Podcast appearances and mentions of John Markoff

Generative AI tools built on large language models are increasingly "intelligent" yet lack a baby's common sense – the ability to non-verbally generalize to novel situations without additional training. What can developmental science contribute to AI? Tech journalist and former CASBS fellow John Markoff chats with 2023-24 CASBS fellow David Moore, a developmental scientist with expertise in infant cognition, on evaluating the efforts of DARPA's Machine Common Sense program as well as prospects and concerns associated with creating AIs with common sense.DAVID MOORE: Personal website | Claremont Infant Study Center | Wikipedia page | DARPA Machine Common Sense programRelated resource:David Moore, et al. "Leveraging Developmental Psychology to Evaluate Artificial Intelligence," 2022 IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL), Nov. 2022. DOI: 10.1109/ICDL53763.2022.9962183Recommended by David Moore:Esther Thelen and Linda B. Smith. A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action. MIT Press, 1994.  Read John Markoff's latest book, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand  (Penguin Random House, 2022)  Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford UniversityExplore CASBS: website|Bluesky|X|YouTube|LinkedIn|podcast|latest newsletter|signup|outreach​Human CenteredProducer: Mike Gaetani | Engineer & co-producer: Joe Monzel |

There never will be enough independent fact checking of online political advertising and their ecosystems. Can we develop methods and tools to demonetize or at least disincentivize the behaviors of disinformation producers as well as the ad firms and content providers in business with them? 2023-24 CASBS fellow Ceren Budak navigates the disinformation marketplace and illuminates pathways for better design of online communities and platforms in conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning tech journalist and former CASBS fellow John Markoff. CEREN BUDAK: Faculty webpage | Personal website | Referenced in this episode:"Misunderstanding the harms of online misinformation." Nature 630, 45–53 (2024)The Prosocial Ranking Challenge (Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence)"Intermedia agenda setting during the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential elections." Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 18(1), 254-275. Lawrence Lessig's Pathetic Dot Theory (Wikipedia)----Read John Markoff's latest book, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand  (Penguin Random House, 2022)  Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford UniversityExplore CASBS: website|Bluesky|X|YouTube|LinkedIn|podcast|latest newsletter|signup|outreach​Human CenteredProducer: Mike Gaetani | Engineer & co-producer: Joe Monzel |

To conclude our trilogy of interviews with prominent tech journalists to celebrate the upcoming twentieth anniversary of the DLD Conference, today's interview is with David Kirkpatrick, author of The Facebook Effect and founder of Techonomy Media. In contrast with Steven Levy and John Markoff, whose attitude toward Silicon Valley doesn't seem have dramatically changed, Kirkpatrick's thinking has undergone quite a radical shift over the last twenty years. As he acknowledges, he's been transformed from a Facebook believer into one of its most acute critics. And, in contrast with Levy and Markoff, Kirkpatrick's intellectual attention has also broadened, shifting from the internet to focusing on technological fixes for global warming.David Kirkpatrick is a longtime technology and business journalist, author and media entrepreneur, known for his work connecting technology developments to societal impact and progress. He is an expert on internet companies and social media, and is now focusing especially on climate tech and the climate economy. He is also known for moderating on-stage conversations with tech leaders. Kirkpatrick's bestselling 2010 book, The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World, was published in 32 languages, including Catalan and Vietnamese. It was a finalist for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year as well as the Gerald Loeb Award. In subsequent years, he has written extensively about the growing societal harms caused by Facebook/Meta and social media broadly. His articles include 2018's Facing Facebook's Failure for Techonomy, and earlier that same year, The Facebook Defect, in Time Magazine. In December 2023 he published Vinod Khosla Can See the Future: It Just Got Hazy for a Minute in The Information. Kirkpatrick founded and for 12 years led Techonomy Media, which hosted conferences on technology, innovation, business, and their connection to social progress. Techonomy's mission was to highlight ways technology could improve society and human lives. Among his numerous onstage interviews there were Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Benioff, John Chambers, Commerce Sec. Penny Pritzker, economist Jeffrey Sachs, Patrick Collison, DARPA Chief Arati Prabhakar, Sen. Cory Booker, Nandan Nilekani, and Sean Parker. He also has served as a moderator at Burda Media's DLD conference for 19 years, interviewing a wide range of leaders including Mark Zuckerberg. Kirkpatrick worked for Time Inc. for 30 years, mostly at Fortune Magazine, where he was for many years senior editor for internet and technology. Many years earlier, while serving as a copy clerk at Life Magazine, he served as unit chairperson of The Newspaper Guild at Time Inc. He founded and hosted Fortune's Brainstorm conference series beginning in 2001 and for six years wrote its Fast Forward column. At Brainstorm he hosted and interviewed Pres. Bill Clinton, Israeli Pres. Shimon Peres, Senator John McCain, and numerous technology and business CEOs. He was a formal participant and moderator at the World Economic Forum in Davos for 21 years, and for 13 years was a member of the Forum's International Media Council, consisting of 100 top global media leaders. He also served for many years as a contributing editor at Bloomberg Television. He is a recipient of the 2012 Silicon Valley Visionary Award, awarded alongside Elon Musk, Jim Breyer, and Sal Khan. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Last week, we featured an interview with John Markoff, the legendary New York Times Silicon Valley correspondent. If Markoff has an East Coast equivalent, it's Steven Levy, the former Newsweek technology correspondent and author of best-selling books about hacking, crypto, Google and Facebook. Levy is now Wired's editor-at-large and when I visited Levy at New York City's glittering Conde Nast offices, we talked about what has and hasn't surprised him about the last twenty years of tech history and why he may be the last journalist with the good fortune of being paid to write long articles about Microsoft.Steven Levy is Wired's editor at large. The Washington Post has called him “America's premier technology journalist.”For almost four decades Levy has chronicled the digital revolution, its impact on humanity, and the people behind it. He has written the foundational work on computer culture (Hackers, 1984) and with Crypto (2001) the indispensable book on story behind that groundbreaking technology—years before people began gushing about Bitcoin and the blockchain. He has written the definitive books on Facebook, Google, the Macintosh, and the iPod. World-class engineers tell him that they pursued AI after reading his 1992 book Artificial Life. And he currently covers the breadth of tech stories—the good and the disturbing—for WIRED, where he has been a contributor since its inception. Levy's previous positions include founder of Backchannel and chief technology writer and senior editor for Newsweek. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, Harper's Magazine, Macworld, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, The New Yorker, and Premiere. Among his honors: PC Magazine named Hackers the best sci-tech book written in the last twenty years. Crypto won the grand e-book prize at the 2001 Frankfurt Book Fair. In the Plex was Amazon's best business book of 2011. In 2008 he was inducted as a SVForum Visionary, alongside Reed Hastings and Diane Greene. (Previous winners include Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, and Vin Cerf.) He has won several Computer Press Association Awards, been finalist for the National Magazine Award and the Loeb Award, winner of a Clarion Award and many others.  His 1988 book, The Unicorn's Secret, was the source material for a two-night NBC miniseries, “The Hunt for the Unicorn Killer.” Levy hails from Philadelphia, where he began his career writing for weekly papers and writing stories for Philadelphia Magazine and the Philadelphia Inquirer Sunday Magazine. He wrote extensively on rock music and sports. In 1982, he published a Rolling Stone story on computer hackers that drew him into the world of technology.  He lives in New York City with his wife, Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling author Teresa Carpenter.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Former New York Times reporter John Markoff has been writing about Silicon Valley for almost a half century. In December 1993 the Pulitzer Prize winning journalist wrote one of the earliest articles about the World Wide Web, referring to it as a "map to the buried treasures of the Information Age." So where are we now in the history of tech, I asked Markoff. Is the AI boom just one more Silicon Valley cycle of irrational exuberance? And how do contemporary tech titans like Sam Altman and Elon Musk compare with Steve Jobs, who Markoff covered for many years.John Markoff is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. He has reported on Silicon Valley for more than four decades and wrote for The New York Times' science and technology beat for 28 years, where he was widely regarded as the paper's star technology reporter. He is the author of five books about the technology industry including his upcoming book Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (on sale in March 2022). For decades Markoff has chronicled how technology has shaped our society. In Whole Earth, he delivers the definitive biography of one the most influential visionaries to inspire the technological and cultural revolutions of the last six decades. While Stewart Brand is largely known as the creator of The Whole Earth Catalog that became a counterculture bible for a generation of young Americans during the 1960s, his life's work is much larger. Brand became a key influence in the ‘70s environmental movement and the computing world of the ‘80s. Steve Jobs adopted Brand's famous mantra “Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish” as his code to live by, and to this day Brand epitomizes what Markoff calls “that California state of mind.” Brand has always had “an eerie knack for showing up first at the onset of some social movement or technological inflection point,” Markoff writes, “and then moving on just when everyone else catches up.” Brand's uncanny ahead-of-the-curve-ness is what makes John Markoff his ideal biographer. Markoff's reporting has always been at the cutting edge of tech revolutions—he wrote the first account of the World Wide Web in 1993 and broke the story of Google's self-driving car in 2010. Stewart Brand gave Markoff carte blanche access in interviews for the book, so Markoff gets a clearer story than has ever been set down before, ranging across Brand's time with the Merry Pranksters to his fostering of the marriage of environmental consciousness with hacker capitalism and the rise of a new planetary culture. Markoff's other books are: The High Cost of High Tech (with Lennie Siegel); Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (with Katie Hafner); Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw (with Tsutomu Shimomura); What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry; and Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots. He is a Fellow at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has been a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley School of Journalism, and an adjunct faculty member at the Stanford Graduate Program on Journalism. In 2013, Markoff was part of a Pulitzer Prize-winning team for Explanatory Reporting “for its penetrating look into business practices by Apple and other technology companies that illustrates the darker side of a changing global economy for workers and consumers.” He continues to work as a freelance journalist for The Times and other organizations. Markoff graduated from Whitman College with a B.A. in sociology, and an M.A. in sociology from the University of Oregon.Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.Keen On is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe

Pulitzer Prize-winning tech journalist John Markoff chats with 2022-23 CASBS fellow Nathan Matias about often-overlooked public interest questions and concerns regarding the deployment of tech platform algorithms and AI models. Specifically, Matias is a player in filling the two-way knowledge gaps between civil society and tech firms with an eye on governance, safety, accountability, and advancing the science — including the social science — of human-algorithm behavior. Nathan Matias: Cornell University faculty page | CASBS bio | Personal website |Citizens & Technology LabCoalition for Independent Technology ResearchSelect Matias publications"Humans and Algorithms Work Together — So Study Them Together" Nature (2023)"Impact Assessment of Human-Algorithm Feedback Loops" Just Tech, SSRC (2022)"The Tragedy of the Digital Commons" The Atlantic (2015)"To Hold Tech Accountable, Look to Public Health" Wired (2023)Link to more Nathan Matias public writing | Matias on Medium | on LinkedIn |------Read John Markoff's latest book, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (Penguin Random House, 2022)  Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford UniversityExplore CASBS: website|Twitter|YouTube|LinkedIn|podcast|latest newsletter|signup|outreach​Human CenteredProducer: Mike Gaetani | Engineer & co-producer: Joe Monzel |

Pulitzer Prize-winning tech journalist & 2017-18 CASBS fellow John Markoff chats with 2022-23 CASBS fellow Rebecca Slayton on how the field of computing expertise evolved, eventually giving rise to the niche of professionals who protect systems from cyber-attacks. Slayton's forthcoming book explores the governance & risk implications emerging from the fact that cybersecurity experts must establish their authority by paradoxically revealing vulnerabilities and insecurities of that which they seek to protect.REBECCA SLAYTONCornell University faculty page | |  CASBS page | Slayton's book Arguments that Count: Physics, Computing, and Missile Defense, 1949-2012 (MIT Press)Slayton's article "What is the Cyber Offense-Defense Balance?," International SecurityVideo: Talk on "Shadowing Cybersecurity: Expertise, Transnationalism, and the Politics of Uncertainty" at Stanford Univ.JOHN MARKOFFNew York Times pageMarkoff's latest book, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Steward Brand (Penguin Random House, 2022) Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University75 Alta Road | Stanford, CA 94305 | CASBS: website|Twitter|YouTube|LinkedIn|podcast|latest newsletter|signup|outreach​View the Fall 2023 CASBS Newsletter  Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford UniversityExplore CASBS: website|Twitter|YouTube|LinkedIn|podcast|latest newsletter|signup|outreach​Human CenteredProducer: Mike Gaetani | Engineer & co-producer: Joe Monzel |

Summary   Eric Escobar (Twitter; LinkedIn) joins Andrew (Twitter; LinkedIn) to discuss compromising networks and information security. He has a coveted DEFCON Black Badge.    What You'll Learn  Intelligence  -What keeps Eric up at night   -Thinking like an ethical hacker (aka a “penetration tester)  -Protecting your information (i.e., “Hardening the attack surface”)  -Plain English explanations of key cyber concepts like “Kill Chains” and “Zero Days”  Reflections  -Having a cool job  -The information revolution and life in the modern world  And much, much more…  Episode Notes  Eric Escobar commits several thousand felonies on any given day, if he didn't have permission to do what he was doing.  A Principal Security Consultant with SecureWorks, Eric has compromised pretty much everything out there: from healthcare and banking to technology and critical infrastructure, through to amusement parks and next generation military aircraft.  “From my perspective, it's the coolest job in the entire world.”  His team consecutively won first place in the Wireless CTF category at DEF CON 23, 24, and 25, snagging a Black Badge along the way. He has a BS and MS in Civil Engineering.   And…  The links between computing, hacking and the 60's counterculture are FASCINATING. Learn more by dipping your toes here and here, or dive deeper with What the Dormouse Said (2005) by John Markoff and From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006) by Fred Turner.      Quote of the Week  "Watching any critical infrastructure get compromised is really the thing that keeps me up at night because lives are in the balance…and we do a lot of testing for critical infrastructure, and I've seen computers and machines that have been online and not been taken offline, longer than I've been alive…So really interesting to see those types of things because they interact with really big, expensive hardware…there's a catch 22 that happens where you can't really take the machine offline to do maintenance on it because it's critical infrastructure. So then how do you test it to make sure that a hacker can't take it offline, or maintenance can't be done on it? " – Eric Escobar. Resources  *Andrew's Recommendation*  -Word Notes   From beginner thru advanced, you'll find some helpful definitions of things like “Web 3.0,” “NFT's” and “Digital Transformation” on this Cyberwire audio glossary.  *SpyCasts*  -Inside Microsoft's Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) – with John Lambert and Cristin Goodwin (2021)  -The Cyber Zeitgeist – with Dave Bittner (2021)  -Securing Cyberspace – with Charlie Mitchell (2016)  *Beginner Resources*  -What is Hacking? The Economic Times (n.d.) [web]  -Ethical Hacking in 8 Minutes, Simplilearn (2020) [8 min video]  -Cybersecurity in 7 minutes, Simplilearn (2020) [7 min video]  Books  -The Cyberweapons Arms Race, N. Perloth (Bloomsbury, 2021)  -Cult of the Dead Cow, J. Menn (PublicAffairs, 2020)  -Breaking & Entering, J. Smith (Mariner Books, 2019)  -The Art of Invisibility, K. Mitnick (L, B & C, 2017)  -Ghost in the Wires, K. Mitnick (Back Bay Books, 2012)  -Kingpin, K. Poulson (Crown, 2012)  -The Cuckoo's Egg, C. Stoll (Doubleday, 1989)  -Neuromancer, W. Gibson (Ace, 1984)  Articles  -2022 State of the Threat: A Year in Review, Secureworks (2022)  -The Anthropology of Hackers, The Atlantic (2010)  -Timeline Since 2006: Significant Cyber Incidents, CSIS (n.d.)  Documentary  -DEFCON, The Documentary Network (2013)  Resources  -Government Hacking Bibliography, S. Quinlan, New America Foundation (2016)  *Wildcard Resource*  -“The Aurora Shard”  Come to the International Spy Museum to see an ugly chunk of metal. Why? Well, it speaks to a revolution in the relationship between the material world and the non-material world. Broken down? 30 lines of code blew up a 27-ton generator. Zeros and ones can cause violent explosions! 

John Markoff is a journalist best known for his work covering technology at The New York Times for 28 years until his retirement in 2016 and a book and series of articles about the 1990s pursuit and capture of hacker Kevin Mitnick. John is the author of "What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry" about the culture and consciousness behind the first PCs—the culture being counter– and the consciousness expanded, sometimes chemically. It's a brilliant evocation of Stanford, California, in the 1960s and '70s, where a group of visionaries set out to turn computers into a means for freeing minds and information. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/out-of-the-blank/support

The artificial intelligence landscape is filled with opportunity and risk. On the one hand, AI holds the promise of productivity, accessibility, and medical marvels. On the other, AI is feared as a threat to our social fabric. Depending on who you listen to, AI is either our path to a renaissance or the road to our ruin. The outcome is in the balance, which is why in the first episode of Technically Optimistic, host Raffi Krikorian speaks with John Markoff, journalist and author, about the history of AI; Suresh Venkatasubramanian, coauthor of the White House's Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights and professor of computer science at Brown, about ethics; and Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic, about AI's impact on society. In this wide-ranging episode, Krikorian, Emerson Collective's Chief Technology Officer, explores the nuances and subtleties of the technological revolution we're living through—to ask probing questions about the changes underway and understand what may happen and why it matters. To learn more about Technically Optimistic and to read the transcript for this episode: emersoncollective.com/technically-optimistic-podcast For more on Emerson Collective: emersoncollective.com Learn more about our host, Raffi Krikorian: emersoncollective.com/persons/raffi-krikorian Technically Optimistic is produced by Emerson Collective with music by Mattie Safer. Email us with questions and feedback at technicallyoptimistic@emersoncollective.com. Subscribe to Emerson Collective's newsletter: emersoncollective.com To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

John Markoff is an affiliate fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human Centered Artificial Intelligence and a staff historian at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. He has written about technology and science since 1977. From 1988 to 2016 he reported on technology, science, and Silicon Valley for the New York Times. His work has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize four times, and in 2013 he was awarded a Pulitzer in explanatory reporting. In the upcoming conversation, John reflects on 50-year-old Silicon Valley. Episode recorded on February 6 2023

The Deadcast concludes its dive into the Grateful Dead's entanglement with technology, exploring Jerry Garcia's digital graphics obsession, how Dead Head online communities helped shape the emergent internet, lyricist John Perry Barlow's manifestoes, & more. Guests: Paul Martin, Mary Eisenhart, David Gans, Steve Silberman, Bob Bralove, Dan English, Doug Oade, Christian Crumlish, Charlie Miller, John Markoff, Erik Davis, Michael CaloreSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Summary   Eric Escobar (Twitter; LinkedIn) joins Andrew (Twitter; LinkedIn) to discuss compromising networks and information security. He has a coveted DEFCON Black Badge.    What You'll Learn  Intelligence  What keeps Eric up at night   Thinking like an ethical hacker (aka a “penetration tester)  Protecting your information (i.e., “Hardening the attack surface”)  Plain English explanations of key cyber concepts like “Kill Chains” and “Zero Days”  Reflections  Having a cool job  The information revolution and life in the modern world  And much, much more…  Episode Notes  Eric Escobar commits several thousand felonies on any given day, if he didn't have permission to do what he was doing.  A Principal Security Consultant with SecureWorks, Eric has compromised pretty much everything out there: from healthcare and banking to technology and critical infrastructure, through to amusement parks and next generation military aircraft.  “From my perspective, it's the coolest job in the entire world.”  His team consecutively won first place in the Wireless CTF category at DEF CON 23, 24, and 25, snagging a Black Badge along the way. He has a BS and MS in Civil Engineering.   And…  The links between computing, hacking and the 60's counterculture are FASCINATING. Learn more by dipping your toes here and here, or dive deeper with What the Dormouse Said (2005) by John Markoff and From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006) by Fred Turner.      Quote of the Week  "Watching any critical infrastructure get compromised is really the thing that keeps me up at night because lives are in the balance…and we do a lot of testing for critical infrastructure, and I've seen computers and machines that have been online and not been taken offline, longer than I've been alive…So really interesting to see those types of things because they interact with really big, expensive hardware…there's a catch 22 that happens where you can't really take the machine offline to do maintenance on it because it's critical infrastructure. So then how do you test it to make sure that a hacker can't take it offline, or maintenance can't be done on it? " – Eric Escobar.   Resources  *Andrew's Recommendation*  Word Notes   From beginner thru advanced, you'll find some helpful definitions of things like “Web 3.0,” “NFT's” and “Digital Transformation” on this Cyberwire audio glossary.  *SpyCasts*  Inside Microsoft's Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) – with John Lambert and Cristin Goodwin (2021)  The Cyber Zeitgeist – with Dave Bittner (2021)  Securing Cyberspace – with Charlie Mitchell (2016)  *Beginner Resources*  What is Hacking? The Economic Times (n.d.) [web]  Ethical Hacking in 8 Minutes, Simplilearn (2020) [8 min video]  Cybersecurity in 7 minutes, Simplilearn (2020) [7 min video]  Books  The Cyberweapons Arms Race, N. Perloth (Bloomsbury, 2021)  Cult of the Dead Cow, J. Menn (PublicAffairs, 2020)  Breaking & Entering, J. Smith (Mariner Books, 2019)  The Art of Invisibility, K. Mitnick (L, B & C, 2017)  Ghost in the Wires, K. Mitnick (Back Bay Books, 2012)  Kingpin, K. Poulson (Crown, 2012)  The Cuckoo's Egg, C. Stoll (Doubleday, 1989)  Neuromancer, W. Gibson (Ace, 1984)  Articles  2022 State of the Threat: A Year in Review, Secureworks (2022)  The Anthropology of Hackers, The Atlantic (2010)  Timeline Since 2006: Significant Cyber Incidents, CSIS (n.d.)  Documentary  DEFCON, The Documentary Network (2013)  Resources  Government Hacking Bibliography, S. Quinlan, New America Foundation (2016)  *Wildcard Resource*  “The Aurora Shard”  Come to the International Spy Museum to see an ugly chunk of metal. Why? Well, it speaks to a revolution in the relationship between the material world and the non-material world. Broken down? 30 lines of code blew up a 27-ton generator. Zeros and ones can cause violent explosions! 

