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Stewart Brand

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2017-11-21
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2017-11-21
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  1. “By and large not, every now and then your so desperate see it, you pay the $29.95 or whatever it is to see the thing, but you're angry.”

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

  2. “but they pay well all their stuff and as a result, I think they have a much smaller audience than 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 and I think it's ultimately good for the publications because people realize there's lots more good stuff where that one came from.”

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

  3. “Yeah, I think that's kind of crazy. It gets tricky. I mean, you have publications like New Scientist, which is not really a strict scientific publication. It's a very good publication.”

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

  4. “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 like to, and they'll beg you to subscribe and pay for their service. You might do that.”

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

  5. “But the rest of it really was, and information wants to be expansive. 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 for you, the more it wants to be expensive because there's that many more values to accrue to very large audiences, et cetera. I think 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”

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

  6. “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 the 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 of the time bumper sticker shortcut to dealing with a large phenomenon that was happening.”

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

  7. “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, and 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. As Steve Wasniak was saying quite right, look, the 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...”

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

  8. “along with a lot of the great hackers of the time and leave Helsenstein and the best reporter of all that material, John. Markoff was there and it was great. There's a good video on it you can find online.”

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

  9. “Oh, it keeps coming up from time to time because there is a paradox out there of information, especially on the web, just swarming around 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 is carried on year to year since then. And one of the people who came to the hackers conference was Steve Wasnak.”

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

  10. “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. I said, over, yeah, it's over. Well, did they like it? Oh, just a second check. And it turns out that in the room it had been a standing ovation and mines blown and Alan Kedirecting his entire career and various people getting completely knocked out and blown away by it all. But down in Minlow Park it was, answer came back. Yeah, apparently they liked it. Good night, everybody. We just all wandered home.”

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

  11. “We lost signal from Manila Park, fake it for a while. And Doug were 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 Mendel Park filming that parts of the action and hands-on keyboards and what was on the screen and stuff like that.”

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

  12. “on the stage and also on the projected screen and his faces 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 that's a one-handed keyboard. All of the time that he's going through his spiel, which we had reversed once or twice, but was basically him just telling a playout 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.”

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

  13. “they had developed a computer that was running the demo was not in San Francisco. It was thirty miles south in Menlo Park. And Bill English had developed a microwave capability to get the data flowing back and forth between San Francisco and Menlo Park so that 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.”

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

  14. “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 1969 fault joint computer conference. And this was a demonstration where a group at SRI 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 duging a book called augmented human intellect and it was using mainframe and mini computer capabilities to do 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 highway.”

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

  15. “And the title refers to something I saw in the military and learned to appreciate there when I was 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. discover that there was so much more that they could do with their bodies under certain circumstances with their minds than they thought. They've started to grow toward infinity with that realization. So CrossFit does that for a lot of people.”

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

  16. “Yeah, so beginning with Starbucks and CrossFit is the difference between a good idea and a 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. There's a nice book on it by JC Hertz called Learning to Breathe Fire, which pretty much tells the story of how Crossbit came about.”

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

  17. “Suddenly I was within a few months thirty 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.”

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

  18. “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 are the same, 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. It's a genius program in terms of Getting rid of a lot of the spurious stuff of Jan so there's no machines, there's no mirrors. There are growing 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 it at 75.”

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

  19. “Oh, good God. Well, the main 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 jump rope and I'm going to do whatever's there that day and it's always different. And that plus because”

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

  20. “We're out in it. And I was saying, I'm not learning much because it was so cold. So that was a stupid excuse I gave myself to quit. And it's like all of these intense military trainings 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. And so 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.”

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

  21. “I failed to finish ranger training in the Army and I quit partway through after the sort of early getting into it stuff. Ranger train is much harder now than it was then. Airborne training, jump training is pretty much the same now that 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, February at Fort Benning, which you think was south nice and warm. It was freezing cold.”

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

  22. “I don't really know. I've not been associated, I guess, with I later wished that I hadn't been or the other people wish that I had not been. And so the main politician that I've worked closely with was 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.”

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

  23. “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 From the outside, it looks like lots of good things.”

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

  24. “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 bona fides over time because that's already been done. I don't think it's more profound than that.”

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

  25. “I don't know. I get nosed. 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 that it's not that hard to say yes because you'll get a nice audience for being invited to be on this show. I do run into a fair amount of people who feel one form or 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 Venter to give us 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 like he felt good about payback. So a certain amount goes with that”

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

  26. “Extent that it could 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.”

