Hi, everyone. We have a packed room that really goes to the heart of the matter, that this is probably one of the most important sessions in Davos. Thank you all for joining us. Welcome to our session, Securing Europe. I'm Francine Lacqua from Bloomberg TV. And however the war unfolds, of course, Russia's invasion has upended European defense policy probably for the longer term. But the war in Ukraine has also united the European Union around this common threat while shattering the security order that helped Europe to prosper in the last couple of decades. Now, in the next 45 minutes, we'll try to address what steps Europe needs to take to develop into a viable security player in this radical change context. From Berlin to London to Baltic capitals like Tallinn, the metrics, of course, of defending Europe are changing. They've been torn up. A large-scale war is no longer unthinkable, and nations are reconsidering what they spend, what they buy, and also how they would need to fight. Now, a reminder that you can ask questions for the session, Q&A through the Slido. I've been reminded that it's slido.com, hashtag securing Europe, or there's also QR code that should show up somewhere where you crash. There you go. That's the QR code on the right, where you can just lock it in and send some questions. Now, before we get to an all-star panel that are sitting here with me, let's go straight to Andrei Yermak. He's the head of the presidential administration of Ukraine, and he's joining us from Kiev. So, sir, thank you so much for joining us and for being here with us today. Mr. Yermak, where are we militarily in this war today, and how would you define victory? Dear Ms. Lakwa, dear panelists, dear guests, thank you for the honor of the opening of this meeting. It's dedicated to one of the most pressing issues in today's world. This panel is focused on securing Europe. I'm here and an official Ukrainian representative. No more doubts, obviously. Ukraine is Europe. Shaming took eight years for Europeans to realize it. In those eight years, the world order shattered. The political map was legally changed. Tens of thousands of the people died, and millions more had to escape. However, escape, despite all the crimes Russia's soldiers committed in Bucza, Mariupol, Chernigov, and dozens of other locations, we keep hearing calls for capitulation for the sake of the peace in Europe. Some of our partners are still suggesting us to give in to aggressors to save lives. Negotiations, also called territorial disputes, are proposed. How can one believe it when Russia show all right intention to destroy Ukraine? How can one hope for wild Russian opinions leaders are calling Ukrainians, us, the wrong Russians? How can one expect it, given the numerous testimonies of the act of genocide against Ukraine's committed by Russian troops? Ukraine does not have any territorial dispute with Russia. Russia has simply occupied and tried to annex Ukrainian territories, illegally, absolutely. More than anyone, we strive a balanced and additional dialogue. However, Russian political culture does not provide for a dialogue like the equal terms. Its basis, its dictation, and languages of the brute force. More than one in one is one in all, the sick peace. But it should be just our sovereignty and territorial integrity are not subject of the compromise. We are dealing with the ideologies and practicize terribly alike the worst distroships and the last century. History teach us that pacifying and aggressors is futile. They always take peacefulness for the witness. They demand more with every next concession. Therefore, there is only one way to prevent the war in Ukraine from escalating into continental and even world war. Help Ukraine win. Now you don't have to wage this war. Just help us to do it. Otherwise, you have to. You have sent your troops to the battles. Helping Ukraine is a way to resolve the construction between their policy and real politics. This is a way to send a clear signal to potential aggressor in the future. Their actions will not go to any punished. So Ukraine immediately go to stop Russia brutal aggression and insures the complete withdrawal of these troops from our lands. Then we must find a reliable way to deter Russian pro-repeating aggression in the future. But the world order is nearly wrecked and shattered. Russia's presence in the United Nations is semi-paralyzed in the Russian presence in the Security Council. The OCE has lost its reason that NATO is only institution capable of the providing a reliable security umbrella to its members. But some of the island nations still allow Russia to wait on Ukraine's accession. So we have to take alternative path. Today, I'm glad here in Davos to announce that together with the former NATO Secretary-General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, we're establishing an international advisory working group. Its aim is to make some recommendation for a reliable and efficient security guarantees for Ukraine. Leading figures from security, policy, and diplomacy as they are as a scientist, will be invited to join and they contribute. We look forward to involving the friends of Ukraine who can over their experience and their expertise to efficiently implement the initiative. Our goal is to stop history from repeating and prepare the future for the sovereign and free Ukraine. Given the Budapest memorandum experience, we assume that the future agreements should contain security guarantees, not insurance. And this is very important. No third-party security obligations can fully substitute for Ukraine, developing and sustaining its own strong defense capabilities. So the first block of the security guarantees is related to anthinsic Ukraine