Stewart Brand – The Polymath of Polymaths

Stewart Brand (@stewartbrand https://twitter.com/stewartbrand) is the president of The Long Now Foundation http://longnow.org/, established to foster long-term thinking and responsibility. He leads a project called Revive & Restore http://reviverestore.org/, which seeks to bring back extinct animal species such as the passenger pigeon and woolly mammoth. Stewart is very well known for founding, editing, and publishing The Whole Earth Catalog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog (WEC), which changed my life when I was a little kid. It also received a national book award for its 1972 issue. Stewart is the co-founder of The WELL https://www.well.com/ and The Global Business Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Business_Network, and author of Whole Earth Discipline http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670021210/offsitoftimfe-20, The Clock Of The Long Now http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465007805/offsitoftimfe-20, How Buildings Learn http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0140139966/offsitoftimfe-20, and The Media Lab http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670814423/offsitoftimfe-20. He was trained in biology at Stanford and served as an infantry officer in the US Army. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did! This podcast is brought to you by Peloton https://www.onepeloton.com/, which has become a staple of my daily routine. I picked up this bike after seeing the success of my friend Kevin Rose, and I've been enjoying it more than I ever imagined. Peloton is an indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. No worrying about fitting classes into your busy schedule or making it to a studio with a crazy commute. New classes are added every day, and this includes options led by elite NYC instructors in your own living room. You can even live stream studio classes taught by the world's best instructors, or find your favorite class on demand. Peloton https://www.onepeloton.com/ is offering listeners to this show a special offer. Visit onepeloton.com https://www.onepeloton.com/ and enter the code TIM at checkout to receive $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. This is a great way to get in your workouts, or an incredible gift. Again, that's onepeloton.com https://www.onepeloton.com/ and enter the code TIM. This podcast is also brought to you by Four Sigmatic http://foursigmatic.com/tim. I reached out to these Finnish entrepreneurs after a very talented acrobat introduced me to one of their products, which blew my mind (in the best way possible). It is mushroom coffee featuring chaga http://foursigmatic.com/tim. It tastes like coffee, but there are only 40 milligrams of caffeine, so it has less than half of what you would find in a regular cup of coffee. I do not get any jitters, acid reflux, or any type of stomach burn. It put me on fire for an entire day, and I only had half of the packet. People are always asking me what I use for cognitive enhancement right now — this is the answer. You can try it right now by going to foursigmatic.com/tim http://foursigmatic.com/tim and using the code Tim to get 20 percent off your first order. If you are in the experimental mindset, I do not think you'll be disappointed.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Tim Ferriss?

  No, we're just in an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:04Tim Ferriss?

  subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out, go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink A G one, the number one, drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 1:23Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, you sexy little kittens. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to interview and deconstruct world-class performers of all different types to tease out the habits and routines, tactics, thinking philosophies, belief structures that you can use. And this episode, kids, if you're in the car listening to this with your parents, earmuffs, holy shit, what a treat. I am so happy, could not be happier with what you are about to listen to, and it's all because of the guest. And by way of background, when I was in Uzbekistan with Kevin Kelly, and if you haven't heard of Kevin Kelly, you can check out my interviews

• 2:05Tim Ferriss?

  with him, I have argued for a very long time that Kevin may in fact be the real world most interesting man in the world. But when I asked him, when we were in the back of a taxi in Uzbekistan, long story. Who I should have on the podcast? He gave me a very, very complete list, but the first two names were Tim O'Reilly and Stuart Brand. And when I've asked Kevin who his mentors are, who he considers mentors, the first name that he brings up is Stuart Brand. So who is Stuart? Stuart is one of the sharpest, most badass guys you will ever meet, and it's kind of like Forrest Gump. He shows up at every possible historical moment you can conceive of.

• 2:46Tim Ferriss?

  Stuart Brand, @stuartbrand, is the president of the Long Now Foundation, established to creatively foster long-term thinking and responsibility in the framework of the next 10,000 years. Yes, that's not a typo. He leads a project there called Revive and Restore, which seeks to bring back extinct animal species such as the passenger pigeon and woolly mammoth. Stuart is very well-known for founding, editing, and publishing the Whole Earth Catalog, which changed my life when I was a little kid, and we talk about it. And it also received a National Book Award for its 1972 issue. And on top of that, and we delve into this, Steve Jobs talks about it in his most famous commencement speech. Stuart is the co-founder of The Well and Global Business Network, and the author of

• 3:29Tim Ferriss?

  books including Whole Earth Discipline, The Clock of the Long Now, How Buildings Learn, and The Media Lab. He was trained in biology at Stanford and served as an inventory officer in the US Army. Stuart can cover so many different spheres of expertise and speak intelligently on very, very high concepts, ranging from evolution to the nitty-gritty of designing, say, finite or I should say rather, infinite versus finite games for different groups of people. It's just so much fun to speak with Stuart, and I've been hoping to do this interview for a very, very, very long time. It came together, and maybe the caffeine level on my side was right.

• 4:14Tim Ferriss?

  I think Stuart's always on point, but I'm just thrilled with how it all turned out. So we'll link to everything in the show notes, of course, as usual, that you can find at tim.blog/podcast, and there will be a lot of links. But I really hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. So without further ado, please meet the one and only and incredible Stuart Brand.

• 4:39Tim Ferriss?

  Stuart, welcome to the show.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Howdy, Tim.

• 4:44Tim Ferriss?

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

• 5:29Tim Ferriss?

  and I would sit down for hours, flipping around in this incredible tome. And I wanted to thank you for that, first and foremost, because it had a real formative impact on me in my childhood years.

• 5:45Speaker 02

  Well, that's amazing. I hear that a lot. I'm curious, do you remember any of what particularly got you going through the catalog back then?

• 5:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there were, well, there were a few things. And maybe you can, I've actually never told anybody this. So the first was, I want to say that there were geodesic domes, or some sort of graphic representations of geodesic domes, which at the time were just very fascinating to me. And my grandfather was a classical sculptor on one side, and so was very interested in shapes. I wanted to be an illustrator and a comic book penciler for about 15 years. So anything that represented an unusual, what I felt was an unusual shape in the physical world was very interesting to me. And then, this could be a false memory, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but as a,

• 6:36Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know how old I was, nine or 10-year-old, maybe even younger... Was there any, not nudity necessarily, but were there any breasts of any type in the Whole Earth Catalogue? If so, that was probably also a big draw for me.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, there were breasts, there was even a crotch, I think, in the My Body, Myself, which was this wonderful book that came out on women's health by women. And it was just the facts, ma'am, and graphic and rich. It was a, 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.

• 7:32Tim Ferriss?

  So the answer I gave you, I feel like, might be very trivial. Are there, do you have any common answers that pop up often when you ask people that question about what stuck with them or what really grabbed their attention? I suppose it probably depends on their, the age at which they came across it, but are there certain things that really stick out often for people?

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Well, the common thing is, wow, you did the Whole Earth Catalogue, it really affected my life. You know, I still have the original Whole Earth Catalogue, and then I'll check and see if they mean, the very first one that came out in 1968, there are only a thousand printed, and know what they mean is their first Whole Earth Catalogue, which was probably the last Whole Earth Catalogue in 1972, so-called. And then I'll ask them, why do you still have it? And there's this wonderful silence.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  And I've never gotten a good answer. Uh, it, I think it has something to do with a sense of a certain era, um, 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, uh, tipping point from one way of thinking about what they could do to another way of thinking about it. So, anyway, a lot of people kept them. There's no end of basements and attics that have Whole Earth Catalog in them.

• 9:12Tim Ferriss?

  Now, one, one, one fan who comes to mind, and I'm sure there are many who have name recognition, but is Steve Jobs. So he, I mean, he's, he referred to you in his Stanford commencement speech, uh, which of course has become very, very popular. And, uh, he refers to the amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, one of the bibles of my generation. Uh, have, have you spent any time or did you spend any time with Steve and get an idea of why, why it had such an impact on him?

• 9:46Speaker 02

  Uh, I did spend time with Steve a few times, um, and we did, in fact, even find on YouTube some videos we did together for, uh, the Library of Congress. We were both, the Library of Congress asked both of us to help promote a new program they were doing, and we're both glad to do it. And so we sat down together and did some fun stuff. That was also when Steve put out his, uh, personal computers or Bicycle of the Mind. Um, that vastly enabled and everything. The question I never got to ask Steve was, um, at the end of that commencement speech, what he put out to the Stanford students was, uh, what had been on the back cover of

• 10:28Speaker 02

  the Whole Earth Epilogue, which came out in seventy-three, seventy-four. Uh, and it said, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." And for some reason, that really got Steve. And, uh, his commencement talk was wonderful because it was basically about, um, well, he gives three stories, but the main story is that he's been scared to death by his pancreatic cancer diagnosis. And, um...

• 10:58Speaker 02

  Lived, at least for a good and important while. And so from that perspective, he was kind of just giving the students a little bit of a signal from the other side of a temporary grave. And that's part of what made it such an amazing talk. And his final line, basically, to students was, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." And the question, I never had a chance to ask Steve, even though I did see him for lunch after that talk, was what got him about that. And various people, including me, have tried to interpret why he in particular was moved by "Stay hungry, stay foolish."

• 11:40Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:20Tim Ferriss?

  What was intended by "Stay foolish"? "Stay hungry," I feel like I can interpret in a number of ways that I would probably have some consensus on with other people. What about the "Stay foolish"? What was intended by that? Or could you elaborate on that?

• 12:37Speaker 02

  The back cover of the Holy Theologues is 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 of... So the limb of the earth, basically, is just a crescent of light, the sun. So, you know, that sunrise happening somewhere on earth. And so I wanted to get that from the surface. But the dawn, someone's eyes must meet the dawn. The dawn hitchhiker...

• 13:21Speaker 02

  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. Um, I think I was promoting the idea of occasionally staying random.

• 13:40Tim Ferriss?

  Um.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  Nicky Case, uh, just recently gave one of our Long Now talks, where he points out that chaos is an important part of, uh, keeping creativity and evolution and everything else going. Uh, the story in evolution is what they call fitness landscapes. And it's a biologist from the fifties. Um, I'm really won over by them. The idea of a fitness landscape is it's a series of, uh, 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.

• 14:23Speaker 02

  But all around it may well be, uh, much higher peaks of much greater opportunity, much greater fitness, or whatever it may be. Uh, but so long as it's focusing on being really, really good and being on top of the hill it's on, uh, it will never get to those mountains. The only way it'll get to those mountains is by being foolish, uh, by trying weird stuff, by being random, by, um, uh, recombinating or, uh, mutating sort of down off the hill a little bit, maybe even down into the nearby valley, which looks horrible, uh, and then trying new things, uh, that improve on the new slope they're on, which could well be a higher mountain.

• 15:05Speaker 02

  So what gets you off the, the, the low hill of fitness to potentially a high mountain of fitness is randomness.

• 15:14Speaker 02

  That's stapling.

• 15:17Tim Ferriss?

  Has that been a conscious decision on your part throughout your life to insert a randomizing function? Or has it really just been serendipity? No, I'm just wondering, I mean, you've lived so many lives. I've been very intimidated by the interview because I'm like, how the hell, where should I start? Where's the beginning? Where's the end? It's very challenging. So I'm just curious if that's something you've thought about as you've made decisions in your own life.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  As near as I can tell, Tim, my version of randomness is pretty low threshold of boredom.

• 15:53Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Can you elaborate?

