Pod Insights TED Radio Hour Prophets of Technology: The OG influencers About this episode As AI infiltrates every aspect of our lives, who are some of the people behind this huge inflection point? In this special three-part series, you'll hear from the people predicting and shaping our tech future. Host Manoush Zomorodi reports on the latest and revisits her favorite conversations with the minds crafting the digital world we live in today: what they've gotten right — and wrong — and where they think we're headed next. Part 1 features futurist Ray Kurzweil and counterculture icon Stewart Brand.
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Transcript 7,774 words · 12 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Manoush Zomorodi? This episode's sponsor is HubSpot, which offers the following message: What if instead of updating your CRM, your CRM updated you? HubSpot's self-updating CRM keeps your customer context current so you can win more deals. Learn more at hubspot.com. This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.
0:37 Speaker 01 You just don't know what you're gonna find.
0:39 Manoush Zomorodi? Challenge you.
0:40 Speaker 01 We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?
0:42 Manoush Zomorodi? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading from TED and NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. And behind every new device or innovation that seems to pop up out of nowhere.
1:04 Speaker 02 At the time, people really thought we were crazy.
1:07 Manoush Zomorodi? Are decades of research, countless hours of computation, and vigorous debates.
1:14 Speaker 02 But if we got the technology right and it was.
1:16 Manoush Zomorodi? Over how an invention may completely change what it means to be human. There is no such thing as just a tool. For better or worse. And it's making and shaping and changing us. And now, as AI is becoming part of every aspect of our lives.
1:35 Speaker 03 It just paves the way for future applications of.
1:39 Manoush Zomorodi? Who are some of the people behind this huge inflection point?
1:42 Speaker 04 That's the world that we're moving into.
1:44 Manoush Zomorodi? What makes their brains tick? And there is a kind of a hunger and foolishness to it. And what keeps them up at night? And that's the part that I fear that what it means to be human, what it means to flourish as a human may suddenly not be our own. Today, the first in our three-part series with the prophets of technology, the inventors and scientists who predicted the digital world we live in today and who have been part of crafting it, what they've gotten right and wrong and where they think we're headed next.
2:16 Speaker 05 People talk about human intelligence and then computer intelligence as if they're two different things. But we're actually going to merge.
2:25 Manoush Zomorodi? We're kicking off part one with the futurist Ray Kurzweil.
2:30 Speaker 05 I'm an inventor foremost. Got into futurism really as a thing that enables me to create inventions.
2:37 Manoush Zomorodi? Today, at 77, Ray is best known for his prediction that technology will eventually be able to extend our lives indefinitely. Yes, avoid dying. That idea is built on a lifetime of invention. He has spent over six decades developing groundbreaking tools that paved the way for the technology we use today. He was one of the first people to forecast how AI would turbocharge human potential. To understand his theories about the accelerating pace of technological change and what it might accomplish, we need to rewind to the early 1960s,
3:18 Manoush Zomorodi? when Ray was a teenager just trying to get access to a computer.
3:23 Speaker 05 Well, at age 12 or 13, I was programming computers. People were not familiar with computers. They had not heard of them. But I was programming an IBM 1620. There was only one of 12 computers in all of New York City. It was in Spanish Harlem. I had the midnight to 8:00 AM shift. So you had to wander around Spanish Harlem, which was not the best thing to do as a young person in the middle of the night.
3:50 Manoush Zomorodi? At age 14, Ray heard about something called artificial intelligence that was being developed by an MIT computer scientist named Marvin Minsky.
4:00 Speaker 05 So I went to actually go meet Marvin Minsky. I wrote him a letter. He said, "Come on by. Why don't you come to MIT?" Which I then did, and I thought he might spend half an hour with me. He spent all day with me up in Boston and started a 50-year relationship of him being my mentor. So that was really the beginning of my involvement with computers and artificial intelligence. So this was about 63 years ago.
4:25 Manoush Zomorodi? Ray went on to study at MIT, where he also started his first company, using a computer to help high school students evaluate colleges and find a good match.
4:35 Speaker 05 Yeah, that was actually an example of artificial intelligence at that time. And this was quite early. And it worked quite well. Didn't tell you where to go. It gave you like 12 or 14 different schools that you should look into. But it actually was quite accurate.
4:49 Manoush Zomorodi? A decade later, in 1976, he built a device called the Reading Machine, which helped blind people read by scanning text and turning it into speech.
5:00 Speaker 06 In 1974, computer programs that could recognize printed letters.
5:05 Speaker 05 And that was the first example of OCR, Omni-汉字 character recognition, a flatbed scanner, which didn't exist at the time. And we also created text-to-speech synthesis.
5:17 Speaker 06 A program that could recognize any style of print.