and ability to resist aggression. To ensure Ukraine's defense capabilities, the guarantor states should provide our armed force with the modern conventional weapons and military equipment. No restrictions nor political-motivated bars. We need weapons to defense, only to defense. We must be able to stand any aggressions. I want to say that since February 24, nearly 700 Ukrainian children have been killed, touched, raped, and wounded by Russian troops. What are we know for sure? So we thought probably much higher. Over 230,000 kids, they're deported to Russia. We must be able to protect our children. They have the right to live in this safe country. And we are to ensure that they're right. As a part of our commitment partners could help us in the fields of intelligence-sharing information, security, cyber security, maritime security. We believe that rapid recovery of defense potential of Ukraine, it's one of the important factors in the preventing the new possible aggression. Russia has badly damaged our economy. And we can't put enough money into defense in the coming years. So we'll need a new financial help for reconstruction purposes, as well as we financing the security and defense. The next block of the security guarantees in sections. They are an effective tools for the stopping Russian aggressions today and deterring in the future. The current sanctions should last at the very least until complete withdrawal of the Russian troops from Ukraine. Their mitigation and lifting should be agreed with the government of Ukraine. We should consider the risk of restoring Russian military technical potential. They also believe that guarantees of the imposition of the preventing sanctions should be also provided in case of real free to our states. And of course, in the event of the aggression, immediate and coordinated sanctions should be provided. The final block of the security guarantees. It's related to political and diplomatic support of Ukraine. Invending Ukraine in the mid-ilateral diplomatic process would improve our integration in the international community. First of all, I mean it's about Ukraine joining the European Union as soon as possible. I need to emphasize, we don't think we so-called alternative formats of the integration are acceptable here. Ukraine also support the establishment of the coalition of the responsible states, like your friends of Ukraine or until war coalition, U-24, which be ready to effectively respond to the violations of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine within 24 hours. This means providing the necessary military and military technical, financial and humanitarian aid as well as imposing sanctions against the aggressor's country. This in 24 hours. When it comes to security guarantees for ourselves, we are not asking. We offer our partners to invest to common security. First, your opinion. But in the future, the system could become the base of new global security architecture. Thank you very much for your time. And now the pleasure I give the floor to Ms. Plakma. Thank you for your attention. Mr. Yermak, thank you. Just a quick, Mr. Yermak, just a very quick follow-up before we go to the panel. So victory, I think you were clear at the beginning, but victory in your eyes is not a full ceasefire. It's Russian troops leaving Ukrainian territory full stop. Is that right? Is that how you would describe victory? You see, we are not aggressive states. We are only defending, restoring our sovereignty and territorial integrity and make our people safe. It's real our immediate priority. Now I think it's, meantime, the aggressor must pay the price of their choice. And of course, we need to make everything that Russia will not be able to attack us again. And of course, for us, it's the victory. It's not just ceasefire. It's our people paid the highest price. It's the life of our people, hundreds of our people. And of course, we are waiting for our victory. And I'm absolutely sure that we will. And this win will be not only victory of Ukraine, it will be victory of all democracy and free will. All right, thank you so much. Thank you, Mr. Yermak. I would love to get to our panel straight away. Alexander Dukru, the Prime Minister of Belgium, Jens Stoltenberg, Secretary General of NATO, Kaja Olegren, the Minister of Defense of the Netherlands and Stevo Penderovsky, President of North Macedonia. So thank you all for joining us. Secretary General, let's start with you. How do you see NATO getting involved in this conflict, if at all? Well, NATO has two tasks when it comes to the conflict in Ukraine. The first is to support Ukraine. And I am so impressed by the courage of the Ukrainian people, the Ukrainian armed forces, and the Ukrainian political leadership. And we all have a responsibility to support them in their fight, to help them to uphold the right for self-defense. And actually, NATO Allies have supported Ukraine for many years since 2014, helped to train the thousands of Ukrainian troops in the special United States and at the Kingdom. Canada and also Turkey has provided us with critical equipment. And after invasion, all the NATO Allies stepped up, and many other partners also started to provide support. That's our first responsibility, is to support Ukraine, because this matters also for our security. But the second responsibility and our core task is, of course, to protect all NATO Allies. So it is important to prevent this conflict from escalating to a full-scale war between Russia and NATO. Then we'll see even more death, more destruction, more damage than what we see today in Ukraine. So this dual task of support, but not do anything that can escalate the conflict, is the challenge for NATO. And we do that partly