We Are As Gods (2021) Movie Script
- There you go.
- Oh, yeah.
- Mammoth.
- It's a tusk in here.
Beautifully preserved specimen.
- You think those are part of it?
- That's useful for us.
- All right.
- The main event.
Great.
- Mammoth's trunk.
- Wow.
- Oh yeah,
you can see that.
- Yeah, you can see it.
- So we would like
to help you get DNA sequence.
- DNA, okay.
- We finally got some hair.
- This is not an ancient artifact.
Using DNA, we can bring
back extinct species.
So this is the once in the future mammoth
that we're looking at.
It has been gone for a
while and with any luck,
they are on the way back.
- Stewart is a lot
like the great American P. T. Barnum.
- Stewart is the
intellectual Johnny Appleseed
of the counterculture.
- Stewart might be the
Zelig or maybe the DaVinci
of cyber culture.
- It's actually
a little bit eerie
how often Stewart has
been at the right place
at the right time.
- He's like an invincible string.
- And by the time
all the rest of us get there,
he's gone on to something
else more interesting.
- Stewart has this remarkable
"Forrest Gump" superpower--
- I believe he said he had to go pee.
- To sense where the frontiers are
and then be there.
- He's like Kilroy.
He shows up in the background
of every important thing going on.
- He could see into the future
that this technology was
going to be a huge part
of American culture.
- Welcome Stewart Brand.
- It isn't so much
that he's ahead of it,
he's actually creating the future.
- Steve Jobs, not surprisingly,
was fascinated by Stewart.
- When I was young the
"Whole Earth Catalog"
was one of the Bibles of my generation.
It was created by a fellow
named Stewart Brand.
It was sort of like Google
in paperback form 35 years
before Google came along.
- So many of the
ideas that you may find vital
either originate with Stewart Brand
or were really articulated by him.
- Ideas that scene at
the edge of believability
from the environmental movement,
to the technological
movement, to genetics.
- Stu loves being the
techno file with the answer.
But technologies tend
to break people apart.
- Stewart is an evangelical optimist
which may be quite dangerous.
- He's famous for saying,
"We are as Gods,
"so we might as well get good at it"
- My own progress through life
has been to try stuff early on
when there aren't rules against it yet
so you get to be part of
the new thing in the world.
I didn't sit down in life
to have a trajectory.
It is a pretty interesting
way to have a life
'cause you get to be surprised a lot.
I was born, I'm told,
I don't remember it,
in Rockford, Illinois.
We were a Midwestern family.
My father was a civil engineer out of MIand I got from him respect for that kind
of problem solving that
engineers love to do.
And I took after my mother in the sense
that she was mad for books.
I know my mother was instilling values
of caring about wildlife.
This is kind of where
I grew up and I'm back
in this cottage 63 years, basically,
after I left at the age of 16.
This is where all the fun stuff was.
I got to be a free-range kid.
- I remember Stewart as a
kid who is really interested
in animals and would get into mischief
that way fairly often.
- I was very much in cahoots with wildlife
like the chipmunks and squirrels.
I had an opossum named Frank
I had a wonderful raccoon named Oscar.
There was a feral cat
and he became my friend.
And when we left out the road,
the cat chased the car all
the way out to the highway.
- Stewart was already smart
and he went off to Stanford.
- I've been a conservationist all my life.
And I was trained as a
biologist back in the '50s.
At Stanford, I went
in the direction of ecology and evolution.
- We have an extremely serious
world demographic situation.
Famine and plague and thermonuclear war,
and who knows which one or
what combination will come?
- I'm Paul Ehrlich,
president of the Center
for Conservation Biology
at Stanford University
and notorious doomsayer.
Doom.
- Paul Ehrlich was my advisor
for the field work that I was doing.
- Stewart was one of the
brightest students I ever had
in the biology department working,
as I recall, on tarantulas.
- So I would go
out on a full moon night
and put up a cot and just watch
what tarantulas do all night.
What I've learned is
that in any ecosystem,
species are evolving in
relation to other species
who are evolving right back at them.
And if you apply it to the extinction,
there's a new kind of
problem for humanity.
- Let's put it this way,
if you have a very complex,
evolving planet on which
your life absolutely depends,
taking pieces out of it at random is,
by definition, a bad idea.
- We have the power to
destroy life on this planet,
which we unfortunately are
going about at warp speed.
And we are now looking at
the extinction of species
at a rate faster than when
the dinosaurs went extinct.
- The American chestnut is
one of the prime examples
of a species that is so consequential
in terms of the whole ecosystem that if
that species is gone the
whole ecosystem has changed.
One quarter of all the
trees in the Eastern forest
of the United States used to
be American chestnut trees.
Around 1905, this fungus came in,
apparently from Asia,
killed the trees and they were all gone
within about 20 years.
It was huge.
It's called the Redwood of the East.
It was an enormously loved
species in North America.
They put down these incredibly sweet nuts
in vast quantities every year.
And it fed a lot of humans and a whole lot
of animals depended on that food source.
And when that food source went away,
the animals went away.
Hi sweeties, there they are.
God.
The passenger pigeon was
once one of the wonders
of North America.
Visitors from Europe were
wowed by Niagara Falls,
but they were even more wowed
by these incredibly large
and beautiful flocks of passenger
pigeons streaming overhead
for days at 60 miles an hour.
They were a forest bird
and they ran out of forest
as well as being hunted to death.
My mother grew up in the living memory
of what it was like to have
the most abundant animal
in America disappear in a
period of about three decades.
And she said when the
last one died in 1914,
it broke America's heart.
But that's a tragedy
that can be unwritten.
You can actually go back to
the end of the play and say,
that's not the end of the play,
because we didn't kill their DNA.
Using a closely-related living species,
we can edit the missing
genes into the living species
and basically recreate
the extinct species.
And we're moving in the
direction of bringing
back passenger pigeons and wooly mammoths.
I started to get a sense
of where it was going
from George Church at Harvard,
one of the leading geniuses in biotech.
- George Church,
a world leading geneticist
whose DNA harbors genes for genius.
- He's totally
adored by the media.
- George Church, everyone.
Bring back the wooly mammoth.
Can we get one?
- Yeah.
- Tonight's topic is de-extinction.
Oh my Gosh, de-extinction.
George, what's the next
creature that's gonna crawl
out of your lab?
- So one that's already crawling out are--
- I was just joking.
Okay, so you have a real
answer to that question?
When you're creating new species,
have you really thought it through?
Because if you haven't
then you're dangerous.
- I'm definitely dangerous.
- Okay, got that.
Okay, that answers that.
- This is the room where
we did all the pig cloning
where we were eliminating
viruses from their genome.
- Why its own room?
- Why?
- Why has its own room?
It's extra clean?
- Well, it's very clean.
I tend not to go in
these rooms because most
of the human cell we use are from my body.
And many of them are transformed
with potential carcinogens.
- What? Wait.
You're not worried about your
cells getting into there,
you're worried about those cells
getting into you?
- Getting into me, yeah right.
- And doing what?
- I'm not worried about it
but the lab is, yeah.
Good questions, you're hired.
- The plausibility
of de-extinction,
George Church's lab is
really where it all began.
And George started with wooly mammoth.
- The mammoth was a keystone
species in the Arctic.
20,000 years ago our ancestors
started systematically
slaughtering mammoths.
They were altogether too easy to get
with our new technical abilities.
And the new tools we had
for killing off the
herbivores included knives
and spears and fire.
They had strategies for surrounding them
and running them off of cliffs.
Those mistakes, the people who
made them did them innocently
and aren't around to take
responsibility for them.
We need to take responsibility.
And now we're in a position
where we could reverse those mistakes
with better tools than our ancestors had.
- So this is mammoth tissue.
- Right.
- Can you see
the small tissue?
- Yeah.
- Since Asian elephants and
wooly mammoths are so similar
to each other, 99.6% similar,
we are hoping to test them
first in elephant tissue
and then see whether they work.
- What we're doing at
Harvard is editing the genes
that bridge the small gap between mammoths
and modern Asian elephants
so that they can be cold resistant.
- I am Stewart Brand.
This is the first public
discussion of the possibility
of bringing back extinct species.
What's different and what's the same
about the kind of hybridization--
- Stewart brought us together
in the de-extinction movement
and in the same sense that you say,
this is the Manhattan Project,
this is the Apollo Project,
this is the Human Genome Project.
That's the sort of thing
that Stewart has brought to de-extinction.
- The century of work that'll go in
to making this a reality.
These engineered mammoth-elephant
hybrids will initially go
to Pleistocene Park in Northern Siberia.
We collaborate with these
Russian conservationists,
Sergey Zimov and his son, Nikita Zimov.
They're returning a variety
of herbivores needed
for this particular ecosystem.
The only one they're missing
is this mammoth-elephant hybrid.
That's our job to provide one of those.
- It turns out that by bringing
back the wooly mammoth,
we can help fix climate change.
The exaggerated version is that we need
to bring back wooly mammoths
because they will save the world.
- I think steward likes the idea,
as do I,
of being able to recreate
extinct animals from DNA.
But one of the things that I've learned
in my much longer life
than Stewart has had
is that when you pull a
technological rabbit out of a hat,
it very often has very nasty droppings.
- I would love to see a mammoth.
Wouldn't that be cool.
That, we can do it,
is so much fun and so
fascinating for people
who love technology.
At the same time we ought to be asking,
should we do this?
Is this a good idea?
- So what you've got here
is kind of a place where my stuff lives
and also my entire past,
come to think of it.
And then we go into
The archive.
Films and slides from my
older multimedia shows back
in the '60s.
Photographs, I was a
professional photographer
for years in the
'60s and into the '70s.
I graduated early '60s.
An old family friend commissioned
me to photograph a tribe
of Indians in Oregon.
I had no idea about what
Contemporary Indians did
and how they lived.
So the photographs I took,
for me, there were revelatory.
- The first time I met Stewart Brand was
at the National Congress
of American Indians
in Sheridan, Wyoming.
I was working on the registration desk
and he came through the door
with his camera.
He was very blonde,
didn't fit in.
He was very much out of place.
- We went from friends
to absolutely in love
and she became Lois Jennings Brand.
- Stewart didn't want
to be encumbered by anything
like a lease in an apartment.
So we purchased a trailer,
put all of our belongings,
which in his case involved
photographic equipment
and a ton of books.
- We moved to San Francisco
and I started to immerse myself
in the Bohemian life of the
slightly post Beatnik period
that was happening by the early '60s.
That was when I met Ken Kesey.
His book, "One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest",
had a Indian protagonist.
They sent the photographs
to Kesey and word got back,
we'll, come on down.
- The first time
that Stewart met Kesey,
we drove down to a little tree house.
- Somebody by the door said, welcome,
you must be Stewart.
