Stewart Brand
speaker
734 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 24 Apr
Stewart Brand’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, thank you, Mr. Glad to be here.
For various reasons, a whole lot of people basically in college, in the early 60s and on through into the early 70s,
thought they needed to reinvent civilization.
The 50s had been so successful, it became kind of bland, and the beatnik poets who preceded us showed a kind of a revolutionary path of going wild and going deep.
And so...
We figured out ways to go wild and go deep.
Then he dropped out of college, decided that since civilization had to be reinvented, they have to deal with the gathering of their peers and go back to the countryside and farm and build their own buildings and have their own rules and start over.
They all failed, but they were all highly educational.
We learned that free love isn't free.
We learned that if you expect the women to do all of the really hard work of carrying the water and cooking the meals and taking care of the kids, like pioneer women used to have to do while the guys were building domes and other interesting buildings.
Another thing that we discovered was that the countryside is actually kind of boring, especially if you don't connect with your neighbors, which we did not, mostly.
And so we fled back to the cities.
Some of us figured out how to do too many drugs, and some of the rest of us noticed that and didn't.
But it was a wonderfully fearless time.
We undertook wild and crazy things.
We had this aesthetic of the most wonderful adventures you could with the least amount of money that you could.
And you have to be creative under those circumstances.
So that was the hippies.
And the Whole Earth Catalog was speaking in a way to the fact that these were college dropouts who didn't know how anything worked.
They had not been raised on a farm or a ranch.
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