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Stewart Brand

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151
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2017-11-21
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2017-11-21
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  1. “Yeah, that's the interval. And that was, I think, einterpal.org. And then revive restore.org is the place where the genetic rescue projects I'm talking about are going on. We started out within Long Now as a project and now it's gone independent. It's on 501c3 charging ahead with saving various species and various ecosystems genetically.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Okay, I'm on Twitter, Stuart Brand. the Long Now Foundation is a website longnao.org that has all sorts of things. And we have a bar in San Francisco. I think there's relatively few nonprofits that have a bar. We do. Formation that people are welcome at, and all sorts of things are there. That's the interval.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “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.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “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, let's watch while the thing goes ahead and tries 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 watch for ones that are surprisingly good as well as ones that are surprisingly bad, as near as I can tell in most cases, you got a kind of an even split with the expectation that the ones who are surprisingly good worrying about the things you're worried about associated with that, you can build on them.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “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 of 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.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “You don't have to rederive a lot of stuff from 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 or you have to sort of create the whole world to do it in. You've got a lot of skills. In a way, time is compressed for you in terms of your abilities. And that will continue as long as your brain functions And then that dials down, and then you're presumably got to deal with how you're going to deal with your sensations are still pretty intense and get value from them.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Um 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. There's plenty of time in 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 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...”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Yep. So once like that, and it's a good question to keep going, I think ask it of any people with a science background you get on your series here.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “They're in the hands of a very good writer. Writings by Freeman Dyson are excellent on the how science actually works. They're mostly collections of essays. One of his books is called Infinite in All Directions, which is the right kind of frame to have in relation to the universe. And science can get you there as it did for him. The Feynman, surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “And he was one of my inspirations as a biologist and that I later got to know him. 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 Prileitzer Prize twice.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “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”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “What a very good question. And I wish the 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.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “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 Mickey wanted to take on his kind of self-project and also take on public service in the way that he did. So 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.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “And this would be a case where he was grew up in a political family with Pat Brown and 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. Me, most wonderful example is Theodore Roosevelt, and there's a three-volume biography of Theodore Theodore Roosevelt by the author whose name is Escaping Me that is totally inspiring. An individual with modest gifts”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “And so you could always engage and diffuse opposition with the fact that he could be persuaded out of a position that he had publicly taken. This medium, he was not a good speaker, he's 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.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “And we're rolling our eyes. But here's how you would talk to protesters. You go over to whatever it looked like was being a spokesman. 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.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “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 and his first term back when he was the youngest governor and have kept a little bit in touch with him now that he's our oldest governor. So I would be part of the entourage and we go to some public event like Space Day or something like that, which I helped initiate and organize. would be the usual protesters about one thing or another. I would find myself trying to get Jerry in and we're almost late. Come on, let's keep moving. And then you would see the protesters and then you would veer off and go over and talk to them.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “And maybe if you could punish enough for that, you'll decide to double it 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? 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.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Spread the word that they're pleased now. I realize lots of times somebody is going to go from one crazy belief to another in 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, doubling down is the right thing to do because you really think there is something there even though the first round it doesn't look like it's for sure there. So you double down a few times.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “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 are wrong about that. The people who are 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. 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, 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”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “I was trained as a scientist, as a biologist at Stanford. That was a relatively low requirement major when I was there. It's one of the reasons I took it. But I also knew I was interested in biology quite seriously. And the thing about it, training as a scientist is”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “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 in Stanford. And so when I wanted to start, what was a magazine, Olearth catalog, I ignored the advice I'd been told, which it takes a million dollars to start a magazine. I started with $10,000 or $20,000. 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, you discover you really want to do that. You did not know that before. Now you can do it.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “And then when I got out of Stanford, I started taking courses at San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco State College and 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.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Got to prep school and then to college and realize that nearly everybody there was smarter and more capable than me and a lot of them knew exactly what they were planning to do. There 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 stumbled into them or heard about them. And he said the way to get the best out of college is to find out who they're really good teachers are and 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”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “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 the early, 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, Idaho, and Moscow and go ahead and get a PhD in firefighting. Unfortunately, I had a teacher in prep school who said, you know, you could go to someplace else like Stanford for your undergraduate degree and then if you want to get a PhD in firefighting, go to Idaho. That hadn't really occurred to me. So 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.