And that was not usually
how you met strangers
in those days.
Usually marijuana was smoked
in the bathroom right next
to the toilet so you can flush it down.
So right away I saw the
Prankster and boldness.
- The Merry Pranksters were
a very interesting collection
of young, footloose folk.
And Ken Kesey was kind of
the boss of the outfit.
When Stewart started
coming to Prankster events,
pretty soon, he's sporting a top hat.
- Aware of your their own bodies,
their own senses, their breathing,
where they're at and who they're with.
- He's beginning to
manifest signs of straying
from the norm in a really good way.
- Civilization was in question.
The civil rights and
Vietnam War resistance.
We felt like an all out generation.
LSD was a right of passage.
We took apart the
trappings of orderly mind
and good education.
And LSD gave us permission to
try things in unapproved ways.
And that also probably added
to our creativity in the sense
that we weren't trying to
make it in the lawful world.
We were making it in the
world that we felt was partly
of our own creation.
The best thing I learned
from their Pranksters,
and this came straight from
Kesey, was fearlessness.
And one of the mottos of the
Pranksters was, go further.
- Original Prankster credo,
you start off by saying,
never trust a Prankster,
because I will eventually lie
to you even though I may not want to.
If I say one thing today,
it may not work tomorrow.
- Go ahead,
Would you repeat that again?
- Kesey was a charismatic leader
and it puts you in the position
of paying close attention
to this person.
And then what happens is
that the charismatic
character is writing the story
that everybody is participating in.
And you're left having
not written your own story
for a while.
I happened to me to a little extent.
And I wanted to check in on who am I?
Who do I wanna be?
What do I wanna be doing?
So for my final role in
the Merry Pranksters,
I wanted to plan one last big event.
- One of the things
that we did was events
called The Acid Test.
We had music and projections.
All of this is audience participation
which was not really done in those days.
It was a costume party like
you've never seen before.
because of the additional
energy from the LSD.
- I started
to organize this thing
and that was the most
important of all acid tests,
and we called it the Trips Festival.
- When Stewart was doing all the work
for the Trips Festival
he made up a poster.
He put the names of bands on there
that he would like to attend.
And, in fact,
they showed up because they
saw the posters and said,
oh, we're supposed to be there.
- Good evening
from Captain Consciousness.
For your listening pleasure,
the Grateful Dead.
- Indeed, they
did show up and thousands
and thousands of hippies showed
up and Tom Wolfe was right
because this is the night was born.
There was a big bucket
of ice cream going around
that was laced with LSD.
And it was gonna taste
delicious when you ate it
and then it was gonna
become very strange 1/2 an hour later.
What really took off was Grateful Dead
who had just named themselves
that and they got on stage
and they were sensational.
- Stewart invited
every weirdo in the Bay Area
that had gadgets to come
and set up their stuff.
- We were projecting
various things on the walls
and Ken Kesey is writing messages.
- I spent much of the Trips Festival
under a table with a stripper
that I was going out with,
high on acid.
It would be hard for me to
tell you much more than that.
It was maybe my first
experience of being high
with lots and lots of people.
- People are not dancing with each other,
they're dancing with
everybody and looking around
and clotsing into things
and doing stuff to the beat
that everybody is on.
Typically, at a party
wherever there was a strobe,
people would just get under it and then.
That was another thing
that got people moving
'cause they loved watching pieces
of themselves flying around.
- The Trips Festival
was a watershed moment
that introduced a lot
of different communities
and families to one another.
We could recognize each other and knew
that we were on the same page.
- Thousands of hippies in
the Bay Area discovered
that there were thousands
of hippies in the Bay Area.
And that let's you know
there's a movement.
Trips Festival was a very
true for me in the sense
of I just made a riot happen.
But on the other hand, nothing's changed.
Yeah, that was a great event,
meanwhile, now what?
So two months later,
it's a tedious afternoon
and maybe I'll just take,
I don't know,
100 micrograms or something
and go up on the roof
and see what LSD does for the afternoon.
And as I'm looking out at San Francisco,
I imagine that the buildings
that are parallel Downtown
are not quite parallel,
they're actually slightly
diverge because they're
on the curved surface of the Earth.
At this point we're 10 years into Sputnik
and there's been no photographs
of the Earth as a whole.
LSD is not actually
consciousness expanding,
it's consciousness concentrating.
And so you get thinking about one thing
and that's all you can
think about for hours.
So all I could think
about on that rooftop was
how different everything would be
if you could see a photograph
of the Earth in space?
So what I had conjured
in my mind was a button
that would say,
why haven't we seen a photograph
of the whole Earth yet?
I sent the button to
all of the congressmen,
to NASA and officials in the Soviet Union
and then started selling
them on college campuses.
People would come up and say,
what's this about?
Ever since 1945,
the image of the mushroom
cloud made people feel
that civilization was basically doomed.
Being a photographer,
I was thinking about the images
that hadn't been made yet
that might change humanity's behavior.
- T-minus 10, nine,
eight, seven,
six,
five.
Liftoff.
- I feel the liftoff,
the clock has started.
I was the Apollo 9 lunar module pilot.
Seeing the earth with your own eyes,
you realize how small and fragile it is
and that all of life is on that planet.
It changes your perspective
and that's basically
what Stewart recognized.
- Finally,
NASA publicly released
the first ever image of the whole Earth.
The whole damn thing was alive,
you could see that.
And it was a hopeful image
and it blew away the mushroom cloud.
- That one image created
this extraordinary frame
of reference for our
relationships with other cultures
and the planet itself.
- Humanity wasn't just capable
of destroying itself,
humanity was capable of discovering itself
in this very visual way.
- Let's give Stewart credit.
When we could look at the
real earth in her photograph
that Stewart kept yelling for,
people were beginning to get
this idea that we all live
on a very small planet and
that we're not just passengers,
we're the crew and we're
responsible for what goes on.
- Indeed, once we
did have the photographs,
suddenly there's organizations
called Friends of the Earth
and Earth First.
A bunch of environmental
organizations took off globally
that were assuming care of this thing
that was now understood
to be in need of care.
- The United Nations has
assumed responsibility
for the preservation of
species in danger of extinction
and whereas the United
Nations Conference--
- I think Stu played a very important role
in creating the environmental movement
and in making it accessible,
showing people that there
are different ways to live.
- All my friends were involved
in various commune efforts,
basically trying to reinvent civilization.
Most of these communes were being started
by liberal arts majors who
had dropped out of college
and their knowledge was
not helping them at all.
By then I had a sense I wanted
to effect change in the world.
Human nature doesn't change.
You're wasting your time
if you try to change
how people behave,
but if you can change their tools,
you can change whatever you want.
And I thought, well,
I could maybe have kind of a catalog.
The great thing about being
a double (indistinct) artist
is that I didn't have a job.
So if you have an idea and it still seems
like a good idea the next day,
you just start.
And so I'd started the
"Whole Earth Catalog" in 1968
and the subtitle was "Access to Tools".
- In all the "Whole Earth Catalogs,
Stewart injected the phrase,
"We are as Gods and might
as well get good at it."
- It was an acknowledgement
that there's an empowerment
that has occurred of the individual.
Lois was the COO
and brought a business acumen.
- The first issue I think we
only printed a thousand copies.
A number were given away.
It was just a massive disaster.
He's going, no.
- The first first "Whole Earth Catalog",
we distributed them by
carrying them around physically
to bookstores and saying, here.
And they would say,
what is it, what section do I put it in?
And we would not know how to answer that.
- You have to understand how
impoverished the world was
in terms of information.
If you'd had a question
it was very unlikely
that you would ever get an answer to it,
so most people never asked the question.
- These days I'll pop open my handy phone,
go on the internet,
Google it and the world's
information is at my fingertips.
When the "Whole Earth Catalog" came out,
this wasn't true.
Where would you go?
- You could think of
it as the web on newsprint,
so it became a catalog of possibilities.
And the startup culture
was born directly out
of the "Whole Earth Catalog".
- Stewart and his
team put out several issues
of the "Whole Earth Catalog"
and he brought it to life
with his poetic touch.
This was in the late '60s
before personal computers
and desktop publishing,
so it was all made with typewriters,
scissors and Polaroid cameras.
It was idealistic,
overflowing with neat
tools and great notions.
- Millions of
people who were reading it
were taught to invent their life.
- Everybody could plug in and chip in
on this conversation about what's the role
of tools and technology in this
new imagining of the world?
- For somebody like me,
living in the English
countryside at the time,
I thought, oh my God,
there's a lot of others out there too.
And it consolidated in so
many people's minds the idea
that there was a new movement,
there was a new
consciousness of some kind.
The "Whole Earth Catalog"
was a revolution.
- I had set the "Whole Earth Catalog"
on a path of it had to be bigger, better,
more ambitious, wider reach,
more people involved.
Pretty soon we had a very steep curve
of people subscribing this
publication and money coming in,
and it was being a fabulous
success in the world.
- The "Whole Earth Catalog",
it's just full of the kinds of things
that make you wish you had
infinite amount of spare time.
Oh, this is an amazing thing.
- It won the
National Book Award.
I was getting interviewed.
Why haven't we seen the
photograph of the whole Earth yet?
So at a fairly young age
I was nationally famous.
Plus, we have a flag
which is a pretty thing,
the only flag you can say that
doesn't exclude anybody out,
everybody's in it.
- That's the Earth from the NASA?
- On the back cover
was their farewell message.
"Stay hungry, stay foolish."
- We're going to Pleistocene Park.
In a way what we're doing is
bringing two visions together.
One is what George Church
is doing at the Harvard lab,
bringing wooly mammoths back to a world,
and the matching vision is to
restore the mammoth steppe.
- Come on.
- This is mammoth.
- You figure that's mammoth?
- Yeah.
I feel it's the smell of mammoth.
- The smell of mammoth, come on.
- It's finger, hand or finger of mammoth.
- Mammoth bones
are just dense in the ground
all across this land.
Sergey Zimov refers to it as
once the world's largest biome.
It wrapped all the way
across the North of Eurasia
and the north of North America, Canada.
While we were here,
the story was getting out of
the discovery by the Zimovs
of something troubling
going on in the permafrost
that they're studying.
- This last winter,
a layer of the permafrost
that normally freezes did not freeze,
it stayed thawed.
- What's coming out of
that lake is real methane
that's going on apparently all
day and all night, all year.
So we've got a bad feedback cycle going on
which needs to be slowed, stopped,
and ideally, reversed
- The Sergey Zimov theory is
that if you put a dense array
of grazing animals back on this land,
they will turn Tundra and Boreal
Forest back into grassland.
And the grassland's gonna stop the release
of greenhouse gasses coming
from this thawing permafrost.
Such a great looking animal.