• 15:55Speaker 02

  Because, you know, the way that works is, like with various sports, when they came along, skydiving came along, now that doesn't count because I stopped doing that because I had a parachute not open. But hang gliding came along. And, or snowboarding, those were two sports that as soon as they showed up, I got into it. And pretty quickly, I just ran out of excitement.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  Up the hill, down the hill, up the hill, down the hill, in both cases.

• 16:31Speaker 02

  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 Eno 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.

• 17:02Tim Ferriss?

  I haven't heard that before. Oh, man.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  You know, it's true for artists, it's true in business, it's true in all sorts of things. You know, you sort of develop an expertise, you get rewarded for it. And if it really looks like it is one of those mount opportunities, the temptation is just keep storming up the mountain.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  But after, 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, it just showed up, Tim. I'm, I'm dealing with a biographer now, and he's raising some of these same questions. And when I thought about doing a memoir, I thought about using a title from Arthur Kessler about astronomers called the sleepwalkers. And those things that I progressed

• 18:05Speaker 02

  from one to another, they were not part of any arc of ambition, or even narrative arc. They were just sort of what seemed like a good idea at the time, based on what was around me. So I think biographies, including mine, consist mostly of circumstance and sequence. And then you map onto that character and, and any stories or something you tell backwards.

• 18:32Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So I want to dissect the, the stories for things that you tell backwards in a second. But first, there's something you mentioned in passing that I feel like I have to address as sort of a pink elephant in the room that my listeners are going to ask me about if I don't ask you, which is, you mentioned, I did skydiving for a while, but then I had a parachute not open.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  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 Dix, skydiving was just starting to come along as a thing that you could do. The US 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.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  We would take military chutes 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'd rent a plane and jump out and do, I don't know, first jump and pull and then five second delays and so on. And it was great fun and by then, teaching basic training at Fort Dix was boring for all of the officers who'd been in for a year and a half at that point. So then when I got out of the Army in sixty-two, there was by then, a pretty good amateur

• 20:09Speaker 02

  skydiving scene going on in Northern California, so I joined that. And was jumping on the weekends up near Mount Calistoga, Northern Napa Valley. And 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 do it. And one of the times I jumped out and I think I was doing a ten second delay and you're sort of counting, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  And I got to my count and pulled the parachute, you reach across yourself and pull a ripcord. And then the parachute comes out and there's a kind of sudden stop and then you just really pleasant, long minute or so glide down to where you're going to try to land on a target. And this idle was interrupted by the fact that the parachute was not opening. And there was, I could sense there was crap going on behind me. And the great thing about parachute training in the Army is that you go through a lot of stuff of what do you do if the parachute doesn't open.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  There's a reserve chute, a little stuffed together laundry thing on the front of your main chute's on the back and there's this little chute in the front. And, um, one of the things you're told is if you have to open the reserve, you know, um, go for it and then turn sideways in the air because if you're facing straight down in the standard, uh, position that you skydive in, the chute will open around you and besides being dead on arrival, you'll already be in a shroud. So, uh, I had this wonderful moment of, oh, uh, suddenly the spotlight is on me.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  I could see San Francisco in the distance, I'm really facing that direction and sort of had those cosmic thoughts and I also had at that point eight seconds to live. Um, so, before I'd be a greasy spot. And what I found myself doing was what I was trained to do. This is one of the things that persuaded me that training is better than almost any other form of instruction, uh, which is I rotated ninety degrees in the air, reached for the reserve chute, pulled it, it popped out with a terrible jerk and, uh, 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.

• 22:51Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, God.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  Anyway, I landed and that was that. Um, and, but it was late in the day, so I didn't go back up, or maybe I was afraid to go back up. When I did go back up the following weekend, I did a, uh, a very dangerous jump. I almost hit my head on the step, leaving this small plane. I never really stabilized in free fall and basically it was a, it was a screwed up jump and that persuaded me that my body was not happy doing parachuting anymore, so I stopped.

• 23:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, okay. I think that's a very reasonable conclusion.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  Oh, and by the way, what caused the malfunction was, um... Uh, the pilot chute that jumps out of your backpack first and then pulls out the sleeve, which then, uh, reveals the parachute, that's how it opens in a less than totally sudden way, uh, that pilot chute jumped out and the tether that it was on, uh, managed to tie an overhand knot in the bottom of the sleeve.

• 23:51Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, God.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  So, even if I'd spent my eight seconds trying to undo the, the tangle, uh, I would have still been tugging at the knot when I hit the ground.

• 24:02Tim Ferriss?

  Was there, was there any other training, uh, or principles that you took from the mil- your military experience that ended up being helpful later?

• 24:14Speaker 02

  Well, there's a lot of instruction, um, I was, I take, I was lucky, I took ROTC at Stanford and then did two years of active duty as soon as I graduated, and then, uh, often went to Fort Benning to, uh, Officer Basic Training Course, and there I got all, you know, most of the basics of small unit management and leadership that, uh, my generation, um, of liberal types mostly did not get, so, you know, me and John Kerry and a few others, uh, and it was, you know, just simple things like, um, okay, uh, you're responsible

• 24:57Speaker 02

  for the people on your command, you're gonna critique them to get them doing ever better, especially the sergeants that work for you, and the way you begin a tr- critique is by, um, telling the, the sergeant what, uh, here now she has been doing very well and thank you for that, and it's gotta be close and it's gotta be accurate and well observed, and then you can say, but 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 they work on for improvement, and let them know you're gonna be watching to see signs of that improvement, which you will, you know, congratulate them for when

• 25:39Speaker 02

  it shows up, and then come up with some other, uh, item of potential improvement, just that sequence of telling them what they're doing right before telling them what they're doing wrong, that's the kind of thing that, you know, good management instruction does, and, uh, you know, it's done at taxpayer expense, thank you very much.

• 25:58Tim Ferriss?

  I want to talk about the Whole Earth Catalog a little bit more. And I know that you've probably told many stories about the Whole Earth Catalog. But for those people who are listening who don't have context, I want to read just a short quote, which is from a piece from The Guardian. So they have a little bit of context. And I'm going to borrow from a couple of different pieces. But the Whole Earth Catalog has been called "The Internet Before the Internet." And then quoting from this piece, "It wasn't exactly a book. It was a how-to manual, a compendium, an encyclopedia, a literary review, an opinionated

• 26:43Tim Ferriss?

  life guide, and a collection of readers' recommendations and reviews of everything from computational physics to goat husbandry." And it seemed, even as a kid reading this book, that it was the type of project that would take a lot out of a person. So rather than go into the creation of it necessarily, although we could certainly get into it, I had not been aware that, at least based on some of the reading I did, when you shut down the Whole Earth Catalog, what followed was a pretty severe depression.

• 27:23Tim Ferriss?

  And you and I saw each other not too long ago at TED, where I spoke for the first time on the main stage and decided two weeks beforehand that I would completely redo my presentation and talk about severe depression and how close I came to suicide at one point in college. Would you mind sharing with people a little bit of that period in your life and what you found helpful to regain your footing?

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Well, I saw that TED Talk, Tim, and what I liked about it especially, and a lot of people liked it, it's doing very well online, was the fear naming aspect of that, the sort of catalog the things you're actually worried about, and then work through on each one, you know, what happens if it actually happens, what do you deal with that, how can you head it off, and sort of take it apart in detail, rather than just go along with this sort of blank, "I'm too afraid to make this move" approach to things. I really like that, and it's something I think we're gonna find a way to use for some of the people who get

• 28:39Speaker 02

  worried about the use of genetics in conservation, which is what I do mostly these days.

• 28:46Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, fantastic.

• 28:47Speaker 02

  But, um, 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. That was kind of the, you know, feline curiosity. But it wasn't that then I became depressed, I also was eager to shut it down by 1971, because I was depressed. And it was a combination of a marriage, probably, that was going sour, great is, it had been

• 29:26Speaker 02

  for a few years, and various things that often go on with first-time success. I didn't know how to, as yet, sort of modulate my work and schedule, so I was living at the office most of that time.

• 29:46Tim Ferriss?

  How, how old were you at the time, just to place us?

• 29:49Speaker 02

  Um, so, you know, I was basically thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, right in there.

• 29:56Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  And by now, people who, at that age, have been through three or four failures and successes and whatnot. In those days, it was still my first. And I was considered young at the time to be having a sort of national-scale publication of great interest to a lot of people. Um, it was not money issues, it was a nonprofit, so I was just getting a, a nonprofit salary of ten thousand a year, or something like that. Um, the fame part, I think, was not particularly problematic. I mean, as you know, any kind of fame can lead you into a kind of a self caricature,

• 30:39Speaker 02

  uh, sequence where you, you wind up, um, being driven around by your image rather than vice versa. But that was not really an issue either. I think it was, uh, vacationless, overwork, and, uh, tough marriage. And took a couple of years to get out of it. And, of course, it did. Years later, I had another one. Uh, they come, they go. I am now a great fan of, uh, drugs like Zoloft that can take, in my case, um, depression had occasional panic type attack, and, uh, Zoloft is fabulous against panic attacks.

• 31:22Tim Ferriss?

  So you found that the panic preceded the depression? It was sort of a triggering event, or a triggering phase?

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Uh, it was a, it was a, um, I think one of the elements, I don't, you know, who knows what triggers what.

• 31:36Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  Um, actually, there was a, a recent trigger in the sense that, um, I had a vertigo experience in the, in the middle of the night when I just turned over to the right and suddenly the bedroom was spinning and, uh, my wife, Ryan, is, uh, trying to settle me down and we go off to the emergency room and the guy, uh, there says, "Oh yeah, it's vertigo, pretty common." But, uh, and, you know, there's a, a maneuver that you can turn your head in a certain way and then you get the thing that's causing the vertigo, vertigo that's in your middle ear to go to the right place where it doesn't do that anymore. It's a fabulous correction. But at that particular time, it was the first time I, um...

• 32:20Speaker 02

  Brain or my brain body had sort of frightened me like that. And so I was fearful for a year or two after that. And part of that would be kind of panicking at the kind of things that people panic at. Standing around for a long time in public or driving on a bridge, things like that. And Zoloft is great, it just cuts the peak right off of any kind of panic and then you realize it's you're not, you don't get scared about panicking.

• 32:51Tim Ferriss?

  Right, you don't start panicking about the panic.

• 32:54Speaker 02

  You got it. And, and then just by taking the peak of fearfulness away, then the whole thing gets under control.

• 33:03Tim Ferriss?

  So now that we're on the subject of broadly speaking pharmacology, I had read that, well, I'd, I'd heard someone referred to you, actually it was hearing, not reading, referred to you as a pioneer, early pioneer in psychedelics, but that you had stopped, but that you had stopped. And I'm curious to know why that, why that is and if you could give us any, any backstory on that.

• 33:31Speaker 02

  Well, I happened to be in the Bay Area when LSD was first being researched by then, at that point still legally as a sort of a psychological fitness, a way to do psychotherapy, a way to do severely enhanced psychotherapy, which by the way has come around again now, it's kind of fun to see. And I think a lot of it applied, so you know, using MDMA on, uh, post-traumatic stress syndrome and things like that, which our friend Rockefeller, which Richard Rockefeller was pushing strongly just before he died, that's good stuff.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  But, so then these drugs were around, um, a lot. I never actually bought a psychedelic drug. People would, there was so much of it in the sixties at this point, that, uh, just the marijuana and hashish that people gave me, LSD that people gave me, the mescaline that people gave me, um, or the sessions going on that I would join in. And then I, I joined the Native American Church formerly and was, I went to for a number of peyote meetings and then wound up leading one or two as a roadman. Um, and it sounds like I was doing all the drugs in the world, but compared to my contemporaries, I was pretty modest.

