Stewart Brand

But again, you know, so when I was at UC Berkeley, I used to go hang out with these guys at this place called the Global Business Network, which is kind of a very generic name.

But it was it was Stuart Brand, Peter Schwartz and a bunch of these folks who really had come out of the Royal Dutch Shell Scenario Planning Group.

So and that itself had kind of part of its etymology was part of the part of RAND and part of this forecasting group.

This term futures came up and people started using it as a simple way of describing individuals who are doing a couple of things.

Kevin Kelly is a Silicon Valley veteran.

He was originally the editor of the Whole Earth Catalog under Stewart Brand and went on to become the founder of Wired Magazine in 1993.

In retirement, he calls himself Senior Maverick of Wired Magazine, a title he holds to this day.

Most in Silicon Valley believe that the singularity is still on its way, that we're approaching AGI, that at some point humans and machines will fully merge.

And I am a member of and an advocate for an organization that is based in the Bay Area called the Long Now Foundation.

We have talked before about Stuart Brand.

He's one of the founders of that organization.

And they were founded specifically to address this, I want to say blind spot in our weird society, right? That we are so near term oriented.

who wrote that?

And I'll include a link to his, I forget right now the name of the book, but I'll include it in the show notes.

But he's also one of these people in Stuart Brand's orbit, right? Yeah.

So there's a whole series of folks involved.

the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog.

Stuart Brand.

Stuart Brand.

It's a very good book about maintenance.

Just a bunch of anecdotes, essentially, about maintenance.

Again, one of the really fun things is that it's an experimental space.

And, you know, I'd actually argue one of the really interesting things about AI because it has this sort of it has some things that look more human or at least look more like intelligence is it it probably does let us do some experiments and start to kind of like layout simulations in ways that maybe we couldn't have quite before and and we can start to kind of like and in fact I think like using simulation itself as a kind of technology and tool is a really interesting mechanism that, you know, I mean, lots of people have talked about and, you know, forecasters and, you know, Kevin Kelly, who started Wired, famously had a sort of forecasting organization and he and Stuart Brand have done a lot of this kind of work.

And so, but, you know, Thinking about kind of tying it back to all of these things, maybe talk for a second.

I'll let you introduce the Tetrad and, you know, the idea that Tetrad is.

And anyway, his point was maintaining things is something that is very good for us to do as humans for a lot of reasons, and that if we can think about maintaining things, uh, as, as something that's sort of, like, I don't know, a positive versus something that is a huge negative.

Um, I think maybe it's Stewart Brand's name?

I'm look- eh, the, the AI overview.

So I just typed in this: writer, thinker, book about-

It's this guy's-

... maintaining, and it's Stewart Brand-

Okay.

Yes

It was one world that nobody was paying attention to.

Stewart Brand organized the Trips Festival in January 1966, the Grateful Dead's first major San Francisco show.

Three days of multimedia chaos.

One of the world's first large-scale counterculture tech art events.

Somewhere during the second set, probably during Terrapin Station, they look at each other and have the same thought.

A computer system for Deadheads.

They joined something called The Well, Whole Earth Electronic Link, a Bay Area bulletin board founded by Stewart Brand.

The Grateful Dead conferences exploded.