- These animals busily,
almost frantically they're eating.
Chow, chow, chow, munch munch.
These guys are working.
In the winter,
in order to get to the grass,
the animals, they're
trampling and digging down
through the snow and the
cold gets into the ground
and keeps the ground frozen.
- And then the mammoths,
you can do things that cannot be done
by the other herbivores
like knock down trees.
- Wow.
Talk about data.
At Pleistocene Park
they've been able to prove
that if you have fairly dense population
of grazing animals on the land,
that leads directly to the
ground underneath getting colder
as much as two degrees Celsius.
That amount of coldness can
make an enormous difference
in terms of heading off the
thawing of the permafrost.
So if you get wooly mammoths
back on the landscape,
they will push down the
temperature even more.
This whole Pleistocene
Park Project is a form
of geoengineering, an attempt
to directly affect climate.
And what I love about
it is it's the only form
of geoengineering I know
that's not mechanical, it's biological.
We're nudging the ecosystem
in the right direction
but nature's doing most of the work.
And then the animals take
over and the grass takes over
and this landscape comes back to life.
- Stewart suggests that with tools
and technology there's a
bright future ahead of us,
that we can fix all the
disasters that we've created
on our planet.
But I think these
experiments are horseshit.
At a certain age you need to know
that everything has a shadow
and you need to account for it,
otherwise you run into disastrous
unintended consequences.
- Welcome everybody, we are here tonight
to discuss technology.
We can't live without technology,
no one suggests that,
but how do we live with it?
You, Stewart Brand,
say that we should assume
that the technology is neutral
and that the people
promoting it are neutral.
Why would one assume that
those people are neutral?
- There is very little malevolence
behind new technologies.
People are trying to figure
out how to make a cool,
new tool work in a cool, new way.
- Winona LaDuke?
- Technology's not gonna save us.
It is a tool, perhaps,
in part of what we need to do
but we need to be responsible.
From my perspective all
these questions require
this broader thinking and not an amnesia,
which I think is what you are promoting.
For instance, Edward Teller,
father of the hydrogen
bomb is the guy who came up
with the fabulously bad
idea of geoengineering.
I don't agree that every
new technology is equal
and that everybody comes
with clear moral history
and clear conscience.
I don't agree with that
because I don't actually have amnesia.
- Hi, Stewart.
- Is that Peter?
- Hi, Winona.
- Hi.
- Let me challenge your
hypothesis that we're Gods
and let me suggest a
more accurate metaphor
which would be idiot savants.
We're highly developed.
We have these great skills,
these technological cleverness
which is completely untethered to wisdom.
What I find disturbing and
sort of a little sociopathic
about your perspective
is the absence of doubt.
- Stu loves technology
of almost any variety.
And if you have a big megaphone
like Stewart Brand does,
I would hope he would put it
on the side of preservation.
- This is a American chestnut tree.
There's some tests to be done--
- Instead, for reasons that defeat me,
Stu is a fan of genetic modification.
This is human cleverness.
We know better than nature.
Really?
Stu, I'm sorry,
this is not environmentalism.
- The idea that humans are moving genes
from one organism into the genome
of another organism is
somehow against nature,
is just dead wrong.
It's assisted evolution,
and so we're doing
exactly what nature does.
This is what killed five
billion American chestnut trees.
These trees are functionally extinct
because they can't reproduce
and make a forest like they used to.
But genetically they're
not extinct at all,
they've got all the variety they ever had
and they're about to get
one more bit of variety
which is one or two genes
that will help them head
off the diseases that we brought here,
not on purpose.
But the cure is on purpose.
We use gene guns to move
this gene from wheat
into the American chestnut
and that resists the fungus.
When genetically modified
organisms were first created,
most environmentalists were
just automatically against it,
and that actually makes me pretty mad,
because that's taking
ideology more seriously
than the ecosystems
you're trying to protect.
But this resistance to technology
and intervention is nothing new.
The environmental movement
that formed in the '60s
that I was part of
helping shape, was young,
enthusiastic, not terribly
scientifically informed.
- I enjoy the trees and the elements,
just things that are
very basic to the Earth.
- And it locked
in a number of stances.
- Everything we do affects it.
Everything we get comes from it.
Everything we leave goes back into it.
- An environmentalist
is automatically
against intervention in nature
because nature is always right
and humanity is always wrong.
- Don't fowl your nest.
- It's a romantic story
but it's just wrong.
- A lot of the '60 scene had
been very anti-technological.
You have to make a choice
between being an environmentalist
and being a technologist.
They were seen by many people
as at odds with each other.
Technology was ruining the
environment it seemed like.
Stewart and a few other
people said, no actually,
it's the way we can save it.
- It's a whole lot of good
stuff and it's been for us.
But we're amplifying it as big as we can.
- That started Stewart off
on a line that differed
from many of the people he
had been associated with
in that he had begun
to embrace technology as
the way towards the future.
- It's our biggest problem and
nothing's going to be solved.
No technologies are going
to manipulate people's minds and feelings.
- I was starting to feel isolated
in the environmental movement
and felt like I was cut off
from the rest of the world.
I was working like mad on
the "Whole Earth Catalog"
and I was reduced in
non-catalog function more
and more and more.
There was a room in the back
of the 4,000 square feet
where we did the "Whole Earth
Catalog" where I had a bed
and I was doing a lot of
my work from that bed.
But I didn't even know
to call it depression.
I was bad company for my wife.
The depression I had at
that period was also related
to drug involvement
triggered by the amount
of nitrous oxide I was breathing.
Nitrous oxide was a party
drug in the counter culture.
You would have a flash
which might be exciting or revelatory.
And for a few years I had a tank
about three feet high
delivered once a week
to the "Whole Earth Catalog"
so I could breath it up.
I got wrapped up in my own mind
which then turned all
convoluted watching itself
to the point where I could barely drive,
because I was watching
my mind watch my mind
watch my mind instead of
watching the damn road.
Depression is self-reinforcing
and becomes its own system.
So long after I stopped
breathing nitrous oxide,
I was still badly depressed.
Basically, I wanted
off this runaway train,
so came up with the idea,
how about I just stop the
success right in its tracks?
- He made the decision that we
would do the last "Whole Earth Catalog"
and we sold a million copies.
- And then as
a way to celebrate that
we put on a public,
what we call Demise Party.
- We had some money
and he made a decision
that we would do this social experiment.
- I said, I have here in
my hand $20,000 in cash.
Go on and tell us what you think
should happen to the money?
They money will go to a
person with the responsibility
for seeing it through a
project by probably dawn.
And these are hippies
that have been living
on $200 a year.
So to be standing there on
stage with a pretty thick wad
of $100 bills and trying to say, well,
my commune really needs a pump.
The notions piled up
but it turned out most
of them were bad.
- I think this money should be used
to get all the Jews out of Miami
and get the Puerto Ricans
back where they belong.
- So it was a disappointment
in that regard
'cause my hypothesis had
been that under duress people
would be extra creative.
We've gotta get together
and deal with our problem.
What actually turned out to be the case
was under duress people
are extra non-creative.
- Well, 'cause you're
a fucking (indistinct).
- It was basically chaotic.
- You've got nine million suggestions.
They're all good, pick one.
This could go on for
the next fucking year.
- I suggest one $100 dollar
bill to put in the fireplace.
- You wanna put $100--
One guy, his name's Fred,
set fire to his $100 bill and
said it's not about the money,
it's about the people.
And by the end of all this he was the guy
that took away $20,000.
It felt like a total failure.
I was in a bad way
and I'm shutting down one
thing after another to see
what thing I can get rid of
that will give me a chance
to get myself back?
So I shut down the "Whole Earth Catalog"
and I wasn't better.
And I shut down my marriage.
By then, being just with her
was getting troubled enough
for me and probably to
some extent for her.
But I initiated the,
let's not be married anymore.
- He woke up one morning and
he said he wanted a divorce.
So that was the end of that, okay.
I still feel cold.
- The 1970s I spent living alone.
I was in a lot of stupid pain.
It took a while to get out
of being really shut down
in terms of feeling good about life.
I had seen people get
in the mood of, well,
I'm having a problem with my drug,
so obviously the answer is
I should take more drugs.
That universally did not work out.
So one aspect of how I
treated being depressed
at the time was to not
try to fix it with drugs.
I was starting to do meditation
and seeing a psychiatrist
who was actually pretty good.
And eventually I was able to become more
and more happy again.
And at that point,
having shut down the
"Whole Earth Catalog",
I was free to pursue a
subject I was curious about.
10 years earlier when I
was visiting Stanford,
I hear male yells from
what was called the Computation Center.
And it turns out they
were playing the earliest
of all the video games called "Space War".
They were gathered around a
mini computer called PDP-1.
What got me about it was
the insane enthusiasm
and out of body wildness that was going on
in the players of this game.
They identified with what
I thought of as hippies
but they weren't doing drugs very much,
because they had found a better drug
and the better drug was computer power.
I wrote it up for "Rolling Stone"
and I began the article with the line,
ready or not,
computers are coming to the people.
People get up to strange things
and people that are good at
getting up to strange things,
get up to more than the one.
At the end of the Demise Party,
the guy who'd set fire
to the $100 bill came away with $20,000.
- He was this unusual
draft resister activist
community organizer, a guy
by the name of Fred Moore.
He was deeply opposed to
the very concept of money,
so the fact that Fred got the
money was really quite ironic.
Fred took the money,
put it in his backyard in
a coffee can and buried it.
It was a little bit
like Frodo and the ring
- That same Fred Moore who
did a few interesting things
for that money,
a couple of years later
was one of the founders
of the Homebrew Computer Club,
one of the most important groups
in the history of technology.
It's where Steve Jobs
and Steve Wozniak met
and started Apple Computer.
- Stewart, he
was in the thick of that
and began to actively
organizing that community.
- Stewart and I are both
attracted to technologists
that are on the frontier.
And because of Stewart
I had the opportunity
to see the very beginning
of how the internet was gonna play out.
- Ryan Phelan and I
took on the organization
of this event called
the Hackers Conference.
That was the beginning of my involvement
with the personal computer revolution.
I'm Stewart Brand.
I'm not a hacker.
I'm here for the contact high.
- One long-time supporter
of Hackers is Stewart Brand.
- They are more effective in
pushing the culture around now
in good ways than almost
any group I can think of.
- But the real
purpose of the get-together was
to discuss the unique set of values
that made the computer
revolution possible.
- Political platform is
that we need an electronic
declaration of independence.
- We were trying
to liberate the tools
that had been kept in the hands
of powerful companies like IBM.
- Sometimes the companies internally,
because they own it,
will squash it and say you cannot have it,
even though we're not gonna put it out
and nobody else in the
world's gonna get it.
That's a hiding of
information that is wrong.
