YouSaid · the spoken record

Stewart Brand

lines on the record
151
first
2017-11-21
most recent
2017-11-21
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “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 Brianino 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 governed Nance 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 really deal with the powerful forces in the world”

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

  2. “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 society that is rewarded for thinking very, very rapidly in business terms and indeed in scientific terms to rapid turnaround and get inside the adversaries loop and move fast and break things. Long term thinking might be proposing some things you probably don't want to break. They might involve moving 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 is that's not tool that circumstance that's situational”

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

  3. “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 their personal computers came along. They were mainly a communication device. They did some calculation, some modeling and games and whatnot. But mainly the goddess was email and then the web and then on and on.”

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

  4. “Well, that's for busted. Okay, I was about to say no. Clearly, I can't. 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 is very band at Stanford Research Institute. And And now that is then played out, and so John Markov came out with his 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.”

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

  5. “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 on what the science is up to. So that's in a sense moving almost from a grab tools and run with them tools are arriving all the time. Just pay attention. And that's, I think, Most of what we consider progress comes from. Now, does that apply to thinking?”

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

  6. “And so we saw that play down in the seventies 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 Wosniak basically saying power two people 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.”

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

  7. “That definitely comes directly from Fuller, the changing human nature is hard when you try, you mostly fail, and it's discouraging. Changing tools and technology is relatively easy, and you can enable things.”

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

  8. “That was a big part of what the whole earth catalog took on much more from Florida than from Fluin in that sense, though I later got to know both of them, especially”

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

  9. “As a guide to important, helpful intellectual endeavor that up till then intellectuals had sort of looked down from a great height on scientists look 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. We're ready to listen to profits 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.”

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

  10. “There's a wonderful chapter in Peter Drucker's early memoir, which you call it 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, and they were guarding how we thought about being artists. Peter Drucker's perspective was that this was the first generation to take technology and engineering. Seriously”

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

  11. “A difference. Indeed, it reframed everything. I think up till 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.”

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

  12. “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 a piece from a sandwich board at Sayor Gate at UC Berkeley and then at Stanford and IT and Harvard Square in 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 and anyway it was just a campaign. So then when the photographs from Apollo started to come in, good color photographs, the earth from the moon missions. I was sort of proven right.”

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

  13. “Why have we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet? It was sort of putting the paranoid terms so that, and it's a question.”

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

  14. “The Soviet Union and America had been in space for that point 10 years and there were no end of photographs in the moon and 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 we call it a psychedelic, meaning mind expanding, but I think it's actually a mind contracting drug. You really focus 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 is this concept of a button that you mentioned that would say”

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

  15. “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 imagine, well, if I went up a little ways, I would see that even more strongly. I went up further still in altitude. The horizon would close on itself and be an obvious circle. And then I guess that took my mind further out. This is kind of a StarMaker story, although I'm stable to this 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 in 1966 Sputnik went up in 1956.”

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

  16. “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 imagine to myself that I can see that the”

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

  17. “Okay, the blue marble you're referring to is the look of the Earth from space. And we're still talking about drugs because I was bored in the spring of 1966 and on my rooftop in North Ridge San Francisco, I took sort of a half a doze, maybe 150 micrograms. Yeah, micrograms.”

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

  18. “I'm on the box of chocolates. 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 it specializes 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.”

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

  19. “Oh God, no. Well, it could be, but everything was illegal. Ken Cusey did this event, he called the acid test graduation and partly was finessing his legal problems, but also was an acknowledgement that You go through the doors of perception that Aldus Huxley talks about and you're in this cosmic place and then the trip is over in your back and you go back through and there's the cosmic place and you go back through and you go back, there's the cosmic place and there's a terrifying versions and exalted versions but in a sense it's the same cosmic place So two things happened one I got sort of recognized that there wasn't a lot of news anymore and sort of side effect was I became much more suspicious about mysticism in general, which I studied in college.”

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

  20. “And if you don't like flash, then you stop. So 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 Sergeant Pepper. And 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.”

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

  21. “I was pretty sure that that was not the direction to look for a solution. So one day we had some bad trips and some good trips and wound up the last one was in nineteen sixty nine, the occasion of Kenkeese and the Mary Pranksters. And their bus in New Mexico having a race with hog farm bus and the great bus race, I dosed up on a certain amount of LSD, and that was fun and amazing experience 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, I had an E-tank delivered weekly at my office. and nitrous, you do a flash, and if you like a flash, you can do another.”

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

  22. “For a number of peyote meetings and then wound up leading one or two as a roadman. 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”

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

  23. “Well, I happen 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 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 using MDMA on post-traumatic stress syndrome and things like that, which our friend Rockefeller was pushing strongly until just before he died. That's good stuff. 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 of just the marijuana and hashish people gave me the LSD, the people gave me the masculine that people gave me or the sessions going on that I would join in. And then I joined the Native American church formally and went to...”

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

  24. “Spinning is trying to settle me down and we go off to the emergency room and the guy there says, oh yeah, that's Vertigo. Pretty common. And there's 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 who doesn't do that anymore. fabulous correction but at that particular time it's the first time I 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 You realize you don't get scared about panicking. Right. You don't start panicking about the...”