Summary   Eric Escobar (Twitter; LinkedIn) joins Andrew (Twitter; LinkedIn) to discuss compromising networks and information security. He has a coveted DEFCON Black Badge.    What You'll Learn  Intelligence  What keeps Eric up at night   Thinking like an ethical hacker (aka a “penetration tester)  Protecting your information (i.e., “Hardening the attack surface”)  Plain English explanations of key cyber concepts like “Kill Chains” and “Zero Days”  Reflections  Having a cool job  The information revolution and life in the modern world  And much, much more…  Episode Notes  Eric Escobar commits several thousand felonies on any given day, if he didn't have permission to do what he was doing.  A Principal Security Consultant with SecureWorks, Eric has compromised pretty much everything out there: from healthcare and banking to technology and critical infrastructure, through to amusement parks and next generation military aircraft.  “From my perspective, it's the coolest job in the entire world.”  His team consecutively won first place in the Wireless CTF category at DEF CON 23, 24, and 25, snagging a Black Badge along the way. He has a BS and MS in Civil Engineering.   And…  The links between computing, hacking and the 60's counterculture are FASCINATING. Learn more by dipping your toes here and here, or dive deeper with What the Dormouse Said (2005) by John Markoff and From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006) by Fred Turner.      Quote of the Week  "Watching any critical infrastructure get compromised is really the thing that keeps me up at night because lives are in the balance…and we do a lot of testing for critical infrastructure, and I've seen computers and machines that have been online and not been taken offline, longer than I've been alive…So really interesting to see those types of things because they interact with really big, expensive hardware…there's a catch 22 that happens where you can't really take the machine offline to do maintenance on it because it's critical infrastructure. So then how do you test it to make sure that a hacker can't take it offline, or maintenance can't be done on it? " – Eric Escobar.   Resources  *Andrew's Recommendation*  Word Notes   From beginner thru advanced, you'll find some helpful definitions of things like “Web 3.0,” “NFT's” and “Digital Transformation” on this Cyberwire audio glossary.  *SpyCasts*  Inside Microsoft's Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) – with John Lambert and Cristin Goodwin (2021)  The Cyber Zeitgeist – with Dave Bittner (2021)  Securing Cyberspace – with Charlie Mitchell (2016)  *Beginner Resources*  What is Hacking? The Economic Times (n.d.) [web]  Ethical Hacking in 8 Minutes, Simplilearn (2020) [8 min video]  Cybersecurity in 7 minutes, Simplilearn (2020) [7 min video]  Books  The Cyberweapons Arms Race, N. Perloth (Bloomsbury, 2021)  Cult of the Dead Cow, J. Menn (PublicAffairs, 2020)  Breaking & Entering, J. Smith (Mariner Books, 2019)  The Art of Invisibility, K. Mitnick (L, B & C, 2017)  Ghost in the Wires, K. Mitnick (Back Bay Books, 2012)  Kingpin, K. Poulson (Crown, 2012)  The Cuckoo's Egg, C. Stoll (Doubleday, 1989)  Neuromancer, W. Gibson (Ace, 1984)  Articles  2022 State of the Threat: A Year in Review, Secureworks (2022)  The Anthropology of Hackers, The Atlantic (2010)  Timeline Since 2006: Significant Cyber Incidents, CSIS (n.d.)  Documentary  DEFCON, The Documentary Network (2013)  Resources  Government Hacking Bibliography, S. Quinlan, New America Foundation (2016)  *Wildcard Resource*  “The Aurora Shard”  Come to the International Spy Museum to see an ugly chunk of metal. Why? Well, it speaks to a revolution in the relationship between the material world and the non-material world. Broken down? 30 lines of code blew up a 27-ton generator. Zeros and ones can cause violent explosions! 

  Jim talks with John Markoff about his new biography, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. They discuss the meme of Brand as a Zelig, his role as a catalyst, the Pace Layers model, why Brand wasn't a pure libertarian, a Hemingwayesque boyhood, a commitment to conservation, relentless networking, the influence of Frederic Spiegelberg, … Continue reading EP 164 John Markoff on the Many Lives of Stewart Brand → The post EP 164 John Markoff on the Many Lives of Stewart Brand appeared first on The Jim Rutt Show.

This week, The Periphery talks to former New York Times technology journalist John Markoff. Join us as we discuss Silicon Valley back when he grew up and began his career covering technology, and how that history has led to the current moment. This includes discussion on the blockchain (which Markoff first covered in 1992), artificial intelligence, demography, and automation. Leave us an honest review, subscribe, and send us any ideas or feedback that you'd like to share at theperipherypodcast@gmail.com. And be sure to become a Conversationalist on our Patreon if you are eager to support our efforts to diversify tech. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Paris Marx is joined by Malcolm Harris to discuss the legacy of Stewart Brand and why the myth we're often told about him overstates the reality of his impact.Malcolm Harris is the author of Kids These Days, Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit, and his forthcoming book Palo Alto. He also writes for New York Magazine. Follow Malcolm on Twitter at @BigMeanInternet.Tech Won't Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, support the show on Patreon, and sign up for the weekly newsletter.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Malcolm Harris wrote a critical review of John Markoff's Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand.Benjamin Kunkel also wrote a critical review of Whole Earth.The Stewart Brand documentary We Are As Gods about his quest to bring back wholly mammoths to solve climate change is slowly being rolled out after two years of delay and seeming lack of sales interest.Brand's Long Now Foundation is building a 10,000-year clock in Texas that's funded by Jeff Bezos.We also mention Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture.Support the show

Facebook has nearly three billion users, which means that when it makes a change to its business, it affects nearly half the planet. Facebook's ambitions have often manifested in chaotic, unpredictable ways and had profound societal impacts for years after they've been implemented. So when the company decided to rebrand to Meta and funnel billions of dollars toward building its own virtual alternate reality, it's a move that's bound to come with some big consequences—if nothing else, for Meta itself. This week on Gadget Lab, we're joined by Shirin Ghaffary from Recode and Alex Heath from The Verge. The new season of their podcast, Land of the Giants, is all about Facebook's transformation into Meta and what it means for the billions of people on Facebook, and in the world at large. Show Notes Listen to the Land of the Giants podcast here or wherever you listen to podcasts. Read Alex's interview with Mark Zuckerburg about Facebook rebranding as Meta. Recommendations Shirin recommends the book Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson. Alex recommends the show The Bear on Hulu. Lauren recommends Taylor Blake's TikTok channel and the viral videos of her emu, Emmanuel. Mike recommends the book Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand, by John Markoff. Shirin Ghaffary can be found on Twitter @shiringhaffary. Alex Heath is @alexeheath. Lauren Goode is @LaurenGoode. Michael Calore is @snackfight. Bling the main hotline at @GadgetLab. The show is produced by Boone Ashworth (@booneashworth). Our theme music is by Solar Keys. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Gracias a la Altair 8800 tenemos computadoras en la mayoría de nuestros hogares hoy en día. Aunque fue una computadora que originalmente se había diseñado para los fanáticos, algunos visionarios se dieron cuenta de su gran potencial, y se esforzaron mucho para que otros lograran verlo también. Y nadie se hubiera podido imaginar los grandes avances que produciría ese diseño. Forrest Mims, que fundó la compañía MITS junto con Ed Roberts, nos cuenta que hubo un momento en que la empresa se veía en serias dificultades, y Ed se empeñaba en salvarla. ¿Su plan? Diseñar una computadora para aficionados. Y esa computadora dio como resultado una llamada telefónica que cambiaría el curso de la historia. Dan Sokol y Lee Felsenstein recuerdan la presentación de la Altair 8800 en el Homebrew Computer Club, y la epifanía que le causó a Steve Wozniak, gracias a la cual diseñó la Apple I. Luego escucharemos a John Markoff contarnos el robo del software que sentó las bases para debatir si el código debe ser propietario o libre. Finalmente, Limor Fried reflexiona sobre la manera en que esta historia sigue influyendo en el movimiento actual de hardware de código abierto.

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by the revered writer and artist Renee Gladman to speak about her latest book, Plans for Sentences. Plans for Sentences is a collection of ink and watercolor drawings paired with texts, each duo labeled as a “figure,” making 60 figures in all. The drawings combine the loops and scribbles of words and letters with the lines of cityscapes and buildings. The text meanwhile outlines what the titular “sentences” of the book will do. Together, Gladman seems to create a new kind of architecture, made up of a blend of words and images, solid and in flux at the same time. The plans here are for the future. Also, John Markoff, author of The Many Lives of Stewart Brand, returns to recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future.

Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher are joined by the revered writer and artist Renee Gladman to speak about her latest book, Plans for Sentences. Plans for Sentences is a collection of ink and watercolor drawings paired with texts, each duo labeled as a “figure,” making 60 figures in all. The drawings combine the loops and scribbles of words and letters with the lines of cityscapes and buildings. The text meanwhile outlines what the titular “sentences” of the book will do. Together, Gladman seems to create a new kind of architecture, made up of a blend of words and images, solid and in flux at the same time. The plans here are for the future. Also, John Markoff, author of The Many Lives of Stewart Brand, returns to recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future.

Journalist John Markoff has been writing about Silicon Valley for over forty years. In this interview with Peoples & Things host Lee Vinsel, Markoff talks about his long career, how he became a “tech journalist” long before that term even existed, and how he came to write his new book, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. Markoff and Vinsel also talk about how Brand's life is interwoven with the history of Silicon Valley and the technology its companies have made.

Hub Dialogues (part of The Hub, Canada's daily information source for public policy – https://www.thehub.ca) are in-depth conversations about big ideas from the worlds of business, economics, geopolitics, public policy, and technology.The Hub Dialogues feature The Hub's editor-at-large, Sean Speer, in conversation with leading entrepreneurs, policymakers, scholars, and thinkers on the issues and challenges that will shape Canada's future at home and abroad.This episode of Hub Dialogues features host Sean Speer in conversation with technology journalist John Markoff about his fascinating, new book, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand.If you like what you are hearing on Hub Dialogues consider subscribing to The Hub's daily email newsletter featuring our insights and analysis on public policy issues. Subscription is free. Simply sign up here: https://newsletter.thehub.ca/.The Hub is Canada's leading information source for public policy. Stridently non-partisan, The Hub is committed to delivering to Canadians the latest analysis and cutting-edge perspectives into the debates that are shaping our collective future.Visit The Hub now at https://www.thehub.ca. Our GDPR privacy policy was updated on August 8, 2022. Visit acast.com/privacy for more information.

Stewart Brand has long been famous if you know who he is, but for many people outside the counterculture, early computing, or the environmental movement, he is perhaps best known for his famous mantra "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." Steve Jobs's endorsement of these words as his code to live by is fitting; Brand has played many roles, but one of the most important is as a model for how to live. In Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (Penguin, 2022), the contradictions are striking: A blond-haired WASP with a modest family inheritance, Brand went to Exeter and Stanford and was an army veteran, but in California in the 1960s he became an artist and a photographer in the thick of the LSD revolution. While tripping on acid on the roof of his building, he envisioned how valuable it would be for humans to see a photograph of the planet they shared from space, an image that in the end landed on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog, the defining publication of the counterculture. He married a Native American woman and was committed to protecting indigenous culture, which connected to a broader environmentalist mission that has been a throughline of his life. At the same time, he has outraged purists because of his pragmatic embrace of useful technologies, including nuclear power, in the fight against climate change. The famous tagline promise of his catalog was "Access to Tools"; with rare exceptions, he rejected politics for a focus on direct power. It was no wonder, then, that he was early to the promise of the computer revolution and helped define it for the wider world. John Markoff was one of a team of New York Times reporters who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He has covered Silicon Valley since 1977, wrote the first account of the World Wide Web in 1993, and broke the story of Google's self-driving car in 2010. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Stewart Brand has long been famous if you know who he is, but for many people outside the counterculture, early computing, or the environmental movement, he is perhaps best known for his famous mantra "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." Steve Jobs's endorsement of these words as his code to live by is fitting; Brand has played many roles, but one of the most important is as a model for how to live. In Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (Penguin, 2022), the contradictions are striking: A blond-haired WASP with a modest family inheritance, Brand went to Exeter and Stanford and was an army veteran, but in California in the 1960s he became an artist and a photographer in the thick of the LSD revolution. While tripping on acid on the roof of his building, he envisioned how valuable it would be for humans to see a photograph of the planet they shared from space, an image that in the end landed on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog, the defining publication of the counterculture. He married a Native American woman and was committed to protecting indigenous culture, which connected to a broader environmentalist mission that has been a throughline of his life. At the same time, he has outraged purists because of his pragmatic embrace of useful technologies, including nuclear power, in the fight against climate change. The famous tagline promise of his catalog was "Access to Tools"; with rare exceptions, he rejected politics for a focus on direct power. It was no wonder, then, that he was early to the promise of the computer revolution and helped define it for the wider world. John Markoff was one of a team of New York Times reporters who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He has covered Silicon Valley since 1977, wrote the first account of the World Wide Web in 1993, and broke the story of Google's self-driving car in 2010. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/history

Stewart Brand has long been famous if you know who he is, but for many people outside the counterculture, early computing, or the environmental movement, he is perhaps best known for his famous mantra "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." Steve Jobs's endorsement of these words as his code to live by is fitting; Brand has played many roles, but one of the most important is as a model for how to live. In Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (Penguin, 2022), the contradictions are striking: A blond-haired WASP with a modest family inheritance, Brand went to Exeter and Stanford and was an army veteran, but in California in the 1960s he became an artist and a photographer in the thick of the LSD revolution. While tripping on acid on the roof of his building, he envisioned how valuable it would be for humans to see a photograph of the planet they shared from space, an image that in the end landed on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog, the defining publication of the counterculture. He married a Native American woman and was committed to protecting indigenous culture, which connected to a broader environmentalist mission that has been a throughline of his life. At the same time, he has outraged purists because of his pragmatic embrace of useful technologies, including nuclear power, in the fight against climate change. The famous tagline promise of his catalog was "Access to Tools"; with rare exceptions, he rejected politics for a focus on direct power. It was no wonder, then, that he was early to the promise of the computer revolution and helped define it for the wider world. John Markoff was one of a team of New York Times reporters who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He has covered Silicon Valley since 1977, wrote the first account of the World Wide Web in 1993, and broke the story of Google's self-driving car in 2010. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/biography

Stewart Brand has long been famous if you know who he is, but for many people outside the counterculture, early computing, or the environmental movement, he is perhaps best known for his famous mantra "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." Steve Jobs's endorsement of these words as his code to live by is fitting; Brand has played many roles, but one of the most important is as a model for how to live. In Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (Penguin, 2022), the contradictions are striking: A blond-haired WASP with a modest family inheritance, Brand went to Exeter and Stanford and was an army veteran, but in California in the 1960s he became an artist and a photographer in the thick of the LSD revolution. While tripping on acid on the roof of his building, he envisioned how valuable it would be for humans to see a photograph of the planet they shared from space, an image that in the end landed on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog, the defining publication of the counterculture. He married a Native American woman and was committed to protecting indigenous culture, which connected to a broader environmentalist mission that has been a throughline of his life. At the same time, he has outraged purists because of his pragmatic embrace of useful technologies, including nuclear power, in the fight against climate change. The famous tagline promise of his catalog was "Access to Tools"; with rare exceptions, he rejected politics for a focus on direct power. It was no wonder, then, that he was early to the promise of the computer revolution and helped define it for the wider world. John Markoff was one of a team of New York Times reporters who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He has covered Silicon Valley since 1977, wrote the first account of the World Wide Web in 1993, and broke the story of Google's self-driving car in 2010. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/environmental-studies

Stewart Brand has long been famous if you know who he is, but for many people outside the counterculture, early computing, or the environmental movement, he is perhaps best known for his famous mantra "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." Steve Jobs's endorsement of these words as his code to live by is fitting; Brand has played many roles, but one of the most important is as a model for how to live. In Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (Penguin, 2022), the contradictions are striking: A blond-haired WASP with a modest family inheritance, Brand went to Exeter and Stanford and was an army veteran, but in California in the 1960s he became an artist and a photographer in the thick of the LSD revolution. While tripping on acid on the roof of his building, he envisioned how valuable it would be for humans to see a photograph of the planet they shared from space, an image that in the end landed on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog, the defining publication of the counterculture. He married a Native American woman and was committed to protecting indigenous culture, which connected to a broader environmentalist mission that has been a throughline of his life. At the same time, he has outraged purists because of his pragmatic embrace of useful technologies, including nuclear power, in the fight against climate change. The famous tagline promise of his catalog was "Access to Tools"; with rare exceptions, he rejected politics for a focus on direct power. It was no wonder, then, that he was early to the promise of the computer revolution and helped define it for the wider world. John Markoff was one of a team of New York Times reporters who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He has covered Silicon Valley since 1977, wrote the first account of the World Wide Web in 1993, and broke the story of Google's self-driving car in 2010. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-studies