- And there was a
hacker ethic to be transparent
and to share code.
- My project is to make all software free.
My soul is in that.
Tools I will give away to anybody.
- This software I wrote
is a desk accessory,
so it works on top of
any other application.
- This a program that allows
you to switch very quickly
between programs on the
map as I can show you here.
- Stewart was the first guy to get it.
The personal computer was one
of the most powerful examples
of using machines as
tools for independence
and that you could build your own world
out of this new technology.
He saw that hacker's culture
shared a lot of values
with the "Whole Earth Catalog" ideal.
That information should be freely shared.
- Stewart was one of the
first people who realized that
that actually was a social movement,
that wasn't just like a couple of new toys
that had appeared.
That's a very typical
Stewart thing to understand
that there is something there,
to take it seriously,
to give it a name.
As soon as you call a situation something,
the people within it start to
look around and say, oh yeah
it is something, yeah.
Okay, we're in something together.
- I had been in solo
bachelorhood for quite a while
and one of the things I was
missing was conversation.
And I found that the
conversations I was having
with Ryan Phelan,
they were some of the best I was having.
So here we are 35 years later still
having a good conversation.
Hello.
Here you go.
- It must've been about 1980.
I think we both realized
a mutual appreciation
of each other that went beyond work.
We liked taking hikes out in nature.
Sparks flew and there were
some very soulful moments there
on hillsides where we
got to know each other.
We had realized we had fallen in love.
We were both pretty fascinated
with the waterfront community.
We'd been wandering up and down the docks,
looking at houseboats.
Mirene was a rotted out 1912 tugboat
and we brought her back to life.
To be honest,
when Stewart and I started thinking
about getting a boat together,
I still didn't really necessarily think
about it as a marriage.
I was a product of the '60s
and marriage was not something
that I thought was an essential
part of a relationship.
I was kind of in it for the short-term.
That was great and it
was fun and I had no idea
how profound it would be to actually start
to create this life with Stewart.
He surprised me.
I could get used to this.
- You could get used to this, yeah.
Ryan and I are always scheming things up.
We're always advisors to
each other's projects.
But when we work together
closely it's just wonderful.
- You got a seal right here.
- Really?
- Shall we swap?
- Hi, guys.
- Isn't that great?
- The two of us
created Revive and Restore,
which is the entity that is
making de-extinction possible.
- It's not just about
bringing back a wooly mammoth,
but this technology is what's
needed for conservation.
Good afternoon, I'm Ryan Phelan
and we work at the convergence
of biotech and conservation.
- One thing that
biotech is bringing to the rescue
of endangered species is a
chance to get off the defense
and go on the offense.
- We have to protect, absolutely.
We have to intervene
when these new technologies
start to demonstrate--
- So Ross, you wanna prevent extinction,
meanwhile you have other people trying
to bring species back.
Where is your moral compass on this?
- Have we taken on a responsibility
that has no end point to it?
I would say, yes,
because what we're doing is playing God.
And in that event,
we have to look at it in the same way
that we would look at
obligations to any living thing.
- About 10 years ago,
Stewart asked me to
participate in a meeting
that was going to take up de-extinction.
I'm at paleomammalogist
and the idea of being able
to actually interact with
a living wooly mammoth,
this was astounding and
I was totally fascinated,
I admit it.
But although the idea
of bringing back species
that are no longer with us
is immensely attractive,
I also understand it's
about the worst thing
we could possibly do.
Stewart Brand is a visionary.
I, by contrast,
am a pragmatist.
What's the length of time
that we're talking about
to make and to manufacturer
a wooly mammoth?
Stewart thinks centuries.
So do I.
And that's a long period
of time to keep interest up
in an experiment that
has no certain outcome.
- We are a major force
now in this dynamic planet
and we have to function as an
entire global civilization,
patiently over time with
awareness and continuity.
And we've never done that before.
There are issues going on
in the world like climate
change and extinction
and it's gonna take
centuries to sort them out.
One of the problems now is
that civilization is revving itself
into a pathologically
short attention span.
When I met Stewart it was
getting to be the early '90s
and people were still thinking
about the future as
being in the year 2,000.
And I realized that the future had kind
of been shrinking by one year
per year for my whole life.
That's when I started designing this clock
that would last for 10,000 years.
- I heard from
Danny Hillis about his idea
to build Estonian scale mechanical clock
that would tick once a Century,
more in every thousand years
and after much longer than
that the cuckoo comes out.
- Stewart realized
the 10,000-year clock
would change how people thought
about time long before I did,
even when I was building it.
- There are ways
to help each other behave
more responsibly and
we want people to think
about the next 10,000
years the way they think
about next week.
The photographs of the earth
from space 50 years ago
gave humanity a whole new
way to think about itself
and about the planet that we live on,
but it didn't really teach
us anything about time.
We need icons that give people a sense
of long-term thinking.
- To make something last
for 10,000 years you have
to choose materials that
can last, like titanium.
You make things very,
very large so that the
wear doesn't matter much.
But actually by far the hardest
problem is making something
that people will care
about for 10,000 years.
- When we started building the clock,
we had talked about the idea
of the clock having a chime.
Because it will be beautiful
if this was almost subsonic
or even subsonic.
And I thought,
well, if you had 10 bells you would
have three million possible
permutations of those 10 bells.
Just the sound of the clock.
That meant you could have
a different chime each day
for 10,000 years.
- We're trying
to figure out what kind
of a site should it be for a clock?
And we decided it should be
kind of a pilgrimage site.
So after much exploration,
we're now putting a very large
clock inside a 500-foot shaft
inside a mountain.
- It's in analog.
- The big clock
probably just going.
If the clock is an artwork
then it's already an expression
of thinking long term.
(clock bell chiming)
- The clock is a provocation in a sense.
You're hoping to consciously
put into the world something
that would give people that flash,
that moment of saying, wow,
I see, is it possible
that we could be around
for 10,000 years?
What if there's a war?
Or what if a astroid hits the earth
and there's a nuclear winter?
Even saying, what if,
is starting to do what the
clock is intended to do.
- I think we're in the shift
point in the long story,
finding out how nature actually works,
finding out how we actually work.
And de-extinction is a good
way of keeping people reminded
that they're gonna bear down
on some issues for a long time.
And when you do that astounding
things can be accomplished,
including bringing back wooly mammoths.
In fact, bring back the
whole damn mammoth steppe,
change that biome back
to what it used to be,
which would be better for the climate,
and that's a long-term story.
- The Greek word, hubris,
has to do with the idea that
a hero has a central failing
that he's not aware of,
but the failing eventually comes out
and usually results in disaster.
I think that's a very word
for the de-extinction agenda.
It is hubris.
- Remember Jurassic park,
amazing movie where
science brings dinosaurs
back from extinction.
The science is now getting real.
Right now scientists and
thinkers are working on a way
to revive other extinct
species like the wooly mammoth.
To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum, should they?
Here to be making his opening statement,
ladies and gentlemen, Stewart Brand.
- I've been a conservationist
since I was 10,
just 70 years ago,
and what's driving us now is
getting some species back.
You will be having the
chestnut trees coming back,
raining down sweet nuts for
wildlife and for humans.
You will have passenger pigeons back,
taking up their old habitat
which is perfectly intact
and waiting for them.
So a vote for de-extinction
is a vote for more life.
- All right, thank you very much ladies
and gentleman, Stewart Brand.
Stewart, but I would like to
let your opponents respond
to that last point.
- Why do we think we can
do this with elephants?
Elephants are sentient creatures.
They have self-awareness.
Human babies, until they're
six months or a year or so,
are not self-aware.
Your dog isn't self-aware.
So why are we considering
them the kind of property
that we can mess with
and then set them loose?
Is that really their job?
- Okay, that's a perfectly
phrased question.
I want to bring it to George Church.
- Excellent point and I sympathize.
However, they are currently not
having such a happy life going extinct.
I agree that we should be humane.
We should do something
that's for their benefit,
not just the benefit of the planet.
I think the ends and the
means should be humane.
- The real de-extinction agenda,
which is bringing back
completely extinct species,
it's not for repairing ecosystems
that in a sense don't
need repairing anymore
because we're already
10,000 years down the pike
from what they were.
The planet is getting warmer.
Whether or not we get elephants
up into Northern Siberia is not going
to change the equation sufficiently
to turn the whole process back.
The real problem,
as usual, is us.
- Stewart, to response?
- Wooly mammoths and the mammoth steppe
are not gonna fix climate change,
but they could be over the long-term part
of the stabilization of climate.
- I have to say, Stewart,
that I'm very pleased that I
am not the most naive person
on the panel tonight.
- All right, we try not
to make it personal.
- It's a joke.
- I'm trying to think of not naive,
it's not that cutting but it was there.
So let's try to keep it above board.
Dr. Lynn Rothschild?
- In the end we've been
dancing around this idea
of what is natural.
Is it natural to have a wooly mammoth
on the Siberian steppes?
Or is it more natural to have
a sky filled with teradactyls
or maybe a sea filled with trilobites.
Jurassic park was a bad idea.
Pleistocene Park is no better.
So no matter how cool this seems,
we should not de-extinct creatures.
- And now it's time to learn
which side that you feel
has been more convincing?
Lynn and Ross,
they pulled up 17 percentage points.
That's the number to beat.
Stewart and George,
they lost four percentage points.
That means that the winner
of this debate is the side arguing,
don't bring extinct
creatures back to life.
- I think what will change
people's minds is the change
in the facts,
change in the data.
And we're all still waiting
for actual de-extinction to occur.
I wish I could see the wooly
mammoth back in the wild
and that probably won't
happen in my lifetime,
but I have lived to see
American chestnuts come back.
- These are all destined to go out
in the field this year.
- Back in the day I said that,
we are as gods and might
as well get good at it,
but it's really becoming,
we are as nature,
and using nature to do things
that nature does already.
In my mind this is a forest
we're flying over at altitude.
- I like that idea.
- American chestnut is
the first de-extinction
and then trees will be
planted by the thousands.
And that was not possible two decades ago.
Now it's not only possible,
it's the way it's gonna be.
Okay, is that about right?
It's good?
These little American
chestnuts can live a Century
or more in getting arms.
And eventually in this
century the American chestnut
should be completely back
in the Eastern forest
and I can't wait.
For me as a conservationist
to engage seriously
with an ecosystem that you may care about,
gives you a place to live that
isn't inside your own skin
and takes down some of the dread of death
and engages a larger life.
People wind up writing memoirs
because they want their children to know
what their life was really like.
People are really interested
in their parents' story,
maybe their grandparents' story.
Generations is a good way to think,
but let's go way longer than that.
Once you are holding these
longer timeframes in mind,
that starts to raise the question
of what do you do on Monday?
Does your behavior start to
reflect this larger frame?