by making it clear that we support Ukraine, but NATO will not be part of the conflict. We will not send NATO troops into Ukraine. Second, we have, of course, increased our military presence in the Eastern part of the Alliance. Now we have 40,000 troops on the NATO command. We have more naval and air capabilities, especially in the Eastern part of the Alliance. And we have more than 100,000 troops on high alert. This is to send a very clear message to Moscow and leave no room for miscalculation or misunderstanding. An attack on one NATO ally will trigger the full response from the whole Alliance. This is the Terrence. The purpose is not to provoke conflict, but it's to prevent conflict per surface. So this is the way we conduct our dual task. Support Ukraine, of course, also supporting the sanctions on Russia, but then at the same time stepping up the Terrence on the fence to ensure no escalation of the conflict. But, Security General, so when you look at what kind of security arrangements are needed to secure peace in Ukraine, what do those look like in the next six months? Well, I welcome the fact that allies are discussing with Ukraine how to help them ensure their security. I also welcome, of course, that NATO allies and NATO is also providing support. And the strongest way of providing support is actually to do what they're asking for, and that is to deliver weapons. And that's exactly what allies are doing at an unprecedented level. And then the issue of NATO membership is further down the road. The important thing now is to support Ukraine in their heroic fight for their freedom, which is also important for our security. Prime Minister, what do you see as the most important thing in terms of a common defense strategy in Europe right now? Well, I think European countries are waking up from a certain degree of naiveness that we've had the last decades, thinking that full-scale war on the European continent would never come back, and especially not this type of war. And the good thing is that as European countries, we're not alone. I mean, in a moment like this, if you are alone, or you're scared to death, or you're joining NATO, which is what we're seeing with Finland and Sweden these days. So it's good that this is a collective thing. Of course, the collective defensive umbrella is something that we also need to contribute to, and all European countries are scaling up in a gradual way their investment. We in Belgium have decided so a few months ago we will continue in doing so. What is important to me is that if we invest more in defense, is that to me there are three elements which are important. First element is less fragmentation. Today, European defense is incredibly fragmented, which makes it expensive and not very operational. Second element is more industrial return for European industry. Today, that industrial return is way too low. Third element is more societal return. If we do investments in cybersecurity, it should be for our industry and our population. If we invest in intelligence, it should help us. For example, in counterterrorism, if we invest in the well-developed defense, it should also be a way of training part of our population. The last element that I want to put forward is that security is not just defense. We have to have a much more holistic view of this. And why is this holistic view necessary? That's because Vladimir Putin has also a much broader view of destabilizing Europe. He's not only destabilizing Europe just with the war in Ukraine. He's doing it with the war in Ukraine. He's doing it strategically using his energy reserves. He's doing it with disinformation campaigns. He's doing it with refugee flows that he's trying to weaponize through Belarus. I mean, there's so many tracks that he is using to try to destabilize Europe, which means that if we want to stabilize Europe, we also have to have a much broader view than only the defense part. But the defense part is the most urgent one, and it's good to see that European countries are all stepping up. But, President Pindorovsky, if we talk about the defense part, it took years for your country to actually exceed to NATO. What do you make of the fact that we're now trying to accelerate the accession of two member countries? No, being the last entry into the alliance two years now, I know the best, the desires of the Ukrainian people, why they would like to join the alliance. And I would like to forget, speaking about the NATO membership, the membership in the European Union, they have applied for that recently as well, because these are two corridors, so to say, for the better, more secure and prosperous future. We have been waiting for 21 years to become the member of the alliance, since becoming the candidate country for membership in 1999, and we have finally succeeded in 2020. And unfortunately, we're still waiting, speaking about the European Union, 17 years with the status of a candidate country for membership. So we should help Ukraine to persuade other allies, which might be skeptical, I'm not speaking only about our allies in NATO, but in the European Union as well, that both gates of these both organizations should stay open for those people, for this country, because they're not fighting only for their freedom in the first place, of course, but they're fighting, this is the war of one autocracy towards democracy. They are fighting for the democratic values, for all of us. And if Putin somehow succeeds in winning this war, then it's not gonna be only Ukraine. So a few days ago, I have sent a letter to President Zelensky, saying that we are doing everything we can. As a small country, do not forget that North Macedonia is 1.8 million inhabitants. We have a military budget of only 171 million euros, but we are helping Ukraine as much as we can from the military hardware to the diplomatic support throughout the international fora. So I sent to him that we are gonna speak with our partners, both organizations, that gates should stay open. As I said, the open door policy is not, should not apply only for the NATO Alliance, but for the European Union as well. Otherwise, the concept to have the United Europe, to be at peace with itself and with the world, from the Atlantic to the Euro, will be only a dream. Mr. Drollengren, how much money, how much funding do we need actually to secure Europe? And how much, can your country and allies keep on sending to Ukraine in terms of weapons? Well, in terms of weapons, I think yesterday we had a meeting with the Romstein format, so that was 40 plus countries that coordinate their efforts to help Ukraine with the weapons they need. Ukraine is very good at articulating very precisely what is needed, and I think we are now also much better coordinating amongst ourselves in a way that we can actually provide what they need. If we can not do it ourselves as the Netherlands, we can join forces with Germany or with other countries, and by in that way, provide them with really complex, advanced weapons systems that is very much needed in the war itself, but also as the representatives of Ukraine just said also, because Ukraine now has to sort of backfill their own military equipment, because they also used old Soviet Russian equipment, they can of course not replace it by Russian equipment, so they have to get stuff from our countries also to build on their military infrastructure, so that's really costly. And at the same time, we're also increasing in the Netherlands and other countries our own defense budgets, of course, because we have to be stronger on the eastern flank of the Alliance, we really want to step up our efforts to be ready also for the future. But one warning, I mean, if we all are going to spend more, but going to spend it separately, then only the costs are going to go up, and then we will not increase our own security, so we really have to work on that, we have to coordinate better, we have to find ways for standardization, for interoperability of our systems, and for joint procurements in ways that countries are already experimenting with now, the Netherlands with Belgium, for instance, but we have to step it up, because otherwise we will keep fragmented armies in national countries instead of a very strong NATO army and also European defense that can step up when necessary in Europe. Prime Minister, what happens if the war lasts years? Well, then, first of all, I hope not, of course, but if it lasts years, we'll continue support for years. I mean, we have to be very clear on this, we're supporting Ukraine and this, and we will continue supporting what is necessary, what equipment talked about with information as well, because in a war situation like this, information intelligence, of course, is extremely important, and we, as European countries, will continue improving the equipment that we have, and I think indeed, as Kasha said, I think it's important that we do it in an intelligent way, in a planned way, less fragmentation, as I said. This is about how much we invest and how much is important, but how we do it is equally important, and if I see in some of the investment plans of some European countries, which are very aggressive investment plans, let's coordinate, let's really sit together and let's see who is doing what, what are we buying, how can we standardize? I mean, what we need to do as a European Union is to do a gap analysis ourselves, and to see, okay, what weapon systems do we need, how do we develop them together? Together with the Netherlands, we do this for naval efforts, we develop together the battleships that we need. It's good that Belgium and Netherlands is doing it, but honestly, we should be doing this together with many, many countries. This is not just ramping up investment because of Ukraine war. This is a long-term effort that we are putting forward for the next decades. If we do it for the next decades, let's please do it in a coordinated way so that we become more efficient, because, I mean, if you look at the total defense budget of European countries and compare it to Russia, actually, our budget is much higher, but it's much too fragmented if you compare it to the way Russia is organized today. Mr. President, then I want to ask you. Only one sentence plus. Of course, I wouldn't like to criticize my friends because we are in the part of the same alliance, but please, that joint procurement system, which has a big flaws from times to times and weaknesses, should be improved in the future. In my view, that should be the task, main task of all of us, to coordinate to have the better procurement system, but in the years to come. Now, give the Ukrainians on the bilateral basis, whatever they want, because this is a critical period of the war. In my view, then, following what the NATO experts and all of the military security experts would say are saying to us, in this period of the time, it's probably very decisive period for the rest of the war, whatever it might last. So, this is very important. Give them now, on the bilateral basis, we are giving them, of course, everything they want, but give them more, and these questions, these coordination among joint procurement systems, that's hot topic always, being for years and years within the alliance, not to waste time and resources and to have duplicity in that process, but now it's critically important to help Ukrainians today, not tomorrow. Yeah, so this is a kind of timeline. I just want to spend a couple of