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

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

News, Government, Society & Culture

4.3 • 14.5K Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2026

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Stewart Brand might be the most influential philosopher of the internet – at least in its more idealistic era. In the 1960s, Brand was the central bridge figure between the San Francisco counterculture and the emerging technology scene. He created the legendary Trips Festival with Ken Kesey in 1966, and was there at “the mother of all demos” in 1968. And he created and edited the Whole Earth Catalog, which Steve Jobs called “one of the bibles of my generation” and “Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along.” Brand has seen Silicon Valley evolve in the decades since. And along the way, he has written many brilliant books about our relationship to technology, the built environment and the natural world. His latest book is “Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One.” In this conversation, we discuss everything from dropping acid to the genesis of the Whole Earth Catalog, what he thinks A.I. will reveal about humanity, the 40 years he’s spent living on a tugboat and the importance of maintenance in a culture that prizes novelty and disposability. Mentioned: Ezra is moderating a forum on housing and affordability with some of the top California gubernatorial candidates. The event is on Friday, May 8, in Oakland, CA. You can buy tickets here. Use the code EKSHOW for 20 percent off your order. Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One by Stewart Brand “We Didn’t Ask for This Internet” with Cory Doctorow and Tim Wu, The Ezra Klein Show I And Thou by Martin Buber Book Recommendations: The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester The Scottish Enlightenment by Arthur Herman Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Kelsey Lannin. Our recording engineers are Aman Sahota and Johnny Simon. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Fred Turner.

Transcript

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0:00.0	We've got an announcement before we begin the show today.
0:03.1	I am going to be hosting a forum on housing and affordability
0:06.1	with some of the top California governance candidates on Friday, May 8th.
0:10.1	We're going to discuss why housing in California, my beloved home state, is so damn expensive
0:15.1	and what each candidate hopes to do about it.
0:18.2	The event is being co-hosted by the New York Times, Housing Action Coalition,
0:22.3	and the Turner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley, and the San Francisco Foundation.
0:26.9	Tickets are on still now, so get them while they're available. We'll include a link and a promo
0:30.6	code in the show notes.
0:38.3	Music I'm I'm I'm The I think if you were to look for the philosopher, the thinker who is most influential in the culture that became the internet, who
1:13.2	sort of laid down the way Silicon Valley thought, at least in its more idealistic era.
1:19.3	The person to come up with is Stuart Brand. Brand has one of these amazing lives where he seemed
1:24.2	to be present, at least for a part of the culture, and almost everything
1:29.4	that mattered. They're in the 60s, in the moment of the hippies, in a $20 a month apartment
1:35.2	in San Francisco with other beatniks. They're at the mother-of-all demos that creates much of
1:40.9	the structure for modern computing that foresees many places we're ultimately going to go.
1:46.9	They're creating the well, one of the earliest online communities.
1:49.7	They're with the Whole Earth Catalog, which Steve Jobs describes as an early inspiration for what we now think of as the Internet.
1:57.3	When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog,
2:03.1	which was one of the Bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand,
2:08.6	not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the
2:14.9	late 60s, before personal computers and desktop publishing.
	...

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