Stewart Brand has long been famous if you know who he is, but for many people outside the counterculture, early computing, or the environmental movement, he is perhaps best known for his famous mantra "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." Steve Jobs's endorsement of these words as his code to live by is fitting; Brand has played many roles, but one of the most important is as a model for how to live. In Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (Penguin, 2022), the contradictions are striking: A blond-haired WASP with a modest family inheritance, Brand went to Exeter and Stanford and was an army veteran, but in California in the 1960s he became an artist and a photographer in the thick of the LSD revolution. While tripping on acid on the roof of his building, he envisioned how valuable it would be for humans to see a photograph of the planet they shared from space, an image that in the end landed on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog, the defining publication of the counterculture. He married a Native American woman and was committed to protecting indigenous culture, which connected to a broader environmentalist mission that has been a throughline of his life. At the same time, he has outraged purists because of his pragmatic embrace of useful technologies, including nuclear power, in the fight against climate change. The famous tagline promise of his catalog was "Access to Tools"; with rare exceptions, he rejected politics for a focus on direct power. It was no wonder, then, that he was early to the promise of the computer revolution and helped define it for the wider world. John Markoff was one of a team of New York Times reporters who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He has covered Silicon Valley since 1977, wrote the first account of the World Wide Web in 1993, and broke the story of Google's self-driving car in 2010. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/american-west

Stewart Brand has long been famous if you know who he is, but for many people outside the counterculture, early computing, or the environmental movement, he is perhaps best known for his famous mantra "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." Steve Jobs's endorsement of these words as his code to live by is fitting; Brand has played many roles, but one of the most important is as a model for how to live. In Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (Penguin, 2022), the contradictions are striking: A blond-haired WASP with a modest family inheritance, Brand went to Exeter and Stanford and was an army veteran, but in California in the 1960s he became an artist and a photographer in the thick of the LSD revolution. While tripping on acid on the roof of his building, he envisioned how valuable it would be for humans to see a photograph of the planet they shared from space, an image that in the end landed on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog, the defining publication of the counterculture. He married a Native American woman and was committed to protecting indigenous culture, which connected to a broader environmentalist mission that has been a throughline of his life. At the same time, he has outraged purists because of his pragmatic embrace of useful technologies, including nuclear power, in the fight against climate change. The famous tagline promise of his catalog was "Access to Tools"; with rare exceptions, he rejected politics for a focus on direct power. It was no wonder, then, that he was early to the promise of the computer revolution and helped define it for the wider world. John Markoff was one of a team of New York Times reporters who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He has covered Silicon Valley since 1977, wrote the first account of the World Wide Web in 1993, and broke the story of Google's self-driving car in 2010. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/science-technology-and-society

Stewart Brand has long been famous if you know who he is, but for many people outside the counterculture, early computing, or the environmental movement, he is perhaps best known for his famous mantra "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." Steve Jobs's endorsement of these words as his code to live by is fitting; Brand has played many roles, but one of the most important is as a model for how to live. In Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand (Penguin, 2022), the contradictions are striking: A blond-haired WASP with a modest family inheritance, Brand went to Exeter and Stanford and was an army veteran, but in California in the 1960s he became an artist and a photographer in the thick of the LSD revolution. While tripping on acid on the roof of his building, he envisioned how valuable it would be for humans to see a photograph of the planet they shared from space, an image that in the end landed on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog, the defining publication of the counterculture. He married a Native American woman and was committed to protecting indigenous culture, which connected to a broader environmentalist mission that has been a throughline of his life. At the same time, he has outraged purists because of his pragmatic embrace of useful technologies, including nuclear power, in the fight against climate change. The famous tagline promise of his catalog was "Access to Tools"; with rare exceptions, he rejected politics for a focus on direct power. It was no wonder, then, that he was early to the promise of the computer revolution and helped define it for the wider world. John Markoff was one of a team of New York Times reporters who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He has covered Silicon Valley since 1977, wrote the first account of the World Wide Web in 1993, and broke the story of Google's self-driving car in 2010. Caleb Zakarin is the Assistant Editor of the New Books Network (Twitter: @caleb_zakarin). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/photography

John Markoff was (once upon a time) New York Times technology reporter and is the biographer of Stewart Brand — Whole Earth - The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. For show notes and transcript visit: https://kk.org/cooltools/john-markoff-technology-writer-and-stewart-brand-biographer/ If you're enjoying the Cool Tools podcast, check out our paperback book Four Favorite Tools: Fantastic tools by 150 notable creators, available in both Color or B&W on Amazon: https://geni.us/fourfavoritetools  

Attend the Long Now Talks in-person or via our livestream Watch & share these talks on YouTube and Long Now Join us for an illuminating evening with journalist John Markoff in conversation with Long Now's Co-founder Stewart Brand and Executive Director Alexander Rose around Markoff's new biography of Brand. Journalist John Markoff writes about technology, society and the key figures who shaped Silicon Valley and the personal computer revolution. Along the way, his stories and reporting intersected with Stewart Brand's paths numerous times and in surprising ways. And now Markoff has distilled Brand's formative rise from the Merry Pranksters and the Whole Earth Catalog, to the marriage of environmental consciousness and hacker capitalism into his newest book, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. The book will be available to purchase at the in-person talk, and sales will benefit BookShop West Portal. John Markoff writes for the New York Times, has covered Silicon Valley since 01977, wrote the first account of the World Wide Web in 01993, and broke the story of Google's self driving car in 02010. He is the author of What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry and Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots, amongst others. His new biography of Stewart Brand is Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand, which will be released on March 22, 02022.

Long Time Silicon Valley journalist John Markoff unearths the roots of a tree, whose branches include, among others, Ken Kesey, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk. Markoff's new book, "Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand,” examines a Zelig-like character in both California's 1960s counterculture and the ethos of Silicon Valley. Brand's Whole Earth Catalog remains a cultural bible, from which we are still singing hymns.

Veteran technology journalist John Markoff, author of the new biography “Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand,” discusses the forces that have helped Brand forecast the future, the great value in Brand's “eco-pragmatist” perspective, and why the next tech innovation is likely to come out of left field.

This week we interview John Markoff, a Pulitzer Prize winning, veteran science and technology journalist for The New York Times, the Pacific News Service, InfoWorld, Byte Magazine, and The San Jose […]

This week it's a LARB Radio doubleheader. In the first half of the show, Kate Wolf talks with John Markoff about his latest book, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. Brand is probably best known as the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, a countercultural magazine he published regularly between 1968 and 1972, and then infrequently up until 1998. With influences ranging from the Beat poets whom Brand met as a youth in San Francisco to his experimentation with LSD, the wisdom of indigenous cultures, and the philosophy of Buckminster Fuller, Whole Earth Catalog featured articles on sustainable living, ecology, and emerging technologies. As Markoff shows in his book, Brand — who's worked as a photographer, writer, political advisor, and environmental activist, among other things — is not an easy person to pin down. His sympathies have ranged from libertarianism to eco-pragmatism, which stresses “useful technologies,” including nuclear power. Brand is now 83 and Markoff's book is based on many years of interviews with him. In the second half of the show, Kate is joined by artist Ulysses Jenkins on the occasion of his first, long overdue retrospective, Without Your Interpretation, which runs until May 15th at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Jenkins's career spans five decades and he's known especially for his pioneering video and performance art pieces, which often explore questions of race, multiculturalism, ritual, representation, and technology. Born in Los Angeles in 1946, Jenkins has been integral to the artistic evolution of the city, collaborating and forming collectives with many other important artists, including Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassinger, David Hammons, Nancy Buchanan, Harry Gamboa Jr., May Sun, and Kitt Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz.

This week it's a LARB Radio Doubleheader. In the first half of the show, Kate Wolf talks with John Markoff about his latest book, the biography, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. Brand is probably best known as the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, a countercultural magazine he published regularly between 1968-and 72, and then infrequently up until 1998. With influences ranging from the Beat poets Brand met as a youth in San Francisco to his experimentation with LSD, the wisdom of indigenous culture, and the philosophy of Buckminster Fuller, Whole Earth Catalog featured articles on sustainable living, ecology, and emerging technologies. As Markoff shows in his book, Brand—who's worked as a photographer, a writer, a political advisor, and an environmental activist, among other things— is not an easy person to pin down. His sympathies have ranged from libertarianism to eco-pragmatism, which stresses “Useful technologies”—including nuclear power. Brand is now 83 and Markoff's book is based on many years of interviews with him. Kate is joined in the second half of the show by artist Ulysses Jenkins on the occasion of his first, and long overdue retrospective, Without Your Interpretation, at the Hammer Museum here in Los Angeles until May 15th. Jenkins's career spans five decades: he's known especially for his pioneering video and performance art which often explores questions of race, multiculturalism, ritual, representation, and technology. Born in Los Angeles in 1946, Jenkins has been integral to the artistic evolution of the city, collaborating and forming collectives with many other important artists including Senga Nengudi, Maren Hassinger, David Hammons, Nancy Buchanan, Harry Gamboa Jr, May Sun, and Kitt Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz.

From his time with the Merry Pranksters to his influence on Steve Jobs to his utopian “Whole Earth Catalog,” Stewart Brand epitomizes the Bay Area counterculture visionary. Brand has “an eerie knack for showing up first at the onset of some social movement or technological inflection point and then moving on just when everyone else catches up,” writes technology reporter John Markoff. Forum talks with Markoff about the life, work and influence of Brand and his new biography, "Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand.”

Iconic counterculture icon Stewart Brand has been at the center of many of the social and cultural movements launched and nurtured in the Bay Area. Whether it be early computing, the Merry Pranksters and the hippies, the generation-defining Whole Earth Catalog, or the environmental movement, Brand has been at the center of them all. Yet many outside these movements only know him because Apple founder Steve Jobs quoted Brand's famous mantra—stay hungry, stay foolish—in a famous Stanford University commencement speech. Legendary science and technology writer John Markoff hopes to elevate an understanding of Brand's impact on our world. In his new book, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand, Markoff provides the first serious biography of Brand, his impact and his many contradictions. A blond-haired WASP with a modest family inheritance, Brand went to Exeter and Stanford and was an army veteran, but in California in the 1960s he became an artist and a photographer in the thick of the LSD revolution. While tripping on acid on the roof of his building, he envisioned how valuable it would be for humans to see a photograph of the planet they shared from space, an image that in the end landed on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog, the defining publication of the counterculture. He married a Native American woman and was committed to protecting indigenous culture, which connected to a broader environmentalist mission that has been a through line of his life. He also was early to the promise of the computer revolution—nurtured in the pages and community of the Whole Earth Catalog—and helped define it for the wider world. Please join us as Markoff discusses Brand's influential and remarkable California life and the impact he has had on millions of people. NOTES This program is part of our Good Lit series, underwritten by the Bernard Osher Foundation. SPEAKERS John Markoff Writer-in-Residence, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence; Author, Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand Paul Saffo Futurist; Consulting Associate Professor, Stanford University In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently hosting all of our live programming via YouTube live stream. This program was recorded via video conference on March 24th, 2022 by the Commonwealth Club of California. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of “Keen On”, Andrew is joined by John Markoff, the author of “Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand”. John Markoff was one of a team of New York Times reporters who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He has covered Silicon Valley since 1977, wrote the first account of the World Wide Web in 1993, and broke the story of Google's self-driving car in 2010. Visit our website: https://lnkd.in/gZNKTyc7 Email Andrew: a.keen@me.com Watch the show live on Twitter: https://twitter.com/ajkeen Watch the show live on LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/gatW6J8v Watch the show live on Facebook: https://lnkd.in/gjzVnTkY Watch the show on YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gDwPgesS Subscribe to Andrew's newsletter: https://lnkd.in/gzwFsxPV Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

John Markoff, the longtime New York Times tech writer and author of a new biography of Stewart Brand, joins David Bank to talk psychedelic drugs, the roots of Silicon Valley and Brand's knack for being in the right place at the right time. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/554161/whole-earth-by-john-markoff/ https://impactalpha.com/subscribe/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/impact-alpha/message

Just how healthy is peanut butter? This episode begins with a look at some amazing and little-known health facts about eating peanut butter – just as long as it is the right kind of peanut butter. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323781#health-benefits Changing someone's else's mind is usually difficult if not impossible. Still, people do change their minds so clearly it can be done. Jonah Berger joins me to explain how you can get someone to change their mind and agree with you. Jonah is a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the book The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone's Mind (https://amzn.to/33hpVJE) . Listen and you will hear him explain the fascinating research on how to get people to agree with you. We've been told by experts that one of the best ways to NOT get sick is to stop touching your face. Well, good luck with that! Trying not to touch your face is really hard. Listen as I explain why. https://www.wired.com/story/cant-stop-touching-your-face-science-has-some-theories-why/ Could machines really take over the world someday– or is that science fiction? There is concern among scientists that we could create machines that might actually become self-aware and end up being smarter than we are. Joining me to discuss whether or not this could happen is John Markoff, a science writer for the New York Times and author of the book Machines of Loving Grace. (http://amzn.to/2j55XgN) PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! We really like The Jordan Harbinger Show! Check out https://jordanharbinger.com/start OR search for it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen!  Go to https://Indeed.com/Something to claim your $75 credit before March 31st! Masterworks gives everyone the opportunity to invest in blue-chip artwork. To receive exclusive access to their latest offerings go to https://Masterworks.art/SYSK LEVEL UP will give you the confidence, know-how, and savvy to grow your business and thrive. LEVEL UP, by Stacey Abrams and Lara Hodgson, is now available everywhere audiobooks are sold. Discover matches all the cash back you've earned at the end of your first year! Learn more at https://discover.com/match M1 Finance is a sleek, fully integrated financial platform that lets you manage your cash flow with a few taps and it's free to start. Head to https://m1finance.com/something to get started!  To TurboTax Live Experts an interesting life can mean an even greater refund! Visit https://TurboTax.com to lear more. To see the all new Lexus NX and to discover everything it was designed to do for you, visit https://Lexus.com/NX Use SheetzGo on the Sheetz app! Just open the app, scan your snacks, tap your payment method and go!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bem vindos ao primeiro episódio do podcast CTRL+ALT+LAW, onde vamos discutir a evolução da internet como meio de comunicação, até esse elemento considerado por muitos essencial para o exercício da cidadania, um direito humano, e uma ferramenta essencial para a humanidade. O que aconteceu nos últimos 30 anos para que a rede mundial de computadores se tornasse esse fenômeno, e o que o futuro nos espera? Um bate papo com muito conteúdo, com a presença dos especialistas em Direito Digital Luiza Faccin, Antony Gama, Luiz Bino e Raphael Chaia. Assine o nosso podcast para acompanhar novos episódios quinzenalmente às quartas-feiras! Mande sua mensagem com suas sugestões, opiniões e críticas! As melhores podem entrar no próximo episódio: https://anchor.fm/ctrl-alt-law-podcast/message Siga-nos em nossas redes sociais - INSTAGRAM! @lufaccin @oluizbino @profraphaelchaia @antonyaugusto Referências e autores citados no episódio: • Lawrence Lessig (escritor norte-americano, professor na faculdade de direito de Harvard e um dos fundadores do Creative Commons): Software como dispositivo político porque serve como tecnologia mediadora da comunicação entre as pessoas. • “A verdadeira empatia requer a capacidade de solidão” (Sherry Turkle, professor of the social studies of science and technology at MIT) • “A Chegada”: filme com Amy Adams, do diretor Denis Villeneuve • Pierre Levy, “Cibercultura” • Marshall MacLuhan, “A Galáxia de Nuremberg” • Tim OReilly, “What is Web 2.0” • John Markoff, “Entrepreneurs see a web guided by common sense”