minutes with Secretary General, because I know you spoke to the President of Turkey over the weekends, over his concerns about Sweden and Finland, actually accessing NATO. What does he want in return? Well, in my conversation with President Dalluan, he expressed many of the same concerns that he has expressed publicly, and that's about terrorism, it's about their concerns about the PKK, and also, of course, the need for Turkey to be able to acquire the weapons, the beam that they need. But let me start by saying that the fact that Finland and Sweden applies for NATO membership, that is historic. Very few people, if anyone expected that as late as the beginning of February, and now they are implying. And that demonstrates a very important thing, and that is that when President Putin tried to close the door to NATO, then actually Finland and Sweden decide to move in. Because as late as in December this year, President Putin proposed a legally binding treaty for NATO, which actually was going to re-establish spheres of influence, where big powers like Russia could decide what smaller neighbors could do or not do. Because in that treaty, it was stated clearly that there was no more NATO enlargement whatsoever. NATO had to withdraw all its troops from those allies that had joined after the end of the Cold War, introducing NATO A and B membership, first and second class membership. And then of course, he wanted less NATO military presence on his borders. He's getting the opposite. He's getting more NATO presence on his borders, more troops, more forces. And then there will be more NATO members. And I think that's a very strong answer to a President that really tries to reshape the European security architecture by using force and intimidation. And the response is, no, we will not bow to that. Then of course, as when there are concerns, as expressed by Turkey, we sit down. As we always do when there are differences in NATO, and then we find a way out. I cannot tell you exactly how and when, but be confident, we're working on the issue. And we have solved the problems before in this alliance. All of us, also Turkey, agree that NATO enlargement has been a great success, helped to stabilize Europe. And we also realise how Finnish and Swedish membership will strengthen NATO, will strengthen the transatlantic bond and also not least be of great importance for the Baltic region. So I'm confident that we will address those issues. Quickly, you have been confident in the past that actually this can be resolved quite quickly. But if you look at some of the weapon expert controls, they cannot be lifted overnight. No, but I still hope and work for a quick solution. But let me also add that I think a part of this solution is also to recognise that despite the fact that there are different views within NATO and among NATO allies on issues related to Turkey, we also have to recognise that Turkey is an important ally. Turkey is the ally that has suffered the most terrorist attacks, far more than any other NATO ally country. And Turkey is key just because of its geographic, strategic location bordering Iraq and Syria, the fight against ISIS has been totally dependent on using facilities in Turkey. And of course, when you look at the war in Ukraine, the Black Sea, you realise the importance of Turkey. So I'm not saying that there are not these differences within the alliance on issues related to Turkey, on the freedom of press and other things, but I'm only saying that we need to understand that the reason why we need to solve this issue, the concerns that Turkey has put forward is that Turkey matters for the whole alliance. And therefore we are working hard on this. Yeah, look, I think the question that is at hand here is do we believe Europe will be more secured if Sweden and Finland join NATO? I think yes. There's absolutely no doubt about that. OK, so Europe will be more secure when both of them join. That's the main goal. And let's talk with Turkey and let's solve the issues that they have, but we as 30 countries and now 32, the main goal we have is stabilising Europe and we will be better off 32 than 30. So I honestly would be very surprised that things would be put on the table which are unsolvable, knowing what the goal is that we have in front of us. Minister, you agree with that? Absolutely. I think NATO will be stronger with Finland and Sweden in. I think they were already partner countries, member of the European Union. We have military cooperation with these countries, also with the northern part of Europe in the Joint Expeditionary Force. And as the Secretary-General says, of course there can always be issues and issues must be raised. There is room for talking about specific issues that countries have. But in the light of the situation that we're in now, I think we have to have the confidence that Secretary-General and others will be able to solve this issue. If we're talking, I mean, have they asked you to actually lift some of the exports, bands on weapons? Is it something that your country would need to do? We also, we have bilateral talks with Turkey on a very regular basis. I think these talks are good. We take each other seriously, and we try to find solutions that are acceptable. Just a few technical elements, because we have been, as I said, last entry and Secretary-General knows the best that procedure, but without the political agreement and full consensus among all of 30 members of the alliance, there is no way forward. If that political disputes between Sweden and Finland and Turkey on the other side is resolved today, hopefully, as soon as possible. But let's say today, this procedure for ratification of that protocol should go into all of these 30 parliaments of the nation states. In our case, it took 20 months. But a half of that time was during the pandemic. But I cannot remember that anybody has entered the alliance without having the political disputes prior to that moment, quicker than 12 months, only for the ratification process in all of the parliaments of the member states. Prime Minister, what can Europe actually do to not double up on NATO, but also secure as European Union? I mean, also given the fact that the funds are limited, we've just gone through COVID. There's been a lot of fiscal spending and debt is mounting. That's true, I mean, a lot of things have changed for the fact that population looks much more towards the public or public service or government in solving all the big things we're confronted with.  