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “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 then go do it that I think really worked for people who have a clear idea that they want to be”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “But you've got to do both because 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 away. And then there's an argument. And 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 in that combination as part of the story.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “Yours looking for okay, we 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. talking about changing the rules of how to prevent gerrymandering from being such a distorter of the electoral 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 in the sense that it goes on indefinitely the better off we are.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “It's a way of organizing physical and mental behavior, often in combination that is just wonderful along with the James P. Karst book, the other book is Homo Lutins by Heusinger. And Homo Lutins basically says, man the player of games is what we do. Well, here 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,”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “And in a way that clearly was not killing anybody, is not even hurting anybody. We had t-shirts that said play hard, play fair, nobody hurt. In a way that was the better thing than war is kind of a competitive situation where you play hard, 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 saying things in game terms, designing things in game terms is one of the profound things that civilization has done for a very long time.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “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, you're out, down, 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. It had the advantage of being intensely physical because people really are having to grab and rustle each other. and move them from 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 intensity and overwhelm that is ideal because you get out of your body of that much intensity and that many things to think about at once. So that was smarter.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “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 if 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 and B 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 have slaughter. And immediately people start coming up with all sorts of strategies of teaming up and trying to stay out of the fray.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “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”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “So here'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 they 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 warlike games. One 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 grab ass now, but physical.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “One that was called slaughter. I built this for the war resistors league during the resistance to Vietnam War and the War Resistors League knew that I was doing public events and they asked me like the TRIPS Festival asked me to would I do a public event for them”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “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 immersion property of freely shaping games really, really interested me. So this is, and we had a number of such things. I invented a few games. Some of them were semi-violent.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “Where a bunch of strange games would be provided. I provided a six foot high earth ball that people invented various games around this big pushball that crowds people can interact with. We had a huge ships hawser and had tug-of-war that went across kind of a canyon where it was a 300 foot ship saucer and a couple hundred feet people on each side. And it was the Le Man 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 that the team that's starting to lose are finding themselves dangling over this. That was really just 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.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “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 pay volleyball or instead of the way you usually play it, we play it where, let's see how long we can go. Usually the usual roles 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 the new games tournament as a public place.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “I got really interested in games. Back in the early 70s and in fact organized a thing called the new Games Tournament. And the idea I had there was that 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 games is brilliant. He actually knew John von Neumann, who came up with it. He said the problem of 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 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.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “For saying yes changed at the beginning. They're pretty relaxed and then they get more and more constrained as time goes by.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “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 to try to take them on more than the right number at the same time. And then you know unless yes, the criteria”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “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 and less yes. I'm not trying to. Fueled a career, a certain amount of work and travel and updating the slides, whatever the hell it may be. And there's other things I wanted to put my time on.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “And 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 actual tables. He knows how many hours more he's going to live and acts accordingly.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “Oh, yeah, I guess I'll really take on that huge five-year commitment that I may not live to finish, just given the other way the statistics fall. So that's a different answer to your question. But there's very good stuff in that line from Oliver Sachs and his last year when he was writing like mad the whole time that he knew he was dying. 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.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “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 are 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. At various times in your life, you have a sense of how many five years it's 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...”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “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 would be 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. Kevin Kelly has probably put it to you, but he's put it to various people in a similar mode, which is that we both discovered that”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “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.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “I don't think Western sieve is taught anymore. That would be probably called global sieve 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 is 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”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “So having enough storage space to throw the interesting stuff with a remote idea might be eventually interesting go back to turned out to which is a cluttering, not a decluttering move. The decluttering move is you get the hell rid of it. But anyway, it gives poor John lots to work with. I think the result there is that He'll be able to tell a more accurate and probably less interesting story of me”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “I think whatever systems they use are half crap. I have been rewarded for not getting rid of stuff, which is that the guy who's actually suffering from most now, by the way, is John Markov, because he's the guy who took on trying to write a biography of me. And 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 actually relatively stable and continuous life in the Bay Area and semi-interesting stuff I just threw into boxes. And there's now, I gather 70 linear feet at Stanford in their archives, and they've got probably another 100 plus feet of my papers. Yet to come, notebooks that I kept every day, but I've written in since I was in college and all that stuff.”

    2017-11-21 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #281: Stewart Brand - The Polymath of Polymaths · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT