Mammoths resurrected, geoengineering and other thoughts from a futurist | Stewart Brand and Chris Anderson
TED Talks Daily
TED
4.1 • 12.1K Ratings
🗓️ 5 January 2018
⏱️ 31 minutes
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Summary
Stewart Brand is a futurist, counterculturist and visionary with a very wide-ranging mind. In conversation with TED Curator Chris Anderson, Brand discusses ... just about everything: human nature, bringing back the wooly mammoth, geoengineering, rewilding and science as organized skepticism -- plus the story of an acid trip on a San Francisco rooftop in the '60s that sparked a perspective-shifting idea. "The story we're told is that we're the next meteor," Brand says, but "things are capable of getting better."
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This interview features environmentalist and futurist Stuart Brand and TED curator Chris Anderson, |
| 0:07.5 | recorded live at TED 2017. |
| 0:11.2 | Okay, Stuart, in the 60s, you found, I think it was 68, was it? You founded this magazine. |
| 0:19.0 | Bravo, it's the original one. That's hard to find. |
| 0:22.1 | Right. |
| 0:22.7 | Issue one, right? |
| 0:24.5 | Why did that make so much impact? |
| 0:28.6 | Counterculture was the main event that I was part of at the time. |
| 0:32.9 | And it was made up of hippies and new left. |
| 0:36.9 | That was sort of my contemporaries, |
| 0:38.5 | the people I was just slightly older than. |
| 0:41.5 | And my mode is to look at where the flow, |
| 0:45.7 | the interesting flow is, and then look the other direction. |
| 0:50.1 | Partly I was trained to do that as an army officer, |
| 0:52.3 | but partly it's just a cheap heuristic to find originality, |
| 0:55.5 | is don't look where everybody else is looking. |
| 0:58.2 | Look the opposite way. |
| 0:59.8 | So the deal with the counterculture is the hippies were very romantic, |
| 1:03.4 | kind of against technology, |
| 1:05.1 | except very good LSD from Sandoz. |
| 1:08.3 | And the new left was against technology |
| 1:11.6 | because they thought it was a power device. |
... |
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