I know that there's this discussion if Europe has a stronger integration from a defense perspective, is that to the detriment of NATO, not at all, not at all. I think NATO will be way stronger if we as European countries pull our weight. And NATO will be more stable with two stable legs, which is one North American one and one European one. Honestly, I'm not afraid of that at all. What is important is that if we do these military investments, is that the return of those investments is as high as possible. As I said before, industrial and economic return should be way higher. Societal return should be way higher with also components in basically also dealing with climate change. I mean, we will be confronted with the impacts of climate change in the years to come in a much more drastic way. Actually, some of the defensive investments could help with this. And yes, the pandemic has shown us that the bar is being put much higher on the expectations that the public has and we have to invest in climate change. Okay, how I see it as a government leader is the bar is being put higher, which means that we have to be on the top of our toes and it's that moment of crisis that we move forward. It's this moment of crisis that as a European Union, we take steps forward. And honestly, what I see now is that as European Union, we used to move forward because we had some visionary leaders with great ideas and they pulled the European public forward. Now this has changed. It's actually the European public that looks at us and that says, please, for those big challenges, we know that the nation state on its own cannot do it. Please do it as European Union. Healthcare was not exactly European competence. Energy isn't really as well. And defense isn't really either. The public demands from us more integration. And yes, so there's more demands of how much we should do, but if we do it as an integrated way, we can do it in a more efficient way and we can do more. The minister and then I have many questions for you, Secretary General, also from the audience. So I'll get to that in a second. Just briefly, I think, yes, we are increasing our budgets for defense and that is also, you have to prioritize. You cannot do everything at the same time. But I think it's not only about defense. It's not only about having military at our borders. It's also about our freedom. It's about rule of law. It's about democracy. It's what we all stand for. So that's why I think we all feel it's important to do it, but to do it in a smart way, as Prime Minister of Belgium has just stated. And I think also you have to look at the future. So at the same time, with climate change, with the importance of having a well-educated population in our countries, these are the choices that you have to make. And sometimes it means raising taxes, being smart because we also have our budgetary rules and they apply to all of us in the European Union, at least. Thank you. I have many questions for the Secretary General. So we'll start off a bit rapid fire. This one is, is it time now for naval coalition of NATO states to secure a free and open black sea by escorting vessels from Odessa to supply grain to the Global South? It's first and foremost time for President Putin to lift the blockade of Odessa and other Ukrainian ports to allow a grain to be exported out of Ukraine, because this is really his responsibility. The war is causing the food shortage and the increasing prices. It's not NATO or EU sanctions. It's actually the direct consequence of the war and the Russian blockade. Then I welcome efforts by EU, by NATO member states and others to try to find a way to get more grain out of Ukraine, by rail on land, and also the efforts that are addressing is it possible to get it out on ships? That is a difficult task. It's not an easy way forward. The best and easiest way is to end the war, to drop the blockade and let the food go out. Let me add one more thing. And this is a war in Ukraine that affects the whole of Europe, but it has global consequences. The increasing energy prices, energy and food prices affects everyone and the poorest people of the world. It just makes the whole war, the Russian invasion, even more senseless. Another question for you. Is the best way to prevent a NATO-Russia war to ensure Russia is defeated, or is it to ensure that Russia has an off-ramp? So diplomatic negotiations or are we beyond that? I think the best way to prevent this from escalating, again, it's for Putin to stop the war. If that's not the case, then the best way to act is for us to be very firm. To make it absolutely sure that there is no room to believe that he can attack any NATO-allowed country without the full response from the alliance. Because as long as that's clear, there will be no attack. Because NATO is by far the strongest military alliance in the world, 50% of the world's military might and 50% of the world's economic might. So NATO solidarity and also demonstrated