The Whole Earth ‘lectronic Link, or WELL, was started by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant in 1985, and is still available at well.com. We did an episode on Stewart Brand: Godfather of the Interwebs and he was a larger than life presence amongst many of the 1980s former hippies that were shaping our digital age. From his assistance producing The Mother Of All Demos to the Whole Earth Catalog inspiring Steve Jobs and many others to his work with Ted Nelson, there's probably only a few degrees separating him from anyone else in computing.  Larry Brilliant is another counter-culture hero. He did work as a medical professional for the World Health Organization to eradicate smallpox and came home to teach at the University of Michigan. The University of Michigan had been working on networked conferencing since the 70s when Bob Parnes wrote CONFER, which would be used at Wayne State where Brilliant got his MD. But CONFER was a bit of a resource hog. PicoSpan was written by Marcus Watts in 1983. Pico is a small text editor in many a UNIX variant and network is network. Why small, well, modems that dialed into bulletin boards were pretty slow back then.  Marcus worked at NETI, who then bought the rights for PicoSpan to take to market. So Brilliant was the chairman of NETI at the time and approached Brand about starting up a bulletin-board system (BBS). Brilliant proposed NETI would supply the gear and software and that Brand would use his, uh, brand - and Whole Earth following, to fill the ranks. Brand's non-profit The Point Foundation would own half and NETI would own the other half.  It became an early online community outside of academia, and an important part of the rise of the splinter-nets and a holdout to the Internet. For a time, at least.  PicoSpan gave users conferences. These were similar to PLATO Notes files, where a user could create a conversation thread and people could respond. These were (and still are) linear and threaded conversations. Rather than call them Notes like PLATO did, PicSpan referred to them as “conferences” as “online conferencing” was a common term used to describe meeting online for discussions at the time. EIES had been around going back to the 1970s, so Brand had some ideas abut what an online community could be - having used it. Given the sharp drop in the cost of storage there was something new PicoSpan could give people: the posts could last forever. Keep in mind, the Mac still didn't ship with a hard drive in 1984. But they were on the rise.  And those bits that were preserved were manifested in words. Brand brought a simple mantra: You Own Your Own Words. This kept the hands of the organization clean and devoid of liability for what was said on The WELL - but also harkened back to an almost libertarian bent that many in technology had at the time. Part of me feels like libertarianism meant something different in that era. But that's a digression. Whole Earth Review editor Art Kleiner flew up to Michigan to get the specifics drawn up. NETI's investment had about a quarter million dollar cash value. Brand stayed home and came up with a name. The Whole Earth ‘lectronic Link, or WELL.  The WELL was not the best technology, even at the time. The VAX was woefully underpowered for as many users as The WELL would grow to, and other services to dial into and have discussions were springing up. But it was one of the most influential of the time. And not because they recreated the extremely influential Whole Earth catalog in digital form like Brilliant wanted, which would have been similar to what Amazon reviews are like now probably. But instead, the draw was the people.  The community was fostered first by Matthew McClure, the initial director who was a former typesetter for the Whole Earth Catalog. He'd spent 12 years on a commune called The Farm and was just getting back to society. They worked out that they needed to charge $8 a month and another couple bucks an hour to make minimal a profit.  So McClure worked with NETI to get the Fax up and they created the first conference, General. Kevin Kelly from the Whole Earth Review and Brand would start discussions and Brand mentioned The WELL in some of his writings. A few people joined, and then a few more.  Others from The Farm would join him. Cliff Figallo, known as Cliff, was user 19 and John Coate, who went by Tex, came in to run marketing. In those first few years they started to build up a base of users. It started with hackers and journalists, who got free accounts. And from there great thinkers joined up. People like Tom Mandel from Stanford Research Institute, or SRI. He would go on to become the editor of Time Online. His partner Nana. Howard Rheingold, who would go on to write a book called The Virtual Community. And they attracted more. Especially Dead Heads, who helped spread the word across the country during the heyday of the Grateful Dead.  Plenty of UNIX hackers also joined. After all, the community was finding a nexus in the Bay Area at the time. They added email in 1987 and it was one of those places you could get on at least one part of this whole new internet thing. And need help with your modem? There's a conference for that. Need to talk about calling your birth mom who you've never met because you were adopted? There's a conference for that as well. Want to talk sexuality with a minister? Yup, there's a community for that. It was one of the first times that anyone could just reach out and talk to people. And the community that was forming also met in person from time to time at office parties, furthering the cohesion.  We take Facebook groups, Slack channels, and message boards for granted today. We can be us or make up a whole new version of us. We can be anonymous and just there to stir up conflict like on 4Chan or we can network with people in our industry like on LinkedIn. We can chat real time, which is similar to the Send option on The WELL. Or we can post threaded responses to other comments. But the social norms and trends were proving as true then as now. Communities grow, they fragment, people create problems, people come, people go. And sometimes, as we grow, we inspire.  Those early adopters of The WELL inspired Craig Newmark of Craigslist to the growing power of the Internet. And future developers of Apple. Hippies versus nerds but not really versus, but coming to terms with going from “computers are part of the military industrial complex keeping us down” philosophy to more of a free libertarian information superhighway that persisted for decades. The thought that the computer would set us free and connect the world into a new nation, as John Perry Barlow would sum up perfectly in “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”. By 1990 people like Barlow could make a post on The WELL from Wyoming and have Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus, makers of Lotus 1-2-3 show up at his house after reading the post - and they could join forces with the 5th employee of Sun Microsystems and GNU Debugging Cypherpunk John Gilmore to found the Electronic Foundation. And as a sign of the times that's the same year The WELL got fully connected to the Internet. By 1991 they had grown to 5,000 subscribers. That was the year Bruce Katz bought NETI's half of the well for $175,000. Katz had pioneered the casual shoe market, changing the name of his families shoe business to Rockport and selling it to Reebok for over $118 million.  The WELL had posted a profit a couple of times but by and large was growing slower than competitors. Although I'm not sure any o the members cared about that. It was a smaller community than many others but they could meet in person and they seemed to congeal in ways that other communities didn't. But they would keep increasing in size over the next few years. In that time Fig replaced himself with Maurice Weitman, or Mo - who had been the first person to sign up for the service. And Tex soon left as well.  Tex would go to become an early webmaster of The Gate, the community from the San Francisco Chronicle. Fig joined AOL's GNN and then became director of community at Salon. But AOL. You see, AOL was founded in the same year. And by 1994 AOL was up to 1.25 million subscribers with over a million logging in every day. CompuServe, Prodigy, Genie, Dephi were on the rise as well. And The WELL had thousands of posts a day by then but was losing money and not growing like the others. But I think the users of the service were just fine with that. The WELL was still growing slowly and yet for many, it was too big. Some of those left. Some stayed. Other communities, like The River, fragmented off. By then, The Point Foundation wanted out so sold their half of The WELL to Katz for $750,000 - leaving Katz as the first full owner of The WELL.  I mean, they were an influential community because of some of the members, sure, but more because the quality of the discussions. Academics, drugs, and deeply personal information. And they had always complained about figtex or whomever was in charge - you know, the counter-culture is always mad at “The Management.” But Katz was not one of them. He honestly seems to have tried to improve things - but it seems like everything he tried blew up in his face.  So Katz further alienated the members and fired Mo and brought on Maria Wilhelm, but they still weren't hitting that hyper-growth, with membership getting up to around 10,000 - but by then AOL was jumping from 5,000,000 to 10,000,000. But again, I've not found anyone who felt like The WELL should have been going down that same path. The subscribers at The WELL were looking for an experience of a completely different sort. By 1995 Gail Williams allowed users to create their own topics and the unruly bunch just kinda' ruled themselves in a way. There was staff and drama and emotions and hurt feelings and outrage and love and kindness and, well, community. By the late 90s, the buzz word at many a company were all about building communities, and there were indeed plenty of communities growing. But none like The WELL. And given that some of the founders of Salon had been users of The WELL, Salon bought The WELL in 1999 and just kinda' let it fly under the radar. The influence continued with various journalists as members.  The web came. And the members of The WELL continued their community. Award winning but a snapshot in time in a way. Living in an increasingly secluded corner of cyberspace, a term that first began life in a present tense on The WELL, if you got it, you got it. In 2012, after trying to sell The WELL to another company, Salon finally sold The WELL to a group of members who had put together enough money to buy it. And The WELL moved into the current, more modern form of existence. To quote the site: Welcome to a gathering that's like no other. The WELL, launched back in 1985 as the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, continues to provide a cherished watering hole for articulate and playful thinkers from all walks of life. For more about why conversation is so treasured on The WELL, and why members of the community banded together to buy the site in 2012, check out the story of The WELL. If you like what you see, join us! It sounds pretty inviting. And it's member supported. Like National Public Radio kinda'. In what seems like an antiquated business model, it's $15 per month to access the community. And make no mistake, it's a community.  You Own Your Own Words. If you pay to access a community, you don't sign the ownership of your words away in a EULA. You don't sign away rights to sell your data to advertisers along with having ads shown to you in increasing numbers in a hunt for ever more revenue. You own more than your words, you own your experience. You are sovereign.  This episode doesn't really have a lot of depth to it. Just as most online forums lack the kind of depth that could be found on the WELL. I am a child of a different generation, I suppose. Through researching each episode of the podcast, I often read books, conduct interviews (a special thanks to Help A Reporter Out), lurk in conferences, and try to think about the connections, the evolution, and what the most important aspects of each are. There is a great little book from Katie Hafner called The Well: A Story Of Love, Death, & Real Life. I recommend it. There's also Howard Rheingold's The Virtual Community and John Seabrook's Deeper: Adventures on the Net. Oh, and From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, And the Rise of Digital Utopianism from Fred Turner and Siberia by Douglas Rushkoff. At a minimum, I recommend reading Katie Hafner's wired article and then her most excellent book! Oh, and to hear about other ways the 60s Counterculture helped to shape the burgeoning technology industry, check out What the Dormouse Said by John Markoff.  And The WELL comes up in nearly every book as one of the early commercial digital communities. It's been written about in Wired, in The Atlantic, makes appearances in books like Broad Band by Claire Evans, and The Internet A Historical Encyclopedia.  The business models out there to build and run  and grow a company have seemingly been reduced to a select few. Practically every online community has become free with advertising and data being the currency we parlay in exchange for a sense of engagement with others.  As network effects set in and billionaires are created, others own our words. They think the lifestyle business is quaint - that if you aren't outgrowing a market segment that you are shrinking. And a subscription site that charges a monthly access fee to cgi code with a user experience that predates the UX field on the outside might affirm that philosophy -especially since anyone can see your real name. But if we look deeper we see a far greater truth: that these barriers keep a small corner of cyberspace special - free from Russian troll farms and election stealing and spam bots. And without those distractions we find true engagement. We find real connections that go past the surface. We find depth. It's not lost after all.  Thank you for being part of this little community. We are so lucky to have you. Have a great day.

Show page with suggested readingsJohn MarkoffNilam RamByron ReevesAbby Smith RumseyMaryanne WolfThe Human Screenome ProjectSocial Science for a World in Crisis

Sandra González-BailónA great thread on her recent paper “Exposure to News Grows Less Fragmented with an Increase in Mobile Access”“Bots are Less Central than Verified Accounts during Contentious Political Events”Her book Decoding the Social WorldFacebook 2020 Election Research portal CASBSCASBS on Twitter

Mario Biagioli's UCLA ProfileMario's article in the Los Angeles Review of Books, "Fraud by Numbers: Metrics and the New Academic Midconduct"Mario’s book “Gaming The Metrics: Misconduct and Manipulation in Academic Research”2019-20 CASBS fellow Brian Arthur’s paper “All Systems Will Be Gamed: Exploitative Behavior in Economic and Social Systems” 

In this very short episode, I will be saying a few words for William English. White Rabbit: Interview with Doug Engelbart and Bill English, Moderated by John Markoff. Link This is a text to speech generated voice. Subscribe to My Newsletter : http://eepurl.com/gruRrX In this Weekly Newsletter, I'm going to share with you what's new in the world of Technology, Security and Privacy for everyone. One e-mail every week and no spam, I promise.

Alta CharoShe recommends checking out the documentary “Human Nature,” in which she appears.Learn about CRISPR gene editingRevive & Restore, the organization working on “genetic rescue” of endangered and extinct species.The controversy over He Jiankui’s genetic modification of human embryosVisit CASBS on the webVisit CASBS on TwitterCASBS staff member Jason Gonzales read this episode's opening line. Woohoo!

Jefferson CowieJefferson’s recent New York Times Piece “The ‘Hard Hat Riot’ Was a Preview of Today’s Political Divisions”The illuminating CASBS symposium “_Contesting the Nation_”, with Jefferson Cowie, Kathleen Belew, and Catherine RamírezRichard Rorty, CASBS fellow 1982-83 “Achieving Our Country”Donald F. Kettl’s “The Divided States of America: Why Federalism Doesn’t Work”Arlie Russell Hochschild’s “Stranger in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right”Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century”Special thanks to CASBS staff member Paola Dios for the opening the episode!Visit CASBS on the webFollow CASBS on Twitter

Wendy K. Tam Cho's homepageFamiliarize yourself with Optimization Problems"How to Quantify (and Fight) Gerrymandering” - Quanta Magazine“Toward a Talismanic Redistricting Tool: A Computational Method for Identifying Extreme Redistricting Plans” - Wendy K. Tam Cho and Yan Y. LiuWendy’s reading recommendation “Deep Thinking” by Gary Kasparov"

In this episode, I'm Stuck@Om with John Markoff—a renowned technology reporter for the New York Times. John currently allocates his time to writing a biography for Stewart Brand—a writer, editor, and entrepreneur—who is famous for saying “We are as God's and we might as well get good at it”. John and I discuss topics revolving around the biography, such as the Whole Earth Catalogue and Stewart's organizations “The Long Now Foundation” and “Revive & Restore”.  During our conversation, we talk about the importance of our history. As the pandemic is sweeping through the world and we're losing many of our elderly population—the realization hits me that we are losing a piece of our past. Collective wisdom is being snuffed out and it cannot be replaced.  We also talk about the evolution of the internet and social networks. We once believed a connected world was a better world — but is that our reality? With the Coronavirus pandemic; will we see a fundamental transformation of the way we communicate? Children are now growing up with iPads, Facetime, and interacting with ‘Alexa' is normal. We're already seeing a fundamental shift that will likely be perpetuated.  Could the pandemic be preparing us for something bigger? A changed planet — perhaps a dystopian future where we are forced to live indoors? John points out that the futures that happen tend to surprise us and come out of nowhere. This world is a giant game of ‘wait and see'. Listen to this conversation for a full exploration of the future of our world, communication, and technology.  Subscribe to THE OM SHOW Outline of This Episode John Markoff is staying busy writing Steward Brand's biography The controversial world of Revive and Restore John's origin story is tied to the 1918 Spanish Flu Why John had to get out of cybercrime The evolution of the internet — good and bad Why John wouldn't permit anonymity across the internet The development of language models and artificial intelligence The line between machine and human creativity A fundamental transformation of the way we communicate What the future of tech media looks like Resources & People Mentioned The Long Now Foundation Stewart Brand Revive & Restore BOOK: Facebook by Steven Levy GPT-2 Artificial Intelligence The AI institute Connect with John Markoff LinkedIn Twitter New York Times Connect With Om www.Om.co Om on Twitter: @Om Om on Instagram: @Om

Susan Holmes' Stanford PageSusan Holmes on TwitterClaude Shannon, former CASBS fellow, and the "father of information theory"CASBSCASBS on TwitterShout out to Barbie Mayock, CASBS dining program coordinator, for reading this episode's opening line!!

You have probably been eating peanut butter since you were a kid. And that turns out to be a really good thing. This episode begins with a look at the amazing and little known health benefits of eating peanut butter – as long as it is the right kind of peanut butter. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/323781#health-benefitsChanging someone’s mind is difficult if not impossible - or so it seems. However, minds do change so clearly it can be done. Jonah Berger joins me to explain how. Jonah is a marketing professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and his latest book is called The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind (https://amzn.to/33hpVJE) . Listen as he explains the fascinating research on how to get people to agree with you. The experts are saying that one of the ways to prevent the spread of coronavirus is to NOT touch your face. Good luck with that! Listen as I explain why trying to not touch your face is almost certainly going to make you touch it even more. https://www.wired.com/story/cant-stop-touching-your-face-science-has-some-theories-why/Could machines really get so smart they could take over the world – or is that just in the movies? Some scientists have expressed real concern that we could create machines that actually become self-aware and could in fact become smarter than we are. Joining me to discuss whether that is a real possibility or just science fiction is John Markoff, a science writer for the New York Times and author of the book Machines of Loving Grace. (http://amzn.to/2j55XgN)

The Altair 8800 is why we have computers in most homes today. It was initially designed for hobbyists. But a few visionaries saw massive potential in this strange little machine—and worked hard to make others see it too. What they created led to so much more than anyone could have ever imagined. Forrest Mims tells us how his co-founder, Ed Roberts, planned to save their struggling electronics company. His idea? A microcomputer made for hobbyists. That computer led to a fateful phone call from Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Dan Sokol and Lee Felsenstein recall the unveiling of the Altair 8800 at the Homebrew Computer Club, and how it sparked Steve Wozniak’s eureka moment for the Apple I. We then hear from John Markoff about an infamous software heist that set the stage for the debate about whether code should be proprietary. And finally, Limor Fried reflects on how this story continues to influence today’s open source hardware movement. If you want to read up on some of our research on personal computers, you can check out all our bonus material over at redhat.com/commandlineheroes. You’ll find extra content for every episode. Follow along with the episode transcript .

In our first episode we introduce ourselves, the podcast, and help you understand this so-called ‘Psychedelic Renaissance'. We synthesized over 7000 years of history to explain how cave paintings of mushroom-wielding shaman have led to FDA approved research, millions in VC funding, and an emerging early-stage industry. If you want to dive deeper into some of the leading academic research we referenced you should start with the work at Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research [https://hopkinspsychedelic.org/publications] and Imperial College's Center for Psychedelic Research [https://www.imperial.ac.uk/psychedelic-research-centre/research/]. Additional resources discussed in the episode include: MAPS: Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies [https://maps.org/about/mission] What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Dormouse_Said] Other great timelines that helped inform our research included those by Psychedelic Times [https://psychedelictimes.com/psychedelic-timeline/] and Psychedelic Science Review [https://psychedelicreview.com/timelines/cultural-events/] We'd love to read your feedback and answer any additional questions that you may have; email us at hello@psychedelicmemos.com and follow-us on Twitter (@arminkhaya & @colinrball) to continue the discussion. Copyright 2020. All Rights Reserved.