5:20 Speaker 05 You'd put a book on it and it would read it out loud. People didn't expect that at that time. Actually, I remember the date, January 13, 1976. This is the CBS Evening News. Because multi-kronkite, at the end of each program, you'd say, yeah, that's the way it was. That's the way it is. He would say the date. And for the very first time, he actually didn't read it himself. He had the Reading Machine read it. Today Show then asked me to come on, demonstrate the program.
5:50 Manoush Zomorodi? Musician Stevie Wonder happened to tune in and decided he wanted the device.
5:55 Speaker 05 He showed up, came by taxi. He wanted to pay us for the machine. We didn't accept payment, and he went away with the Reading Machine. And that began really what is now a 50-year relationship with him.
6:11 Manoush Zomorodi? Together, Stevie Wonder and Ray started another company, Kurzweil Music.
6:16 Speaker 07 Okay, here I am with my new synthesizer. And this is great.
6:22 Speaker 05 In 1984, we had the Kurzweil 250, which could actually play any type of instruments, piano, for example, which is the most difficult one to recreate.
6:34 Speaker 05 It was really the first synthesizer that sounded like a real piano or a real orchestral instrument.
6:43 Manoush Zomorodi? There's a video that I watched where you and a musician are demonstrating it. And to someone who has never heard this, it was like mind blowing. Do you remember that?
6:56 Speaker 05 Yeah, I remember that. And people still have that kind of reaction. Although synthesizers now sound like pianos, but at the time they didn't. And this was quite a revelation at that time.
7:11 Manoush Zomorodi? Ray's inventions track the rise of modern computing. They're also the basis of some of his most provocative theories. So all of these inventions that we've sort of run through, and there's many, many more, but they all led you to an idea that you call Ray's Law of Accelerating Returns. You have said this chart, which tracks how many calculations a computer can do per dollar, is your most important chart. Can you explain?
7:43 Speaker 05 Yeah, how to describe this chart? It shows all of the computers we've had. The very first computer that we created was in 1939. It was done by a German, Zusa. And it could produce 0.000007 calculations per second per constant dollar. And there's basically a straight line from 1939 to the present. It starts with electromechanical relays, then goes to vacuum tubes, then goes to transistors, then goes to integrated circuits, then goes to integrated circuits devoted to AI. And in 2024, we have the Nvidia B200 chip.
8:25 Speaker 05 Does half a trillion calculations per second per dollar. Does a 75 quadrillion fold increase. Quadrillion means thousand trillion fold increase in 86 years. But what's really quite remarkable is the increment each year is about the same. It multiplies, basically doubles the amount of computation you could do in each year. That's why we're seeing AI being so capable today. And that's the basis on which I made these predictions.
8:56 Manoush Zomorodi? I think many people have heard of Moore's law. This is the idea that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles about every two years, which leads to more processing power.
9:06 Speaker 05 Right. But that's only, that only deals with integrated circuits.
9:10 Manoush Zomorodi? Right. So your, your law applies to everything.
9:14 Speaker 05 Yeah, right.
9:17 Manoush Zomorodi? So you gave a TED Talk in 2005 where you first sort of shared your law of accelerating returns. And you basically said, yes, technology builds upon itself. Faster technology begets faster technology and so on, leaning to all kinds of acceleration in areas like DNA sequencing and storing data and more powerful processing.
9:44 Speaker 08 And a lot of people, when they think about the future, think about it linearly. They think they're going to continue to develop a problem or address a problem using today's tools at today's pace of progress and fail to take into consideration this exponential growth. The genome project was a controversial project in 1990. We had our best PhD students, our most advanced equipment around the world. We got one ten thousandths of the project done. So how are we going to get this done in 15 years? And 10 years into the project, the skeptics were still going strong, says you're two-thirds of this project and you've managed to only sequence a very tiny percentage of the whole genome. But it's the nature of exponential growth that once it reaches the knee of the curve,
10:29 Speaker 08 it explodes. Most of the project was done in the last few years of the project. It took us 15 years to sequence HIV. We sequenced SARS in 31 days. We are gaining the potential to overcome these problems.
10:44 Speaker 08 The actual paradigm shift rate, the rate of adopting new ideas, is doubling every decade, according to our models.
10:50 Manoush Zomorodi? So here we are, it's 20 years later, exactly. Is there anything that you said back then that you sort of tweaked? Or has the graph just gone on to prove your point exactly?
11:01 Speaker 05 Well, the graph has accelerated exponentially, and that has not stopped. I guess one thing where I was perhaps incorrect is the amount of capability that would be required to initiate a change. For example, self-driving cars.
11:19 Manoush Zomorodi? So you said that we'd have self-driving cars by 2009. What did you get wrong?
11:24 Speaker 05 So we expected to be much more capable in order to put it into being. It doesn't have to just be better than humans. It has to be a lot better for us to rely on it. So that wasn't really clear to me.
11:38 Manoush Zomorodi? So the social norms have to change in addition to the technological capability in order for your predictions to come true?
11:47 Speaker 05 Yeah. I mean, we basically accept humans having problems and causing accidents and deaths and so on, and we don't expect that of computers. We expect them to be almost perfect.
11:59 Manoush Zomorodi? In 1999, you predicted that by 2009, we would have portable computers and facial recognition software. That was correct. You also thought we would be using virtual reality all the time, everywhere. But that one is not correct. Do you think that's because of the tech or because people just don't want it?
12:24 Speaker 05 I don't think I predicted that we'd use it all the time, but I went through all the predictions I made in 1999 about 2009, about 147 different predictions. Figured we would need several trillion-fold computations per second to emulate the human mind. And I predicted that that would actually happen in the late 2020s, which is what's happening now.
12:54 Manoush Zomorodi? In a minute, more with futurist Ray Kurzweil. How AI is getting closer to surpassing the human mind, and why Ray thinks AI is vastly going to extend his lifespan.
13:06 Speaker 05 Well, my goal is not to die at all.
13:10 Manoush Zomorodi? You're listening to the TED Radio Hour's special series with the prophets of technology. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and we'll be right back.
13:30 Speaker 03 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Schwab. At Schwab, you can get everything from self-directed investing to full-service wealth management, all in one place. No matter your investing goal, life stage, amount to invest, or know-how, you can invest your way with Schwab.
13:51 Speaker 09 This message comes from Rula. The holidays come with an expectation that you're supposed to feel happy. But what if it's not true for you? Rula makes accessing quality mental health care affordable and easy, with sessions costing an average of $15 with insurance. If you've been telling yourself you'll deal with it after the holidays, you don't have to wait. Head to rula.com, that's R-U-L-A dot com, and take the first step.
14:17 Manoush Zomorodi? This message comes from REI Co-op. At REI, they don't just sell outdoor gifts. They use them, test them, trust them. REI knows what to give this season, from joy rides, campfire cheers, or peak views. REI knows what to give the people you love who love to get out there, because they're out there, too. Just stop in and ask a green vest. For the best gifts out there, shop in-store or at REI dot com.
14:47 Manoush Zomorodi? It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and this is part one of our special series, The Profits of Technology. We're talking to the inventors and scientists who predicted and shaped the digital world we live in today, and asking them where they think we're headed next. So now, more with inventor and futurists Ray Kurzweil. In 1999, Ray predicted that artificial general intelligence, that human levels of intelligence in machines, would arrive by the year 2029, a forecast that is starting to seem less and less crazy.
15:27 Manoush Zomorodi? A warning: this next part of our conversation includes a discussion about assisted suicide. Let's go to artificial general intelligence, then. You know, Ray, I have to say, before ChatGPT came out, I would have been like, "Ha ha, funny, that's never going to happen." But even just playing around with various AI on my laptop at home, I am shocked at how insightful they can be. So are you actually early with your AGI prediction? It's 2025 while we're talking.
16:00 Speaker 05 No, I'm still saying 2029. But AGI is really quite remarkable. And it's not just human level, it's really an ability to be at basically the best of somebody that's got a PhD in that field. And being able to do that in every field together, and blending all these skills together. And we're not quite there yet, but it is quite promising. For example, a person I know was asked to compare two books. Took her four days to read the two books and write something and then review it. And then she decided, okay, she's going to ask one of the major, large language models to do the same thing.
16:42 Speaker 05 It took forty seconds and she felt it was better than what she had written. And this is today.
16:48 Manoush Zomorodi? So what needs to be solved then in the next few years for your prediction to be correct?
16:53 Speaker 05 It can't do everything that people who have a PhD in that subject can do. Certain types of math skills and other things it needs to be more perfect at, but it's getting there. Twenty twenty-nine is actually considered somewhat conservative today. People are thinking this is gonna happen like by twenty twenty-seven, but I'm sticking with twenty twenty-nine.
17:17 Manoush Zomorodi? So this brings us to the word you are really famous for, the singularity. So artificial general intelligence is a machine with human-like abilities, but you've also famously predicted, this is a couple decades ago, that we will get to a point when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence. And the speed of technology gets so fast that humans won't be able to understand it or even control it. Did I explain that correctly?
17:48 Speaker 05 Well, there's one way in which my prediction is somewhat different than other people. People talk about human intelligence and then computer intelligence as if they're two different things. I'm holding in my hand my phone, and people consider that somewhat different than yourself. And if I actually get something, information from my phone, that's a bit different than getting it from my own mind. But we're actually going to merge. I could try to think of a name of an actress, and it just appears in my mind, and I'm not sure where it came from, but it's there. We're going to be able to think of things, and we're not going to be true whether it came from our biological intelligence or computational intelligence.
18:32 Speaker 05 It's all gonna be the same thing, and that's what's gonna happen in the twenty thirty's.
18:38 Speaker 05 In physics, a singularity is something where the gravity is so great that you can't actually tell what's going on inside it, like a black hole. This is, we're talking about intelligence, but it's going to be so fantastic change in our ability to deal with the world that we're also calling it a singularity, because we can't really tell what's going to happen. When we get to the 2030s, nanobots will connect our brains to the cloud, just the way your phone does. It'll expand intelligence a million-fold by 2045. That is the singularity.
19:19 Speaker 05 We will be funnier, sexier, smarter, more creative, free from biological limitations. We'll be able to choose our appearance. We'll be able to do things we can't do today, like visualize objects in eleven dimensions. We can speak all languages. We'll be able to expand consciousness in ways we can barely imagine.
19:46 Manoush Zomorodi? Part of me is extremely intrigued by this. I love the idea of my brain being enhanced, so I can dial up my focus or be able to do extraordinary calculations just in my head.
20:01 Speaker 05 Right, and you can do that today somewhat. I mean, you actually get ideas from your phone. You actually forget whether you got it from your phone or your own mind.
20:09 Manoush Zomorodi? True, but I can trace it back to the source, whereas this makes me nervous, not knowing who's actually presenting me with these ideas in my head.
20:18 Speaker 05 Right, but everybody, like I go to presentations, everybody has a cellphone, and they're all getting information from their cellphone. And it's really, it's not separate, and it's getting more intelligent all the time. And people are already using virtual reality, they're getting information that's coming from their eyes. It's not really clear whether it's coming from their eyes or from their brain. It's merging, and it's going to merge even more in the future.
20:48 Manoush Zomorodi? Yeah, which brings me to your latest TED Talk. So... On the TED stage in 2024, you introduced a new concept, one that you think will help people live potentially forever. Let's talk through this concept. You call it longevity escape velocity.
21:07 Speaker 05 And by the end of this decade, if we go into the 2030s, we're going to achieve a new milestone. It's called longevity escape velocity. Right now, you go through a year and you use up a year of your longevity. However, scientific progress is also progressing, which is actually bringing us back. It's giving us cures for diseases and new forms of treatments. So right now, you're getting back about four months. So you lose a year, you get back four months, or you're losing eight months. However, the scientific progress is on an exponential. It's going to get faster and faster. And as we get to the early 2030s, let's say between 2029 and 2035,
21:51 Speaker 05 depending on how diligent you are, you're going to get back a full year. So you lose a year, you get back a year. As we actually go past that point, you'll actually get back more than a year, and you'll go backwards in time, which will be cool.
22:08 Manoush Zomorodi? Right now, our body ages, just as the human body always has. But you predict that in a decade or less, we'll actually have treatments that make our bodies younger than the age we are, to the point that every 80-year-old can have a 30-year-old's body in mind? How will this happen?
22:28 Speaker 05 Well, not exactly. But right now, you go through a year and you use up one year of your life. However, scientific discovery is creating new cures for diseases, new ways of treating things. And you're actually getting back, if you're diligent, about four months from scientific discovery. So you're only really aging eight months out of the year because you're getting back four months if you're diligent and taking advantage of the latest scientific discoveries. For example, I had two problems, diabetes and heart disease, which I've actually overcome. Today, I have an artificial pancreas, just like a real pancreas. It's actually external.
23:12 Speaker 05 But it actually detects my glucose, determines the amount of insulin that I should have. And it works just like a real pancreas.
23:21 Manoush Zomorodi? But this sounds like life extension rather than turning back time. What is going to be the sort of key technology that you think sort of suspends aging?
23:32 Speaker 05 Well, the whole way in which we come up with medications is going to change. For example, Moderna, when they tried to develop a COVID vaccine, they considered all the different possibilities. And they did that in two days using AI and came up with the optimal sequence. Whereas it used to take years to do that kind of thing. Then they had to go through human testing. But we're actually going to be able to eliminate human testing and replace it with simulating biology in the computer. The estimate right now by people who are working on this is about five years to be able to eliminate human testing
24:14 Speaker 05 and replace it with simulated testing. So we'll be able to actually create medications for diseases that will take days rather than years. And this will be in the 2030s. I don't guarantee immortality. I'm talking about longevity escape velocity, where we can keep going without getting older. We won't be aging in the same way that we are today.
24:40 Manoush Zomorodi? Not everyone believes you. You have an amazing story about your relationship with the late Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman. I understand you talked about these predictions to him before he ended up taking his own life at the age of 90.
25:01 Speaker 05 Yeah, he was a Nobel Prize winner in economics. I met with him every few months, had lunch with him in New York. And he was ninety, but he would actually walk from his apartment several blocks to where we were meeting. He seemed very healthy.
25:17 Manoush Zomorodi? Hmm.
25:18 Speaker 05 And we got into a big debate. I was saying, we're gonna be able to come up with cures for diseases much more quickly. And he didn't believe it. He said, no, it takes ten years by the time you have an idea before it can actually be a cure.
25:33 Manoush Zomorodi? Hmm.
25:33 Speaker 05 It takes ten years. I said, well, it's taken ten years in the past, it's not gonna take ten years in the future. And he didn't believe that, even though he understood what my predictions were about. And he actually had a plan to kill himself, because he didn't want to be going downhill in his nineties.
25:53 Manoush Zomorodi? And he did it.
25:54 Speaker 05 And he did it. He actually went to Switzerland and killed himself, and he had nothing wrong with him.
26:00 Manoush Zomorodi? So you think he made a mistake?
26:01 Speaker 05 Absolutely. He had this idea about what human beings were going to be, and this is probably true in the past. It was not true in the future, but I couldn't convince him of that.
26:15 Manoush Zomorodi? You have called dying tragic in the past. You've said that people try to trick themselves into accepting it. It sounds like that idea has not changed for you.
26:27 Speaker 05 I mean, a lot of human history is about this. People generally get sick and die, and they very often have a very messy death, and they leave lots of their intelligence behind them.
26:43 Manoush Zomorodi? Hmm.
26:46 Speaker 05 Loss of love, loss of knowledge is what death is about. And people have actually rationalized death as being a good thing, because there's nothing they could do about it. But now it's happening quickly enough that we can actually get a handle on it, be able to overcome it largely, and that's what I've been talking about.
27:12 Manoush Zomorodi? Realistically speaking, based on what you know about technology and your own health, how much longer do you think you could live for, provided there was no accident or something out of the blue?
27:26 Speaker 05 Well, my goal is not to die at all. That's the goal. Now, we can't guarantee immortality, and I don't think about immortality. I'm thinking about tomorrow is actually a good day. I'd like to live tomorrow. And tomorrow, I think I'll want to live till the next day. I'm being able to do that so far. My father died at 58. I'm 77.
27:52 Manoush Zomorodi? You've already escaped death.
27:54 Speaker 05 According to my family, yes. And I feel very good. And I see that technology is able to create new capabilities that we didn't even have last year. And it's happening very, very quickly. It's not something that's going to happen over, you know, the next 50 years. It's happening over the next one year, two years.
28:16 Manoush Zomorodi? So it's a really, I'm not sure we're prepared in any way, or maybe if we can even can prepare for it, how much this accelerating technology forces us to change how we use our brain? Like, for example, if I'm a great writer, but AI is an even better writer, what is my value? Who am I? You know, what am I good for? These are big existential questions.
28:41 Speaker 05 Well, we're not going to be as concerned about whether it comes from you or whether it comes from ChatGPT. We're not going to be able to tell whether it's coming from a large language model that's part of us, our own brain. And we'll be proud of what we're able to create. And at least for me, that's what gives me meaning.
29:01 Manoush Zomorodi? It's funny, Ray, I wanted to tell you that while I was preparing for this interview, Google AI warned me. They said, "It is important to note that Ray Kurzweil is a futurist and inventor, and his predictions are intended to be thought-provoking and optimistic. While his views have been influential and have generated excitement, it's crucial to critically assess them, acknowledge the potential challenges and limitations." Considering you have worked with Google as a technologist for decades, what do you think about that warning?
29:35 Speaker 05 Well, I think it's important to understand that the future is not without peril. There's both promise and peril, and it's up to people to use that. We don't know what's going to happen in the future, and I don't know either. So far, it's worked out pretty well. We've had problems in the past that we've overcome. I mean, remember 80 years ago, we had a war that caused 100 million people to die in Europe and Asia. And we thought that that would continue, that has not continued. We've actually gotten a lot better. You're aware of what AI can do, but a lot of people are not.
30:18 Speaker 05 And the world's going to be quite different. And it's changing very rapidly. What AI can do is different than it was three months ago.
30:29 Speaker 05 For example, I asked a large language model last week to understand humor, and it actually was quite funny. I thought maybe it might be accidentally funny, so I asked it again, and it was very, very funny over and over again. That was not true a year ago. So it's actually capable of doing things that it couldn't do a year ago. And people actually used to change quite rapidly. So things will be different. I think they'll be positive, but there are acute dangers that we need to be aware of. Because the world we live in already is influenced greatly by AI, and it's going to be even more so in the future.
31:13 Speaker 05 And we really need to train people to be part of the world that we're living in.
31:18 Manoush Zomorodi? That was inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil. His latest book is called The Singularity Is Near. You can see all of his talks at ted.com. And if you or someone you know is in crisis, please call, text, or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988.
31:43 Manoush Zomorodi? So if Ray is one of the big brains behind tech inventions, our next prophet of technology has been the brain behind some of the biggest changes in our culture, often by sparking the counterculture of California and creating the scene that eventually morphed into Silicon Valley.
32:04 Speaker 10 I'm Anush.
32:05 Manoush Zomorodi? Hi, Stuart. Thank you so much for doing this. You may never have heard of Stuart Brand, but he's been right next to even propelling some of the biggest names and movements of the last century, like with his Whole Earth Catalog, which Steve Jobs once referred to as "Google in paperback form."
32:23 Speaker 11 ... in paperback form 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
32:32 Manoush Zomorodi? Brand is 86 years old now, and his never-ending curiosity continues to this day.
32:38 Speaker 10 There is a kind of a hunger and foolishness to it. It's appetite. It's willingness to be ridiculous on the way to something you think might be interesting.
32:49 Manoush Zomorodi? When we come back, my conversation with Stuart Brand, how his parties in the 60s helped ignite the hippie movement and Silicon Valley's legacy of being open to wild ideas. I'm Anush Zamirodi, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour's Profits of Technology series. Stick with us.
33:19 Speaker 09 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
33:23 Speaker 03 This message comes from Schwab. At Schwab, you can get everything from self-directed investing to full-service wealth management, all in one place. No matter your investing goal, life stage, amount to invest, or know-how, you can invest your way with Schwab.
33:39 Speaker 09 This message comes from Rula. The holidays come with an expectation that you're supposed to feel happy. But what if it's not true for you? Rula makes accessing quality mental health care affordable and easy, with sessions costing an average of $15 with insurance. If you've been telling yourself you'll deal with it after the holidays, you don't have to wait. Head to rula.com, that's R-U-L-A dot com, and take the first step.
34:06 Manoush Zomorodi? This message comes from REI Co-op. At REI, they don't just sell outdoor gifts. They use them, test them, trust them. REI knows what to give this season, from joy rides, campfire cheers, or peak views. REI knows what to give the people you love who love to get out there, because they're out there, too. Just stop in and ask a green vest. For the best gifts out there, shop in-store or at REI dot com.
34:34 Manoush Zomorodi? It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manoush Zomorodi, and this is part one of our special series, The Profits of Tech, talking to the people who predicted and propelled forward some of the biggest changes we have seen in society. And one name that inevitably comes up is Stuart Brand. In 2022, I spent some time with Stuart talking about the roots of technology in San Francisco's counterculture scene in the 1960s and the magazine that he created, The Whole Earth Catalog.
35:10 Manoush Zomorodi? But it all started for him back in 1966, when Stuart and his friend Ken Keasy, the acclaimed author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, threw a massive party called the Trips Festival, which some historians say marked the beginning of the hippie movement and a new way of thinking.
35:32 Speaker 10 Paris avant-garde artists did their thing. A sculptor named Ron Boise, who made these enormous, noisy sculptures that you would bang on and pluck at strings, and make a sort of a group music.
35:48 Speaker 10 I mean, I grew up doing the damn foxtrot. And what I loved about the Bohemian world is dancing was just go out in the middle of the floor and carry on.
36:01 Speaker 10 The kind of thing we see at Burning Man ever since, for example, is a direct result of people discovering how much fun you could have if you just threw yourself completely into be part of the performance.
36:18 Manoush Zomorodi? So it was a couple of months after the Trips Festival that you took LSD on your own and zeroed in on a provocative question. Why haven't people seen a photo of the Earth from space? Nowadays, that would maybe be turned into an online conspiracy theory. But that's not what happened. What did happen? What did you do?
36:40 Speaker 10 What was happening was I was reading and listening to Buckminster Fuller, and he was focused on sort of world system thinking. And I was also a photographer, so I'm always thinking about what are the images that change people's minds? And I was on the rooftop of my place in San Francisco with probably a half-dose, quarter-dose of LSD, just watching the afternoon scintillate, and pretended to myself that I could see that the buildings downtown, the tall buildings, were not exactly parallel. They diverged slightly because they were on the curved surface of the Earth.
37:25 Speaker 10 And then I imagined myself going to a higher and higher altitude, and that curve would extend and then close all the way around on itself, and you would have San Francisco seen from space. And at that point, this is 10 years since Bucknik. And so it suddenly seemed very strange to me that both the Soviet Union and the United States could have taken serious photographs of the Earth from space and apparently hadn't done so. And I just thought, well, as soon as that photograph happens, everything's going to change. And a year or two later, that's exactly what happened.
38:10 Manoush Zomorodi? You made this big sign and you printed out a bunch of buttons that asked the question, "Why haven't we seen a photo of the Earth from space?" And then you went around to different college campuses and just like handed them out. So, I mean, what did people think? Did they think you were a crackpot? Or were they actually like, huh, this is kind of interesting? How did people respond to you?