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

  27. “Emissions of greenhouse gases, it was discounted for reasons left over from an earlier time. Cities were taken as the problem rather than the solution. But when you look at the demographic cities, are the solution? They're the greenest thing that humans do. And geoengineering of intervening in the climate directly to buyer cells more time to cut down our 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”

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

  28. “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 equopragmatism that I called Whole Earth Discipline and was looking at things that I thought Look like environmentalists just had wrong. We had wrong that genetic engineering was a bad thing and agriculture GMOs were thought to be bad starting with the Friends of the Earth and 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 the shortest cut to being able to really, really reduce”

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

  29. “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. Back to the land and a lot of that kind of stuff and that romanticism and turned into a certain amount of anti-technology and even anti science. To be one was nature is to dissolve yourself in the nature that is already there and don't fuck with it. In any kind of intervention or any kind of reliance on technology was regarded as a quote technofix and therefore contemptible That set of”

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

  30. “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, dealing with one another, wildebeest in huge herds like American bison used to be in the US. 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 bully mammoths. And it looks like they're relatively straightforward one to bring back. So there you have it. Long big animals. Mammoth is a good place to start.”

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

  31. “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 the ponds, that cut down some of the trees, that make a whole rich environment for lots of other species, along with themselves.”

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

  32. “They are going through the government regulation process, but should be they're getting back into the wild already. 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.”

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

  33. “There's a scale issue here, which is 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 there where you are. And then a blight came along from Asia that killed their They're evolutionarily still around, but ecologically they're extinct. But a workaround is found to make American chestnuts that are now completely plight proof, and those are being bred up and because there are food plants, complete chestnuts roasting on the open fire.”

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

  34. “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. In the far north the Arctic and subarctic regions would be swell for that in terms of bully mammoths. I think I went so astray from your question I lost track of what it was. Oh, that's okay.”

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

  35. “There's no end of fascination with Woolly Mammoth because there's no end of fascination with elephants as there will should be. Anybody who's really spent time with elephants falls in love with elephants. And in Asia, the Asian elephants have been a partially domesticated animal for a long time. And the fact that it is still endured along with the fact that about 100 people are killed by elephants in Asia every year suggests that not only useful, they are loved. And 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 downsize as well.”

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

  36. “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.”

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

  37. “Well, that statement, that analysis is usually based on the climate. This is a system so complex that we don't understand it. And if you screw around with a complex system, you will have unintended consequences that you'll just hate. And 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. But 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.”

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

  38. “We bring back the various graziers, the far north, like the Muskocks and maybe the Lily rhinoceros. Mammoths are 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. It's a much richer environment for all kinds of species as we see in the parts of Africa that have these animals. And the far north could be like the Serengeti is now. So that'll take a while, but I think we'll probably do it.”

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

  39. “Get the woolly manus 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. Well, 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 Willy Mammoth 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 muscox, that grassland turned into tundra and boreal forest. Mammoth would be helpful as”

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

  40. “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 the direction of eventually being able to get a cell with a nucleus that is basically woolly mammoth genome and then getting that into living Asian elephants who can then give birth to wooly mammoths. Obviously this would go through many steps and then move from there to the standard reintroduction techniques of wildlife conservation to”

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

  41. “Down severely destructive, invasive rodents on ocean islands, for example, things like that. You can do a genetics. In that case, maybe with chain 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 was just 100 years ago, like the passenger pigeon or several thousand years ago like the woolly mammals. 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.”

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

  42. “Yeah, Revive and Restore is 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 subdiscipline that's opening up in conservation biology is called genetic rescue. And mainly you're focusing on other genetic workarounds for inbreeding, depression in small populations that one would like to have come back to be large populations. It's a small group of California condors left and captive 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”

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

  43. “And 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 out a start on that when I'm 78. That's comforting.”

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

  44. “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 it's 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 Nile Foundation, which is kind of a strange thing that would be successful, that 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.”

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

  45. “The narrative, the sequence of events, the story of that thing. And then you extend it forward. When you extend it forward, you go buy 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”

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

  46. “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. And apparently there's some research done in this a few years back. Danny Hillis has referred to. I've never seen the actual research. When people are doing something they care about for a long-term institution they care about, might be a church, might be a branch of military they're in, might be the US government, might be a species they're dedicated to they take comfort in engaging the timeframe of that institution or thing. I think one of the comforts maybe when you're dealing with an 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...”

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

  47. “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 logarithmic scale model of understanding how that happens and why that is the case. Stuff like that.”

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

  48. “Kevin Kelly has done two or three now. Jesse Osible 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 backgrown 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”

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

  49. “Well, I'm looking at the seminars homepage and the Long Nile 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 is some of the most cogent thinking about time that I think we've seen in a long time.”

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

  50. “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 the West sort of won the world for now. It's a sort of Jared Diamond level of understanding how civilization has moved in relation really to the makeup of the planet. Jared Diamond gave one of the talks on And the main one I think is his gun sterms and steel book, though his collapse book also has some interesting stuff to propose I'd have to go down the list. You have some that you particularly”

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