowledge is at best a waste and at worst an extreme hazard. And kind of the signature project of the Long Now Foundation is this massive clock that you're building, a clock to keep time for 10 ,000 years. It ticks just once a year and bongs just once a century. And the goal of the project is to encourage us to think about our connection to the centuries, to the millennia ahead of us. You actually gave a TED Talk about the clock in 2004. Let's listen. For 10 years, I've been trying to figure out how to hack civilization so that we can get long-term thinking to be automatic and common instead of difficult and rare, or in some cases, non-existent.

28:25It would be helpful if humanity got into the habit of thinking of the now not just as next week or next quarter, but the next 10 ,000 years. And the last 10 ,000 years, basically civilization's story so far. So we have the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco. It's an incubator for about a dozen projects, all having to do with continuity over the long term. Our core project is a rather ambitious folly, I suppose a mythic undertaking, to build a 10 ,000-year clock that can really keep good time for that long a period. And the design problems of a project like that are just absolutely delicious.

29:11How do you house an eventual monumental clock like this so it can really tick, keep good, safe time beautifully for 100 centuries? So here we are now, Stuart, 20 years later. Where is the clock? A clock's in a mountain in West Texas. And nearing completion, it will be operational and should be visitable by later in this decade. How do you explain the purpose of the clock to people who might think it's a ridiculous way to spend time and money? I mean, you called it a follow yourself when we have so many problems on Earth right here and right now. It's art. It's land art. In this particular case, it's a machine.

29:57It's a great big mechanism that all by itself, just using the energy and the difference between a cold night and a hot day, drives a genuine clock to keep very good time. And it also has chimes designed by Brian Eno. Jeff Bezos paid for it and also participated in the design. I visited it a couple times. It is intended to be mythic, and I think it achieves that.

30:35I can only imagine the sense of smallness one must feel as a human who will live less than a century compared to this timelessness that you are capturing with the project. But I have to say one thing that sort of seems like a paradox to me is that, as you said, one of the biggest supporters of the Long Now clock is Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, the sort of king of our on-demand consumerist society. And many people blame him for exactly the problems you're hoping to solve even just a little bit with this project. Good Lord. I think that's completely misplaced. Really? Talk about access to tools and ideas.