38:34 Speaker 10 I can't say why. It just seemed like the obvious thing to do. But I stood in these places where there were young people with open minds and also teachers, many of them involved in astrophysics and space program and so on. The ones who were interested would come up and say what's going on. And I'd say, well, you know, what do you think it'll be like when people really look in the big mirror? So it became just a way to have public discussion.
39:01 Manoush Zomorodi? So not too long after NASA actually did take a picture of the Earth from a satellite and share it, and it was the first time the public saw a picture of the whole Earth, what impact did it have on people?
39:16 Speaker 10 So I think the photograph that really got people was the Earthrise photograph from Apollo 8 going around the moon and recording the lunar surface in the foreground and the Earth in the background. And the contrast between the dead, boring-looking, gray-brown planet in the foreground, the moon, with this vivid, scintillating, bright-blue, living, but distant and kind of small in the enormity of black space, that contrast is what got people. Dead planet, live planet, and we're on the live one. And then that raises the
39:59 Speaker 10 question, now that we've seen that, what does that mean? What do we do with that?
40:06 Manoush Zomorodi? So we're talking about the late 60s here. And that's really when a sort of new consciousness about the environment, this understanding that we are shepherds of the earth. You put a picture of the planet on the cover of a magazine that you started publishing called The Whole Earth Catalog. It became a cult read, and it made you pretty famous in the US. You were on the late night talk shows. But for those who are not familiar with it, what was The Whole Earth Catalog? What was in it?
40:41 Speaker 10 The Whole Earth Catalog was a very tightly edited collection of tools and ideas. So the important subtitle of The Whole Earth Catalog was "Access to Tools." We didn't sell the things in the catalog. It was just a catalog of stuff that we were pointing out. And it was trying to give you enough of a sample that you can make your own decision. Something or other jug and bottle cutter was a device that you could put in any bottle and turn it into a glass. We didn't call it ecological yet, but it was... A whole lot of being a hippie was living as cheap as possible.
41:23 Speaker 10 And so all the creativity went into learning how to dumpster dive and how to find roadkill that was fresh enough you could cook it and eat it, or make a hat out of it or something.
41:36 Manoush Zomorodi? Okay, so in 2005, many years later, Steve Jobs gave a commencement address at Stanford University where he talked about how inspired he was by the catalog when he was younger, especially by the way it ended. Let's listen.
41:57 Speaker 11 Stuart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog. And then, when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay hungry, stay foolish. And I have always wished that for myself.
42:30 Manoush Zomorodi? Stay hungry, stay foolish. Words for some to live by, but Stuart, you stopped publishing the Whole Earth Catalog regularly in the middle of the 70s. And then you get introduced to another subculture in California at that point. It definitely wasn't mainstream yet. The world of computers and hackers.
42:53 Speaker 10 It had been coming for a long time, in the sense that, I'm 62, I happened to see, we later called them hackers, young programmers, at the Computation Center at Stanford, where I was getting a tour. So 10 years later, when I had stopped the catalog, the guy who ran Rolling Stone magazine, Jan Wenner, invited me to write something for them. And I thought, great, I get to be a journalist. And he said, what do you want to write about? And I said, well, actually, I think something is going on with computers. And I wound up reporting on things going on at Zerox Park and at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, where the ARPANET was just starting to happen, what became the Internet
43:38 Speaker 10 later on. And robotics was starting to happen, so there were robots wandering around the laboratory. And I just reported on all of that in 72. The opening line was, ready or not, computers are coming to the people.
43:55 Manoush Zomorodi? I mean, you were one of the first people who even used the phrase "personal computer" publicly.
44:00 Speaker 10 That's true. I did that in a follow-up version of that article.
44:03 Manoush Zomorodi? So you saw the direction that computers were going. You saw, before a lot of people did, that this was going to completely change the world. In 1984, you threw yet another legendary event, the hackers conference, where you brought together all these incredible minds, I mean, the top engineers and programmers. They were all there. And there are people who say that if, in the 70s, things were kind of bubbling along when it came to tech, this event really kicked off the computer revolution.
44:34 Speaker 04 This ever-expanding library with millions of people online simultaneously, they will all be able to publish simultaneously, add things, annotate, make links, and we hope live in a freer environment than we live in now. Now, there's some big political issues here.
44:49 Speaker 10 Once computers became personal, they flipped from being...
44:54 Speaker 10 Seen as these machines of oppression to machines of liberation. Because the individual could grab it and then run with it toward whatever horizon they thought most interesting. And they were not only using it, they were programming it. And so, again, sort of like the thrift festival, everybody's a performer. With personal computers, everybody's a creator.
45:19 Manoush Zomorodi? A few years after immersing yourself in computers, you pivoted yet again, starting another organization called The Long Now. And basically, this is a nonprofit dedicated to getting people to think more long-term about the future. Why did you think people needed this, Stuart?