• 35:00Speaker 02

  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. And I was pretty sure that that was not the direction to look for a solution. So one day I had some bad trips and some good trips. And wound up, the last one was in 1969, the occasion of Ken Kesey and 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 a fun and amazing experience and also the last time I did LSD.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  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.

• 35:57Tim Ferriss?

  (laughing)

• 35:59Speaker 02

  And, uh, and nitrous, you do a flash, and if you like the flash, you can do another. And if you don't like the 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, um, 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."

• 36:33Tim Ferriss?

  (laughing)

• 36:34Speaker 02

  It is laughing gas after all. But, uh, clearly I had gone over some edge with nitrous oxide, so I stopped doing that.

• 36:43Tim Ferriss?

  Why did you stop doing, was the LSD then a matter of, the cessation, a matter of legality at that point?

• 36:52Speaker 02

  Oh, God, no. Um, well, it could be, but, you know, everything was illegal. So, um...

• 37:03Speaker 02

  I've, you know, Ken Kesey did this event, he called the Acid Test Graduation. And partly it was finessing his legal problems, but also it was an acknowledgement that, um, you know, you go through the doors of perception that Aldous Huxley talks about, and you're in this cosmic place, and then the trip is over and you're back, and you go back through, and there's the cosmic place, and you go back through, and you go back, and there's the cosmic place. And there's terrifying versions and exalted versions, but in a sense, it's the same cosmic place. So, two things happened. One, I got sort of, uh, recognized

• 37:48Speaker 02

  that there wasn't a lot of news anymore. And, uh, a sort of side effect was I became much more suspicious about mysticism in general, which I'd studied in college, both Christian mysticism and everybody else's mysticism. And I had a feeling like, um, I'd taken the shortcut into that world, and, uh, there wasn't as much there as I, uh, had thought and hoped.

• 38:17Tim Ferriss?

  So I might, I might come back to that. For people who don't know the name Ken Kesey, he's the author of other things, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and then the, uh, The Pranksters, and the Rip Roaring Ride, uh, that you mentioned also led you to appear, just as a point of trivia, please correct me if I'm wrong, in Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Uh, so just as a, as a side note, because you, you make these appearances in so many sort of defining cultural works or moments, it's almost like watching Forrest Gump, but with someone who's not Forrest Gump. I mean, it's really astonishing.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  Well, I'm on the box of chocolates, you know, you really do not know what you're gonna get, uh, approach to things, but yeah, I got lucky. But partly, uh, by choice, I'm in a creative area where, uh, you know, specializes in doing weird stuff in the San Francisco Bay Area. And, um...

• 39:24Speaker 02

  You run into a lot and wind up connecting with a lot that turns out to be important just by sort of strolling around.

• 39:31Tim Ferriss?

  Can you tell us about the, about blue marble? So, the, can you tell us about the buttons that you distributed, or I guess you were selling them way back in the day and give us a little bit of context on...

• 39:54Speaker 02

  Okay, the blue marble you're referring to is the look of the earth from space.

• 39:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  And we're still talking about drugs because I was bored in the spring of 1966 and on my rooftop in North Beach, San Francisco, I took sort of a half a dose, maybe 100, 150 micrograms of micro whatever's...

• 40:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, micrograms, mhm.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  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.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  And then they're stoned, looking out at the San Francisco skyline, and imagined to myself that I can see that the buildings are all vertical, but they're not exactly parallel. They diverge slightly because of the curvature of the earth and sort of the fish eye 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, I would, you know, the horizon would close on itself and be an obvious circle. And then I guess I took my mind further out. This is kind of a Starmaker story. Oh, I'm stapled to this story, begins this way.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  And then in my mind, I saw the Earth not only as a circle, but as a sphere, um, rotating against a star field. I thought, now that's, that is really the way to see the Earth. But it's weird that we haven't seen that because this is nineteen sixty-six. Spudnik went up in nineteen fifty-six. So, uh, Soviet Union and America had been in space for, at that point, ten years. And there were no end of photographs of 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

• 42:21Speaker 02

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

• 43:06Speaker 02

  It was sort of put in paranoid terms so that, and it's a question, so that people would, you know, raise the question I had, how come we've been in space for ten years and, uh, this photograph hadn't been made? And the implication was that it had been made and they were hiding it from us. Uh, yeah. And then I, uh, printed those buttons up in the next week and made some kind of posters. And I went and started selling those buttons for twenty-five cents a piece from a sandwich board at, say, the gate at UC Berkeley and then at Stanford and at IT and Harvard Square and Columbia University and, uh, got in the newspapers, The Village Voice.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  And, um, I sent, uh, 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, um, anyway, it was just a campaign. So then when the photographs from Apollo started to come in, good color photographs of the Earth from the moon missions, um, I was sort of proven right that it would make a difference. Indeed, it reframed everything, I think.

• 44:25Speaker 02

  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.

• 44:47Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned Buckminster Fuller. And, uh, he seems to have been very influential in, or had an influence certainly on you in some way. What was most striking about him? Or what did you take, what have you taken from Buckminster Fuller?

• 45:08Speaker 02

  You know, there's a wonderful chapter in Peter Drucker's early memoir, which he called something like Observations of a Bystander. And in it, he has a chapter about the hippie generation and about two of his friends, which was Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller. And he said McLuhan and Fuller were these two voices in the wilderness, shouting away with nobody listening. And he said, both of them would turn up at his door and come in and sort of, you know, rant their various rants at him. And he would patiently listen to them and encourage them and show them the door.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  And what happened in the 60s is artists that I was hanging out with in New York, a group called USCO, were paying close attention to both Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller. And they were guiding how we thought about being artists.

• 46:07Speaker 02

  Peter Drucker's perspective was that this was the first generation to take sort of technology and engineering seriously as a guide to important, helpful intellectual endeavor. That up till then intellectuals had sort of looked down from a great height on, scientists looked down on engineers and technology was seen as, you know, 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

• 46:52Speaker 02

  and run to our own horizons with them. And we're ready to listen to prophets of that, such as Marshall McLuhan saying that the medium is the message and Buckminster Fuller saying that if all the politicians in the world died next week, the world would barely notice, but if all the scientists and engineers in the world died next week, the world would cease to function. That was a big part of, you know, what the Horace Catlog took on, much more from Fuller than from McLuhan in that sense, though I later got to know both of them, especially Buck.

• 47:33Tim Ferriss?

  There's a quote that I found that may or may not be relevant, but I'd love to explore it a little bit. And that is, I believe attributed to you, "You can't change human nature, but you can change tools, you can change techniques, and then by so doing you can change civilization." Is that something you could expand on? And related to that is, do you think of thinking as one such tool that you could change instead of human nature? I'd just love to know where that came from or how it applies in your own mind.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  Um, that definitely comes directly from Fuller. Fuller said a lot of basic... Yeah, that the changing human nature is, is hard and when you try, you mostly fail and it's discouraging. Changing tools and technology is relatively easy and you can enable things. And so we saw that play down in the 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."

• 48:56Speaker 02

  And you had Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak basically saying, "Power to people. Just provide the tools and the rest will come." That's been a pretty reliable framing. A later version of that that I came up with is my sort of proclamation that science is the only news. All, all the other stuff, the politics goes in cycles, the fashion goes in very, very tight little cycles. And even the, the technology is pretty predictable if you, if you've got a good eye on what the

• 49:39Speaker 02

  science is up to. So the, that's in a sense, moving almost from a grab tools and run with them to, "Tools are arriving all the time, just pay attention." And that's, I think, where most of what we consider progress comes from. Now, does that apply to thinking?

• 50:08Tim Ferriss?

  And I ask because of the seminars about long-term thinking.

• 50:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, that's per... 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 sixties who were doing a thing called Augmented Human Intellect. This was Doug Engelbart and his Mary Band at Stanford Research Institute. And, um...

• 50:43Speaker 02

  And now, that has then played out, and so John Markoff 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. Augmented intelligence. So, augmented intelligence, I think, has been going on ever since humans got around to developing language.

• 51:24Speaker 02

  And that then becomes, individual intelligence becomes much more social intelligence. I think almost all intelligence is social intelligence, anyway. And there's, personal computers came along, they were mainly a communication device. They did some calculation, some modeling, and games, and whatnot. But mainly, how the goddess was, you know, email, and then the web, and then on and on. Social intelligence is really easily augmented with tools. Now, what do you do with social intelligence? Can you change that?

• 52:07Speaker 02

  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, indeed in scientific terms, to, you know, rapid turnaround, get inside the adversary's loop, and move fast, and break things. And...

• 52:49Speaker 02

  Long-term thinking might be proposing, uh, some things you probably don't want to break. And they might involve moving slow and steadily. Uh, I think climate change is the one that our century, our generation has been handed is a thing to which there is no quick fix whatsoever. Uh, 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. Um, so that is, uh, that's not

• 53:28Speaker 02

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

• 54:09Speaker 02

  forces and climate change and so on is really big and slow. And what's interesting about that is, is that the fast parts get all the attention, but the slow parts have all the power. And, uh, if you really want to really deal with the powerful forces in the world, uh, in relation to, uh, seeing what can be done with appreciating and maybe helping adjust the big, slow things.

• 54:38Tim Ferriss?

  So when you look, for instance, if somebody wanted to start exploring some of the slower-moving layers and topics, you've been curating Salz, which I referred to earlier, the seminar's about long-term thinking, and you've released a very affordable book. It's basically a collection of summaries, I think it's $2.99, of many of the talks at this point, which include, I mean, you name it, Michael Pollan, Matt Ridley. It's a very, very long list.

• 55:06Speaker 02

  Tim Ferriss.

• 55:08Tim Ferriss?

  Tim Ferriss, and there you have it, about on meta-learning, which was a lot of fun and is a great honor. Uh, are there any particular... For people who wanted to perhaps take a break from the perishable goods of so-called news, non-scientific news, and fashion, and all of that noise, to think about the slower-moving, extremely powerful layers, are there any talks that you might suggest they start with, or any summaries?

• 55:39Speaker 02

  I'd have to scroll through them, but one that comes to mind is Matt Ridley talking about rational optimism. There's a good one by Ian Morris on basically how the West sort of won the world for now. It's a sort of Jared Diamond level of understanding of how civilization has moved in relation, really, to the makeup of the planet. Jared Diamond's Sony, Jared gave one of the talks on, and the main one, I think, is his

• 56:19Speaker 02

  Guns, Terms, and Steel book, though his collapse book also has some interesting stuff to propose. I'd have to go down the list. Do you have some that you particularly like?

• 56:32Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, well, I'm looking for a shopping list, basically, because I've, I think, in the last few months, become particularly sensitive to the fact that I've been pulled out by the riptide of noise, I think, and I'm, so I'm actually looking for a homework list from you, more than anything else.

• 56:56Speaker 02

  Well, I'm looking at the Seminars homepage, and at the Long Now Foundation, and we've done, I guess, 120, 130 of these talks now, and they're about as long as this broadcast. They're 90 minutes in a sense, so it's long-form, it's like long-form TED Talks. They're illustrated, so there's really good edited videos of them, but a lot of people use the iPod, I'm sure, as they do with your stuff, you know, 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.

• 57:43Speaker 02

  Kevin Kelly has done two or three now. Jesse Ossebl 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 vat grown or lab grown synthetic meats come along, I think we'll start to be, have fewer of the landscape being given over to grazing, which will then free up a lot of nature, which is where I'd like to see things happening. Jeffrey West, his book, Scale, he did a talk version of that, which is fantastic, particularly

• 58:25Speaker 02

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

• 58:55Tim Ferriss?