by increased presence. The reason why we have now roughly 30,000 more US troops in Europe over the last three months is to demonstrate exactly that NATO solidarity. So that will not win the war in Ukraine, but that will prevent it from escalating into NATO territory. Then we need to support Ukraine to help them reach a result on the battlefield that makes it possible for them to agree on the negotiating table. This war will most likely end at the negotiating table. The question is how and when. And therefore we know that for Ukraine to reach an acceptable result at the negotiating table, they need to be strong at the battlefield. And that's the reason why it's not either support the military or be in favor of a negotiated solution. A negotiated solution which is possible to accept for Ukraine will only be achieved if they have strong military position on the battlefield. President, maybe this one is for you, the former UK Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Hague of the UK. Wrote in The Times today that Putin may attempt to divide NATO by calling ceasefire that Ukraine cannot agree to. Would NATO remain alive? Do you want to take, yeah? No, I agree fully with that. But up to now we are not showing any signs in the little one that we are divided. This was, as Secretary General knows the best, we have shown the unprecedented unity, not in recent times, in NATO history probably. But I would like to send a message to everybody speaking about this subject these days. What is at stake in Ukraine? First of all, defending the Ukrainian territory, defending the Ukrainian children and whole people. But we should help, first of all, Ukrainians to defend themselves, but we should send the message to all the prospective autocrats that democracy will always prevail over dictatorships. And that we would like to live in the democratic world. Minister? Well, I can only agree, of course, with that. But it could be much more of a challenge than we're talking about here, if this drags on again for years. Yes, it's very difficult to predict this, of course. None of us know exactly what is going to happen, but it's one of the scenarios that we have to take very seriously, is that this can go on for years. And I think it's very important to point out that it is for Ukraine to decide whether a ceasefire or even a peace is acceptable, if the terms are acceptable. And I also agree, until then, we must do everything we can to support Ukraine with weapons, with training, with our partnership that we can give them. And one thing I'd like to mention, because it's what's also important, is every day the price for Putin and for the Kremlin is going up, the sanctions are hurting them. And we have to push that even further, I think. And to make them pay for this war in every way that we can. And that also helps Ukraine, of course. It's the other side, the more economical side, but it's very important. Prime Minister? Yeah, actually, I think you just said it. Don't forget the sanctions and the impact of the sanctions. It's a thorough impact. The six packages there, it's going to go much, much further. And then besides the sanctions, all European countries are making irreversible choices related to energy supply. And the impact of that takes time. But in the years to come, this is going to have a profound impact on the exchange with Russia. And it's really hurting the Russian financial capability to continue financing this war. Don't underestimate, besides the packages, what we are doing in energy and all European countries are making choices which are not going to be turned back. I think one of the lessons we have learned during this crisis is that long-term security interests are more important than short-term economic interests. To be too dependent on Russian gas is dangerous. That's the brutal reality. It has a price to win off Russian gas but we have to do it. And therefore, I support free trade. I believe in a more globalized economy but when we need to choose between protecting our values or profits, we need to choose protecting our values. If we need to choose between long-term security interests and economic gains, then, of course, again, we need to choose economic interest. This is about energy. It's about technology. And it's about also controlling critical infrastructure in Europe. So this is a hard lesson learned. It has a price. But I think that's quite obvious in light of what we have seen over the last weeks after the invasion of Ukraine. We're almost out of time. So I'm going to ask you each for about 30 seconds, actually, to give one or two priorities for what we need to do to achieve peace and security. Mr. Yermak, let me start off with you. You're still there joining us from Kyiv. I'm sorry. Can you repeat your question, please? The question is in the very short term, apart from the weapons and the support, what do we need to make sure that there's peace and security in this region in the longer term? Thank you for your questions. First of all, I'd like to say that I very tend to release in all your comments of colleagues. Thank you for your attention. And thank you for your support, Ukraine, in this war. It's very important to understand that this war is continuing. And every day, Ukraine continue fighting, but we continue lost our people. And of course, as soon as possible, we need to receive all necessary weapons. Because I'd like to say that as long this war is continuing, it's starting to be more higher the risk that some in other countries, especially which have the borders with Russia, will be involved. And in this country, it is country as the members of the NATO. It's mean that if we receive everything, which absolutely you say that in all capitals in