Stewart Brand

Stewart Brand is a cofounder of Global Business Network and president of The Long Now Foundation. He is best known as the founder, editor, and publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog and creator of The WELL. Stewart has served on the board of the Santa Fe Institute since 1989 and is a founding member of the board of directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He is the author of many books, including The Clock of the Long Now, How Buildings Learn, and The Media Lab: Inventing the Future at MIT. We talked with him about global aging, globalized youth, family and community.

PwC: The global population is aging—not only in the developed world but increasingly in the developing world. What will this mean?

SB: There’s a power shift going on. The rise of the West is over. The largest and most consequential cities in the world are increasingly no longer London, Paris, and New York. Instead, they are cities like Mumbai, which has large slums, but also one-sixth of the GDP of India. The so-called bottom of the pyramid is a huge, highly resourceful market.

PwC: What are the biggest social challenges you see for companies that are operating within North America, but have a global reach?

SB: Studies have shown that America is regarded best by people who have had direct contact with Americans; less well-regarded by people whose only contact is with corporations, and least-well regarded by people whose only interaction with the U.S. is the American government and military. The conclusion? When they know us, they like us. The more companies really engage with people in various countries, the higher the regard will be.

PwC: What might the workplace look like in the future? Or should we even be using the word "workplace?"

SB: The group I would watch is mothers who want to keep working. It’s hard to have a young family and report to work every day. But if you can mix having a young family with doing work at home, that can be exquisite. The companies that employees feel most loyal to are the ones that are very family-oriented. In Europe, the countries that are doing best are the ones where the government makes sure that everybody takes good care of the families.

PwC: If you were advising an 18-year-old American today what sort of education to seek out, what would you tell them?

SB: Theater, anthropology, and microbiology. Theater, simply because those skills are useful anywhere, any time. And anthropology because the world is converging culturally and being hip to cultural variety, and ways to think about it, is useful. Finally, microbiology because many new ways of understanding the world are rooted in this discipline. I also tell them to travel. Get the out of country. Learn other languages, ideally on the ground.

PwC: Are young people better suited than older people for a technology-filled future?

SB: The competitive environment rewards connectivity and speed. As technology moves faster, younger people are ever-more advantaged as being the ones who can grab it and run with it. Agility with new media is a generation separator. Most of the people my age have grudgingly gotten around to doing family email and maybe shopping online, but not much beyond that.

PwC: What’s the upside of the world getting older?

SB: It depends a lot on medicine. If people are old and dependent, that’s a problem. But being old and on top of your game is a solution, because older people automatically think long-term. They can’t help it. They’ve seen a bunch of stuff come and go. They live downstream of their own mistakes and other people’s mistakes. They’ve seen wars, so they know the difference between a big war and a small one. So they have perspective. Personally, I think the idea of retirement should be retired. We’re still sorting out the best way to engage and employ and celebrate the skills of older people.

PwC: Do you think the inclination to think long-term is common to most?

SB: People love to be given the permission and encouragement to think long-term. There’s almost no speaker in the world who doesn’t say "yes" when asked to speak about the long-term future of some particular area in which he or she has an interest.  And so for intellectuals, at least, there’s a comfort and a kind of a delight and challenge in trying to think long-term.

Corporations are all over the map on the practice of thinking long term. Is there a company that is capable of thinking in decades—or even centuries? Maybe that’s not possible. Corporations are famously short-lived. Very few make it to a century.