  So, these are, I need to, immediately after we're done talking, jump back in because I've been feeling a deep hunger for revisiting and, well, visiting for the first time, a lot of these. You mentioned Kevin-

• 59:10Speaker 02

  Say why? Because you're tired of the daily melodrama in the White House, or what?

• 59:13Tim Ferriss?

  I'm tired of daily melodrama, period. I think that whether it's self-manufactured emergencies or anxiety or shiny objects-

• 59:26Speaker 02

  Well, that's interesting.

• 59:27Tim Ferriss?

  -that are distractions. I've actually, and I don't want to take us two off the rails, but, I mean, I've been-

• 59:35Tim Ferriss?

  I hesitate to use the word mysticism. You mentioned that after having some of these psychedelic experiences, you felt like you'd peeked behind the curtain in a sense and that some of the maybe appeal or draw of mysticism was decreased. I've had the opposite experience and have been increasingly drawn to reading about definitions of reality and looking at perception and the doors of perception and really trying to pull back from, I was just chatting with Tim O'Reilly about this actually, but if we were to look at, say, reality and then one abstraction of

• 1:00:18Tim Ferriss?

  that being our personal experience as perceived through the senses and then language and additional abstraction on top of that, I've been trying to return to, I hate to use this term, but I'm not coming up with anything better on the spot, source or the layer of least abstraction to study that to the extent possible because I think it informs everything else that's upstream.

• 1:00:47Speaker 02

  So there's probably a book or two that is speaking to you at this point. What are they?

• 1:00:52Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I will tell you that I've been reading, so there are books that are speaking to this, but they might not be what people would expect. They're actually not nonfiction. I think I've tried to look in nonfiction for answers, but there is a very kinesthetic feeling of greater truth, which will make certain rationalists out there just drop their jaws open. But I've spent my whole life operating out of my prefrontal cortex and using spreadsheets and pro and con lists and so on. And I think that for a long time I viewed my emotions or intuition or feelings

• 1:01:35Tim Ferriss?

  as a liability and distraction and nothing else. And I've come to believe otherwise. So I've actually spent a lot of time reading. Certain poetry, which is very much not anything who grew up with me would associate with me, but also reading fiction, highly autobiographical fiction that questions the nature of perception. For instance, Milon Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is, I think, just a tremendous, tremendous work that it uses hilarity and absurdity to teach a lot. So that's one that comes to mind because I literally just finished

• 1:02:17Tim Ferriss?

  it yesterday and it's sitting on my table. But what, what, what books are you drawn to right now?

• 1:02:26Speaker 02

  I'll come to that. I want to say a little more about what you're talking about is taking comfort in, 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, but 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

• 1:03:07Speaker 02

  comfort in engaging the timeframe of that institution or thing. And I think one of the comforts may be when you're dealing with an institution that's lived longer than any human, or a natural system that's obviously been longer even than humans themselves have been around. And you extend your mind back through the narrative, the sequence of events, the story of that thing, and then you extend it forward. And you extend it forward, you go by a thing which might otherwise obsess you, which is your own personal death. And...

• 1:03:52Speaker 02

  Denial of death is a big event and things that sort of finesse death without denying it by, you know, taking on the life of something that lives longer than you do. People get this from their children and grandchildren, obviously. That's why the loss of a child is harder on a parent than any other thing, I think. But this is a place that people like to abide from time to time and it also feels like the opposite of the daily melodrama, which has its own attractions, God knows.

• 1:04:36Speaker 02

  And, you know, 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 it's one of the reasons that the Long Now Foundation, which is, you know, 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." And a surprising number of people say, "Oh, good idea."

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  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 mammoths and that's going to take a couple of centuries. So I'll just get out a start on that one on 78. That's comforting.

• 1:05:46Tim Ferriss?

  There's so many different directions we could go with this.

• 1:05:50Speaker 02

  I know.

• 1:05:51Tim Ferriss?

  No, I know.

• 1:05:52Speaker 02

  I can see them branching out in your mind there.

• 1:05:54Tim Ferriss?

  I know. The dendrites of possibilities are branching out. And I think, I think I'm gonna go, much like the parachute not opening, I feel like for the people listening, I have to address the woolly mammoth.

• 1:06:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:08Tim Ferriss?

  So that, so thank you for that easy option. And I, I shouldn't assume, but I will. If, is this related to revive and restore?

• 1:06:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, revive and restore is an organization that my wife, Ryan Phelan, runs that we've been working on for, for almost five years now, to basically bring genetic technology to wildlife conservation. And the general term for what we do and, and the sub-discipline that's opening up in conservation biology is called genetic rescue. And mainly you're focusing on other work, genetic workarounds for inbreeding depression in small populations that one would like to have come back to be large populations. Maybe there's a smaller group of California condors left in captive breeding, and then

• 1:07:04Speaker 02

  you want to get them back out to the wild, which has now happened. And the genetic monitoring of that helps with the breeding program, for example. Head off diseases to maybe dial down severely destructive invasive rodents on ocean islands, for example, things like that you can do with genetics. In that case, maybe with gene drive, which is a very aggressive form of genetic intervention. And then the extreme case is because we now have recoverable DNA from animals that have gone extinct, whether it was just 100 years ago, like the passenger pigeon, or several thousand years ago, like the woolly mammoth.

• 1:07:49Speaker 02

  And if there are close relatives to those extinct animals that are still living, and they have working genomes, in the case of the woolly mammoth, it's Asian elephants.

• 1:08:02Speaker 02

  Then you can contemplate, or in our case, working with George Church at Harvard, begin to apply the taking of the most mammoth-y of the mammoth genes, identifying them and using editing tools like CRISPR, move those genes basically into the genomes of living elephant cells, moving in the direction of eventually being able to get a cell with a nucleus that is basically woolly mammoth genome, and then getting that into a living

• 1:08:44Speaker 02

  Asian elephants who can then give birth to woolly mammoths. Obviously, this goes through many steps. And then move from there through the standard reintroduction techniques of wildlife conservation to get the woolly mammoths up to a population that is self-sustaining, has enough genetic variability that they will not get into an inbreeding bottleneck, and start the process of reintroducing them to their wild, which was the far north, where there's not a lot of people, so they'd be able to perhaps prosper pretty well. And eventually, the rest of that story is woolly mammoths could be part of the revival of what used

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  to be called the mammoth steppe, which is the grasslands of the far north that was once the largest biome on earth. But when humans got through all of that biome and killed off all of the large megafauna, except for the musk ox, that grassland turned into tundra and boreal forest. Mammoths would be helpful as we bring back the various grazers in the far north, like the musk ox and maybe the woolly rhinoceros. But mammoths were good, as elephants were good, all over the world. Everybody had elephants. And what they're good at is knocking down trees. And knocking down trees is good because it turns a closed

• 1:10:12Speaker 02

  canopy forest into a mosaic, and a mosaic ecologically is a much richer environment for all kinds of species, as we see in the parts of Africa that have these animals.

• 1:10:25Speaker 02

  And the far north could be like the Serengeti is now. So that's, it'll take a while, but I think we'll probably do it.

• 1:10:33Tim Ferriss?

  So to those people who are fearful of some of what they perceive as implications of this, to someone who might say, for instance, we couldn't have predicted when we were eliminating these species, or we didn't predict the downstream effects, how can we be confident in predicting the consequences of reintroducing, say, megafauna like the woolly mammoth? What is the response to that?

• 1:11:08Speaker 02

  Well, that statement, that analysis is usually based on the, and you see this also with the climate.

• 1:11:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:11:16Speaker 02

  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 a number of people who are still alive, because medical interventions were made that we, you know, 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.

• 1:11:58Speaker 02

  So what you do with a complex system you don't completely understand is you tweak it and see what the tweak does. And tweaking is good because it's probably not going to cause a major change. It will cause a small, local change, you can see how it works. And ecology is not a predictive science, but it is a great observational science. And so, like with the human body, you do these experiments, see what happens, and then build on your successes and work around your failures, kind of normal.

• 1:12:32Tim Ferriss?

  And I should say, I'm taking a devil's advocate position. There are also some...

• 1:12:38Tim Ferriss?

  There are observational data sets that you can pull from that don't involve genetic rescue incorporating something like CRISPR, but say the reintroduction of wolves to certain parts of Yellowstone and how that affected, say elk or deer populations, which affected grazing, which affected ultimately the paths of rivers and so on. It means fascinating. There's some really engaging video that discusses that. Now, is the woolly mammoth

• 1:13:15Tim Ferriss?

  a... how much of the interest in the woolly mammoth specifically is about an input that has a very strong output, say ecologically, versus just a fascination with the woolly mammoth?

• 1:13:30Speaker 02

  There's no end to fascination with the woolly mammoth because there's no end to fascination with elephants as there will should be. These are... you know, just anybody who's really spent time with elephants falls in love with elephants. And in Asia, the Asian elephants have been, you know, a partially domesticated animal for a long time. And the fact that it is still endured beside, along with the fact that about 100 people are killed by elephants in Asia every year, suggests that, you know, not only are they

• 1:14:10Speaker 02

  useful, they are loved. In Africa, they don't kill people quite as much, but there's a certain amount of death and destruction that happens with them there. So, you know, let's have an open mind about that there's downsides as well as upsides for having an elephant in your life. But humans and elephants have lived together for a long time, and mostly we know how to do that. And they're safest for themselves and for us when they are in wildernesses that they pretty much own. And the far north, the Arctic and subarctic regions would be swell for that in terms of woolly mammoths.

• 1:14:51Speaker 02

  I think I went so astray from your question, I lost track of what it was.

• 1:14:55Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, that's okay. The, I think the question was how much of it was a strategic decision for the impact the woolly mammoth could have versus a personal interest or passion for the woolly mammoth that is unrelated to its impact if reintroduced?

• 1:15:11Speaker 02

  Well, there's a scale issue here, which is a lifelong conservationist I'm concerned about, which is, um, 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 them.

• 1:15:49Speaker 02

  Basically, they're, they're evolutionarily still around, but ecologically they're extinct. But a workaround was found to make American chestnuts that are now completely blight-proof, and those are being bred up, and because they're a food plant, people eat chestnuts roasting on the open fire. They are going through the government, you know, regulation process, but should be, they're getting back into the wild already. And what they will do is not just introduce one tiny element of biodiversity of the eastern forest, they will introduce, um, food that comes raining down, sweet nuts that everybody

• 1:16:34Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:16:54Speaker 02

  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. And I would like to, everybody who's been on safari in Africa, whether it's South Africa or Kenya or Tanzania, has had the experience of wildlife on the land where, my God, there's

• 1:17:34Speaker 02

  hippos and giraffes and rhinos and lions and elephants and a lot of big animals moving around and dealing with one another. Wilderbees and, you know, 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 woolly mammoths. And it looks like they're relatively straightforward one to bring back, so there you have it.

• 1:18:19Speaker 02

  One big animals, mammoths is a good place to start.

• 1:18:22Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. That's extremely helpful. And I'd love to expand from that to a discussion of, for lack of a better term, environmentalism in general. And this is a quote, feel free to correct it because often quotes are misquotes, but...

• 1:18:47Tim Ferriss?

  His, that's you Stuart, his own big idea is that the best approach to the issues he discusses is pragmatism. He flushes it out by example rather than by discussing its philosophical defense by John Dewey or William James. He reckons it is an engineer's approach, accepting whatever gets results. For environmentalists, he suggests it means not a shift in ideology, but discarding ideology completely. And the part that grabbed my attention here is the "it means not a shift in ideology, but discarding ideology completely." And I was wondering if you could talk a bit about that and what you mean by it.