- Oh, yeah.
- Mammoth.
- It's a tusk in here.
Beautifully preserved specimen.
- You think those are part of it?
- That's useful for us.
- All right.
- The main event.
Great.
- Mammoth's trunk.
- Wow.
- Oh yeah,
you can see that.
- Yeah, you can see it.
- So we would like
to help you get DNA sequence.
- DNA, okay.
- We finally got some hair.
- This is not an ancient artifact.
Using DNA, we can bring
back extinct species.
So this is the once in the future mammoth
that we're looking at.
It has been gone for a
while and with any luck,
they are on the way back.
- Stewart is a lot
like the great American P. T. Barnum.
- Stewart is the
intellectual Johnny Appleseed
of the counterculture.
- Stewart might be the
Zelig or maybe the DaVinci
of cyber culture.
- It's actually
a little bit eerie
how often Stewart has
been at the right place
at the right time.
- He's like an invincible string.
- And by the time
all the rest of us get there,
he's gone on to something
else more interesting.
- Stewart has this remarkable
"Forrest Gump" superpower--
- I believe he said he had to go pee.
- To sense where the frontiers are
and then be there.
- He's like Kilroy.
He shows up in the background
of every important thing going on.
- He could see into the future
that this technology was
going to be a huge part
of American culture.
- Welcome Stewart Brand.
- It isn't so much
that he's ahead of it,
he's actually creating the future.
- Steve Jobs, not surprisingly,
was fascinated by Stewart.
- When I was young the
"Whole Earth Catalog"
was one of the Bibles of my generation.
It was created by a fellow
named Stewart Brand.
It was sort of like Google
in paperback form 35 years
before Google came along.
- So many of the
ideas that you may find vital
either originate with Stewart Brand
or were really articulated by him.
- Ideas that scene at
the edge of believability
from the environmental movement,
to the technological
movement, to genetics.
- Stu loves being the
techno file with the answer.
But technologies tend
to break people apart.
- Stewart is an evangelical optimist
which may be quite dangerous.
- He's famous for saying,
"We are as Gods,
"so we might as well get good at it"
- My own progress through life
has been to try stuff early on
when there aren't rules against it yet
so you get to be part of
the new thing in the world.
I didn't sit down in life
to have a trajectory.
It is a pretty interesting
way to have a life
'cause you get to be surprised a lot.
I was born, I'm told,
I don't remember it,
in Rockford, Illinois.
We were a Midwestern family.
My father was a civil engineer out of MIand I got from him respect for that kind
of problem solving that
engineers love to do.
And I took after my mother in the sense
that she was mad for books.
I know my mother was instilling values
of caring about wildlife.
This is kind of where
I grew up and I'm back
in this cottage 63 years, basically,
after I left at the age of 16.
This is where all the fun stuff was.
I got to be a free-range kid.
- I remember Stewart as a
kid who is really interested
in animals and would get into mischief
that way fairly often.
- I was very much in cahoots with wildlife
like the chipmunks and squirrels.
I had an opossum named Frank
I had a wonderful raccoon named Oscar.
There was a feral cat
and he became my friend.
And when we left out the road,
the cat chased the car all
the way out to the highway.
- Stewart was already smart
and he went off to Stanford.
- I've been a conservationist all my life.
And I was trained as a
biologist back in the '50s.
At Stanford, I went
in the direction of ecology and evolution.
- We have an extremely serious
world demographic situation.
Famine and plague and thermonuclear war,
and who knows which one or
what combination will come?
- I'm Paul Ehrlich,
president of the Center
for Conservation Biology
at Stanford University
and notorious doomsayer.
Doom.
- Paul Ehrlich was my advisor
for the field work that I was doing.
- Stewart was one of the
brightest students I ever had
in the biology department working,
as I recall, on tarantulas.
- So I would go
out on a full moon night
and put up a cot and just watch
what tarantulas do all night.
What I've learned is
that in any ecosystem,
species are evolving in
relation to other species
who are evolving right back at them.
And if you apply it to the extinction,
there's a new kind of
problem for humanity.
- Let's put it this way,
if you have a very complex,
evolving planet on which
your life absolutely depends,
taking pieces out of it at random is,
by definition, a bad idea.
- We have the power to
destroy life on this planet,
which we unfortunately are
going about at warp speed.
And we are now looking at
the extinction of species
at a rate faster than when
the dinosaurs went extinct.
- The American chestnut is
one of the prime examples
of a species that is so consequential
in terms of the whole ecosystem that if
that species is gone the
whole ecosystem has changed.
One quarter of all the
trees in the Eastern forest
of the United States used to
be American chestnut trees.
Around 1905, this fungus came in,
apparently from Asia,
killed the trees and they were all gone
within about 20 years.
It was huge.
It's called the Redwood of the East.
It was an enormously loved
species in North America.
They put down these incredibly sweet nuts
in vast quantities every year.
And it fed a lot of humans and a whole lot
of animals depended on that food source.
And when that food source went away,
the animals went away.
Hi sweeties, there they are.
God.
The passenger pigeon was
once one of the wonders
of North America.
Visitors from Europe were
wowed by Niagara Falls,
but they were even more wowed
by these incredibly large
and beautiful flocks of passenger
pigeons streaming overhead
for days at 60 miles an hour.
They were a forest bird
and they ran out of forest
as well as being hunted to death.
My mother grew up in the living memory
of what it was like to have
the most abundant animal
in America disappear in a
period of about three decades.
And she said when the
last one died in 1914,
it broke America's heart.
But that's a tragedy
that can be unwritten.
You can actually go back to
the end of the play and say,
that's not the end of the play,
because we didn't kill their DNA.
Using a closely-related living species,
we can edit the missing
genes into the living species
and basically recreate
the extinct species.
And we're moving in the
direction of bringing
back passenger pigeons and wooly mammoths.
I started to get a sense
of where it was going
from George Church at Harvard,
one of the leading geniuses in biotech.
- George Church,
a world leading geneticist
whose DNA harbors genes for genius.
- He's totally
adored by the media.
- George Church, everyone.
Bring back the wooly mammoth.
Can we get one?
- Yeah.
- Tonight's topic is de-extinction.
Oh my Gosh, de-extinction.
George, what's the next
creature that's gonna crawl
out of your lab?
- So one that's already crawling out are--
- I was just joking.
Okay, so you have a real
answer to that question?
When you're creating new species,
have you really thought it through?
Because if you haven't
then you're dangerous.
- I'm definitely dangerous.
- Okay, got that.
Okay, that answers that.
- This is the room where
we did all the pig cloning
where we were eliminating
viruses from their genome.
- Why its own room?
- Why?
- Why has its own room?
It's extra clean?
- Well, it's very clean.
I tend not to go in
these rooms because most
of the human cell we use are from my body.
And many of them are transformed
with potential carcinogens.
- What? Wait.
You're not worried about your
cells getting into there,
you're worried about those cells
getting into you?
- Getting into me, yeah right.
- And doing what?
- I'm not worried about it
but the lab is, yeah.
Good questions, you're hired.
- The plausibility
of de-extinction,
George Church's lab is
really where it all began.
And George started with wooly mammoth.
- The mammoth was a keystone
species in the Arctic.
20,000 years ago our ancestors
started systematically
slaughtering mammoths.
They were altogether too easy to get
with our new technical abilities.
And the new tools we had
for killing off the
herbivores included knives
and spears and fire.
They had strategies for surrounding them
and running them off of cliffs.
Those mistakes, the people who
made them did them innocently
and aren't around to take
responsibility for them.
We need to take responsibility.
And now we're in a position
where we could reverse those mistakes
with better tools than our ancestors had.
- So this is mammoth tissue.
- Right.
- Can you see
the small tissue?
- Yeah.
- Since Asian elephants and
wooly mammoths are so similar
to each other, 99.6% similar,
we are hoping to test them
first in elephant tissue
and then see whether they work.
- What we're doing at
Harvard is editing the genes
that bridge the small gap between mammoths
and modern Asian elephants
so that they can be cold resistant.
- I am Stewart Brand.
This is the first public
discussion of the possibility
of bringing back extinct species.
What's different and what's the same
about the kind of hybridization--
- Stewart brought us together
in the de-extinction movement
and in the same sense that you say,
this is the Manhattan Project,
this is the Apollo Project,
this is the Human Genome Project.
That's the sort of thing
that Stewart has brought to de-extinction.
- The century of work that'll go in
to making this a reality.
These engineered mammoth-elephant
hybrids will initially go
to Pleistocene Park in Northern Siberia.
We collaborate with these
Russian conservationists,
Sergey Zimov and his son, Nikita Zimov.
They're returning a variety
of herbivores needed
for this particular ecosystem.
The only one they're missing
is this mammoth-elephant hybrid.
That's our job to provide one of those.
- It turns out that by bringing
back the wooly mammoth,
we can help fix climate change.
The exaggerated version is that we need
to bring back wooly mammoths
because they will save the world.
- I think steward likes the idea,
as do I,
of being able to recreate
extinct animals from DNA.
But one of the things that I've learned
in my much longer life
than Stewart has had
is that when you pull a
technological rabbit out of a hat,
it very often has very nasty droppings.
- I would love to see a mammoth.
Wouldn't that be cool.
That, we can do it,
is so much fun and so
fascinating for people
who love technology.
At the same time we ought to be asking,
should we do this?
Is this a good idea?
- So what you've got here
is kind of a place where my stuff lives
and also my entire past,
come to think of it.
And then we go into
The archive.
Films and slides from my
older multimedia shows back
in the '60s.
Photographs, I was a
professional photographer
for years in the
'60s and into the '70s.
I graduated early '60s.
An old family friend commissioned
me to photograph a tribe
of Indians in Oregon.
I had no idea about what
Contemporary Indians did
and how they lived.
So the photographs I took,
for me, there were revelatory.
- The first time I met Stewart Brand was
at the National Congress
of American Indians
in Sheridan, Wyoming.
I was working on the registration desk
and he came through the door
with his camera.
He was very blonde,
didn't fit in.
He was very much out of place.
- We went from friends
to absolutely in love
and she became Lois Jennings Brand.
- Stewart didn't want
to be encumbered by anything
like a lease in an apartment.
So we purchased a trailer,
put all of our belongings,
which in his case involved
photographic equipment
and a ton of books.
- We moved to San Francisco
and I started to immerse myself
in the Bohemian life of the
slightly post Beatnik period
that was happening by the early '60s.
That was when I met Ken Kesey.
His book, "One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest",
had a Indian protagonist.
They sent the photographs
to Kesey and word got back,
we'll, come on down.
- The first time
that Stewart met Kesey,
we drove down to a little tree house.
- Somebody by the door said, welcome,
you must be Stewart.
And that was not usually
how you met strangers
in those days.