Russ Altman: Today, on The Future of Everything the future of Silicon Valley. Periodically, in human history every now and then there is an unusual mix of opportunity, capital, talent, technology in a geographical region that concentrates this and creates perhaps an unusual period of creativity, invention and sometimes great impact on a global scale. Far beyond, what you might expect from that local geography. I like to think about the Italian Art Renaissance in the 15th and 16th century, focused in Florence. So, removed from Rome, the seat of Italian power and the church power. The Medici family and others provided capital. There was a network of business connections there was a good supply of marble, and paint supplies. And, things were advancing, and then a few masters Giotto, da Vinci, Michelangelo emerged from this pool of kind of opportunity as masters. They integrated the lessons from the past, they added their own vision and there was this revolution in art that seemed to advance from static 2-D depictions, mostly of bible scenes to dynamic three-dimensional art that many people, even today are captivated by. Books have been written about Florence. Why then? Why there? We're not gonna do that today. But I love that it is related to the Bubonic plague. And the fact that one-third of European people died from this terrible disease. But that took pressure off the farmers who could then produce extra food. Yadda yadda yadda. Now, we have the growth of Silicon Valley. Now, I don't wanna push this too hard. This was not an art, and it's not clearly about art, or about cultural things. But there was digital technologies and there's a somewhat parallel story. Removed from the seats of power in Washington D.C and New York. The power and influence. There was this West Coast place which actually even 50 years ago was mostly fruit farms. But companies arose, Hewlett Packard, Intel. There was this University, Stanford University. Disclaimer: I'm an employee of Stanford University that provided a growing technological work force in both engineering and science. These masters weren't artists — far from it. Although, well we could discuss that. But they were industrialists. You had Hewlett and Packard, you had the Gordon Moore, and the Intel founders. Steve Jobs and then of course Jerry Yang from Yahoo!, Sergey Brin, Larry Page. And recently now we know about the founders of Facebook, Uber, Twitter, etc. A remarkable concentration of talent, opportunity, technology. Creating a singularity, you could argue that in this area that was just a fruit farming area. So, Silicon Valley perhaps has helped usher in an era of AI, machine learning and the gig economy. Now, as I said I don't want to oversell this analogy and let's also remember what happened to Florence. It did not maintain its preeminence in art. Wars and important changing trade patterns reduced the available capital, reduced it as the center of the world in many ways. The reformation changed the religious dynamics. The Catholic church had various reactions against humanism. The pendulum and perhaps the luck of Florence ran out. And Florence became once again a local geographic region. It's great to visit, it's great to eat there but it is not really particularly, the center of anything right now. What does the future hold for Silicon Valley? John Markoff is a fellow, former fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study and Behavioral Sciences. He's a current fellow and research affiliate at the Human-centered Artificial Intelligence Institute at Stanford. He has been a science writer at the New York Times for more than 20, 30 years. He's covered the general computer industry, Silicon Valley in particular during this time that I just described of great innovation and disruption both in good and bad ways. John, you have written that Silicon Valley may be over optimistic, both at the rate of expected future progress, and also the benefits that that progress will bring to society. Perhaps it's peddling some things. How do you see this manifesting? And is it a byproduct of hyperbolic marketing, purely? Or does it indicate potentially the beginning of the end for this period of Silicon Valley flourishing innovation. John Markoff: Boy, I love your analogy to Florence. Because I think about that a lot and I think about it particularly in the context of fragility. How fragile is the Valley. Nothing lasts forever. Clearly the arc of technological innovation in the last couple of centuries has been from east to west. There's always the implication that it may continue to go west perhaps to China. You know, the question of where Silicon Valley came from is a really interesting one as well — you brought that up — what's new, I mean I always thought there's a lot of serendipity. I mean Shockley came here — Russ Altman: Right. John Markoff: — famously because his mother was here. What if his mother had been in Iowa? Russ Altman: Exactly. John Markoff: And then there's this wonderful thing that David Brock who's the staff historian at Computer History Museum recently discovered, Shockley didn't come here to build the transistor. He created a transistor company, but when he left Bell labs in the early 50s he was super — there was an automation phase. It's kind of an interesting thing considering where we are today. Russ Altman: Yes, yes. John Markoff: An automation fad, and he came here to build a robot. He got money from Beckman, who was his investor. And it devolved down, first, into a company whose first intent was to build a company to build a robot eye. Because he wanted to build an automated factory. So, Silicon Valley's roots are actually in robotics and AI. Which I think is not known, largely. Russ Altman: No, that is not generally appreciated. John Markoff: And it's just a wonderful sort of — it devolved down into transistor company and then of course the traders left and they went to Fairchild. Russ Altman: Right, right. John Markoff: And all of that happened. But then — so, I guess you know when I was a reporter in 2006 I was spending a lot of time in Europe. And it looked like innovation in mobile software was moving to Europe. Nokia, and Sion were there. Russ Altman: Yes. John Markoff: And I had this sense, that the ball was moving overseas in that direction. And then the iPhone happened. In 2007, the mobile platform came to the Valley. Russ Altman: You're right, we all had Nokia phones in 2005, 2006. John Markoff: At some point. That's right. Russ Altman: And it was like where the heck is Nokia. Why don't I see signs on it when I drive down 101. John Markoff: Yeah. Absolutely. Russ Altman: It was not a thing from Silicon Valley. John Markoff: So, the way I think about it, there are a couple things. It's really interesting to me to think about where the next IT platform might come from. Will it come from Silicon Valley? It's not guaranteed. I mean, there's lots of speculation it might be augmented reality, it might be speech. There clearly will be something after, if you walk down the street in San Francisco half the population is looking at the palm of their hand. Russ Altman: Yes. John Markoff: That can't be the end of user interface. There has to be something after that. So what'll it be? John Markoff: The sooner — the other thing I have to say is the visionaries are almost always wrong. It'll surprise us. It'll come out of left field. It might come from China. Russ Altman: So what about this idea, where does it, where does this idea come from that the marketing from Silicon Valley in terms of the pace of progress has been a little bit misleading and perhaps the data doesn't support — John Markoff: Yeah. Russ Altman: The looking back at how fast things have been and how fast they're going to be. John Markoff: I can't tell you in my career how many press releases I've gotten that have the word “revolution” in them. Russ Altman: Yeah. John Markoff: And in fact I think the reality of Silicon Valley is there have been a couple of big ideas. Personal computing, networks, ubiquitous computing, and then there's been a lot of great engineering. This is an engineering center. But big ideas that actually break paradigms only come along, every once in a while. We had a free ride for 50 years on Moore's law. What I would argue is because not only did things get exponentially faster, but cost fell exponentially as well. And that drove the creation of new markets at regular intervals. It was kind of a free ride. Russ Altman: Very interesting. John Markoff: Computing, went through these different stages, mobile phones in a sense happened because of cost and other related factors. Not because of brilliant innovation often. Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything. I'm Russ Altman, I'm speaking with John Markoff about innovation in the last couple of decades. How much of it, I guess, how much of it was designed and deserves credit, so let's — and, how much of it was free luck and a free ride. So let's dig a little bit deeper. So Moore's law, in what sense — First of all for those who are not familiar Moore's law is the general idea that computing every 18 months, computing power roughly doubles. In a remarkable turn of events for the last 20 or 30 years, that actually has been true. There is a profound concern now that engineers will not be able to maintain that. And that that will lead to putting the brakes on a lot of things. I guess what you mean by we've, they've been lucky and been getting a free ride is that they didn't have to worry about being particularly clever in their software or even in their hardware because they could count on Moore's law giving them vastly greater computer power very soon. John Markoff: Yeah. Russ Altman: But what is the world like when that flattens out? John Markoff: Well — Russ Altman: Is that the concern? John Markoff: Yeah. That's the concern, so basically the cost of Silicon stopped falling at an exponential rate around 2015 because we'd hit that wall we all knew was coming. And that's not to say it's over; there may be some way around or some new acceleration. But for the moment things have slowed down dramatically. So we're in this new era. And I had this wonderful moment about two and half years ago it was actually Engineering School Industrial Partners Program here. Everybody was wringing their hands about how we'd hit the wall. I ran into this Harvard computer architect and he was just wild with enthusiasm. Because he said “Now it's our turn.” Russ Altman: Interesting. John Markoff: You'll make, and that's in fact what we've seen. What we've seen is new architectural designs most of them in terms of chips that do AI kinds of algorithms better but that's where the innovation has been. So, that is — we're not saying that innovation is over but it's not in the lock step acceleration model of Moore's law. It's based on human ingenuity. Russ Altman: And this could be one of the changes that opens up the world and allows other places, other institutional structures to kind of take over in the innovation leadership. John Markoff: Absolutely, for example lets hypothetically, everything in AI is now about big data. So that argues that those with most data win. Google, Amazon, Apple, China. Russ Altman: Yes. John Markoff: As in a nation-state. But what if there is an algorithmic that break through that works off of small data. That changes the entire playing field. Russ Altman: Right. John Markoff: So it could — there's interesting stuff happening in AI approaches that may not be based on the current state of the art neuro-nets and deep learning. Russ Altman: Fantastic. So okay, so you've written a lot about, you know I love — I love that you're a journalist. I should say as a disclaimer to anybody listening I am not a journalist. My mother sometimes calls, My mother is only person I know, for sure listens to this show. Hi mom, I know you're listening. She'll call me every now again and said “You let that guy off the hook. You're a bad journalist.” And I had to say mom, I'm an enthusiast. I'm not a journalist. But as a journalist, I love you're trained to look at situations and kinda cut the B.S. from what's really happening. And you've looked for example at AI and jobs. What's your impression, there are a lot technologists saying Well, don't worry about this, we're gonna everybody will adapt. And they're forging ahead. John Markoff: Yeah. Russ Altman: When you look at it from your journalistic trained eye, what do you see as the reality? John Markoff: Okay. Couple of things. I had to come around to that view. I was part of that, in fact I helped create that current sort of period of anxiety that we're in about jobs and technology. I began writing about the impact of AI and white collar around 2010, 2011. And I was in that camp. Then I had an important sort of interaction with Danny Kahneman, who is the behavioral economist. Russ Altman: Very famous. John Markoff: I was on this rant about how automation would come to China and It would lead to disruption because of the loss of jobs. And he stopped me and he said you don't get it. He said, in China they'll be lucky if the robots come just in time. And I said what do you mean? He walked me through the demography of modern China. I began looking around the world. And all of sudden I realized that the most important things happening in the world today are demography not technology. Russ Altman: Ah. John Markoff: All over the world except for Africa and the Middle East, the world is aging at a rapid rate. And he's really right. The issue is care and dependency. So I changed the question I asked as a journalist. I used to ask when will there be self driving cars? Not anymore. I ask when will there be an robot that can safely give a shower to an aging human? And nobody has a good answer. Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything. I'm Russ Altman, I'm speaking with John Markoff who just changed the question. This is great. So, demography is driving technology is kinda the core concept that you just alluded to. John Markoff: Yeah. Russ Altman: Does that change our level of optimism? Should we now think, well, self-driving cars and AI for care of elderly? I think what you implied is not only should we be rooting for that we need for it to come soon or we for example might not have the work force to — John Markoff: That's right Russ Altman: — to take care of our parents and ourselves in the next 20 to 30 years. John Markoff: Absolutely. I mean Rod Brooks, who's a pioneering roboticist, says with a bit of humor, that self-driving cars will be the first elder care robots. Which actually may be true. And if you think about that, if self-driving cars did show up, they could give people who are sort of bound to home new mobility. And that would be a very great thing. Russ Altman: I Just had a very good friend say that their parents are driving and they don't think they're safe, and how people all over, certainly all over the country and probably all over the world, are trying to decide how do you have these tough conversations about many issues — John Markoff: Yeah. Russ Altman: — where there is a very important and difficult loss of autonomy associated with aging. You want to obviously support the elderly in a caring, loving way. But, they can be a danger to themselves and to others. John Markoff: Yeah. Russ Altman: And this is not a solved problem. And its only getting worse. John Markoff: The world is gonna look so different in a half century. Already, more people in the world as a whole are older than 65 , than under five. By the middle of the century the number of people over 80 globally will double and will go up seven fold by the end of the century. That's the most important factor in the world. Russ Altman: So as you look at this, do you now worry so now I'm flipping my perspective a little bit. Do you worry that with this challenge to Moore's law and the difficulty in getting that next doubling every 18 months that this is happening at kind of a perfect storm of just when we need Moore's law the most, because were not, we do not have robots to help take care of my parents. John Markoff: Exactly. Russ Altman: Or to drive them around. I need them to exist soon. And now at the same time were having some technological resets. Is this a potential crisis? John Markoff: Well, I think that the — there is a crisis, I think, in elder care. We do have to think about that as a society. The other question about markets and sort of the work force. The work force is not gonna change as fast as some people worry because of this slowing down. How many job categories, census job categories, have gone away in the last three decades? One. Elevator operators. The kind of rapid change. In 1995 when Jeremy Rifkin wrote the End of Work, the American economy grew more than it ever had grown in history in the next decade. Russ Altman: Right. John Markoff: The whole thing about jobs going away here we are in a full employment economy. We've had a half century of the micro-processor and a decade of deep learning. So something else is going on. It's a more, and I think what the deal is, it's very easy to point to jobs that might go away. It's much more difficult to look at jobs that might be created. We have a very difficult time understanding what the future is gonna look like. Russ Altman: I hate to be Mr. Renaissance, but I have spent time in Florence. And in fact the thing I was saying about the Bubonic plague. The farmers said we're in big trouble now because there's nobody to eat our food but they did not suffer because this middle class emerged of merchants, and people who created jobs and industries and guilds that didn't even exist a hundred years before. There was plenty of economic churn to support these folks. It's an exactly the example that you're referring to. Actually amazingly good things in many ways happened when you had some free time. So I've often wondered is the AI, robotic revolution if it ever happens. Is that actually gonna free up people to do things that we've had on our to-do list for a long time, that really society needs. Fantastic. We should now talk about the work force. You referred to that a little bit. What is the challenge in training young people for the future that is hard to predict? John Markoff: Boy, let's see if there are good examples. You know, the nature of education has changing in interesting ways. Sebastian Thrun and others at Stanford predicted that were gonna have this new kind of education and universities would go away. Universities don't appear— Russ Altman: The MOOC, the massive — John Markoff: That's right, online classroom. And MOOCs exist now, and universities are still thriving. The visionaries are always wrong. Russ Altman: We don't know. John Markoff: Yeah. Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything. I'm Russ Altman, more with John Markoff about the future of technology and computing, next on SiriusXM insight 121. Welcome back to The Future of Everything. I'm Russ Altman, I'm speaking with John Markoff, about technology, history of technology and computation and the future of technology and computation. John, you're currently working on a biography about Stewart Brands, who was associated with the he was a Stanford graduate student and he's associated with the Whole Earth Catalog. I think you believe this to be a critical, kind of historical moment in time. So tell us about the Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brands, and why we should care. John Markoff: Yeah, okay. First of all, Stewart was a Stanford student. He studied biology here in the 1950's. He's associated with a couple of very important events, that were instrumental in creating what I think of as a California perspective or world view, ideology. One of them was the Whole Earth Catalog. Before that there was something called the Trips Festival. Which was the most visible and most successful of these things that Ken Kesey organized called the acid tests. Russ Altman: Ken Kesey was a famous LSD guy. John Markoff: He participated in these experiments in Menlo park. They were financed by the CIA. Then the drug kinda leaked out into the surrounding community. And people like Stewart began experimenting with it. Some formally, and some recreationally. My generation experienced LSD as a recreational drug. But it was part of a cultural shift. And the Trips Festival which happened in January of 1966 in San Francisco at the Longshoremen's Hall. It was organized by Stewart was important because it was the moment that the 10,000 hippies in the Bay area realized that there were 10,000 hippies. It created a community. There was a direct line to Haight-Ashbury and to the counter culture. It also led directly — Russ Altman: Into the summer of 1968. John Markoff: Summer of love, that's right. All of that grew out of that moment, in a very direct sense. They hired to help organize it, this guy who had been a publicist for the Mime Troupe by the name of Bill Graham. Russ Altman: Pretty famous guy. John Markoff: He became famous, Bill Graham at that moment realized that there was money in music and the day after the Trips Festival he went out and leased the Filmore. So it led also directly to the San Francisco music scene. So it was the spark. So dial the clock forward a couple of years— Russ Altman: What, just one quick question. What did they do at the Trips Festival? Was it a discussion, was it music? John Markoff: It was all — it was several things. Stewart showed this multi-media slide show he'd produced called “America Needs Indians.” Which was important in the creation of the American environmental movement of the 1970's. He showed that for the last time. But then a couple of rock groups like Big Brother before Janice, the Grateful Dead, not the Warlocks, let's see who else played — three different rock groups played. And it was really the sort of the moment that you know the rock, the San Francisco rock concerts — Russ Altman: By any chance was it Jefferson Airplane? John Markoff: No, Jefferson Airplane wasn't there they played before at the Family Dog — Russ Altman: Okay they were a favorite of mine. John Markoff: Favorite of mine too. As a matter of fact, I used them to title a book that I wrote. Yeah, so all that sort of happened the culture sort of emerged. But by that time, Stewart who was the bridge between the beat culture, which had been in North Beach in the 50's and early 60's and hippe culture. He was done with that. He moved down the peninsula he came down here to help organize an education conference festival that never really happened. And after that failure, this is sort of Silicon Valley cultural thing about fail fast. He had a mentor his name was Dick Raymond, who had something called the Portola Institute was just up the road here in Menlo park and Stewart got this idea, and it was largely because his friends were going off to communes. That he would create a catalog, perhaps a little bit like the Sears robot catalog. Russ Altman: Which was a dominant thing in the 60's and 70's. John Markoff: That's right there was no Google. Russ Altman: I remember spending hours in the Sears catalog. John Markoff: That's right. And there was no Google. How could you find interesting things? So he came up with this notion of a catalog of tools. And his idea was a truck store, that he would drive around to the communes. And he would sell them stuff they need. Well, he did that about two times and then he realized that communes had no money. So that wasn't gonna work. So he pivoted, in a classic kind of Silicon Valley way Russ Altman: This is great. John Markoff: And he created this catalog that went from 1,000 copies in the fall of 1968, to winning the national book award in 1972. It really became the bible of my generation. And I can't tell you how many people I've run into, that said you know I saw something in the catalog, and my life took a right hand turn, or a left hand turn. That it really changed people's lives. Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything. I'm Russ Altman. I'm speaking with John Markoff about the Whole Earth Catalog. Okay so tell us more. How did it impact the world? Does it connect at all to the Silicon Valley that then emerged? John Markoff: Okay, it's super complicated. And I'm now writing Stewart's biography, I'm trying to — Russ Altman: Take your time because we have at least four minutes. John Markoff: So in 1962, Stewart's had just gotten out of the army and he was visiting the computer center at Stanford. And he saw something that really stuck with him. He saw these two kids sitting in front of a graphical computer display. Remember they didn't exist at that point. Russ Altman: This is very experimental. John Markoff: Having what he thought of as an out of body experience and what they were doing is they were playing a game called Space War. Which was the first video game. That had been invented by at MIT and had been imported to Stanford and I would argue that that was the first inkling of a something called “cyber space.” Stewart saw it first. And he kept that in the back of his mind. In 1972 he shut down the Whole Earth Catalog, and he was sort of becoming a journalist. He wrote this really important article for Rolling Stone which dealt with the two laboratories on both sides of Stanford campus. One was the Stanford Artificial Intelligence laboratory and the other was Xerox Park, which had just opened. And that was the first window, that people like me had that there was this thing called the internet coming and there was this thing called personal computing coming. Stewart saw it first. And he alerted the world to it. So he was sort of playing the role of a journalist at that point. But you sort of dial the world even farther forward and he set up this thing called The Well in 1985 in Sausalito, and there too, it's complicated. Because there was this explosion of what do you call it sort of digital utopianism. And he was part of that digital utopian movement. Russ Altman: So he bought in. John Markoff: Absolutely. Russ Altman: So he moved from the counter culture, beats, hippies he came literally south 20 miles started seeing computers, starting thinking about the future and that is a direct connection then. And does that spirit? Maybe you've written this, and I apologize. I've read that the Whole Earth Catalog embodied a spirit that is still traceable to current Silicon Valley utopianism. John Markoff: Yeah. Russ Altman: Is that an overstatement? John Markoff: It is a debated statement. There are two recent books this is where Stewart becomes kinda Rashomon. Franklin Foer's “World Without Mind” — so there's a Zeitgeist shift that's happened. In 2016 Silicon Valley went from being able to do no wrong, to being able to do no right. Russ Altman: It was an amazing turnaround. John Markoff: Just turned. And the two books that best sort of capture this are Foer's book. And he goes right back to Stewart and sort of — Stewart is patient zero. I think he gets it wrong. Russ Altman: Okay that might've been what I — John Markoff: And then there's Johnathan Taplan's book. It's called “Move Fast and Break Things.” Very similar book, but he has a more sophisticated understanding of what happened. He goes back to the digital utopians and Stewart was one of them. But there was a second wave and those are the digital libertarians. And it went from utopianism to libertarianism and I think that's the sort of arch. Stewart started as sort of sympathetic with Ayn Rand but he ended up in the middle of the 1970's working in Jerry Brown's administration — first administration. And he came away with this sense of the value of good government. So it's just wrong to think of Stewart as a complete libertarian. Russ Altman: I see. John Markoff: That's not what he is. Russ Altman: So there's another trail that says were gonna build this utopia. And you guys are preventing us from doing it. We are now libertarians because we want to be able to just build it. John Markoff: Yeah. Russ Altman: He wasn't necessarily part of that strand — John Markoff: No. Russ Altman: But responsible, maybe, I don't wanna overstate it, responsible use of — what would be the word — stewardship of this technology in an advancing — John Markoff: He was very optimistic but Stewart was always someone who saw nuance and paradox. He is seen as the person who said information wants to be free. That's not what he said. At the first hackers conference — Russ Altman: Aha. John Markoff: What he said was, information wants to be free and information wants to be very expensive. That's Stewart. Understanding the nuance — Russ Altman: That's interesting because that information wants to be free you can trace directly to statements of the Google founders and the Facebook founders. That's one of their mantras. John Markoff: Yeah. Russ Altman: And as we know, they have not always been led well by that mantra. And they've gotten themselves into very sticky, thorny situations because you need to moderate that with other considerations. John Markoff: And Stewart is an optimist. He was particularly an optimist about technology having an important role and impact on the world. There's this arc — the first sentence of Whole Earth Catalogs was “We are as gods, and we might as well get good at it.” Russ Altman: Wow. John Markoff: So 20 years ago with Danny Hillis, who's this computer scientist, he set up this organization called the Long Now foundation to build a clock. A mechanical clock to run for 10,000 years as a demonstration of long-term thinking. It's almost finished. Jeff Bezos picked up the tab, it exists. It's in Texas. Russ Altman: So were building it. Is it a pendulum? John Markoff: It is not a pendulum — is it a pendulum? Let me think. Is it a pendulum? Yes. It's a pendulum. Russ Altman: It's a physical device. It's not like an atomic clock. We're not counting cesium vibrations. John Markoff: No, it will run from air flow and being wound by people for millennia. We hope. But Stewart now has got this de-extinction group called Revive and Restore. Which is sort of him trying to sort of deliver on that original vision of we are as gods. This notion of sort of humans and technology. And they're trying to bring back the woolly mammoth. Or more importantly — Russ Altman: These are like the seed banks and the DNA banking so that we can track species that are either extinct or going extinct. John Markoff: Or modifying species like Coral to make them more resilient in endangered niches in the environment. Russ Altman: It'll be a great book. It's coming out I'm sure as soon as you can finish it. Thank you for listening to The Future of Everything. I'm Russ Altman, if you missed any of this episode listen any time on demand with the SiriusXM app.

The Future of Everything with Russ Altman: "John Markoff: The past, present and future of Silicon Valley" John Markoff is perhaps best known as a science and technology writer for the New York Times, but he is also a fellow at the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Stanford. In both roles he is a keen observer and chronicler of the rise of Silicon Valley as the heart of the technological revolution of the past six decades. While Silicon Valley remains the preeminent technology center in the world today, Markoff cautions that nothing lasts forever and a demise can often be just as swift as the rise. The next big thing in tech, he says, will be a surprise and it could come from anywhere. To remain at the top, Silicon Valley cannot rest on its laurels, but must continue to innovate like no other. Markoff has noticed a shift in emphasis in recent years from faster and cheaper computers to artificial intelligence and robotics that may be opening new frontiers to technologists outside of Silicon Valley for the first time in many decades. He says the biggest problem for society will not be losing jobs to robots, but rather dealing with rapidly aging populations around the world. The question, he says, isn’t which jobs will be the first to go, but rather who will be available to fill the jobs that remain. Originally aired on SiriusXM on June 1, 2019. Recorded at Stanford Video.

John Markoff is a Pulitzer Prize winning technology journalist, who retired from his position at the New York Times in 2017. He grew up in the Bay Area of California, and was one of the first journalists to write about the World Wide Web. This interview includes a discussion about Silicon Valley as an idea and workplace; counter cultures and technology; distributed computing and the evolution of the internet / World Wide Web. There is also some discussion about self-driving vehicles toward the end of the interview. Work on a Stewart Brand biography was also touched upon. Books written by Markoff include What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry and Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots. Co-authored and collaborative works include The High Cost of High Tech; Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier and Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw. Computer History Museum https://www.computerhistory.org/events/bio/John,Markoff Stanford University https://casbs.stanford.edu/people/john-markoff BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY; A Free and Simple Computer Link https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/08/business/business-technology-a-free-and-simple-computer-link.html What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry https://www.amazon.com/What-Dormouse-Said-Counterculture-Personal/dp/0143036769 Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots https://www.amazon.com/Machines-Loving-Grace-Common-Between/dp/0062266691 The “Whole Earth Catalog" was a 1960s publishing sensation. It happened because its creator was given a chance to fail. https://altaonline.com/access-to-success/ Cyberpunk http://www.brucebethke.com/ https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bn5k5m/william-gibson-interview-399 http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/nealstephenson.html https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/06/neal-stephenson-metaverse-snow-crash-silicon-valley-virtual-reality Elon Musk's War On LIDAR: Who Is Right And Why Do They Think That? https://www.forbes.com/sites/bradtempleton/2019/05/06/elon-musks-war-on-lidar-who-is-right-and-why-do-they-think-that/#6630eb492a3b Do You Trust This Computer? https://youtu.be/3CJE6XheubM The future of radio may well be digital, but it won't survive on DAB https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/22/digital_future_is_not_dab/

John is a former New York Times reporter reporting nationally on science and computing. He’s been an adjunct faculty member of the Stanford Graduate Program on Journalism. In 2013 he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. John has published several books on the computer industry. Currently he’s a Research Affiliate at the Stanford University Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences researching a biography of Stewart Brand, the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog. We talked about his early days of computing at InfoWorld and Byte, as well as the Kevin Mitnick affair. We also talked about the current breed of young journalists and the importance of community newspapers. We delved into a mutually favorite topic: the problem with personal robots: cost vs. capability vs. expectations. Don’t miss this wide-ranging discussion with John.

Journalist and author John Markoff discusses the Whole Earth Catalog, a long defunct counter-culture magazine and product catalog published by writer and entrepreneur Stewart Brand. Markoff details how the catalog came to be, why the Whole Earth Catalog was so vital, the ways it influenced Silicon Valley, and if there will ever be anything like it again.

The Valley comes of age as the center of innovation and personal computing. Doug Englebart delivers the Mother of All Demos. Steve Jobs makes a fateful visit to Xerox PARC. On The WELL, people learn what it means to socialize online. Guests: Leslie Berlin, John Markoff, and Howard Rheingold.

Inspired by cybernetics and LSD, Stewart Brand creates the Whole Earth Catalog as a how-to manual for the commune movement. The catalog articulates a philosophy of tech idealism and individual empowerment. Guests: Fred Turner, John Markoff, and Kevin Kelly.

John Markoff has been writing about technology for The New York Times for 30 years. He was there when Steve Jobs unveiled the first ever iPhone... and that wasn't even the first time he'd seen it.

The iOS 11 public beta has started: https://beta.apple.com/sp/betaprogram/ MacRumors says Apple has acquired German firm SensoMotoric Instruments: https://www.macrumors.com/2017/06/26/apple-acquires-sensomotoric-instruments/ On the 10th anniversary of the iPhone, John Markoff interviews those who worked on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5xDRdWFdsoQ Echo Show might be a little creepy: https://www.buzzfeed.com/mathonan/meet-amazons-new-echo-show-alexa-is-watching The Super Nintendo Classic arrives in September: https://sixcolors.com/post/2017/06/super-nintendo-classic-arrives-in-september/ Our thanks to Shutterstock (http://shutterstock.com/rebound) for sponsoring this episode. Whether you're making ads or brochures, you need high quality images to attract and keep customers. Go to Shutterstock.com/Rebound and get started today with a 20% discount. Our thanks as well to Indochino (https://www.Indochino.com) where you'll find the best made to measure shirts and suits at a great price. Use the promo code "REBOUND" and get any premium suit for just $379. And our thanks to Couchbase (https://www.couchbase.com/therebound). Get exceptional customer experience at any scale on the Couchbase engagement database. Always on, always fast. To find out more, go to Couchbase.com/TheRebound.

Special guest John Moltz returns to the show. Topics include more follow-up from WWDC 2017, the iPad Pro models and ProMotion, Scott Forstall's interview with John Markoff regarding the 10-year anniversary of the original iPhone, the ongoing shitshow at Uber, quick thoughts on the Nintendo Switch, and more. Also: guess which John enjoys throwing babies into the air.

Nick Bilton is a special correspondent for Vanity Fair and the author of American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road. “I’ve been covering tech for a long, long time. And the thing I’ve always tried to do is cover the people of the tech culture, not the tech itself. … I've always been interested in the good and bad side of technology. A lot of times the problem in Silicon Valley is that people come up with a good idea that’s supposed to do a good thing—you know, to change the world and make it a better place. And it ends up inevitably having a recourse that they don’t imagine.” Thanks to MailChimp, Viacom, and Audible for sponsoring this week's episode. @nickbilton nickbilton.com Bilton on Longform [00:00] Ponzi Supernova [01:15] American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road (Portfolio • 2017) [01:45] Bilton’s New York Times archive [01:45] Bilton’s Vanity Fair archive [01:45] Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal (Portfolio • 2014) [07:30] "The Underground Website Where You Can Buy Any Drug Imaginable" (Adrian Chen • Gawker • Jun 2011) [07:30] Adrian Chen’s first appearance on the Longform Podcast [07:30] Adrian Chen’s second appearance on the Longform Podcast [09:15] NYC Resistor [11:45] "Uber’s C.E.O. Plays With Fire" (Mike Isaac • New York Times • Apr 2017) [16:00] Fan Club [21:30] Bits, New York Times technology blog [21:45] Gizmodo [23:00] Bill Keller’s New York Times archive [23:00] John Markoff’s New York Times archive [25:45] "The iEconomy" series [27:30] "How the Kindle Moved From BlackBerry to iPad" (New York Times • Sep 2011) [29:45] "Disruptions: Fliers Must Turn Off Devices, but It’s Not Clear Why" (New York Times • Nov 2011) [50:45] "Meet the Dread Pirate Roberts, The Man Behind Booming Black Market Drug Website Silk Road" (Andy Greenberg • Forbes • Sep 2013) [50:45] "Silk Road Creator Ross Ulbricht Sentenced to Life in Prison" (Andy Greenberg • Wired • May 2015) [50:45] "The Rise & Fall of Silk Road Part I" (Joshuah Bearman • Wired • Apr 2015) [50:45] "The Rise & Fall of Silk Road Part II" (Joshuah Bearman • Wired • May 2015) [51:00] "Exclusive: How Elizabeth Holmes’s House of Cards Came Tumbling Down" (Vanity Fair • Oct 2016) [52:00] "‘It’s An Honor’" (Jimmy Breslin • New York Herald Tribune • Nov 1963)

"Over 2,000 bylines, each one thoroughly reported, crisply rendered, and gloriously drenched with quiet authority."

Technology journalist and former New York Times reporter John Markoff talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about his nearly three-decade long career covering tech for the Times before retiring at the end of 2016. He reflects on why Steve Jobs was both a great and terrible person to interview and how science fiction books such as "Neuromancer," "Snow Crash" and "True Names" gave him a leg up on other reporters. Markoff says the most important issues facing the tech world today include the dangers of anonymity online; how scientific advances will make it easy to edit genes; and why roboticists need to focus on creating elder care robots. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In our 140th episode of the Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast, Stewart Baker, Alan Cohn, Maury Shenk, and Jennifer Quinn-Barabanov discuss: Five EU members say they want EU-wide crypto controls; FBI hacked more than 8,000 computers in 120 countries; Undisclosed collection of data on massage device spurs class action; and Wages of defeat: Election hack fever seizes the left and fake news fever seizes the left. Our interview is with New York Times reporter and author of "Machines of Loving Grace" John Markoff. The views expressed in this podcast are those of the speakers and do not reflect the opinions of the firm.

Once the realm of science fiction, smart machines are rapidly becoming part of our world—and these technologies offer amazing potential to improve the way we live. Imagine intelligent, autonomous vehicles that reduce crashes and robots that can help your aged grandma move around safely. In this episode, Gill Pratt, CEO of the Toyota Research Institute, talks with John Markoff of The New York Times about how scientists are pushing the boundaries of human knowledge in autonomous vehicles and robotics.

Brian David Johnson Show Notes Brian’s Book: 21st Century Robot Brian’s Midwest Compute video on The Future of Technology Trossen Robotics Website: Jimmy The Robot Erector set John Markoff’s history of the PC revolution: What The Dormouse Said Big Five Personality Traits Brian’s firm: Frost and Sullivan IEEE Ethical Design of Autonomous Systems Committee Charter

In this episode we talk to John Markoff, science writer for The New York Times and author of the book Machines of Loving Grace about the complicated and evolving relationship between humans and computers. Listen as he squashes our dreams of near future driver-less cars and conscious sex robots with pleasure centers.

中国国际航空公司可笑的伪舱内 Wi-Fi，Google 的新图标，即将重返中国的 Google Play Store，以及 Facebook 的智能机器人「M」。 本期会员通讯将于稍后发至各位会员邮箱。每月三十元，支持不鸟万如一和 Rio 把《IT 公论》做成最好的科技播客。请访问 itgonglun.com/member。若您无意入会，但喜欢某一期节目，也欢迎用支付宝或 PayPal 支付小费至 hi@itgonglun.com，支付宝用户亦可扫描下方二维码： 相关链接 John Markoff 关于人工智能和机器人学的新书《Machines of Loving Grace》 乔布斯电子邮件生成器 《Wired》杂志关于 Facebook M 的文章 John McCarthy Doug Engelbart Robot or Not? Hans Moravec Norbert Wiener IPN 播客网络常见问题解答 人物简介 不鸟万如一：字节社创始人。 Rio: Apple4us 程序员。

中国国际航空公司可笑的伪舱内 Wi-Fi，Google 的新图标，即将重返中国的 Google Play Store，以及 Facebook 的智能机器人「M」。 本期会员通讯将于稍后发至各位会员邮箱。每月三十元，支持不鸟万如一和 Rio 把《IT 公论》做成最好的科技播客。请访问 itgonglun.com/member。若您无意入会，但喜欢某一期节目，也欢迎用支付宝或 PayPal 支付小费至 hi@itgonglun.com，支付宝用户亦可扫描下方二维码： 相关链接 John Markoff 关于人工智能和机器人学的新书《Machines of Loving Grace》 乔布斯电子邮件生成器 《Wired》杂志关于 Facebook M 的文章 John McCarthy Doug Engelbart Robot or Not? Hans Moravec Norbert Wiener IPN 播客网络常见问题解答 人物简介 不鸟万如一：字节社创始人。 Rio: Apple4us 程序员。

Longtime New York Times technology and science writer John Markoff joins the a16z Podcast to discuss our changing relationship with technology and machines ... as well as the changing nature of Silicon Valley itself (where Markoff grew up). Jumping off from the themes of Markoff's new book, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots, we explore the future of human and robot work; hear about chatbots that keep kids enthralled during "toilet time;" and the implications of “the wheels finally falling off of Moore's Law” -- something people have long predicted but has never happened yet. And finally, why education is the raw material for a future where humans and intelligent machines work hand in (robotic) hand.

JOHN MARKOFF is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who covers science and technology for The New York Times. His most recent book is the forthcoming Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots. The Conversation: https://www.edge.org/conversation/john_markoff-the-next-wave

李如一应彭博《商业周刊/中文版》邀请推荐了十本与技术/文化/社会相关的书，本期节目是对这篇稿子的延伸。 这十本书是： Bruce Sterling: Shaping Things Bruce Sterling: Tomorrow Now Fred Turner: The Democratic Surround John Markoff: *What the Dormouse Said*，繁体中文版：《PC 迷幻纪事》，大块文化 Jonathan Zittrain: *The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop It*，简体中文版：《互联网的未来：光荣、毁灭与救赎的预言》，东方出版社 Eli Pariser: The Filter Bubble Jaron Lanier: Who Owns the Future? James Gleick: *The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood*，简体中文版：《信息简史》，人民邮电出版社 Guy Debord: *Society of the Spectacle*，简体中文版：《景观社会》，南京大学出版社 Walter Isaacson 将于 2014 年底出版的新书 相关链接 李如一：互联网变得有文化了？ 人物简介 李如一：字节社创始人。 曹然：电台主播。

电脑从商用、工业用转为个人用的过程里，还有着文化层面的原因，那段历史长期以来都被忽视。 《史蒂夫·乔布斯传》的作者 Walter Isaacson 的下一本书，会让美国 1960 年代的反文化运动（counterculture）与个人电脑的关系成为正史的一部分。这段故事会被主流化。 电脑和互联网所象征的反叛、自由、去中心化精神也正在逐步被商业保守主义取代。个人选择不再被重视，信息被圈在一个个围栏当中，难以自由流动，电脑变得电器化和傻瓜化，曾经以「不看电视」为荣的一代人，如今在电脑屏幕前吃着薯片干着上一代人在电视前干的事情，磨损着自己的颈椎和腰椎。 前戏 请不要再用「长微博」了好吗？ 相关链接 Walter Isaacson 新书在 Medium 上的节选（之一） Walter Isaacson 新书在 Medium 上的节选（之二） John Markoff: What the Dormouse Said 《What the Dormouse Said》繁体中文版《PC 迷幻纪事》 Fred Turner: From Counterculture to Cyberculture 《From Counterculture to Cyberculture》简体中文版《数字乌托邦》 Fred Turner 的新书《The Democratic Surround》 人物简介 李如一：字节社创始人。

