Commonwealth Club Of California Podcast

Iconic counterculture icon Stewart Brand has been at the center of many of the social and cultural movements launched and nurtured in the Bay Area. Whether it be early computing, the Merry Pranksters and the hippies, the generation-defining Whole Earth Catalog, or the environmental movement, Brand has been at the center of them all. Yet many outside these movements only know him because Apple founder Steve Jobs quoted Brand's famous mantra—stay hungry, stay foolish—in a famous Stanford University commencement speech. Legendary science and technology writer John Markoff hopes to elevate an understanding of Brand's impact on our world. In his new book, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand, Markoff provides the first serious biography of Brand, his impact and his many contradictions. A blond-haired WASP with a modest family inheritance, Brand went to Exeter and Stanford and was an army veteran, but in California in the 1960s he became an artist and a photographer in the thick of the LSD revolution. While