• 1:19:29Speaker 02

  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,

• 1:20:13Speaker 02

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

• 1:20:52Speaker 02

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

• 1:21:37Speaker 02

  Uh, nuclear was thought to be bad, um, and when climate change came along and it was the shortest cut to being able to really, really reduce, um, emissions to greenhouse gases, it was discounted for reasons left over from an earlier time. Uh, cities, uh, were taken as the problem rather than the solution, but when you look at the demographics, cities are the solution. They're the greenest thing that humans do. And, uh, geoengineering of intervening in the climate directly to buy ourselves more time to cut down our emissions was taken as some kind of profound abomination and,

• 1:22:21Speaker 02

  as Al Gore told me, "Brand, you want to experiment with the whole planet? Don't do it." Um, well, you know, 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, um, I think the environmental movement, to the extent that it can even be called a single thing anymore, is, um, catching up to the real world. And, um, it'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.

• 1:23:07Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it seems to me that looking at the projects you're currently involved with, looking at the projects that you've been involved with, you're very good at enlisting the help and collaboration of other people. And I asked Kevin, Kelly, if there were any particular questions or topics or facets of your life that might be fun to explore. And one of the bullets that came back was, "Very few humans have ever turned down a request by Stuart. How is he so persuasive?" And I'll just, I'll leave it at that.

• 1:23:52Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know how to really dig into that. So I can try, but let me just keep it general. Why does Kevin have that perception of you? And why are you, if that's the case, so effectively persuasive, do you think?

• 1:24:08Speaker 02

  I don't know. I get no's. I don't ask that much. Basically, I invite people to give these seminars about long-term thinking. And it's kind of like being invited to give a TED Talk. It's not that hard to say yes, because you'll get a nice audience for being invited to be on the 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 Banter to give a self-talk, I was surprised

• 1:24:50Speaker 02

  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, you know, felt like he felt good about payback. So, a certain amount goes with that.

• 1:25:12Speaker 02

  Other stuff has to do with just being around and kind of being public for decade after decade. You get kind of known and recognized enough where you don't sort of have to establish your bona fides

• 1:25:29Speaker 02

  over time because that's already been done. I don't think it's more profound than that.

• 1:25:34Tim Ferriss?

  Well, at the same time though, I could say you've been in the public and met many, many, many, many, many people, interacted with a huge group of individuals. When most people have that much interaction over a long period of time, sometimes you make mistakes, maybe people meet you on a bad day. You don't seem to have, and this may be a strong wording, but you don't seem to have any known enemies, if that makes sense. I've never heard someone attack you, and maybe that's just because I haven't come across it.

• 1:26:13Tim Ferriss?

  Why do you think, why do you think that's the case? And even if that isn't the case, why is that the perception?

• 1:26:22Speaker 02

  Well, I'm not powerful or rich. So, you know, the enemies that go with position and power,

• 1:26:30Speaker 02

  there's nothing to resist. And the resentment that goes with it sort of kind of wealth is not there either.

• 1:26:41Speaker 02

  I've certainly had people who've strongly opposed me on certain things, sometimes publicly. Mostly, I think that, you know, my successes have been public and my failures have been private. So, from the outside, it looks like, you know, lots of good things.

• 1:27:04Tim Ferriss?

  Can you?

• 1:27:04Speaker 02

  I don't really know.

• 1:27:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:05Speaker 02

  I've not been associated, I guess, with the things that I later wished that I hadn't been. Or that other people wished that I had not been. And, you know, 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.

• 1:27:35Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any particular failure that you could share which greatly informed your life after you experienced it? Or something that could be something that set you up for later success? Or just a failure that taught you a lot in some way or another?

• 1:27:57Speaker 02

  Um, I failed to finish Ranger training in the Army. And I quit partway through after the sort of early getting into it stuff. Ranger training is much harder now than it was then. Airborne training, jump training is pretty much the same now than it was then. But, um, it was, uh, five weeks, six weeks or something. You know, pretty intense stuff. And about halfway through, after having finished the five mile run part and the, uh, saving myself from drowning in thirty-two degree water with weighed down with ammunition,

• 1:28:34Speaker 02

  uh, bags and all of that, um, one day I just quit. And, um, I think what I told myself was that it was, uh, this was January or February in Fort Benning, which I think was south nice and warm. It was freezing cold and we were out in it. And I was thinking I'm not learning much because it was so cold. So that was a stupid excuse I gave myself to quit. And, um, what I, and it's like all of these intense military training the SEAL do or Delta or any of those guys do. If you say, "I don't want to do this anymore," you are gone in about thirty seconds.

• 1:29:15Speaker 02

  Which is the right thing to do. And so what I learned from that is, um...

• 1:29:22Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:29:35Tim Ferriss?

  Can you think of a, let's see, a project or anything that you were involved with later where you had the impulse to quit and what was behind it and then what you did instead?

• 1:29:53Speaker 02

  I'm making noise because I'm trying to avoid radio silence here while I ponder if there's something I wanted.

• 1:30:04Tim Ferriss?

  I could also, I could also come back to that and buy some time if you like.

• 1:30:07Speaker 02

  Sure, let's buy time because I'm not getting anything immediate.

• 1:30:10Tim Ferriss?

  Alright, so I'm gonna buy time, since we were talking about physical training. To confirm one thing, which is you're, are you currently 78, is that right?

• 1:30:22Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:30:23Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, and you do CrossFit twice a week?

• 1:30:25Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 1:30:26Tim Ferriss?

  Alright, now, I guess two, two questions related to CrossFit. One is, because you seem to thrive on variety and like you mentioned, you get bored of, say, snowboarding because it's up, down, up, down, up, down.

• 1:30:42Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:30:43Tim Ferriss?

  What, what appeals to you about CrossFit number one and then number two, do you have any favorite exercises or workouts?

• 1:30:52Speaker 02

  Oh, good God. Well, the main, in relation to getting bored, the wonderful thing about CrossFit, for me, among other things, is that it's a different set of exercises that you encounter every single time. So I've been going for two, two and a half years now and I do not, you know, look online to see what the workout is gonna be. I show up and I have my jumper open, I'm gonna do whatever's there that day and it's always different. And that plus because...

• 1:31:30Speaker 02

  You're doing it with other people in a competitive mode. There's a social aspect to it and there's gonna be a different group of people in the two days a week I go, some of them are the same, you know, high Nick, high Casey, and some that are different. And competitive aspect, that you're going against time, and keeping score helps keep it interesting. It's a very impressive program, it's a genius program, in terms of getting rid of a lot of the spurious stuff of gyms, so there's no machines, there's no mirrors, there are

• 1:32:14Speaker 02

  rowing machines, but that's it. There's free weight work, and the free weight work is not only straightforward strength, but the coordination to manage free weights, you don't have a machine doing the managing part for you. And I, it made a huge difference for me, when I started it at seventy-five, of, suddenly I was, within a few months, thirty pounds lighter, and I'm at a hundred and fifty-seven pounds now, which is the weight I was when I started the Whole Earth Catalog at the age of thirty.

• 1:32:51Speaker 02

  And, and then, and I used to stand different, as you know, when you work out, and I, one of the things I learned to appreciate in the military was, you know, being able to stand like you mean it. Stand like you mean it, you gotta be fit, and that just makes all the difference. My own sense is that, certainly for males and maybe for anybody, being, having a certain amount of fitness and strength makes you proud, and being proud is the most reliable source of happiness that I know.

• 1:33:39Tim Ferriss?

  So the CrossFit is fascinating to me on many different levels.

• 1:33:46Speaker 02

  Good.

• 1:33:47Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I had my first CrossFit workout in 99 or 2000, I want to say it was around 2000, in Mountain View at a Half Gracie Jiu-Jitsu Academy where a number of the guys were going to Santa Cruz to train with a bunch of the original CrossFit crew. And it's morphed a lot over time, but I remember in that year and maybe the year after, how many people talked about how there was no demand for yet another group exercise program. And it made me think of how Starbucks was turned down by many, many, many, many, many

• 1:34:32Tim Ferriss?

  different investors who said, "Really? Another coffee chain? Nobody needs that." And this leads me to want to ask you about, and I would love for you to describe it a little bit for people who are not familiar with it. You mentioned a name earlier on, which was Doug Engelbart. And you were present for what has been called "The Mother of All Demos." And I'd love for you to describe for people what that was and what the experience and feeling was for you and other people in the room.

• 1:35:14Tim Ferriss?

  Because what I don't know, because I haven't read much about it, is if people realized the implications of what they were witnessing. So if you could kind of take it from here and tell us the story, that would be great.

• 1:35:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, so beginning with Starbucks and CrossFit, there's a difference between a good idea and good execution. Or even a bad idea and good execution. The execution on CrossFit was impeccable and you being there at the start of it is impressive. There's a nice book on it by J.C. Hertz called "Learning to Breathe Fire," which pretty much tells the story of how CrossFit came about.

• 1:36:02Speaker 02

  And the title refers to that, something I saw in the military and learned to appreciate there when I would talk 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 coming from Brooklyn and so on, and we would push them, and they would discover that there was so much more that they could do with their bodies and, under certain circumstances, with their minds than they thought, and then they, you know, they started to grow toward infinity with that realization.

• 1:36:47Speaker 02

  So, CrossFit does that for a lot of people. It's quite intense, and that intensity, as you know, once you realize you can do stuff that you didn't think you could do, then things open up. So, the mother of all demos was 1969, Vault Joint Computer Conference, and this was a demonstration where a group at SRI that I got to be part of as a sort of advisor and

• 1:37:24Speaker 02

  filmer, showed the results of about three or four years of work doing what Doug Engle called "automatic human intellect," and he was using mainframe and mini-computer capabilities to do interactive text, Windows, they developed, he and his leading engineer, Bill English, developed the mouse. And he gave a demo, it was about an hour and a half long, in San Francisco, that is the greatest high-wire act you've ever seen, because...

• 1:38:03Speaker 02

  They had developed, the computer that was running the demo was not in San Francisco. It was thirty miles south in Menlo Park. And Bill English had developed the microwave capability to get the data flowing back and forth between San Francisco and Menlo Park so that a computer-generated demo was happening. Well, that was a very tin cans and string kind of connection. And so getting it to, you know, the edge of capability and then maintaining it for an hour and a half was astonishing in its own right.

• 1:38:44Speaker 02

  So Bill English, or, uh, Bill English was in the room and was in Doug Engelbart's ear. He is on the stage and also on the projected screen and his face is being cut in and out of the visuals that he is working. He's showing how you can create text, change text, make various files, move the files around, connect them to other people. He's showing a, uh, the mouse. He's showing a keyboard. He developed it, so one-handed keyboard. And, um, all of the time that he's going through the, his spiel, which we had rehearsed

• 1:39:26Speaker 02

  once or twice, but was basically him just telling a play out of the work that he and the team had been developing for three or four years. It was hanging over the raggedy edge the whole time. Every now and then, Bill, Bill would whisper into his ear, um, we lost signal from Menlo Park, fake it for a while. And, uh, and Doug would just launch into a, uh, some encomiums for the people that he worked with and, you know, holding forth on that while his computer came back up. Uh, it really was an awesome demo. I was not in the room. I was in Menlo Park filming that parts of the action. Ah, I see.