Arash Komeili cell biologist, Assc. Prof. plant and microbial biology UC Berkeley. His research uses bacterial magnetosomes as a model system to study the molecular mechanisms governing the biogenesis and maintenance of bacterial organelles. Part1TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 3: [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 1: [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews, featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 4: Hi, and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. We are doing another two part interview on spectrum. Our guest is Arash Kamali, [00:01:00] a cell biologist and associate professor of plant and microbial biology at cal Berkeley. His research uses bacterial magneta zones as a model system to study the molecular mechanisms governing the biogenesis and maintenance of bacterial organelles. Today. In part one, Arash walks us through what he is researching and how he was drawn to it in part two, which will air in two weeks. [00:01:30] He explains how these discoveries might be applied and he discusses the scientific outreach he does. Here's part one, a rush. Camelli. Welcome to spectrum. Thank you. I wanted to lay the groundwork a little bit. You're studying bacteria and why did you choose bacteria and not some other micro organism to study? One Speaker 5: practical motivation was that they're easier to study. They're easier to grow in [00:02:00] the lab. You can have large numbers of them. If you're interested in a specific process, you have the opportunity to go deep and try to really understand maybe all the different components that are involved in that process, but it wasn't necessarily a deliberate choice is just as I worked with them it became more and more fascinating and then I wanted to pursue it further. Speaker 4: And then the focus of your research on the bacteria, can you explain that? Speaker 5: Yeah, so we work with [00:02:30] a specific type of bacteria. They're called magnate as hectic bacteria and these are organisms that are quite widespread. You can find them in most aquatic environments by almost any sort of classification. You can really group them together if you take their shape or if you look at even the genes they have, the general genes they have, you can really group them into one specific group as opposed to many other bacteria that you can do that. But Unites Together as a group [00:03:00] is that they're, they're able to orient in magnetic fields and some along magnetic fields. This behavior was discovered quite by accident a couple of times independently. Somebody was looking under a microscope and they noticed that there were bacteria were swimming all in the same direction and they couldn't figure out why. They thought maybe the light from the window was attracting them or some other type of stimuli and they tried everything and they couldn't really figure out why the bacteria were swimming in one direction except they noticed that [00:03:30] regardless of where they were in the lab, they were always swimming in the same geographic direction and so they thought, well, the only thing we can think of that would attract them to the same position is the magnetic field, and they were able to show that sure enough, if you bring a magnet next to the microscope, you can change the swimming direction. Speaker 5: This type of behavior is mediated by a very special structure that the bacteria build inside of their cell, and this was sort of [00:04:00] what attracted me to it. Can you differentiate them? The UK erotic? Yeah. Then the bacterial, can you differentiate those two for us so that we kind of get a sense of is there, they're easy, different differentiate, you know the generally speaking you out excels, enclose their genetic material in an organelle called the nucleus. They're generally much bigger. They have a lot more genetic information associated with them and they have a ton of different kinds of organelles that perform [00:04:30] functions. All these Organelles to fall the proteins to break them down. They have organelles for generating energy, but all those little specific features, you know, you can find some bacterium that has organelles or you can find some bacterial solid that's really huge. Or you can find some bacteria so that encloses its DNA and an organelle. Speaker 5: It's just that you had accels have all of them together. Many of the living organisms that you encounter everyday because you can see them [00:05:00] very easily. Are you carry out, almost all of them are plants and fungi and animals. They're all made up of you. Charismatic cells. It's just that there's this whole unseen world of bacteria and what function does that capability serve, that magnetic functions that it can be realized that yet in many places on earth, the magnetic field will act as a guide through these changes in oxygen levels, sort of like a straight line through these. These [00:05:30] bacteria are stuck in these sort of magnetic field highways. It's thought to be a simpler method for finding the appropriate oxygen levels and simpler in this case means that they have to swim less as swimming takes energy. So the advantage is that they use less energy, get to the same place, that bacteria and that doesn't have the same capabilities relatively speaking, as a simple explanation, it's actually, because it is so simple, the model, you can kind of replicate [00:06:00] it in the lab a little bit. Speaker 5: If you set up a little tube that has the oxygen grading and then the bacteria will go to a certain place and you can actually see that they're sort of a band of bacteria at what they consider for them to be appropriate oxygen levels. And then if you inject some oxygen at the other end of the tube, the bacteria will swim away from this oxygen gradient. Now, if you give them a magnetic field that they can swim along, they can move away from this advancing oxygen threat much more quickly than [00:06:30] bacteria that can't navigate along magnetic fields. So that's sort of a proof of concept a little bit in the lab. There's a lot of reasons why it also doesn't make sense. For example, some of these bacteria make so many of these magnetic structures that we haven't talked about yet, but they make so many of these particles way more than they would ever need to orient in the magnetic field. Speaker 5: So it seems excessive. There are other bacteria that live in places on earth where there is not really this kind of a magnetic field guide. And in those environments there's [00:07:00] plenty of other bacteria that don't have these magneto tactic capabilities and they still can find that specific oxygen zone very easily. So in some ways I think it is an open question but there isn't really enough yet to refute the kind of the generally accepted model on the movement part of it. You were mentioning that they use magnetic field to move backwards and forwards. Only explain the limiting factor. Yeah, that's [00:07:30] an important point actually because it's not that they use the magnetic field for sensing in a way. It's not that they are getting pulled or pushed by the magnetic field. They are sort of passively aligned and the magnetic field sort of like if you have two bar magnets and if one of them is perpendicular to the other one and you bring the other one closer, I'll just move until they're parallel to each other. Speaker 5: This is the same thing. The bacteria have essentially a bar magnet and inside of the cell and so the alignment to the magnetic field [00:08:00] is passive that you can kill the bacteria and they'll still align with the magnetic field. The swimming takes advantage of structures and and machines that are found in all bacteria essentially. So they have flagella that they can use to swim back and forth as you mentioned. And they have a whole bunch of other different kinds of systems for sensing the amount of oxygen or other materials that they're interested in to figure out, should I keep swimming or should I stop swimming? And [00:08:30] as I mentioned earlier, the bacteria are quite diverse. So when you look at different magnatech active bacteria, the types of flagella they have are also different from each other. So it's not one universal mechanism for the swimming, it's just the idea that that the swimming is limited by these magnetic field lines. Speaker 6: [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 5: Our guest today on spectrum is [inaudible] Chameleon, a cell biologist Speaker 7: and associate professor at cal Berkeley. In our next segment, [00:09:00] Arash talks about what attracted him to study the magnetism and why it remains in some bacteria and not others. This is k a l x Berkeley. So Speaker 5: let's talk about the magnetic zone, right? This is sort of my fascination. I was a graduate student at UCF and I studied cell biology. I use the yeast, which are not bacteria but in many ways they are kind of like bacteria. They're much simpler to study than maybe other do care attic [00:09:30] organisms and we have genetics available and so I was very fascinated by east, but I was studying a problem with XL organization and communication within the cell and yeast. We were taught sort of as students in cell biology at the time, that cell organization and having compartments in the cell organelles basically that do different functions was very unique feature of you carry attic cells and there's one of the things I've defined them. I received my phd to do a postdoctoral fellowship. I happen to be [00:10:00] in interviewing at cal tech and professor Mel Simon there he was talking about all kinds of bacteria that he was interested in and he said there's these bacteria that have organelles and I just, it kind of blew my mind because we were told explicitly that that's not true and in many textbooks, even today it still says that bacteria don't have organelles. Speaker 5: I learned more about men and I learned that these magnatech to bacteria that we've been talking about so far, you can actually build a structure inside of the cell, out of their cell membrane and within [00:10:30] this membrane compartment, it's essentially a little factory for making magnetic particles so they can build crystals of mineral called magnetite, which is just an iron oxide. Every three or four and some organisms make a different kind of magnetic minerals called Greg [inaudible], which is an iron sulfur mineral, but these are perfect little crystals, about 50 nanometers in diameter, and they make a chain of these magnesiums, so these membrane enclosed magnetic particles. [00:11:00] This chain is sort of on one side of the cell and it allows the bacteria to orient and magnetic fields because each of those crystals has this magnetic dipole moment in the same direction and all those little dipole moments interact with each other to make a little bar magnet, a little compass needle essentially that forces the bacterium to Orient in the magnetic field. Speaker 5: When I heard about this, I realized that this is just incredibly fascinating. Nobody really knew how it was that the membrane compartment forum [00:11:30] or even if it formed first and the mineral formed inside of it. There wasn't much or anything known about the proteins that were involved in building the compartment and then making the magnetic particle. It just seemed like something that needed to be studied and it was fascinating to me and I've been working on it for 1213 years now. Have we covered what the of the magnetic is that idea behind the function of the magnetism, which is the [00:12:00] structures of the cells build to allow them to align with a magnetic field. We think that function is to simplify the search for low oxygen environments. That's the main model in our field and I think there are definitely some groups that are actively working on understanding that aspect of the behavior better. Speaker 5: How it is that the bacteria can find a certain oxygen concentration. These bacteria in particular, what are the mechanics of them swimming along [00:12:30] the magnetic field and the, is there some other explanation for why they do this? For example, if they are changing orientations into magnetic field, can they sense the strain that the magnetic field is putting onto the cell? Can that be sensed somehow and then used for some work down the line and there are groups that are actively pursuing those kinds of ideas. You were mentioning that this is a particular kind of bacteria that has this capability, right, and others don't. Right. Yet both seem to be equally [00:13:00] effective and populating the water areas that you're studying. No apparent advantage. Disadvantage, so winning in Canada? Yeah, I mean it's a lot of the Darwinian, you could say as long as it's not severely disadvantageous, then maybe they wouldn't be a push for it to be lost. Speaker 5: What is kind of intriguing a little bit is there's examples of magna detective bacteria in many different groups, phylogenetic groups, so many different types of species that will be, let's [00:13:30] say bacterium that normally just lives free in the ocean and then I'll have a relative that's very similar to it, but it's also a magnet, a tactic. In recent years, people have studied this a little bit more and we know now what are the specific set of genes that allow bacteria to become magnetic tactic. So you can look at those genes specifically and say, how is it that bacteria that are otherwise so different from each other can all perform the same function? And if you know the genes that build the structures that allow them to orient [00:14:00] the magnetic fields, you can look at how different those genes are from each other or has similar they are. Speaker 5: And normally with a lot of these types of behaviors in bacteria, there's something called horizontal gene transfer that explains how it is that otherwise similar bacteria can have different functionalities. For example, you can think of that as bacteria being cars and everybody has sort of the same standard set of know features on the car. But you can add on different features if you want to. So you can upgrade and have other kinds of features like leather [00:14:30] seats or regular seats. And so the two cars that have different kinds of seats are very similar to each other. It's just one that got the leather seats. And so these partly are thought to occur by bacteria exchanging genes with each other. Somebody who wasn't magna tactic maybe got these jeans from another organism, but when people look at the genes that make these mag Nita zones, these magnetic structures inside of the cell, what you see is that they appear to be very, very ancient. Speaker 5: So it doesn't seem like there was a lot of recent [00:15:00] exchange of genes between these various groups of bacteria to make them magna tactic. And it almost seems to map to the ancestral divergence of all of these bacteria from each other. One big idea is that the last common ancestor of all these organisms was mag new tactic and that many, many other bacteria have sort of lost this capability over what would be almost 2 billion years of evolution for these bacteria. And then some have retained it. [00:15:30] Those of that have retained it is it's still serving an advantage for them, or is it just sort of Vista GL and they have it and they're sort of stuck in magnetic fields and they have to deal with it? No, but nobody really knows. Actually. The other option is that there was a period of horizontal gene transfer, but it was a very long time ago so that the signature is sort of lost from, again, a couple of billion years of evolution or divergence from each other, but it really looks like whenever this process happened, it was quite anxious. Speaker 3: [00:16:00] You are listening to spectrum on KALX Berkeley. Our guest is Arash [inaudible]. In the next segment, rush talks about organelles in bacterial cells. Speaker 5: [00:16:30] Explain what the Organelle is, so there's a lot of functions within the cell that need to be enclosed in a compartment for various reasons. You can have a biochemical reaction that's not very efficient, but if you put it in within a compartment and concentrates, all of the components that carry that reaction, it can be carried out more efficiently. The other thing is that for some reactions to to happen, you need a chemical environment that's different than the rest of the cellular environment. You can't convert [00:17:00] the whole environment of the cell to that one condition. So by compartmentalizing it you able to carry it out and often the products of these reactions can be toxic to the rest of the cell. And so by componentizing again you can keep the toxic conditions away from the rest of the, so these are the different reasons why you care how to excels. Speaker 5: Like the cells in our body have organelles that do different things like how proteins fold or modify proteins break him down and in bacterial cells it [00:17:30] was thought that they're so simple and so small that they don't really have a need for compartments. Although for many years people have had examples of bacteria that do form compartments. You carrot axles are big and Organelles are really easy to see where the light microscope so you can easily see that the cell has compartments within it. Whereas a lot of bacteria are well studied, are quite simple, they don't have much visible structure within them. And that's maybe even further the bias that there is some divide and this [00:18:00] allowed you carry out access to become more complex, quote unquote, and then it just doesn't exist in bacteria. How is it that they then were revealed? I think they'd been revealed for a long time. Speaker 5: You know, for example, there's electron microscope images from 40 years ago or more where you see for example, photosynthetic bacteria, these are bacteria that can do photosynthesis. They have extensive membrane structures inside of the cell that how's the proteins that harvest light and carry [00:18:30] out photosynthesis and they're, it seems like the idea for having an Organelle is that you just increased it area that you can use for photosynthesis sorta like you just have more solar panels if you just keep spreading the solar panels. Right. So that in this way, by just sort of making wraps of membranes inside of the cell, you just increased the amount of space that you can harvest light. So those were known for a long time and I think it just wasn't a problem that was studied from the perspective of cell biology and cell [00:19:00] organization that much. That's sort of a different angle that people are bringing to it now with many different bacterial organelles. Speaker 5: And part of the reason why it's important to think of it that way is that of course what the products of the bike chemistry inside of the Organelles is fascinating and really important to understand. But to build the organ out itself is also a difficult thing. So for example, you have to bend and remodel the cell membrane [00:19:30] to create, whether it's a sphere or it's wraps of membrane, and that is not a energetically favorable thing to do. It's not easy. So in your cataract cells, we know that there are specific proteins and protein machines. Then their only job is really to bend and remodeled the membrane cause it's not going to happen by itself very easily. And with all of these different structures that are now better recognized in bacteria, we really have no idea how it is that they performed the same function. Is [00:20:00] it using the same types of proteins as what we know in your care at excels or are they using different kinds of proteins? Speaker 5: That was sort of a very basic question to ask. How similar or different is it than how you carry? Like some makes an Oregon own fester was one of the first inspirations for us to study this process in magnatech the bacteria. And what sort of tools are you using to parse this information? In our field we use various tools and it's turned out to be incredibly beneficial [00:20:30] because different approaches have sort of converged on the same answer. So my basic focus was to use genetics as a tool. And the idea here was if we go in and randomly mutate or delete genes in these bacteria and then see which of these random mutations results in a loss of the magnetic phenotype and prevents the cell from making the magnetism Organelles, then maybe we know [00:21:00] those genes that are potentially involved. And so that was sort of what I perfected during my postdoctoral fellowship. Speaker 5: And that was my main approach to study the problem. And then on top of that, the other approach has been really helpful for us. And this is again something we've worked on is once we know some of the candidate proteins to be able to study them, their localization in the cell and they're dynamics, we modify the protein. So that they're linked to fluorescent proteins. So then we can, uh, use for us in this microscopy to follow them within the cell. [00:21:30] Other people, their approach was to say, well, these structures are magnetic. If we break open the cell, we can use a magnet and try to separate the magnesiums from the rest of the cell material. And then if we have the purified magnesiums, we can look to see what kinds of proteins are associated with them and sort of guilt by association. If there is a protein there, it should do something or maybe it does something. Speaker 5: That was the other approach. And the final approach that's been really helpful, [00:22:00] particularly because Magno take it back to your, our diverse, as we talked about earlier, is to take representatives that are really distantly related to each other and sequence their genomes. So get the sequence of their DNA and see what are the things that they have in common with each other. Take two organisms that live in quite different environments and their lineages are quite different from each other, but they both can do this magnetic tactic behavior. And by doing that, people again found [00:22:30] some genes and so if you take the genes that we found by genetics, random mutations of the cell by isolating the magnesiums and cy counting their proteins, and then by doing the genome sequencing, it all converges on the same set of genes. Speaker 2: [inaudible] this concludes part one of our [00:23:00] interview. We'll be sure to catch part two Friday July 12th at noon. Spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. Speaker 7: The link is tiny url.com/calex spectrum. Now a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Speaker 5: Rick Karnofsky [00:23:30] joins me for the calendar on the 4th of July the exploratorium at pier 15 in San Francisco. He's hosting there after dark event for adults 18 and over from six to 10:00 PM the theme for the evening is boom, Speaker 4: learn the science of fireworks, the difference between implosions and explosions and what happens when hot water meets liquid nitrogen tickets are $15 and are available from www.exploratorium.edu [00:24:00] the Santa Clara County Parks has organized an early morning van ride adventure into the back country. To a large bat colony view the bat tornado and learn about the benefits of our local flying mammals. Meet at the park office. Bring a pad to sit on and dress in layers for changing temperatures. This will happen Saturday July six from 4:00 AM to 7:00 AM at Calero County Park [00:24:30] and Santa Clara. Reservations are required to make a reservation call area code (408) 268-3883 Saturday night July six there are two star parties. One is in San Carlos and the other is near Mount Hamilton. The San Carlos event is hosted by the San Mateo Astronomical Society and is held in Crestview Park San Carlos. If you would like to help [00:25:00] with setting up a telescope or would like to learn about telescopes come at sunset which will be 8:33 PM if you would just like to see the universe through a telescope come one or two hours after sunset. Speaker 4: The other event is being hosted by the Halls Valley Astronomical Group. Knowledgeable volunteers will provide you with a chance to look through a variety of telescopes and answer questions about the night. Sky Meet at the Joseph D. Grant ranch county park. [00:25:30] This event starts at 8:30 PM and lasted until 11:00 PM for more information. Call area code (408) 274-6121 July is skeptical hosted by the bay area. Skeptics is on exoplanet colonization down to earth planning. Join National Center for Science Education Staffer and Cal Alum, David Alvin Smith for a conversation [00:26:00] about the proposed strategies to reach other star systems which proposals might work and which certainly won't at the La Pena Lounge. Three one zero five Shattuck in Berkeley on Wednesday July 10th at 7:30 PM the event is free. For more information, visit [inaudible] skeptics.org the computer history museum presents Intel's Justin Ratiner in conversation with John Markoff. Justin Ratner is a corporate [00:26:30] vice president and the chief technology officer of Intel Corporation. He is also an Intel senior fellow and head of Intel labs where he directs Intel's global research efforts in processors, programming systems, security communications, and most recently user experience. Speaker 4: And interaction as part of Intel labs. Ratner is also responsible for funding academic research worldwide through its science and technology centers, [00:27:00] international research institutes and individual faculty awards. This event is happening on Wednesday, July 10th at 7:00 PM the Computer History Museum is located at 1401 north shoreline boulevard in mountain view, California. A feature of spectrum is to present news stories we find interesting. Rick Karnofsky and I present the News Katrin on months and others from the Eulich Research Center in Germany have published the results of their big brain [00:27:30] project. A three d high resolution map of a human brain. In the June 21st issue of science, the researchers cut a brain donated by a 65 year old woman into 7,404 sheets, stain them and image them on a flatbed scanner at a resolution of 20 micrometers. The data acquisition alone took a thousand hours and created a terabyte of data that was analyzed by seven super competing facilities in Canada. Speaker 4: Damn. Making the data [00:28:00] free and publicly available from modeling and simulation to UC Berkeley. Graduate students have managed to more accurately identify the point at which our earliest ancestors were invaded by bacteria that were precursors to organelles like Mitochondria and chloroplasts. Mitochondria are cellular powerhouses while chloroplasts allow plant cells to convert sunlight into glucose. These two complex organelles are thought to have begun as a result of a symbiotic relationship between single cell [00:28:30] eukaryotic organisms and bacterial cells. The graduate students, Nicholas Matzke and Patrick Schiff, examined genes within the organelles and larger cell and compared them using Bayesians statistics. Through this analysis, they were able to conclude that a protio bacterium invaded UCR writes about 1.2 billion years ago in line with earlier estimates and that asino bacterium which had already developed photosynthesis, invaded eukaryotes [00:29:00] 900 million years ago, much later than some estimates which are as high as 2 billion years ago. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 4: The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Speaker 3: Interview editing assistance by Renee round. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via [00:29:30] email or email address is spectrum dot [inaudible] dot com join us in two weeks. This same time. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Arash Komeili cell biologist, Assc. Prof. plant and microbial biology UC Berkeley. His research uses bacterial magnetosomes as a model system to study the molecular mechanisms governing the biogenesis and maintenance of bacterial organelles. Part1TranscriptSpeaker 1: Spectrum's next. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 3: [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 1: [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews, featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news. Speaker 4: Hi, and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. We are doing another two part interview on spectrum. Our guest is Arash Kamali, [00:01:00] a cell biologist and associate professor of plant and microbial biology at cal Berkeley. His research uses bacterial magneta zones as a model system to study the molecular mechanisms governing the biogenesis and maintenance of bacterial organelles. Today. In part one, Arash walks us through what he is researching and how he was drawn to it in part two, which will air in two weeks. [00:01:30] He explains how these discoveries might be applied and he discusses the scientific outreach he does. Here's part one, a rush. Camelli. Welcome to spectrum. Thank you. I wanted to lay the groundwork a little bit. You're studying bacteria and why did you choose bacteria and not some other micro organism to study? One Speaker 5: practical motivation was that they're easier to study. They're easier to grow in [00:02:00] the lab. You can have large numbers of them. If you're interested in a specific process, you have the opportunity to go deep and try to really understand maybe all the different components that are involved in that process, but it wasn't necessarily a deliberate choice is just as I worked with them it became more and more fascinating and then I wanted to pursue it further. Speaker 4: And then the focus of your research on the bacteria, can you explain that? Speaker 5: Yeah, so we work with [00:02:30] a specific type of bacteria. They're called magnate as hectic bacteria and these are organisms that are quite widespread. You can find them in most aquatic environments by almost any sort of classification. You can really group them together if you take their shape or if you look at even the genes they have, the general genes they have, you can really group them into one specific group as opposed to many other bacteria that you can do that. But Unites Together as a group [00:03:00] is that they're, they're able to orient in magnetic fields and some along magnetic fields. This behavior was discovered quite by accident a couple of times independently. Somebody was looking under a microscope and they noticed that there were bacteria were swimming all in the same direction and they couldn't figure out why. They thought maybe the light from the window was attracting them or some other type of stimuli and they tried everything and they couldn't really figure out why the bacteria were swimming in one direction except they noticed that [00:03:30] regardless of where they were in the lab, they were always swimming in the same geographic direction and so they thought, well, the only thing we can think of that would attract them to the same position is the magnetic field, and they were able to show that sure enough, if you bring a magnet next to the microscope, you can change the swimming direction. Speaker 5: This type of behavior is mediated by a very special structure that the bacteria build inside of their cell, and this was sort of [00:04:00] what attracted me to it. Can you differentiate them? The UK erotic? Yeah. Then the bacterial, can you differentiate those two for us so that we kind of get a sense of is there, they're easy, different differentiate, you know the generally speaking you out excels, enclose their genetic material in an organelle called the nucleus. They're generally much bigger. They have a lot more genetic information associated with them and they have a ton of different kinds of organelles that perform [00:04:30] functions. All these Organelles to fall the proteins to break them down. They have organelles for generating energy, but all those little specific features, you know, you can find some bacterium that has organelles or you can find some bacterial solid that's really huge. Or you can find some bacteria so that encloses its DNA and an organelle. Speaker 5: It's just that you had accels have all of them together. Many of the living organisms that you encounter everyday because you can see them [00:05:00] very easily. Are you carry out, almost all of them are plants and fungi and animals. They're all made up of you. Charismatic cells. It's just that there's this whole unseen world of bacteria and what function does that capability serve, that magnetic functions that it can be realized that yet in many places on earth, the magnetic field will act as a guide through these changes in oxygen levels, sort of like a straight line through these. These [00:05:30] bacteria are stuck in these sort of magnetic field highways. It's thought to be a simpler method for finding the appropriate oxygen levels and simpler in this case means that they have to swim less as swimming takes energy. So the advantage is that they use less energy, get to the same place, that bacteria and that doesn't have the same capabilities relatively speaking, as a simple explanation, it's actually, because it is so simple, the model, you can kind of replicate [00:06:00] it in the lab a little bit. Speaker 5: If you set up a little tube that has the oxygen grading and then the bacteria will go to a certain place and you can actually see that they're sort of a band of bacteria at what they consider for them to be appropriate oxygen levels. And then if you inject some oxygen at the other end of the tube, the bacteria will swim away from this oxygen gradient. Now, if you give them a magnetic field that they can swim along, they can move away from this advancing oxygen threat much more quickly than [00:06:30] bacteria that can't navigate along magnetic fields. So that's sort of a proof of concept a little bit in the lab. There's a lot of reasons why it also doesn't make sense. For example, some of these bacteria make so many of these magnetic structures that we haven't talked about yet, but they make so many of these particles way more than they would ever need to orient in the magnetic field. Speaker 5: So it seems excessive. There are other bacteria that live in places on earth where there is not really this kind of a magnetic field guide. And in those environments there's [00:07:00] plenty of other bacteria that don't have these magneto tactic capabilities and they still can find that specific oxygen zone very easily. So in some ways I think it is an open question but there isn't really enough yet to refute the kind of the generally accepted model on the movement part of it. You were mentioning that they use magnetic field to move backwards and forwards. Only explain the limiting factor. Yeah, that's [00:07:30] an important point actually because it's not that they use the magnetic field for sensing in a way. It's not that they are getting pulled or pushed by the magnetic field. They are sort of passively aligned and the magnetic field sort of like if you have two bar magnets and if one of them is perpendicular to the other one and you bring the other one closer, I'll just move until they're parallel to each other. Speaker 5: This is the same thing. The bacteria have essentially a bar magnet and inside of the cell and so the alignment to the magnetic field [00:08:00] is passive that you can kill the bacteria and they'll still align with the magnetic field. The swimming takes advantage of structures and and machines that are found in all bacteria essentially. So they have flagella that they can use to swim back and forth as you mentioned. And they have a whole bunch of other different kinds of systems for sensing the amount of oxygen or other materials that they're interested in to figure out, should I keep swimming or should I stop swimming? And [00:08:30] as I mentioned earlier, the bacteria are quite diverse. So when you look at different magnatech active bacteria, the types of flagella they have are also different from each other. So it's not one universal mechanism for the swimming, it's just the idea that that the swimming is limited by these magnetic field lines. Speaker 6: [inaudible] [inaudible]. Speaker 5: Our guest today on spectrum is [inaudible] Chameleon, a cell biologist Speaker 7: and associate professor at cal Berkeley. In our next segment, [00:09:00] Arash talks about what attracted him to study the magnetism and why it remains in some bacteria and not others. This is k a l x Berkeley. So Speaker 5: let's talk about the magnetic zone, right? This is sort of my fascination. I was a graduate student at UCF and I studied cell biology. I use the yeast, which are not bacteria but in many ways they are kind of like bacteria. They're much simpler to study than maybe other do care attic [00:09:30] organisms and we have genetics available and so I was very fascinated by east, but I was studying a problem with XL organization and communication within the cell and yeast. We were taught sort of as students in cell biology at the time, that cell organization and having compartments in the cell organelles basically that do different functions was very unique feature of you carry attic cells and there's one of the things I've defined them. I received my phd to do a postdoctoral fellowship. I happen to be [00:10:00] in interviewing at cal tech and professor Mel Simon there he was talking about all kinds of bacteria that he was interested in and he said there's these bacteria that have organelles and I just, it kind of blew my mind because we were told explicitly that that's not true and in many textbooks, even today it still says that bacteria don't have organelles. Speaker 5: I learned more about men and I learned that these magnatech to bacteria that we've been talking about so far, you can actually build a structure inside of the cell, out of their cell membrane and within [00:10:30] this membrane compartment, it's essentially a little factory for making magnetic particles so they can build crystals of mineral called magnetite, which is just an iron oxide. Every three or four and some organisms make a different kind of magnetic minerals called Greg [inaudible], which is an iron sulfur mineral, but these are perfect little crystals, about 50 nanometers in diameter, and they make a chain of these magnesiums, so these membrane enclosed magnetic particles. [00:11:00] This chain is sort of on one side of the cell and it allows the bacteria to orient and magnetic fields because each of those crystals has this magnetic dipole moment in the same direction and all those little dipole moments interact with each other to make a little bar magnet, a little compass needle essentially that forces the bacterium to Orient in the magnetic field. Speaker 5: When I heard about this, I realized that this is just incredibly fascinating. Nobody really knew how it was that the membrane compartment forum [00:11:30] or even if it formed first and the mineral formed inside of it. There wasn't much or anything known about the proteins that were involved in building the compartment and then making the magnetic particle. It just seemed like something that needed to be studied and it was fascinating to me and I've been working on it for 1213 years now. Have we covered what the of the magnetic is that idea behind the function of the magnetism, which is the [00:12:00] structures of the cells build to allow them to align with a magnetic field. We think that function is to simplify the search for low oxygen environments. That's the main model in our field and I think there are definitely some groups that are actively working on understanding that aspect of the behavior better. Speaker 5: How it is that the bacteria can find a certain oxygen concentration. These bacteria in particular, what are the mechanics of them swimming along [00:12:30] the magnetic field and the, is there some other explanation for why they do this? For example, if they are changing orientations into magnetic field, can they sense the strain that the magnetic field is putting onto the cell? Can that be sensed somehow and then used for some work down the line and there are groups that are actively pursuing those kinds of ideas. You were mentioning that this is a particular kind of bacteria that has this capability, right, and others don't. Right. Yet both seem to be equally [00:13:00] effective and populating the water areas that you're studying. No apparent advantage. Disadvantage, so winning in Canada? Yeah, I mean it's a lot of the Darwinian, you could say as long as it's not severely disadvantageous, then maybe they wouldn't be a push for it to be lost. Speaker 5: What is kind of intriguing a little bit is there's examples of magna detective bacteria in many different groups, phylogenetic groups, so many different types of species that will be, let's [00:13:30] say bacterium that normally just lives free in the ocean and then I'll have a relative that's very similar to it, but it's also a magnet, a tactic. In recent years, people have studied this a little bit more and we know now what are the specific set of genes that allow bacteria to become magnetic tactic. So you can look at those genes specifically and say, how is it that bacteria that are otherwise so different from each other can all perform the same function? And if you know the genes that build the structures that allow them to orient [00:14:00] the magnetic fields, you can look at how different those genes are from each other or has similar they are. Speaker 5: And normally with a lot of these types of behaviors in bacteria, there's something called horizontal gene transfer that explains how it is that otherwise similar bacteria can have different functionalities. For example, you can think of that as bacteria being cars and everybody has sort of the same standard set of know features on the car. But you can add on different features if you want to. So you can upgrade and have other kinds of features like leather [00:14:30] seats or regular seats. And so the two cars that have different kinds of seats are very similar to each other. It's just one that got the leather seats. And so these partly are thought to occur by bacteria exchanging genes with each other. Somebody who wasn't magna tactic maybe got these jeans from another organism, but when people look at the genes that make these mag Nita zones, these magnetic structures inside of the cell, what you see is that they appear to be very, very ancient. Speaker 5: So it doesn't seem like there was a lot of recent [00:15:00] exchange of genes between these various groups of bacteria to make them magna tactic. And it almost seems to map to the ancestral divergence of all of these bacteria from each other. One big idea is that the last common ancestor of all these organisms was mag new tactic and that many, many other bacteria have sort of lost this capability over what would be almost 2 billion years of evolution for these bacteria. And then some have retained it. [00:15:30] Those of that have retained it is it's still serving an advantage for them, or is it just sort of Vista GL and they have it and they're sort of stuck in magnetic fields and they have to deal with it? No, but nobody really knows. Actually. The other option is that there was a period of horizontal gene transfer, but it was a very long time ago so that the signature is sort of lost from, again, a couple of billion years of evolution or divergence from each other, but it really looks like whenever this process happened, it was quite anxious. Speaker 3: [00:16:00] You are listening to spectrum on KALX Berkeley. Our guest is Arash [inaudible]. In the next segment, rush talks about organelles in bacterial cells. Speaker 5: [00:16:30] Explain what the Organelle is, so there's a lot of functions within the cell that need to be enclosed in a compartment for various reasons. You can have a biochemical reaction that's not very efficient, but if you put it in within a compartment and concentrates, all of the components that carry that reaction, it can be carried out more efficiently. The other thing is that for some reactions to to happen, you need a chemical environment that's different than the rest of the cellular environment. You can't convert [00:17:00] the whole environment of the cell to that one condition. So by compartmentalizing it you able to carry it out and often the products of these reactions can be toxic to the rest of the cell. And so by componentizing again you can keep the toxic conditions away from the rest of the, so these are the different reasons why you care how to excels. Speaker 5: Like the cells in our body have organelles that do different things like how proteins fold or modify proteins break him down and in bacterial cells it [00:17:30] was thought that they're so simple and so small that they don't really have a need for compartments. Although for many years people have had examples of bacteria that do form compartments. You carrot axles are big and Organelles are really easy to see where the light microscope so you can easily see that the cell has compartments within it. Whereas a lot of bacteria are well studied, are quite simple, they don't have much visible structure within them. And that's maybe even further the bias that there is some divide and this [00:18:00] allowed you carry out access to become more complex, quote unquote, and then it just doesn't exist in bacteria. How is it that they then were revealed? I think they'd been revealed for a long time. Speaker 5: You know, for example, there's electron microscope images from 40 years ago or more where you see for example, photosynthetic bacteria, these are bacteria that can do photosynthesis. They have extensive membrane structures inside of the cell that how's the proteins that harvest light and carry [00:18:30] out photosynthesis and they're, it seems like the idea for having an Organelle is that you just increased it area that you can use for photosynthesis sorta like you just have more solar panels if you just keep spreading the solar panels. Right. So that in this way, by just sort of making wraps of membranes inside of the cell, you just increased the amount of space that you can harvest light. So those were known for a long time and I think it just wasn't a problem that was studied from the perspective of cell biology and cell [00:19:00] organization that much. That's sort of a different angle that people are bringing to it now with many different bacterial organelles. Speaker 5: And part of the reason why it's important to think of it that way is that of course what the products of the bike chemistry inside of the Organelles is fascinating and really important to understand. But to build the organ out itself is also a difficult thing. So for example, you have to bend and remodel the cell membrane [00:19:30] to create, whether it's a sphere or it's wraps of membrane, and that is not a energetically favorable thing to do. It's not easy. So in your cataract cells, we know that there are specific proteins and protein machines. Then their only job is really to bend and remodeled the membrane cause it's not going to happen by itself very easily. And with all of these different structures that are now better recognized in bacteria, we really have no idea how it is that they performed the same function. Is [00:20:00] it using the same types of proteins as what we know in your care at excels or are they using different kinds of proteins? Speaker 5: That was sort of a very basic question to ask. How similar or different is it than how you carry? Like some makes an Oregon own fester was one of the first inspirations for us to study this process in magnatech the bacteria. And what sort of tools are you using to parse this information? In our field we use various tools and it's turned out to be incredibly beneficial [00:20:30] because different approaches have sort of converged on the same answer. So my basic focus was to use genetics as a tool. And the idea here was if we go in and randomly mutate or delete genes in these bacteria and then see which of these random mutations results in a loss of the magnetic phenotype and prevents the cell from making the magnetism Organelles, then maybe we know [00:21:00] those genes that are potentially involved. And so that was sort of what I perfected during my postdoctoral fellowship. Speaker 5: And that was my main approach to study the problem. And then on top of that, the other approach has been really helpful for us. And this is again something we've worked on is once we know some of the candidate proteins to be able to study them, their localization in the cell and they're dynamics, we modify the protein. So that they're linked to fluorescent proteins. So then we can, uh, use for us in this microscopy to follow them within the cell. [00:21:30] Other people, their approach was to say, well, these structures are magnetic. If we break open the cell, we can use a magnet and try to separate the magnesiums from the rest of the cell material. And then if we have the purified magnesiums, we can look to see what kinds of proteins are associated with them and sort of guilt by association. If there is a protein there, it should do something or maybe it does something. Speaker 5: That was the other approach. And the final approach that's been really helpful, [00:22:00] particularly because Magno take it back to your, our diverse, as we talked about earlier, is to take representatives that are really distantly related to each other and sequence their genomes. So get the sequence of their DNA and see what are the things that they have in common with each other. Take two organisms that live in quite different environments and their lineages are quite different from each other, but they both can do this magnetic tactic behavior. And by doing that, people again found [00:22:30] some genes and so if you take the genes that we found by genetics, random mutations of the cell by isolating the magnesiums and cy counting their proteins, and then by doing the genome sequencing, it all converges on the same set of genes. Speaker 2: [inaudible] this concludes part one of our [00:23:00] interview. We'll be sure to catch part two Friday July 12th at noon. Spectrum shows are archived on iTunes university. Speaker 7: The link is tiny url.com/calex spectrum. Now a few of the science and technology events happening locally over the next two weeks. Speaker 5: Rick Karnofsky [00:23:30] joins me for the calendar on the 4th of July the exploratorium at pier 15 in San Francisco. He's hosting there after dark event for adults 18 and over from six to 10:00 PM the theme for the evening is boom, Speaker 4: learn the science of fireworks, the difference between implosions and explosions and what happens when hot water meets liquid nitrogen tickets are $15 and are available from www.exploratorium.edu [00:24:00] the Santa Clara County Parks has organized an early morning van ride adventure into the back country. To a large bat colony view the bat tornado and learn about the benefits of our local flying mammals. Meet at the park office. Bring a pad to sit on and dress in layers for changing temperatures. This will happen Saturday July six from 4:00 AM to 7:00 AM at Calero County Park [00:24:30] and Santa Clara. Reservations are required to make a reservation call area code (408) 268-3883 Saturday night July six there are two star parties. One is in San Carlos and the other is near Mount Hamilton. The San Carlos event is hosted by the San Mateo Astronomical Society and is held in Crestview Park San Carlos. If you would like to help [00:25:00] with setting up a telescope or would like to learn about telescopes come at sunset which will be 8:33 PM if you would just like to see the universe through a telescope come one or two hours after sunset. Speaker 4: The other event is being hosted by the Halls Valley Astronomical Group. Knowledgeable volunteers will provide you with a chance to look through a variety of telescopes and answer questions about the night. Sky Meet at the Joseph D. Grant ranch county park. [00:25:30] This event starts at 8:30 PM and lasted until 11:00 PM for more information. Call area code (408) 274-6121 July is skeptical hosted by the bay area. Skeptics is on exoplanet colonization down to earth planning. Join National Center for Science Education Staffer and Cal Alum, David Alvin Smith for a conversation [00:26:00] about the proposed strategies to reach other star systems which proposals might work and which certainly won't at the La Pena Lounge. Three one zero five Shattuck in Berkeley on Wednesday July 10th at 7:30 PM the event is free. For more information, visit [inaudible] skeptics.org the computer history museum presents Intel's Justin Ratiner in conversation with John Markoff. Justin Ratner is a corporate [00:26:30] vice president and the chief technology officer of Intel Corporation. He is also an Intel senior fellow and head of Intel labs where he directs Intel's global research efforts in processors, programming systems, security communications, and most recently user experience. Speaker 4: And interaction as part of Intel labs. Ratner is also responsible for funding academic research worldwide through its science and technology centers, [00:27:00] international research institutes and individual faculty awards. This event is happening on Wednesday, July 10th at 7:00 PM the Computer History Museum is located at 1401 north shoreline boulevard in mountain view, California. A feature of spectrum is to present news stories we find interesting. Rick Karnofsky and I present the News Katrin on months and others from the Eulich Research Center in Germany have published the results of their big brain [00:27:30] project. A three d high resolution map of a human brain. In the June 21st issue of science, the researchers cut a brain donated by a 65 year old woman into 7,404 sheets, stain them and image them on a flatbed scanner at a resolution of 20 micrometers. The data acquisition alone took a thousand hours and created a terabyte of data that was analyzed by seven super competing facilities in Canada. Speaker 4: Damn. Making the data [00:28:00] free and publicly available from modeling and simulation to UC Berkeley. Graduate students have managed to more accurately identify the point at which our earliest ancestors were invaded by bacteria that were precursors to organelles like Mitochondria and chloroplasts. Mitochondria are cellular powerhouses while chloroplasts allow plant cells to convert sunlight into glucose. These two complex organelles are thought to have begun as a result of a symbiotic relationship between single cell [00:28:30] eukaryotic organisms and bacterial cells. The graduate students, Nicholas Matzke and Patrick Schiff, examined genes within the organelles and larger cell and compared them using Bayesians statistics. Through this analysis, they were able to conclude that a protio bacterium invaded UCR writes about 1.2 billion years ago in line with earlier estimates and that asino bacterium which had already developed photosynthesis, invaded eukaryotes [00:29:00] 900 million years ago, much later than some estimates which are as high as 2 billion years ago. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 4: The music heard during the show was written and produced by Alex Simon. Speaker 3: Interview editing assistance by Renee round. Thank you for listening to spectrum. If you have comments about the show, please send them to us via [00:29:30] email or email address is spectrum dot [inaudible] dot com join us in two weeks. This same time. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