Usually marijuana was smoked
in the bathroom right next
to the toilet so you can flush it down.
So right away I saw the
Prankster and boldness.
- The Merry Pranksters were
a very interesting collection
of young, footloose folk.
And Ken Kesey was kind of
the boss of the outfit.
When Stewart started
coming to Prankster events,
pretty soon, he's sporting a top hat.
- Aware of your their own bodies,
their own senses, their breathing,
where they're at and who they're with.
- He's beginning to
manifest signs of straying
from the norm in a really good way.
- Civilization was in question.
The civil rights and
Vietnam War resistance.
We felt like an all out generation.
LSD was a right of passage.
We took apart the
trappings of orderly mind
and good education.
And LSD gave us permission to
try things in unapproved ways.
And that also probably added
to our creativity in the sense
that we weren't trying to
make it in the lawful world.
We were making it in the
world that we felt was partly
of our own creation.
The best thing I learned
from their Pranksters,
and this came straight from
Kesey, was fearlessness.
And one of the mottos of the
Pranksters was, go further.
- Original Prankster credo,
you start off by saying,
never trust a Prankster,
because I will eventually lie
to you even though I may not want to.
If I say one thing today,
it may not work tomorrow.
- Go ahead,
Would you repeat that again?
- Kesey was a charismatic leader
and it puts you in the position
of paying close attention
to this person.
And then what happens is
that the charismatic
character is writing the story
that everybody is participating in.
And you're left having
not written your own story
for a while.
I happened to me to a little extent.
And I wanted to check in on who am I?
Who do I wanna be?
What do I wanna be doing?
So for my final role in
the Merry Pranksters,
I wanted to plan one last big event.
- One of the things
that we did was events
called The Acid Test.
We had music and projections.
All of this is audience participation
which was not really done in those days.
It was a costume party like
you've never seen before.
because of the additional
energy from the LSD.
- I started
to organize this thing
and that was the most
important of all acid tests,
and we called it the Trips Festival.
- When Stewart was doing all the work
for the Trips Festival
he made up a poster.
He put the names of bands on there
that he would like to attend.
And, in fact,
they showed up because they
saw the posters and said,
oh, we're supposed to be there.
- Good evening
from Captain Consciousness.
For your listening pleasure,
the Grateful Dead.
- Indeed, they
did show up and thousands
and thousands of hippies showed
up and Tom Wolfe was right
because this is the night was born.
There was a big bucket
of ice cream going around
that was laced with LSD.
And it was gonna taste
delicious when you ate it
and then it was gonna
become very strange 1/2 an hour later.
What really took off was Grateful Dead
who had just named themselves
that and they got on stage
and they were sensational.
- Stewart invited
every weirdo in the Bay Area
that had gadgets to come
and set up their stuff.
- We were projecting
various things on the walls
and Ken Kesey is writing messages.
- I spent much of the Trips Festival
under a table with a stripper
that I was going out with,
high on acid.
It would be hard for me to
tell you much more than that.
It was maybe my first
experience of being high
with lots and lots of people.
- People are not dancing with each other,
they're dancing with
everybody and looking around
and clotsing into things
and doing stuff to the beat
that everybody is on.
Typically, at a party
wherever there was a strobe,
people would just get under it and then.
That was another thing
that got people moving
'cause they loved watching pieces
of themselves flying around.
- The Trips Festival
was a watershed moment
that introduced a lot
of different communities
and families to one another.
We could recognize each other and knew
that we were on the same page.
- Thousands of hippies in
the Bay Area discovered
that there were thousands
of hippies in the Bay Area.
And that let's you know
there's a movement.
Trips Festival was a very
true for me in the sense
of I just made a riot happen.
But on the other hand, nothing's changed.
Yeah, that was a great event,
meanwhile, now what?
So two months later,
it's a tedious afternoon
and maybe I'll just take,
I don't know,
100 micrograms or something
and go up on the roof
and see what LSD does for the afternoon.
And as I'm looking out at San Francisco,
I imagine that the buildings
that are parallel Downtown
are not quite parallel,
they're actually slightly
diverge because they're
on the curved surface of the Earth.
At this point we're 10 years into Sputnik
and there's been no photographs
of the Earth as a whole.
LSD is not actually
consciousness expanding,
it's consciousness concentrating.
And so you get thinking about one thing
and that's all you can
think about for hours.
So all I could think
about on that rooftop was
how different everything would be
if you could see a photograph
of the Earth in space?
So what I had conjured
in my mind was a button
that would say,
why haven't we seen a photograph
of the whole Earth yet?
I sent the button to
all of the congressmen,
to NASA and officials in the Soviet Union
and then started selling
them on college campuses.
People would come up and say,
what's this about?
Ever since 1945,
the image of the mushroom
cloud made people feel
that civilization was basically doomed.
Being a photographer,
I was thinking about the images
that hadn't been made yet
that might change humanity's behavior.
- T-minus 10, nine,
eight, seven,
six,
five.
Liftoff.
- I feel the liftoff,
the clock has started.
I was the Apollo 9 lunar module pilot.
Seeing the earth with your own eyes,
you realize how small and fragile it is
and that all of life is on that planet.
It changes your perspective
and that's basically
what Stewart recognized.
- Finally,
NASA publicly released
the first ever image of the whole Earth.
The whole damn thing was alive,
you could see that.
And it was a hopeful image
and it blew away the mushroom cloud.
- That one image created
this extraordinary frame
of reference for our
relationships with other cultures
and the planet itself.
- Humanity wasn't just capable
of destroying itself,
humanity was capable of discovering itself
in this very visual way.
- Let's give Stewart credit.
When we could look at the
real earth in her photograph
that Stewart kept yelling for,
people were beginning to get
this idea that we all live
on a very small planet and
that we're not just passengers,
we're the crew and we're
responsible for what goes on.
- Indeed, once we
did have the photographs,
suddenly there's organizations
called Friends of the Earth
and Earth First.
A bunch of environmental
organizations took off globally
that were assuming care of this thing
that was now understood
to be in need of care.
- The United Nations has
assumed responsibility
for the preservation of
species in danger of extinction
and whereas the United
Nations Conference--
- I think Stu played a very important role
in creating the environmental movement
and in making it accessible,
showing people that there
are different ways to live.
- All my friends were involved
in various commune efforts,
basically trying to reinvent civilization.
Most of these communes were being started
by liberal arts majors who
had dropped out of college
and their knowledge was
not helping them at all.
By then I had a sense I wanted
to effect change in the world.
Human nature doesn't change.
You're wasting your time
if you try to change
how people behave,
but if you can change their tools,
you can change whatever you want.
And I thought, well,
I could maybe have kind of a catalog.
The great thing about being
a double (indistinct) artist
is that I didn't have a job.
So if you have an idea and it still seems
like a good idea the next day,
you just start.
And so I'd started the
"Whole Earth Catalog" in 1968
and the subtitle was "Access to Tools".
- In all the "Whole Earth Catalogs,
Stewart injected the phrase,
"We are as Gods and might
as well get good at it."
- It was an acknowledgement
that there's an empowerment
that has occurred of the individual.
Lois was the COO
and brought a business acumen.
- The first issue I think we
only printed a thousand copies.
A number were given away.
It was just a massive disaster.
He's going, no.
- The first first "Whole Earth Catalog",
we distributed them by
carrying them around physically
to bookstores and saying, here.
And they would say,
what is it, what section do I put it in?
And we would not know how to answer that.
- You have to understand how
impoverished the world was
in terms of information.
If you'd had a question
it was very unlikely
that you would ever get an answer to it,
so most people never asked the question.
- These days I'll pop open my handy phone,
go on the internet,
Google it and the world's
information is at my fingertips.
When the "Whole Earth Catalog" came out,
this wasn't true.
Where would you go?
- You could think of
it as the web on newsprint,
so it became a catalog of possibilities.
And the startup culture
was born directly out
of the "Whole Earth Catalog".
- Stewart and his
team put out several issues
of the "Whole Earth Catalog"
and he brought it to life
with his poetic touch.
This was in the late '60s
before personal computers
and desktop publishing,
so it was all made with typewriters,
scissors and Polaroid cameras.
It was idealistic,
overflowing with neat
tools and great notions.
- Millions of
people who were reading it
were taught to invent their life.
- Everybody could plug in and chip in
on this conversation about what's the role
of tools and technology in this
new imagining of the world?
- For somebody like me,
living in the English
countryside at the time,
I thought, oh my God,
there's a lot of others out there too.
And it consolidated in so
many people's minds the idea
that there was a new movement,
there was a new
consciousness of some kind.
The "Whole Earth Catalog"
was a revolution.
- I had set the "Whole Earth Catalog"
on a path of it had to be bigger, better,
more ambitious, wider reach,
more people involved.
Pretty soon we had a very steep curve
of people subscribing this
publication and money coming in,
and it was being a fabulous
success in the world.
- The "Whole Earth Catalog",
it's just full of the kinds of things
that make you wish you had
infinite amount of spare time.
Oh, this is an amazing thing.
- It won the
National Book Award.
I was getting interviewed.
Why haven't we seen the
photograph of the whole Earth yet?
So at a fairly young age
I was nationally famous.
Plus, we have a flag
which is a pretty thing,
the only flag you can say that
doesn't exclude anybody out,
everybody's in it.
- That's the Earth from the NASA?
- On the back cover
was their farewell message.
"Stay hungry, stay foolish."
- We're going to Pleistocene Park.
In a way what we're doing is
bringing two visions together.
One is what George Church
is doing at the Harvard lab,
bringing wooly mammoths back to a world,
and the matching vision is to
restore the mammoth steppe.
- Come on.
- This is mammoth.
- You figure that's mammoth?
- Yeah.
I feel it's the smell of mammoth.
- The smell of mammoth, come on.
- It's finger, hand or finger of mammoth.
- Mammoth bones
are just dense in the ground
all across this land.
Sergey Zimov refers to it as
once the world's largest biome.
It wrapped all the way
across the North of Eurasia
and the north of North America, Canada.
While we were here,
the story was getting out of
the discovery by the Zimovs
of something troubling
going on in the permafrost
that they're studying.
- This last winter,
a layer of the permafrost
that normally freezes did not freeze,
it stayed thawed.
- What's coming out of
that lake is real methane
that's going on apparently all
day and all night, all year.
So we've got a bad feedback cycle going on
which needs to be slowed, stopped,
and ideally, reversed
- The Sergey Zimov theory is
that if you put a dense array
of grazing animals back on this land,
they will turn Tundra and Boreal
Forest back into grassland.
And the grassland's gonna stop the release
of greenhouse gasses coming
from this thawing permafrost.
Such a great looking animal.
- These animals busily,
almost frantically they're eating.