• 1:40:10Speaker 02

  And, uh, hands on keyboards and what was on the screen, stuff like that. So at the end of it, um... You know, I was just hearing the voice of a person who was in communication with Bill English, who was in communication with Doug on the stage. And then everything kind of wound down and we're looking around and said, "Over, yeah, it's over." "Well, did they like it?" "Oh, just a second, I'll check." And it turns out that in the room, it had been a standing ovation and minds blown and Alan Kay, you know, redirecting his entire career and various people getting completely knocked out and blown away by it all. But down in Menlo Park, it was, uh, Hatcher came back. "Um, yeah, apparently they liked it. Good

• 1:40:54Speaker 02

  night, everybody." So we just, we just all wandered home.

• 1:40:58Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, wow. Just another day in the office. Let's go get some pizza. Thank God it's over.

• 1:41:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically, you know, we'd worked hard and it's done now. Phew.

• 1:41:09Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So I, I want to mention one thing about, uh, just to, just to come back because I feel, uh, I feel a duty just to say one more thing about CrossFit, which is, uh, there are a lot of incredible things, uh, and benefits associated with CrossFit. I think there is a risk that people should be aware of, which is the ideology of our way is the only way. So there is a bit of a, a culture of intolerance around some people

• 1:41:48Tim Ferriss?

  who practice CrossFit. And so I would just caution people to be aware of that so that they don't develop a, a myopic approach to fitness. And, um, I know a lot of people who are involved with CrossFit, but I've also, for instance, after one podcast I did, and the headline of which was "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly" of CrossFit. Had the founder of CrossFit reach out to schedule a phone call and I thought it was going to be, because the podcast was very complimentary, that it would be a conversation about maybe doing something on the podcast or something else. And instead, it was this very threatening call because of the headline, even though they had not listened to the

• 1:42:33Tim Ferriss?

  audio. So I would just caution people about anything that paints a very black and white picture that is us versus them. That would just be my cautionary tale. On the mother of all demos and moving back into tech a little bit, though, I would love to talk about the expression, "Information wants to be free." Can you comment on this phrase that is attributed to you, "Information wants to be free," and also, if it is the entire

• 1:43:15Tim Ferriss?

  quote, because I've read that it is not. So if you could elaborate on that a bit, I would certainly love to hear it.

• 1:43:23Speaker 02

  Well, it keeps coming up from time to time because there is a paradox out there of information, especially on the web, just swarming around. And, you know, 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

• 1:44:05Speaker 02

  application of this particular argument. The statement I made goes back to 1984 when Kevin Kelly and I and Ryan Phelan organized a thing called a hackers conference. It turned out to be the first hackers conference. That particular thing has carried on year to year since then. And, uh, one of the people who came to the hackers conference was Steve Wozniak, along with, uh, a lot of the great hackers at the time, and Leif Helsenstein and, uh, uh, you know, the best reporter of all of that material, John Markoff was there, and,

• 1:44:50Speaker 02

  and, and, and, it was great, there's a good video on it, you can find online. But, in the course of it, uh, there were a lot of kind of public discussions of the issues at the time being talked about, and one of them was, um, freeware, shareware, and then regular commercial, uh, products. And Steve Wozniak was making the point that, um, 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. And Steve Wozniak was saying, quite right, "Look, engineer puts a couple of years' work

• 1:45:34Speaker 02

  into one of these things, uh, he or she, it was mostly he in those days, uh, should get some kind of remuneration, so it needs to be commercial." And I s- I apparently replied, "Um, that's right, information does want to be expensive, but information also wants to be free." And, uh, as it gets easier and easier to copy anything that's digital and distribute it, uh, equally easily, that debate is gonna go on forever, that the information wants to be free, and it wants to be expensive. And, uh, information, everybody knew that information, uh, should be expensive, that

• 1:46:18Speaker 02

  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, a slogan, or a motto, or a something at the time, uh, bumper stickers, shortcut to dealing with a, a large phenomenon that was happening.

• 1:46:44Speaker 02

  But the rest of it really was, and information wants to be expensive. And that relationship is not contradictory, it's paradoxical, in the sense that the more the one, the more the other. And the more information wants to be free, the more it wants to be expensive, because there's that many more values to accrue to, you know, very large audiences, etc. And it's, I think, a debate which is permanent. It's kind of like a debate itself around the term hacker, is a hacker a good guy or a criminal? And the answer is both.

• 1:47:27Speaker 02

  And information does, will continue to be a source of major commercial activity, and a source of huge, free, available stuff. So, you know, my rule on Twitter is when I link to something, I only like to stuff that's not behind paywalls, that you can go look at itself. And probably, once you get there, that source will, you know, show you whatever I like to, and they'll beg you to subscribe and pay for their service, and you might do that.

• 1:48:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I was mystified recently. I'm not going to mention the outlet, because I might actually get it wrong, but it was a mainstream scientific publication that was only, it was promoting articles in its Twitter account, and they were all behind a paywall.

• 1:48:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's kind of crazy.

• 1:48:21Tim Ferriss?

  And it drove me nuts, because I said, "Look..."

• 1:48:23Speaker 02

  It's tricky. I mean, you have publications like New Scientist, which is not really a strict scientific publication, it's a very good publication. But they paywall all their stuff, and as a result, I think they have a much smaller audience than...

• 1:48:40Speaker 02

  Things that look like they'll be, wanna be widely read by the public from Nature or Science magazine, um, often get out from behind the paywall. And that's good for science, it's good for public understanding of science. I think it's ultimately good for the publications, because people realize there's lots more good stuff where that one came from.

• 1:49:02Tim Ferriss?

  Well, no, exactly. I mean, if you're trying to get someone hooked on a drug, whether that is a pharmaceutical or really good information in a curated and edited magazine, you, it's, it behooves you to give them a sample, if it's really good enough to be addictive. So if you have a social account where you're only sharing things behind a paywall, there's no conceivable sort of user behavior that I can think of where they go, click on a headline expecting to read an article, they don't get the article, and then they're asked to pay for it. So...

• 1:49:34Speaker 02

  By and, by and large, not. Every now and then, you know, you're so desperate to see it, you pay the 29.95 or whatever it is to see the thing, but you're, uh, you know, you're angry.

• 1:49:43Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:50:10Speaker 02

  Where did you hear that?

• 1:50:12Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I don't wanna incriminate anybody if it's not true.

• 1:50:15Speaker 02

  Do it, tell me. I'll track them down and, and wonder, uh, what happened.

• 1:50:20Tim Ferriss?

  So, is that, is that not true? Is that not accurate?

• 1:50:24Speaker 02

  It's not accurate.

• 1:50:25Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, alright. Alright, well then we can, we can skip that if it's not accurate. But if you have any organizational rules or principles that help you to keep your life in order or projects in order, uh, maybe that's a graceful lateral move from what I guess is incorrect.

• 1:50:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think whatever systems they use are, are, uh, are half crap, and, uh, I, um...

• 1:50:59Speaker 02

  I have been rewarded for not getting rid of stuff, which is that, uh, the guy who's actually suffering the most now, and by the way, it's John Markoff, because he's the guy who took on trying to write a biography of me, and, um, it's a, 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. Uh, but the poor guy is overloaded with material because, uh, I've led a actually relatively stable and continuous life in the Bay Area, and, um, semi-interesting stuff I just threw into boxes. And there's now, I gather, seventy linear feet at Stanford in their archives,

• 1:51:39Speaker 02

  and they've got probably another hundred-plus feet of my papers, uh, yet-to-come notebooks that I kept every day, not every day, but that I've written in since I was in college and all that stuff. So, um, having enough storage space to throw the interesting stuff, uh, with a remote idea might be eventually interesting to go back to, turned out to, you know, which is, uh, you know, it's a cluttering, not a decluttering move. The decluttering move is to get the hell rid of it. Um, but anyway, it, uh, it gives poor John lots to

• 1:52:18Speaker 02

  work with. And I think a result there is, is that, uh, he'll be able to tell a more accurate and probably less interesting story of me.

• 1:52:28Tim Ferriss?

  (laughing)

• 1:52:31Speaker 02

  Whereas if there was none of that stuff, it would all be hearsay, and hearsay is way more interesting than real things.

• 1:52:36Tim Ferriss?

  (laughing) If, if you were teaching a, uh, let's say, a freshman seminar in college, Stanford, wherever, you could take your pick, Berkeley, doesn't matter, you could teach anything you wanted, you could have a class size of any size, uh, what would you teach and why?

• 1:53:05Speaker 02

  I don't think Western Civ is taught anymore. It would be probably called Global Civ now. But it was a required course freshman year in fifty-six 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 Friedrich 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.

• 1:53:49Speaker 02

  But any person who takes on teaching something like that has, you know, got some wonderful research to do. And you have a concept like Big History now. Big History is basically everything from the Big Bang to this week, put together in one somewhat coherent narrative. And that's, 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.

• 1:54:31Tim Ferriss?

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

• 1:55:14Speaker 02

  Well, Tim, this brings up another issue that I think not so many of your guests get into, which is, at the age of seventy-eight, how many months do I have to prepare anything? My health is great, but, you know, the actuarial tables are pretty clear. And...

• 1:55:33Speaker 02

  I find myself not taking on, uh, long-term commitments as much. There's a book I'd love to do, it'd be called How to Be Rich Well. And, uh, that would take three or four years of serious research and then probably two years of writing.

• 1:55:53Speaker 02

  And that's not actually what I want to do at the age of seventy-eight with who knows how much time. So, um...

• 1:56:04Speaker 02

  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 as you move from project to project in your life, the projects that look like they're... I mean, you start projects all the time. Most of them don't take, but the ones that take, that you find that you continue to be interested in, there's starting to be enough other people interested in that the thing kind of makes circuit with the world, they're starting to come to life. To follow through on it and make it really come to pass and be a thing in the world, it's gonna take about five years, give or take. And, um, at various times in your life, you have a sense of how many five years it's

• 1:56:49Speaker 02

  left you might have. And, uh, once you get into your seventies, that becomes a number of fingers on one hand kind of thing. So, uh, one is not quite as, "Oh yeah, I guess I'll really take on that huge, uh, five-year commitment, uh, that I may not live to finish."

• 1:57:13Speaker 02

  Uh, just given the, you know, the way the statistics fall. So, that's a different answer to your question. But, um, there's, there's very good stuff in that line from Oliver Sacks in his last year when he was writing like mad the whole time that he knew he was dying. And I haven't read it all, but I saw glimpses of it. He would say things like, "There's some subjects I find I'm not interested in anymore 'cause I really can't do anything about them," uh, such as climate change.

• 1:57:45Speaker 02

  And, um, you know, uh, stages of life is, uh, life extension folks are working away, but meanwhile, uh, 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, uh, on his computer that is counting down to the day he dies according to the current actuarial tables. He knows how many hours more he's gonna live and acts accordingly.

• 1:58:18Tim Ferriss?

  How do you choose your pro- how do you choose your commitments now? How do you filter what to say yes to or what to say no to?

• 1:58:27Speaker 02

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

• 1:59:09Speaker 02

  There's a certain amount of work and travel and updating the slides or whatever the hell it may be. And there's other things I wanna put my time on. But, uh, people who don't make that shift, you'll find them get into a kind of a crazy point, maybe you've been there, uh, of trying to move ahead on every opportunity that presents itself. And they're all good, but, uh, in combination, they are absolutely lethal to, uh, try to take them on more than the right number at the same time. So, um, and then, you know, your no unless yes, the criteria, uh, for saying yes changed at the beginning.

• 1:59:54Speaker 02

  They're, you know, pretty relaxed and then they get more and more constrained as time goes by.

• 2:00:00Tim Ferriss?