--{ Debunk--Rising Sea Level Sunk: "Climate Report Shows Predictions to be Against All Evidence, No Rising Sea, Dr. Morner Used No Computer Model, Donned His Shoes, Went for a Toddle To the Places Where Tide does Rise, Used Measuring Tool, Used His Eyes, Found Copious Evidence to Refute The IPCC, Who Supercompute With Expensive Machines from Crisis Inc., Which Guarantees to Make an Optimist Sink Into Neurotic Fear of Panic and Gloom, Endless Predictions of Pending Doom, Morner's Findings are Not Fashionable Amongst Elite Who Push the Irrationable" © Alan Watt }-- Big Agenda, Broken Eggs and Cannon Fodder - CFR, Global Governance - GATT, Factories Moved to China - Western "Service" Economy, New Feudal System. Most Adaptable Species - Julian Huxley, "The Unthinkable" - Mass Male Sterilization, Bisphenol-A, Biochemical Warfare. Military Think Tanks, DCDC Report - Degraded Society, Devaluation of Human Life, Moral Relativism - Economic Competition - Neutron Weapons - Tool of Internet. Club of Rome, New Common Enemy, Fake Threat from Outer Space - Taxation for Cold War - Too Many "Wrong" Kind of People. IPCC, Rising Sea Levels Fraud, Crisis Computer Models, Actual Measurements. Model State of China, Organ Harvesting Vans for "Criminals", Death Sentences, Cost-Effective Executions. Computer Spyware Programs, Back Doors for Government Agencies, NSA. Schizophrenia, Climate Change, Global Warming, Greening - Total Surveillance, Monitoring Data. (Articles: ["DCDC Global Strategic Trends Programme 2007-2036" [PDF file, 6 MB] (U.K. Department of Defence Document).] ["Rise of sea levels is 'the greatest lie ever told' " by Christopher Booker (telegraph.co.uk) - March 28, 2009.] ["China's hi-tech 'death van' where criminals are executed and then their organs are sold on black market" by Andrew Malone (dailymail.co.uk) - March 27, 2009.] ["Vast spy system loots computers in 103 countries, researchers say" by John Markoff, New York Times (at boston.com) - March 29, 2009.]) *Title/Poem and Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - March 30, 2009 (Exempting Music, Literary Quotes, and Callers' Comments)

The history of the personal computer has strong roots in the societal changes that occurred during the 1960s. On this program, Prof. John Markoff discussed the 60s counterculture and the personal computing revolution.