John Markoff on Stewart Brand’s Visionary ‘Whole Earth’

KQED's Forum

KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 31 March 2022

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From his time with the Merry Pranksters to his influence on Steve Jobs to his utopian “Whole Earth Catalog,” Stewart Brand epitomizes the Bay Area counterculture visionary. Brand has “an eerie knack for showing up first at the onset of some social movement or technological inflection point and then moving on just when everyone else catches up,” writes technology reporter John Markoff. Forum talks with Markoff about the life, work and influence of Brand and his new biography, "Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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1:00.9	From KQED.
1:00.9	From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal.
1:16.3	A boy is born in Rockford, Illinois, in 1938, to upper middle class parents in the quintessential Midwestern American town.
1:24.8	He gets sent to Phillips Exeter and then comes West following his football playing
1:28.3	brother to Stanford. Somehow this man comes to connect the counterculture, psychedelia, ecology,
1:34.4	emerging computing technologies, new media architecture, and a whole lot more into something
1:39.6	like an ethos that is almost impossibly Bay Area. The character is Stuart Brand, of course, Sassolito's finest, and today we talk with John
1:48.1	Markov, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist about his new book, Whole Earth, The Many
1:53.2	Lives of Stuart Brand.
1:54.8	That's coming up next on Forum.
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