  So you mentioned a word that I want to grab on to, which is finite. And there is a book that has, in the last two years, it's very, it's very odd. Maybe it's selective attention, kind of like when you buy, say, a new jacket or a new car, and suddenly it seems like everyone is wearing the same jacket or driving the same car. Chances are, it hasn't happened overnight, you just have more attention towards it. But there's a book, there's a book that originally came to my attention through Jane McGonigal, who's brilliant and amazing.

• 2:00:39Tim Ferriss?

  And it's, and this was about two years ago, and it has increasingly been sort of entering my life from different directions, and that is James P. Carstens' Finite and Infinite Games.

• 2:00:53Speaker 02

  Oh, good.

• 2:00:55Tim Ferriss?

  So I, could you please tell people about this book and how it has affected your thinking? Or just the principle, or the distinction between a finite and an infinite game?

• 2:01:15Speaker 02

  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 of games is brilliant." He actually knew John von Neumann, who came up with it.

• 2:01:58Speaker 02

  And he said, "The problem with the theory of games is it doesn't have a theory about how you change the rules of the game."

• 2:02:08Speaker 02

  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 is that when they play games they're changing the rules all the time and so, you know, 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

• 2:02:51Speaker 02

  going along and it gets kind of boring and so somebody says, you know, what if we play 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 rules, only the deal is see how long we can go before the ball hits the ground and it turns from a competitive into a collaborative game. So I set up a new games tournament as a public place where a bunch of strange games would be provided. I provided a six foot high earth ball that people invented various games around, this big push ball that crowds of people can interact with.

• 2:03:35Speaker 02

  We had a, we got a huge ship's hawser and it had tug of war that went across a kind of a canyon where it was about 300 foot ship's hawser and a couple hundred feet of people on each side and it was a Le Mans start so I had a starter pistol and you had to, both sides had to stand off 10 feet away from the rope, fire the pistol, they both run to the rope and start pulling and of course they're pulling across the canyon so the team that's starting to lose are finding themselves dangling over this, that was really just in the royal, but they're dangling in space and then bystanders would feel sorry for them and then join the team that was about to lose and help pull the other direction

• 2:04:18Speaker 02

  and those guys would start to lose and bystanders would help them and go back and forth.

• 2:04:25Speaker 02

  This kind of emergent property of, uh, kind of freely, uh, shaping games, uh, really, really interested me. So, this is, and we had a number of such things. I invented a few games. Some of them were semi-violent. And, um...

• 2:04:44Tim Ferriss?

  What would be an example of a semi-violent game?

• 2:04:48Speaker 02

  Uh, one that was called Slaughter. Uh, I developed this for the War Resistors League, this during the resistance, the Vietnam War. The War Resistors League knew that I was doing public events and they asked me, like the troops festival, they asked me, would I do a public event for them? 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 to have. And I said, "Well, you guys need a war, uh, in the worst way." And, but it can be war in your terms. And so, we, uh, sort of came up with a, a series of, uh, public events that we did at various campuses in the Bay Area that had, among other things, uh, some kind of warlike games.

• 2:05:33Speaker 02

  And what I invented was called Slaughter. It's what I knew from hanging out with American Indians and others is that, um, really physical games that involve both sexes, um, is, is really good for young people, because you get to do a lot of kind of, um, (sigh), God, we're not allowed to say grab ass now, but it, it's physical sweaty interaction that is not, uh, explicitly sexual, but everything is sexual at that age. And so, it's like dancing, only competitively, and, uh, in a little more free form. So, the game I invented for these, uh, War Resistors, who I thought were not in their

• 2:06:18Speaker 02

  bodies sufficiently, or probably getting laid enough, uh, that, uh, this game would, uh, involve very, very physical interaction. And what we did was we get a pretty large wrestling mat, maybe twenty feet by twenty feet, and, uh, it was played on your knees, because one of the things I realized is that people standing up can take, uh, their interactions are too violent, and falling down hurts and so on. And the deal was that, uh, there's two teams, it'd be shirts or non-shirts, or socks or non-socks, or whatever, and they're on their knees, and there's a starter gun, and

• 2:07:00Speaker 02

  they go at each other, and, um, the deal is to, you can kill, uh, the other players by wrestling them off the edge of the mat, and, uh, had to slaughter, and, you know, immediately, people started coming up with all sorts of strategies of teaming up, and of, you know, trying to stay out of the fray and lasting longer, and, you know, various things you can imagine people doing, and the deal is, um, 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've been killed are immediately out there saying, "Ah, you're out, now, tap, tap, you gotta leave," and I threw in some other complications of medicine balls that had to be put in baskets and things like that, so, it had the advantage of being intensely

• 2:07:45Speaker 02

  physical, because people really are having to grab and wrestle each other, and, and move them from, you know, to the edge of the mat, and simultaneously deal with defending a basket and moving their ball into the other team's basket, "Where is it now?" And, uh, there was overwhelm, uh, 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, um, so that was slaughter.

• 2:08:13Tim Ferriss?

  And what was the, did you observe any particular effects on the group from playing this game, aside from...

• 2:08:21Speaker 02

  They loved it.

• 2:08:22Tim Ferriss?

  They loved...

• 2:08:23Speaker 02

  They, they fucking loved it, I mean, of course, these war resistors were dying to have, uh, physical combat, and, uh, and in a way that clearly was, you know, not killing anybody, is not even hurting anybody, we had T-shirts that said, "Play hard, play fair, nobody hurt," and, um, in, in a way, that, that was, uh, the better thing than war, is kind of a competitive situation, where you play hard, play far, play hard, play fair, nobody hurt, so, um, it worked out well, and all of this is leading up to

• 2:09:01Speaker 02

  why a book called Finite and Infinite Games, um, is, I think, of fundamental interest, is...

• 2:09:16Speaker 02

  Gamification, seeing things in game terms, designing things in game terms, is one of the profound things that civilization has done for a very long time. And it's a way of organizing physical and mental behavior, often in combination, that is just wonderful. And along with the James P. Carr's book, the other book is Homo Ludens by Heusenga. And Homo Ludens basically says, man the player, games is what we do.

• 2:09:58Speaker 02

  Well, here Carr takes apart the games that are win-lose, like elections, to the games that are, they go on forever, which is democracy. And you need them both. And within any election, everybody's got to go by the rules that they've agreed to. But within democracy, you're always looking for, okay, we've got a problem with the rules, or we're bored with the rules, what's an improvement that we can make? And the infinite game is the infinite improvement of the games we play.

• 2:10:42Speaker 02

  And that's civilization's story. Right now, in democracy, we're thinking about, should we change the rule about Electoral College versus popular vote? And we're talking about changing the rules of how to prevent cherry-mandering from being such a disturber 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.

• 2:11:19Tim Ferriss?

  And as Carst might say, playing with the rules, not just within the rules.

• 2:11:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:11:29Tim Ferriss?

  And the...

• 2:11:30Speaker 02

  But you've got to do both.

• 2:11:32Tim Ferriss?

  No, right. You can't just have...

• 2:11:34Speaker 02

  Because one of the points he makes is, you know, 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. You know, they play a game, sort of not so interesting, somebody says, "Well, let's do it." So-and-so, "No, no, that's not..." And then there's an argument. And the argument, "Ah, 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. That combination is part of the story.

• 2:12:07Tim Ferriss?

  Is the contrast that you've, I believe you've made before, between goals and pathways related to all of this? Or is it maybe a separate topic that I'd still nonetheless love to hear you expand on a bit? In this... Yeah. Whether it's related to any of your projects, right? The Whole Earth Catalog or anything else. I've read that, you know, goals are not that interesting to you, but pathways are. And I would be, as someone who has traditionally been very goal-focused,

• 2:12:49Tim Ferriss?

  but has in recent years changed my thinking about how I select projects to be maybe less explicitly singularly goal-focused, I would love to hear your distinction between the two, goals and pathways.

• 2:13:10Speaker 02

  Uh, this comes down to a lot of the, um, you know, career, uh, theories that one hears out there. Um, follow your passion, uh, figure out what you want to do in life, major in it, get a graduate degree in it and then go do it. Um, that, I think, really works for people who have a clear idea that they want to be at X. But I've 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 early. I wanted to be a firefighter. Um, I fought a forest fire briefly in Michigan

• 2:13:55Speaker 02

  when I was young, and, uh, I was gonna go to, uh, 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, uh, 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, you know, he saved me from, um, probably a pretty limited fate of, of going to University of Idaho versus Stanford in that case, which I had

• 2:14:32Speaker 02

  the option of both. Um, it's, I got to prep school and then to college and realized that nearly everybody there was smarter and more capable than me. And, um, a lot of them knew exactly what they were planning to do. They were gonna be lawyers and biologists and physicists and whatnot. And I adopted my older brother who had gone to Stanford, Mike, uh, had gone there eight years before me, and, um, he knew some of the best teachers there, because he stumbled into them or heard about them. And he said, the way to get

• 2:15:15Speaker 02

  the best out of college is to find out who the really good teachers are, and then get a major that limits you the minimum, and then go to all the good teachers. So, I did that. And one of the things that got for me was a sort of a wider range of, uh, many expertises than I would've gotten otherwise. And then-

• 2:15:37Speaker 02

  And then when I got out of Stanford, I started taking courses at San Francisco Art Institute and San Francisco State College in various skills that I wanted to get in design and in photography, among other things. And so by the time I was twenty-two, I probably had eight different ways I could have made a living with skills that I had acquired from being a logger, choker setter, to being an infantry officer, to being a field biologist, to being a commercial photographer and various other things. Most of those things I did not do.

• 2:16:20Speaker 02

  In fact, the things that I had trained to do, the only one that really played out was, you know, six or eight years later, when I started the Whole Earth Catalog, I had taken some courses in writing and in magazine design, actually, way the hell back at Stanford. And so when I wanted to start what was a magazine, Whole Earth Catalog, I ignored the advice I'd been told, which it takes a million dollars to start a magazine, and I started with ten or twenty thousand dollars. But I had the skills. So, you know, the general rule there is just keep on acquiring skills and the way they

• 2:17:05Speaker 02

  add up lets you do things that turn up that you discover you really wanted to do, that you did not know that before, but now you can do it.

• 2:17:13Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm. That's, that is, when I mentioned that I had changed how I was approaching choosing projects, it's actually very...

• 2:17:29Tim Ferriss?

  Similar in the sense that Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, refers to, I suppose in place of pathways, he would talk about systems thinking, which is in some ways a little confusing, but effectively choosing projects based on the skills and relationships that you develop, so that even if said project fails, over time, you are accumulating skills and relationships, so that when, like you said, an opportunity presents itself that you couldn't possibly have foreseen and pegged as an objective or a goal, say, three years before, you are ripe to take advantage of.

• 2:18:13Tim Ferriss?

  So I, I, I'm sorry, go ahead.

• 2:18:17Speaker 02

  That's it, I'm agreeing with you.

• 2:18:19Tim Ferriss?

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

• 2:18:49Tim Ferriss?

  This is uncommon in a lot of worlds.

• 2:18:55Speaker 02

  I wish it were common, especially in politics.

• 2:18:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so how, how did you, how did you develop this, or what is the self-talk that allows you to do that so readily?

• 2:19:12Speaker 02

  I was trained as a scientist, as a biologist at Stanford, that was a relatively low requirement major when I was there, is one of the reasons I took it, but I also knew I was interested in biology quite seriously. And the thing about training as a, as a scientist is,

• 2:19:34Speaker 02

  Science is the only news. It is gonna 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 were wrong about that." And the people who were strong proponents of that have been exposed to the results of the people who thought they were probably wrong and it turns out they were wrong. And whether or not they've admitted it, everybody else knows it and so let's move on. And so that moving on as a result of, results as a result of trying stuff, experiments

• 2:20:15Speaker 02

  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 spread the word that, you know, they're pleased now. I realize lots of times somebody's gonna go from one crazy belief to another.