Chow, chow, chow, munch munch.
These guys are working.
In the winter,
in order to get to the grass,
the animals, they're
trampling and digging down
through the snow and the
cold gets into the ground
and keeps the ground frozen.
- And then the mammoths,
you can do things that cannot be done
by the other herbivores
like knock down trees.
- Wow.
Talk about data.
At Pleistocene Park
they've been able to prove
that if you have fairly dense population
of grazing animals on the land,
that leads directly to the
ground underneath getting colder
as much as two degrees Celsius.
That amount of coldness can
make an enormous difference
in terms of heading off the
thawing of the permafrost.
So if you get wooly mammoths
back on the landscape,
they will push down the
temperature even more.
This whole Pleistocene
Park Project is a form
of geoengineering, an attempt
to directly affect climate.
And what I love about
it is it's the only form
of geoengineering I know
that's not mechanical, it's biological.
We're nudging the ecosystem
in the right direction
but nature's doing most of the work.
And then the animals take
over and the grass takes over
and this landscape comes back to life.
- Stewart suggests that with tools
and technology there's a
bright future ahead of us,
that we can fix all the
disasters that we've created
on our planet.
But I think these
experiments are horseshit.
At a certain age you need to know
that everything has a shadow
and you need to account for it,
otherwise you run into disastrous
unintended consequences.
- Welcome everybody, we are here tonight
to discuss technology.
We can't live without technology,
no one suggests that,
but how do we live with it?
You, Stewart Brand,
say that we should assume
that the technology is neutral
and that the people
promoting it are neutral.
Why would one assume that
those people are neutral?
- There is very little malevolence
behind new technologies.
People are trying to figure
out how to make a cool,
new tool work in a cool, new way.
- Winona LaDuke?
- Technology's not gonna save us.
It is a tool, perhaps,
in part of what we need to do
but we need to be responsible.
From my perspective all
these questions require
this broader thinking and not an amnesia,
which I think is what you are promoting.
For instance, Edward Teller,
father of the hydrogen
bomb is the guy who came up
with the fabulously bad
idea of geoengineering.
I don't agree that every
new technology is equal
and that everybody comes
with clear moral history
and clear conscience.
I don't agree with that
because I don't actually have amnesia.
- Hi, Stewart.
- Is that Peter?
- Hi, Winona.
- Hi.
- Let me challenge your
hypothesis that we're Gods
and let me suggest a
more accurate metaphor
which would be idiot savants.
We're highly developed.
We have these great skills,
these technological cleverness
which is completely untethered to wisdom.
What I find disturbing and
sort of a little sociopathic
about your perspective
is the absence of doubt.
- Stu loves technology
of almost any variety.
And if you have a big megaphone
like Stewart Brand does,
I would hope he would put it
on the side of preservation.
- This is a American chestnut tree.
There's some tests to be done--
- Instead, for reasons that defeat me,
Stu is a fan of genetic modification.
This is human cleverness.
We know better than nature.
Really?
Stu, I'm sorry,
this is not environmentalism.
- The idea that humans are moving genes
from one organism into the genome
of another organism is
somehow against nature,
is just dead wrong.
It's assisted evolution,
and so we're doing
exactly what nature does.
This is what killed five
billion American chestnut trees.
These trees are functionally extinct
because they can't reproduce
and make a forest like they used to.
But genetically they're
not extinct at all,
they've got all the variety they ever had
and they're about to get
one more bit of variety
which is one or two genes
that will help them head
off the diseases that we brought here,
not on purpose.
But the cure is on purpose.
We use gene guns to move
this gene from wheat
into the American chestnut
and that resists the fungus.
When genetically modified
organisms were first created,
most environmentalists were
just automatically against it,
and that actually makes me pretty mad,
because that's taking
ideology more seriously
than the ecosystems
you're trying to protect.
But this resistance to technology
and intervention is nothing new.
The environmental movement
that formed in the '60s
that I was part of
helping shape, was young,
enthusiastic, not terribly
scientifically informed.
- I enjoy the trees and the elements,
just things that are
very basic to the Earth.
- And it locked
in a number of stances.
- Everything we do affects it.
Everything we get comes from it.
Everything we leave goes back into it.
- An environmentalist
is automatically
against intervention in nature
because nature is always right
and humanity is always wrong.
- Don't fowl your nest.
- It's a romantic story
but it's just wrong.
- A lot of the '60 scene had
been very anti-technological.
You have to make a choice
between being an environmentalist
and being a technologist.
They were seen by many people
as at odds with each other.
Technology was ruining the
environment it seemed like.
Stewart and a few other
people said, no actually,
it's the way we can save it.
- It's a whole lot of good
stuff and it's been for us.
But we're amplifying it as big as we can.
- That started Stewart off
on a line that differed
from many of the people he
had been associated with
in that he had begun
to embrace technology as
the way towards the future.
- It's our biggest problem and
nothing's going to be solved.
No technologies are going
to manipulate people's minds and feelings.
- I was starting to feel isolated
in the environmental movement
and felt like I was cut off
from the rest of the world.
I was working like mad on
the "Whole Earth Catalog"
and I was reduced in
non-catalog function more
and more and more.
There was a room in the back
of the 4,000 square feet
where we did the "Whole Earth
Catalog" where I had a bed
and I was doing a lot of
my work from that bed.
But I didn't even know
to call it depression.
I was bad company for my wife.
The depression I had at
that period was also related
to drug involvement
triggered by the amount
of nitrous oxide I was breathing.
Nitrous oxide was a party
drug in the counter culture.
You would have a flash
which might be exciting or revelatory.
And for a few years I had a tank
about three feet high
delivered once a week
to the "Whole Earth Catalog"
so I could breath it up.
I got wrapped up in my own mind
which then turned all
convoluted watching itself
to the point where I could barely drive,
because I was watching
my mind watch my mind
watch my mind instead of
watching the damn road.
Depression is self-reinforcing
and becomes its own system.
So long after I stopped
breathing nitrous oxide,
I was still badly depressed.
Basically, I wanted
off this runaway train,
so came up with the idea,
how about I just stop the
success right in its tracks?
- He made the decision that we
would do the last "Whole Earth Catalog"
and we sold a million copies.
- And then as
a way to celebrate that
we put on a public,
what we call Demise Party.
- We had some money
and he made a decision
that we would do this social experiment.
- I said, I have here in
my hand $20,000 in cash.
Go on and tell us what you think
should happen to the money?
They money will go to a
person with the responsibility
for seeing it through a
project by probably dawn.
And these are hippies
that have been living
on $200 a year.
So to be standing there on
stage with a pretty thick wad
of $100 bills and trying to say, well,
my commune really needs a pump.
The notions piled up
but it turned out most
of them were bad.
- I think this money should be used
to get all the Jews out of Miami
and get the Puerto Ricans
back where they belong.
- So it was a disappointment
in that regard
'cause my hypothesis had
been that under duress people
would be extra creative.
We've gotta get together
and deal with our problem.
What actually turned out to be the case
was under duress people
are extra non-creative.
- Well, 'cause you're
a fucking (indistinct).
- It was basically chaotic.
- You've got nine million suggestions.
They're all good, pick one.
This could go on for
the next fucking year.
- I suggest one $100 dollar
bill to put in the fireplace.
- You wanna put $100--
One guy, his name's Fred,
set fire to his $100 bill and
said it's not about the money,
it's about the people.
And by the end of all this he was the guy
that took away $20,000.
It felt like a total failure.
I was in a bad way
and I'm shutting down one
thing after another to see
what thing I can get rid of
that will give me a chance
to get myself back?
So I shut down the "Whole Earth Catalog"
and I wasn't better.
And I shut down my marriage.
By then, being just with her
was getting troubled enough
for me and probably to
some extent for her.
But I initiated the,
let's not be married anymore.
- He woke up one morning and
he said he wanted a divorce.
So that was the end of that, okay.
I still feel cold.
- The 1970s I spent living alone.
I was in a lot of stupid pain.
It took a while to get out
of being really shut down
in terms of feeling good about life.
I had seen people get
in the mood of, well,
I'm having a problem with my drug,
so obviously the answer is
I should take more drugs.
That universally did not work out.
So one aspect of how I
treated being depressed
at the time was to not
try to fix it with drugs.
I was starting to do meditation
and seeing a psychiatrist
who was actually pretty good.
And eventually I was able to become more
and more happy again.
And at that point,
having shut down the
"Whole Earth Catalog",
I was free to pursue a
subject I was curious about.
10 years earlier when I
was visiting Stanford,
I hear male yells from
what was called the Computation Center.
And it turns out they
were playing the earliest
of all the video games called "Space War".
They were gathered around a
mini computer called PDP-1.
What got me about it was
the insane enthusiasm
and out of body wildness that was going on
in the players of this game.
They identified with what
I thought of as hippies
but they weren't doing drugs very much,
because they had found a better drug
and the better drug was computer power.
I wrote it up for "Rolling Stone"
and I began the article with the line,
ready or not,
computers are coming to the people.
People get up to strange things
and people that are good at
getting up to strange things,
get up to more than the one.
At the end of the Demise Party,
the guy who'd set fire
to the $100 bill came away with $20,000.
- He was this unusual
draft resister activist
community organizer, a guy
by the name of Fred Moore.
He was deeply opposed to
the very concept of money,
so the fact that Fred got the
money was really quite ironic.
Fred took the money,
put it in his backyard in
a coffee can and buried it.
It was a little bit
like Frodo and the ring
- That same Fred Moore who
did a few interesting things
for that money,
a couple of years later
was one of the founders
of the Homebrew Computer Club,
one of the most important groups
in the history of technology.
It's where Steve Jobs
and Steve Wozniak met
and started Apple Computer.
- Stewart, he
was in the thick of that
and began to actively
organizing that community.
- Stewart and I are both
attracted to technologists
that are on the frontier.
And because of Stewart
I had the opportunity
to see the very beginning
of how the internet was gonna play out.
- Ryan Phelan and I
took on the organization
of this event called
the Hackers Conference.
That was the beginning of my involvement
with the personal computer revolution.
I'm Stewart Brand.
I'm not a hacker.
I'm here for the contact high.
- One long-time supporter
of Hackers is Stewart Brand.
- They are more effective in
pushing the culture around now
in good ways than almost
any group I can think of.
- But the real
purpose of the get-together was
to discuss the unique set of values
that made the computer
revolution possible.
- Political platform is
that we need an electronic
declaration of independence.
- We were trying
to liberate the tools
that had been kept in the hands
of powerful companies like IBM.
- Sometimes the companies internally,
because they own it,
will squash it and say you cannot have it,
even though we're not gonna put it out
and nobody else in the
world's gonna get it.
That's a hiding of
information that is wrong.
- And there was a
hacker ethic to be transparent
and to share code.