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

  25. “It was a I think one of the elements who knows what triggers what 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”

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

  26. “Failures and successes and whatnot. Those days was still my first. And I was considered young at the time to be having a sort of national scale publication of great interest to a lot of people. There was not many issues. It was a nonprofit. So I was just getting a nonprofit salary of 10,000 a year or something like that. The fame part 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 vacationless overwork and tough marriage and a couple years to get out of it and due course it did. Years later I had another one. They come they go. I am now a great fan of drugs like Zilloft that can take my case depression Had an occasional panic type attack and Zilloff is fabulous against panic attacks.”

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

  27. “So it was basically thirty, thirty-one, 32 right in there. Got it. And by now people at that age have been through three or four.”

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

  28. “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 marriage probably that was going sour. Great is it had been for a few years and various things they often go on with first time success. I didn't know how to as yet sort of modulate my work and schedule. And so I was living at the office most of that time.”

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

  29. “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, the sort of catalog the things you're actually worried about and then work through on each one what happens when it actually happens, how 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 and 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 fantastic”

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

  30. “Okay, you're responsible for the people on 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 to critique is by telling the sergeant what he or now 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. Do you see science of that improvement? But 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 what they're doing right before telling them what they're doing wrong, that's just the kind of thing that good management instruction does.”

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

  31. “Well, there's a lot of instruction. I was lucky. I took ROTC at Stanford and then did two years active duties as soon as I graduated and then often went to Fort Benning to officers basic training course. And there I got all most of the basics of small unit management and leadership that my generation of liberal types mostly did not get. So me and John Kerry and a few others. And it was just simple things like”

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

  32. “By the way, what caused the malfunction was the pilot shoes that jumps out of your backpack first and then pulls out the sleeve, which then reveals the parachute. That's how it opens at a less than totally sudden way. 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.”

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

  33. “But it was late in the day, so I didn't go back up, or maybe I was afraid to go back up. And basically it was a screwed up jump. And that persuaded me that my body was not happy doing parachuting anymore, so I stopped.”

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

  34. “So before I'd be a greasy spot, and what I found myself doing was what I was trained to do. And 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. No god. Anyway, I landed and that was that.”

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

  35. “And the great thing about parachute training in the Army is that you go through a lot of the stuff of what do you do if the parachute doesn't open. There's a reserve chute, little stuff together, laundry thing on the front of your main chute's 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 besides being dead on arrival, you'll already be in a shroud. So I had this wonderful moment of, oh, suddenly this spotlight is on me. I could see San Francisco in the distance, I'm going to be facing that direction and sort of had those cosmic thoughts. And I also had... At that point, eight seconds to live.”

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

  36. “It was a young and dangerous sport at that time. It was still a parachute, 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 to do it. And one of the times I jumped out and I think I was doing a 10 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, reach across yourself and pull the ripcord and then a parachute comes out and there's a kind of sudden stop and then you're really pleasant, long minute or so. glide down to where you're going to try to land on a target. And this idol was interrupted by the fact that the parachute was not opening. And I could sense there was crap going on behind me.”

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

  37. “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 62, 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.”

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

  38. “Oh, yeah, sorry, that's an easy story. I took airborne training when I was an Army officer and when I was stationed at Fort Dick's skydiving, which is 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. And just a couple of the local guys got together and we started We would take the military shoots and cut gores in the side and then a section out of the back and then put sort of pegged 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 run a plane and jump out and do I don't know first jump and pull and then five second delays and so on.”

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

  39. “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. And meanwhile, other stuff is kind of tempting, or they just show up. A lot of my stuff just showed up, Tim. 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”

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

  40. “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, temptation is just keep storming up the mountain.”

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

  41. “Because the way that works is like with various sports when they came along, skydiving came along. No, 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 days. 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 interesting things. It is a not good career advice in terms of scoring big because as Brian, you know, has pointed out to me and to others, the way to make a lot of money is to have a very good idea and then be extremely careful never to have another”

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

  42. “Randomizing function? Serendipity As near as I can tell Tim, my version of randomness is pretty low threshold of boredom.”

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

  43. “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 around, which could well be a higher mountain. So it gets you off the low hill of fitness to potentially a high mountain of fitness is randomness. Of that stay pool.”

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

  44. “Nikki 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 biologist from the 50s. I'm really won over by then. 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 happened to be nearby. It gets better and better and better going up that hill and it 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.”

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

  45. “Could you elaborate on The back cover of the whole receptor was a photograph I commissioned that was meant to look like sunrise that a hitchhiker might see on some roadside. And 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. 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 you staying random.”

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

  46. “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.”

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

  47. “And his commencement talk was wonderful because it was basically about 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 the students would 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.”

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

  48. “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. We're both 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 enable and 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”

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

  49. “Well, the common sense. And there's this wonderful silence. 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 who kept them. There's no end of basements and attics that have catalogs in them.”

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

  50. “Yeah, there were breasts. There were even a crutch, I think, in 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, I think 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.”

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