• 2:20:56Speaker 02

  And in the sixties and seventies, 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?" (laughing) And so, you know, there's various levels of being wrong and acknowledging it and deciding what to do about that. In some cases, you know, doubling down is the right thing to do because you really

• 2:21:37Speaker 02

  think there is something there even though at the first round, it doesn't look like it's for sure there. So you double down a few times and...

• 2:21:49Speaker 02

  And maybe if you get punished enough for that, you'll decide that doubling down is no longer the right thing to do for you. Um, but I think with politicians, I would love every politician to have pretty good answers to the question of, uh, sir or ma'am, uh, in the course of your public service, and thank you for doing that, what are some things that you noticed you were wrong about and had to change your mind about? And, uh, tell us about that. And if they say, as I've always said, I'm never wrong, uh, you know not to waste your time with them.

• 2:22:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Scott, such an important question. How, what is, given the game, now, so we're talking about the finite and infinite games, and I don't want to take us too far into political land, because it would be a full night.

• 2:22:39Speaker 02

  It becomes instantly dated, instantly dated right now. Whatever we say politically, uh, is going to be out of date tomorrow.

• 2:22:45Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So, I, I want to focus more on the, the game, the game that politicians have chose to play.

• 2:22:52Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 2:22:53Tim Ferriss?

  What is, now, i- is it possible to be an effective politician while still answering that question honestly? I guess there are probably examples of people who have answered that honestly, but then there are people who answer it honestly and get labeled a flip-flopper, or whatever you might call it, and that's used as ammo against them in, say, elections of various types. Uh, so, so is...

• 2:23:23Speaker 02

  Well, I think a shining example of, of mind-changing that we have in California is Governor Jerry Brown. And I was on his personal staff in his first term, back when he was the youngest governor, and I've kept a little bit in touch with him now that he's our oldest governor. Um, and I remember, so I would be part of the entourage, and we'd go to some public event, like Space Day or something like that, which I helped initiate and organize. And, uh, you know, there, outside the event, would be the usual protestors about one thing or another. And, uh...

• 2:24:01Speaker 02

  I would find myself, you know, trying to get Jerry in and we're almost late, come on, let's keep moving and then he would see the protesters and then he would veer off and go over and, uh, talk to them. And we're rolling our eyes, but here's how he would talk to protesters. He'd, uh, he'd go over to whoever it looked like was being a spokesman, maybe they had the loud hailer or something and say, uh, "Uh, glad you're here, what's on your mind?" And they would start to say their trip. And he would listen for a bit and 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.

• 2:24:41Speaker 02

  And you would see them just melt, um, because the thing they wanted to have happen was for him to be aware of their position and to understand it, and he just showed that he'd done that. And then they had the further hope that since it was known that Jerry occasionally changed his mind and his policy on things, that not only had he heard their position, he might even adopt it at some point. And so he could always engage and diffuse opposition with the fact that he could be persuaded out of a position that he had publicly taken. This made him of a, you know, he was not a good speaker, he was not a charismatic character

• 2:25:25Speaker 02

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

• 2:26:10Speaker 02

  So he just went against it and won big. Now, for somebody who's thinking of going into politics, uh, which I would encourage anybody to do, Jerry Brown is one good example. The other-

• 2:26:25Speaker 02

  To me, most wonderful example is Theodore Roosevelt. And there's a three-volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt, by an author whose name is escaping me, that is totally inspiring. This is an individual with modest gifts, who basically set out on your kind of self-improvement project early on. He was kind of a weak kid. He was born to do money and got himself out of the strictures of that, you know, became a rancher out west and all the rest of it.

• 2:27:07Speaker 02

  And kept reinventing himself and helped reinvent America in profound ways that make he wanted to take on his kind of self-project and also take on public service in the way that he did. So, you know, one of the campaigns these days is to get more scientists and engineers going into not just appointed politics, but elective politics. And I'm all for it. I think it's what needs to happen.

• 2:27:37Tim Ferriss?

  Is the three-book series by Edmund Morris?

• 2:27:42Speaker 02

  That's the one. It's beautifully written, beautifully researched, and an astounding subject.

• 2:27:48Tim Ferriss?

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

• 2:28:37Speaker 02

  Wow, what a very good question, and I wish to hell I had an immediate answer to it.

• 2:28:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:45Speaker 02

  Probably, you know, some of the biographies of good scientists, Edward O. Wilson wrote a rather wonderful memoir called Naturalist about his becoming one of the great biologists of his time, and this is a guy who revolutionized the field of biology five or six times personally.

• 2:29:07Tim Ferriss?

  What was the name again?

• 2:29:08Speaker 02

  It's called Naturalist by Edward O. Wilson.

• 2:29:13Tim Ferriss?

  Edward O. Wilson, got it.

• 2:29:15Speaker 02

  Yep, and who was one of my inspirations as a biologist, and then I later got to know him when we worked together on a couple of projects, and it was just, you know, awesome to do that. And this is a guy who's won the Pulitzer Prize twice, so you're in the hands of a very good writer. Writings by Freeman Dyson are excellent on 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

• 2:29:53Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:30:06Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I was gonna bring it up.

• 2:30:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, those work very well, because...

• 2:30:10Tim Ferriss?

  Such a great book.

• 2:30:11Speaker 02

  This was one of the great science teachers, as well as one of the great scientists, and sort of watching him think is just good across the board.

• 2:30:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there's a fantastic documentary, I want to say it was Nova, so it's an old television program, it's hard to find, but it's called The Joy of Finding Things Out, in which Feynman talks about, in many ways, how his father taught him how to think and how to question authority, and it's just fantastic if people can track that down also. But Surely You Must Be Joking, or Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman is such a wonderful read.

• 2:30:52Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm, yep. So, ones like that...

• 2:30:58Speaker 02

  And it's a good question to keep going. I think, you know, ask it of any people with a science background you get on your series here.

• 2:31:07Tim Ferriss?

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

• 2:31:53Speaker 02

  Um, I think there's still plenty of time is not a thing which comes completely to mind at age forty. There's the, you know, I think you may think it's, you know, sort of, 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. Um, but, uh, there's plenty of time, and

• 2:32:37Speaker 02

  to some extent, time compresses as your age increases. I remember when my mother was in her eighties, I said, "What's time like for you?" And she said, "Years like fence posts, just whipping, whipping by." And, uh, I certainly feel that at seventy-eight. I feel like I'm spending all my time clipping my fingernails, and going to get another goddamn haircut.

• 2:33:01Speaker 02

  And yet, the thing which expands as time goes by, which is, um, you don't have to re-derived a lot of stuff, uh, from first principles. You've already got a number of things squared away. You've got a number of friends you can count on. You've got a number of skills that you can deploy, uh, and so when you do take on something new, uh, it's not like when you were 22, where you have to sort of create the whole world to do it in. You've got a lot of skills. And so, i- in a way, time is compressed for

• 2:33:40Speaker 02

  you in terms of your abilities. And, uh, that'll continue as long as your brain functions. Um, and then, then that dials down, and then you're presumably got to deal with how you're going to deal with, uh, your sensations are still pretty intense and, uh, get value from them.

• 2:34:03Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have any last recommendations, uh, thoughts or questions that you'd like to leave with the people listening to this?

• 2:34:15Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 2:34:15Tim Ferriss?

  Or any, or any request or ask of the people listening to this?

• 2:34:22Speaker 02

  I keep running into

• 2:34:27Speaker 02

  versions of something we've came across a couple of times in this discussion, which is, uh, people worrying about unintended consequences of, uh, often of new technologies or of, uh, you know, some new regime or practice, whatever the hell it may be. And, um,

• 2:34:50Speaker 02

  and then often it'll be in the mode of, uh, don't even explore that area because unintended consequences will occur.

• 2:35:01Speaker 02

  And I think the mode should be, well, of course unintended consequences will occur. And maybe it's even worth, and this is in your version of defining your fears. Think about what the consequences that you're worried about are. And meanwhile, watch while the thing goes ahead and tries, or go ahead and try it yourself. And watch for those things that you're worried about. And also watch for surprises. Lots of unintended consequences are surprising. And then you watch for ones that are surprisingly good, as well as ones that are surprisingly bad. As I can tell, in most cases, you've got a kind of an even split.

• 2:35:43Speaker 02

  With the expectation that the ones that are surprisingly good, you can not only stop worrying about the things you're worried about and associated with that, you can build on them. And also the ones that are surprisingly bad, that may indicate, well, okay, that whole pathway is not so good after all, shut it down. Or other workarounds. And basically, it's trying to flip from being fearful about unintended consequences to being welcoming about situations that might have unintended consequences.

• 2:36:22Tim Ferriss?

  I love that. And it makes me think of, on top of that, recognizing that with everything you do in almost every moment, there are unintended consequences.

• 2:36:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, weird shit happens.

• 2:36:39Tim Ferriss?

  At all times. And that it draws for me a parallel with, and I may be misattributing this, but I believe at one point I read about Andy Grove, and in his management approach...

• 2:36:57Tim Ferriss?

  Would recognize that whenever you created an incentive, you would simultaneously create a perverse incentive or an incentive to do things that were undesirable, right? So perhaps you're, I'm making this up, but you have, you create a commission structure for people to, who bring in a certain dollar amount of advertising revenue. But in the, and you could ask yourself in advance, what would the, what might the sort of perverse incentive there be? And it would be to get someone to spend a lot of money upfront, which could lead to advertiser disappointment because it's front-loaded and then a high churn rate. And so how can you, when you have a metric for what you desire, how could you, what metric could you look for or create to track what you don't desire?

• 2:37:42Tim Ferriss?

  And it could be, say, a high churn rate, right? So if you're thinking of, assumption number one, there are always going to be unintended consequences to any material action. So how can you, how can you measure them? How can you track them?

• 2:37:59Tim Ferriss?

  I think it's so important. We just mentioned, well Stuart, it is such a joy and such an honor to have a chance to spend more time with you on the phone like this and in conversation. It's, it's so much fun for me. And is there any particular place that people can check out, that you'd like them to check out online or places where they could say hello to you on social media?

• 2:38:25Speaker 02

  Okay, I'm on Twitter, Stuart Brand. And the Long Now Foundation is a website, longnow.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, but we do. At Fort Mason, that people are welcome at, and all sorts of things are there.

• 2:38:49Tim Ferriss?

  That's the interval?

• 2:38:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the interval. And that was, I think, the interval.org. And then revive restore.org is the place where the genetic rescue projects I'm talking about are going on. We started that within Long Now as a project, and now it's gone independent as its own 501(c)(3) charging ahead with saving various species and various ecosystems genetically.

• 2:39:20Tim Ferriss?

  Well Stuart Brand, thank you so much. I really appreciate all the time. I've learned a lot, I've taken many, many notes, as I hope other people have. So, I just want to express my gratitude for you taking the time.

• 2:39:37Speaker 02

  Well, you make it fun for your interviewees, so keep up the good work.

• 2:39:42Tim Ferriss?

  Alright, and to everybody listening, as always, and this is gonna be one hell of a set of show notes, you can find links to everything that we've talked about in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast for this episode and every other episode. And, until next time, and as always, thank you for listening.

• 2:40:08Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again, just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered, it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance.

• 2:40:50Tim Ferriss?

  And it's very short, it's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out, just go to fourhourworkweek.com, that's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.