Stewart Brand, Silicon Valley’s Favorite Prophet, on Life’s Most Important Principle

I gave my brother a New York Times subscription. We exchange articles. And so having read the same article, we can discuss it. She sent me a year long subscription so I have access to all the games. The New York Times contributes to our quality time together. It enriches our relationship. It was such a a cool and thoughtful gift. We're reading the same stuff. We're making the same food. We're on the same page. Learn more about giving a New York Times subscription as a gift at nytimes.com/gift. We've got an announcement before we begin the show today. I am going to be hosting a forum on housing and affordability with some of the top California governor's candidates on Friday, May 8. We're gonna discuss why housing in California, my beloved home state, is so damn expensive and what each candidate hopes to do about it. The event is being co hosted by the New York Times, Housing Action Coalition, and the Turner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Foundation. Tickets are on sale now, so get them while they're available. We'll include a link and a promo code in the show notes. Notes. I think if you were to look for the philosopher, the thinker who is most influential in the culture that became the Internet, who sort of laid down the way Silicon Valley thought, at least in its more idealistic era, the person you come up with is Stewart Brand. Brand has one of these amazing lives where he seemed to be present, at least for, a part of the culture, and almost everything that mattered. They're in the sixties, in the moment of the hippies, in a $20 a month apartment in San Francisco with other beatniks. They're at the mother of all demos that creates much of the structure for modern computing that foresees many of the places we're ultimately gonna go. They're creating The Well, one of the earliest online communities. They're with the Whole Earth Catalog, which Steve Jobs describes as an early inspiration for what we now think of as the Internet. When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand, not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty five years before Google came along. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. A list of all the places Brand was and all the things he influenced from the clock of the long now to his long running correspondence, Brian Eno, It is very, very long. And along the way, Brent has been writing these very beautiful, unusual …