- My project is to make all software free.
My soul is in that.
Tools I will give away to anybody.
- This software I wrote
is a desk accessory,
so it works on top of
any other application.
- This a program that allows
you to switch very quickly
between programs on the
map as I can show you here.
- Stewart was the first guy to get it.
The personal computer was one
of the most powerful examples
of using machines as
tools for independence
and that you could build your own world
out of this new technology.
He saw that hacker's culture
shared a lot of values
with the "Whole Earth Catalog" ideal.
That information should be freely shared.
- Stewart was one of the
first people who realized that
that actually was a social movement,
that wasn't just like a couple of new toys
that had appeared.
That's a very typical
Stewart thing to understand
that there is something there,
to take it seriously,
to give it a name.
As soon as you call a situation something,
the people within it start to
look around and say, oh yeah
it is something, yeah.
Okay, we're in something together.
- I had been in solo
bachelorhood for quite a while
and one of the things I was
missing was conversation.
And I found that the
conversations I was having
with Ryan Phelan,
they were some of the best I was having.
So here we are 35 years later still
having a good conversation.
Hello.
Here you go.
- It must've been about 1980.
I think we both realized
a mutual appreciation
of each other that went beyond work.
We liked taking hikes out in nature.
Sparks flew and there were
some very soulful moments there
on hillsides where we
got to know each other.
We had realized we had fallen in love.
We were both pretty fascinated
with the waterfront community.
We'd been wandering up and down the docks,
looking at houseboats.
Mirene was a rotted out 1912 tugboat
and we brought her back to life.
To be honest,
when Stewart and I started thinking
about getting a boat together,
I still didn't really necessarily think
about it as a marriage.
I was a product of the '60s
and marriage was not something
that I thought was an essential
part of a relationship.
I was kind of in it for the short-term.
That was great and it
was fun and I had no idea
how profound it would be to actually start
to create this life with Stewart.
He surprised me.
I could get used to this.
- You could get used to this, yeah.
Ryan and I are always scheming things up.
We're always advisors to
each other's projects.
But when we work together
closely it's just wonderful.
- You got a seal right here.
- Really?
- Shall we swap?
- Hi, guys.
- Isn't that great?
- The two of us
created Revive and Restore,
which is the entity that is
making de-extinction possible.
- It's not just about
bringing back a wooly mammoth,
but this technology is what's
needed for conservation.
Good afternoon, I'm Ryan Phelan
and we work at the convergence
of biotech and conservation.
- One thing that
biotech is bringing to the rescue
of endangered species is a
chance to get off the defense
and go on the offense.
- We have to protect, absolutely.
We have to intervene
when these new technologies
start to demonstrate--
- So Ross, you wanna prevent extinction,
meanwhile you have other people trying
to bring species back.
Where is your moral compass on this?
- Have we taken on a responsibility
that has no end point to it?
I would say, yes,
because what we're doing is playing God.
And in that event,
we have to look at it in the same way
that we would look at
obligations to any living thing.
- About 10 years ago,
Stewart asked me to
participate in a meeting
that was going to take up de-extinction.
I'm at paleomammalogist
and the idea of being able
to actually interact with
a living wooly mammoth,
this was astounding and
I was totally fascinated,
I admit it.
But although the idea
of bringing back species
that are no longer with us
is immensely attractive,
I also understand it's
about the worst thing
we could possibly do.
Stewart Brand is a visionary.
I, by contrast,
am a pragmatist.
What's the length of time
that we're talking about
to make and to manufacturer
a wooly mammoth?
Stewart thinks centuries.
So do I.
And that's a long period
of time to keep interest up
in an experiment that
has no certain outcome.
- We are a major force
now in this dynamic planet
and we have to function as an
entire global civilization,
patiently over time with
awareness and continuity.
And we've never done that before.
There are issues going on
in the world like climate
change and extinction
and it's gonna take
centuries to sort them out.
One of the problems now is
that civilization is revving itself
into a pathologically
short attention span.
When I met Stewart it was
getting to be the early '90s
and people were still thinking
about the future as
being in the year 2,000.
And I realized that the future had kind
of been shrinking by one year
per year for my whole life.
That's when I started designing this clock
that would last for 10,000 years.
- I heard from
Danny Hillis about his idea
to build Estonian scale mechanical clock
that would tick once a Century,
more in every thousand years
and after much longer than
that the cuckoo comes out.
- Stewart realized
the 10,000-year clock
would change how people thought
about time long before I did,
even when I was building it.
- There are ways
to help each other behave
more responsibly and
we want people to think
about the next 10,000
years the way they think
about next week.
The photographs of the earth
from space 50 years ago
gave humanity a whole new
way to think about itself
and about the planet that we live on,
but it didn't really teach
us anything about time.
We need icons that give people a sense
of long-term thinking.
- To make something last
for 10,000 years you have
to choose materials that
can last, like titanium.
You make things very,
very large so that the
wear doesn't matter much.
But actually by far the hardest
problem is making something
that people will care
about for 10,000 years.
- When we started building the clock,
we had talked about the idea
of the clock having a chime.
Because it will be beautiful
if this was almost subsonic
or even subsonic.
And I thought,
well, if you had 10 bells you would
have three million possible
permutations of those 10 bells.
Just the sound of the clock.
That meant you could have
a different chime each day
for 10,000 years.
- We're trying
to figure out what kind
of a site should it be for a clock?
And we decided it should be
kind of a pilgrimage site.
So after much exploration,
we're now putting a very large
clock inside a 500-foot shaft
inside a mountain.
- It's in analog.
- The big clock
probably just going.
If the clock is an artwork
then it's already an expression
of thinking long term.
(clock bell chiming)
- The clock is a provocation in a sense.
You're hoping to consciously
put into the world something
that would give people that flash,
that moment of saying, wow,
I see, is it possible
that we could be around
for 10,000 years?
What if there's a war?
Or what if a astroid hits the earth
and there's a nuclear winter?
Even saying, what if,
is starting to do what the
clock is intended to do.
- I think we're in the shift
point in the long story,
finding out how nature actually works,
finding out how we actually work.
And de-extinction is a good
way of keeping people reminded
that they're gonna bear down
on some issues for a long time.
And when you do that astounding
things can be accomplished,
including bringing back wooly mammoths.
In fact, bring back the
whole damn mammoth steppe,
change that biome back
to what it used to be,
which would be better for the climate,
and that's a long-term story.
- The Greek word, hubris,
has to do with the idea that
a hero has a central failing
that he's not aware of,
but the failing eventually comes out
and usually results in disaster.
I think that's a very word
for the de-extinction agenda.
It is hubris.
- Remember Jurassic park,
amazing movie where
science brings dinosaurs
back from extinction.
The science is now getting real.
Right now scientists and
thinkers are working on a way
to revive other extinct
species like the wooly mammoth.
To paraphrase Jeff Goldblum, should they?
Here to be making his opening statement,
ladies and gentlemen, Stewart Brand.
- I've been a conservationist
since I was 10,
just 70 years ago,
and what's driving us now is
getting some species back.
You will be having the
chestnut trees coming back,
raining down sweet nuts for
wildlife and for humans.
You will have passenger pigeons back,
taking up their old habitat
which is perfectly intact
and waiting for them.
So a vote for de-extinction
is a vote for more life.
- All right, thank you very much ladies
and gentleman, Stewart Brand.
Stewart, but I would like to
let your opponents respond
to that last point.
- Why do we think we can
do this with elephants?
Elephants are sentient creatures.
They have self-awareness.
Human babies, until they're
six months or a year or so,
are not self-aware.
Your dog isn't self-aware.
So why are we considering
them the kind of property
that we can mess with
and then set them loose?
Is that really their job?
- Okay, that's a perfectly
phrased question.
I want to bring it to George Church.
- Excellent point and I sympathize.
However, they are currently not
having such a happy life going extinct.
I agree that we should be humane.
We should do something
that's for their benefit,
not just the benefit of the planet.
I think the ends and the
means should be humane.
- The real de-extinction agenda,
which is bringing back
completely extinct species,
it's not for repairing ecosystems
that in a sense don't
need repairing anymore
because we're already
10,000 years down the pike
from what they were.
The planet is getting warmer.
Whether or not we get elephants
up into Northern Siberia is not going
to change the equation sufficiently
to turn the whole process back.
The real problem,
as usual, is us.
- Stewart, to response?
- Wooly mammoths and the mammoth steppe
are not gonna fix climate change,
but they could be over the long-term part
of the stabilization of climate.
- I have to say, Stewart,
that I'm very pleased that I
am not the most naive person
on the panel tonight.
- All right, we try not
to make it personal.
- It's a joke.
- I'm trying to think of not naive,
it's not that cutting but it was there.
So let's try to keep it above board.
Dr. Lynn Rothschild?
- In the end we've been
dancing around this idea
of what is natural.
Is it natural to have a wooly mammoth
on the Siberian steppes?
Or is it more natural to have
a sky filled with teradactyls
or maybe a sea filled with trilobites.
Jurassic park was a bad idea.
Pleistocene Park is no better.
So no matter how cool this seems,
we should not de-extinct creatures.
- And now it's time to learn
which side that you feel
has been more convincing?
Lynn and Ross,
they pulled up 17 percentage points.
That's the number to beat.
Stewart and George,
they lost four percentage points.
That means that the winner
of this debate is the side arguing,
don't bring extinct
creatures back to life.
- I think what will change
people's minds is the change
in the facts,
change in the data.
And we're all still waiting
for actual de-extinction to occur.
I wish I could see the wooly
mammoth back in the wild
and that probably won't
happen in my lifetime,
but I have lived to see
American chestnuts come back.
- These are all destined to go out
in the field this year.
- Back in the day I said that,
we are as gods and might
as well get good at it,
but it's really becoming,
we are as nature,
and using nature to do things
that nature does already.
In my mind this is a forest
we're flying over at altitude.
- I like that idea.
- American chestnut is
the first de-extinction
and then trees will be
planted by the thousands.
And that was not possible two decades ago.
Now it's not only possible,
it's the way it's gonna be.
Okay, is that about right?
It's good?
These little American
chestnuts can live a Century
or more in getting arms.
And eventually in this
century the American chestnut
should be completely back
in the Eastern forest
and I can't wait.
For me as a conservationist
to engage seriously
with an ecosystem that you may care about,
gives you a place to live that
isn't inside your own skin
and takes down some of the dread of death
and engages a larger life.
People wind up writing memoirs
because they want their children to know
what their life was really like.
People are really interested
in their parents' story,
maybe their grandparents' story.
Generations is a good way to think,
but let's go way longer than that.
Once you are holding these
longer timeframes in mind,
that starts to raise the question
of what do you do on Monday?
Does your behavior start to
reflect this larger frame?