45:41 Speaker 10 Well, my sort of opening line of humanity has revved itself into a pathologically short attention span. And thanks to science, we know a whole lot more about the long-term past and have a lot more knowledge about the systems that are going to be functioning into the long-term future than we've ever had before. And so, to not act on that knowledge is at best a waste and at worst, an extreme hazard.
46:17 Manoush Zomorodi? Yeah, and the sort of signature project of The Long Now Foundation is this massive clock, a clock that's being built to keep time for 10,000 years. It ticks just once a year and it bongs just once a century. You gave a talk about it in 2004, about building the clock. So where are we now? Where's the clock?
46:44 Speaker 10 Clock's in a mountain in West Texas and nearing completion. It'll be operational and should be visitable by later in this decade.
46:56 Manoush Zomorodi? How do you explain the purpose of the clock to people who might think it's a ridiculous way to spend time and money, when we have so many problems on Earth right here and right now?
47:08 Speaker 10 It's art, it's land art. In this particular case, it's a machine. It's a great big mechanism that, all by itself, just using the energy and the difference between a cold night and a hot day, drives a genuine clock to keep very good time. And it also has chimes designed by Brian Eno. Jeff Bezos paid for it and also participated in the design. I've visited it a couple of times. It is intended to be mythic, and I think it achieves that.
47:50 Manoush Zomorodi? I can only imagine the sense of smallness one must feel compared to this timelessness that you are capturing with the project. But I have to say, one thing that sort of seems like a paradox to me is that, as you said, one of the biggest supporters of the Long Now Clock is Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, the sort of king of our on-demand, consumerist society. And many people blame him for exactly the problems you're hoping to solve, even just a little bit, with this project.
48:24 Speaker 10 Good lord, I think that's completely misplaced.
48:26 Manoush Zomorodi? Really?
48:27 Speaker 10 Talk about access to tools and ideas, and that's where I buy most of my stuff, don't you?
48:34 Manoush Zomorodi? I really try not to, Stuart. I mean, I have taken a lot of issue with warehouse conditions, how much they pay their workers, how they undercut small businesses, and people willing to buy things just because they can so easily. It just... I have a lot of problems with Amazon.
48:56 Speaker 10 Okay. Let's see, do I have problems with Amazon? The thing I'm having to keep saying from the beginning with the internet, it was always a mixed bag. And yet somehow, things proceeded and became okay. By and large, what we've got is much wider capabilities and communication opportunities. And we seem to be blaming the folks who provided that because they got big. They got big because we used them.
49:27 Manoush Zomorodi? Yeah.
49:31 Manoush Zomorodi? So not to end on a morbid note, but you do think a lot about the future, Stuart. May I ask what you want to happen after your death? Do you want to be an AI version of yourself to, I don't know, live on in the metaverse? Or are you going to have your body cryogenically frozen so we can de-extink you? What are you going to do?
49:59 Speaker 10 I have picked a nice place to be planted. It's one of those sort of semi-organic graveyards where you don't have yourself a waterproof crypt. You have some kind of biodegradable coffin. And I can't imagine doing anything cryogenic, and you never know.
50:17 Manoush Zomorodi? What if we contribute this conversation to like the database that's compiling everything you've ever said so that they could make an AI version of you?
50:25 Speaker 10 Oh, God. You know, anybody who wants to become a scholar of that.
50:30 Speaker 10 Yeah, sure, why not?
50:33 Manoush Zomorodi? If you had to pick one, what do you hope your biggest legacy is?
50:38 Speaker 10 It's hard to know. Legacies have their own life. We held a 50th anniversary of Whole Earth Catalog. We printed up a T-shirt for people that said, "Still hungry, still foolish."
50:54 Speaker 10 What did I mean at the time? I was, it's appetite, it's willingness to be ridiculous on the way to something you think might be interesting. But everybody has their own reading, I guess.
51:10 Manoush Zomorodi? That was Stuart Brand. His latest book, Maintenance of Everything Part One, will be out later this year. You can see all of his talks at ted.com and learn more about his career in the documentary, We Are As Gods. Many thanks to the filmmakers for their help, too. Thank you for listening to Part One of our Profits of Technology series. Next week, the head of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman, and renowned psychologist Sherry Turkle, two very different perspectives on how chatbots are changing us.
51:45 Manoush Zomorodi? This episode was produced by James Delahoussaye, Rachel Faulkner-White, and Matthew Cloutier. It was edited by Sanaa Zmeškinpour and me. Our production staff at NPR also includes Katie Monteleone, Fiona Girin, and Tarsha Nahada. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Our audio engineers were Simon Jensen, Stacey Abbott, Jimmy Keely, and Maggie Luthar. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablouei. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Roxane Hylash, Alejandra Salazar, and Daniela Balarezzo. I'm Manoush Zamirodi, and you have been listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR.
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