The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (Commonwealth Club Talk)

This video memorializes a conversation between John Markoff and Paul Saffo at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, March 24, 2022. John's biography of Stewart Brand, Whole Earth, has just been released. See https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/23/technology/stewart-brand-... for a teaser chapter. Amazon or your local independent bookstore for a copy of the real thing.

Whole Earth is more that a biography (unusual because it is a biography of a living person), more than a paean to the Whole Earth Catalog, more than a memoir of the 1960s and 1970s, more than the history of a photograph of the whole earth. John captures the essence of Stewart Brand the catalytic personality who initiated and encouraged many of the best things that emerged from the counterculture. The image that comes to mind it that of a bee flying from flower to flower, pollinating and then flying on.

Full disclosure: These folks are my friends. I was there in the 1960s and 1970s. I shopped at the Truck Store. I ran the People's Computer Company.