our friends and our partners exactly know that we need, we will win. We stop this war in central of the Europe. As we are talking for the long perspective, I explain in my speech that we are proposed and we are now in the consultation of the, first of all, of the security of the guarantees for Ukraine. But we think that after this war, we can't say about strong system of the security in the Europe. It's necessary to build this system. Because till this war, it's continuing. Not any countries in Europe can feel safe. And we are a lot of times talking about it. A lot of conversation was before this war. But it's happened. Most bad things happened. Happened in the center of the Europe. It's mean that it's time to thinking together and to build new strong system, which will be protect any potential aggression, any potential violation of the international law, violation of the territorial integrity of the European countries. Thank you so much, sir. In 20 seconds, President Pinarovsky, how do we achieve peace and security? In 20 seconds, some people are naming this period of the time as a second Cold War. What is important, let's agree with that, but what is important to remember, what is the main difference? The previous Cold War was about ideology. This is not anymore the battle between communism and capitalism. We are speaking here, it's clear at least to me, that this is the battle between democracy, democracy throughout the world, and autocratic leaders. And I'm not even there to think, to imagine the world, if we are pressed to live in a world where the autocracy rules. It's gonna be the most dangerous place to live, and certainly not the prosperous place the next generation would like to take part. Thank you, minister. I think from the beginning, we've said unity is our strongest weapon, so we have to stay united. If we stay united, I'm confident we can keep on helping Ukraine with the weapons, humanitarian aid, financial aid, everything they need. And the second thing I'd like to say, I think this has been a wake-up call for the European Union in a geopolitical sense, and I think we have to use that momentum to build on a stronger European defence within NATO and within the European Union. Secretary General? Well, my main message is that the Ukrainian war has reminded us of the importance of North America and Europe standing together. I don't believe in America alone, and I don't believe in Europe alone, but I believe in North American Europe together, and NATO is the institutionalised expression of that unity. Two world wars and the Cold War thought us that we are not safe when we are divided, we are safe when we stand together. I'm sure. Ensure the support of our domestic population. I think we are in for a somewhat longer period of instability, which means that we need to make sure that our North American European populations are supporting us, which means that we need to protect them for the impact of what is happening. If we don't protect them well, we might lose domestic support and it might become much harder. Thank you so much for this important conversation. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.


I'm Gareth Stevenson, I'm the head chef at Pally Hall Hotel and Restaurant, just on the outskirts of Snowdonia near Balagh. It's important to focus on sustainability because I believe we've got an obligation and a responsibility to leave our surroundings and our environment in a better place for our children and grandchildren. Part of that is taking care of the land and all the people and creatures that are on it. This year we were recognised with Wales's only green Michelin star. That's an important focal point for us when we're developing our dishes and writing our menus and it's an ethos that's carried throughout the hotel, whether it's staff welfare, the materials used for our uniforms, the materials even for the paper that goes into the rooms or the menus. It forms a backbone to everything that we try and do here. At Pally we've got an on-site hydroelectric generator that's powered the hotel's electric since the early 20th century. It's been updated by the current owners. We grow our own microherbs, salads and salad vegetables on site. All our chutneys and preserves are made with apples and pears from our orchards and that's fueled and fed by compost from our kitchen waste in the hotel kitchens. I think the next step on our sustainability journey is to really focus on green and renewable energies and supporting our local suppliers, farmers and producers in pushing us to the forefront of sustainable food production in the world.


Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm chatting with Stuart Brand, and Stuart is an individual who is above all else an individual and who defies summary. But think of him as someone who was there early or there first in a multitude of movements, including cyber-culture, psychedelics, the importance of Native Americans in their philosophy, the whole earth catalog, the entire San Francisco scene, the Long Now Foundation, and the notion of the importance of durability and the idea of maintenance, the idea of bringing back woolly mammoths to life, and much, much more. Stuart Brand, welcome. Oh, thanks. It's a delight and an honor to be here. Thinking back on your entire life, in which ways do you see yourself as a product of the Cold War? I was in a town that was in Rockford, Illinois that was rated as number seven on the list of the American cities to be destroyed by the Soviet Union with bombs because we built machine tools, and they thought that was upstream of American industry and therefore blah, blah, blah. I was younger than 10 by then, and so I had nightmares about wandering around in a destroyed Rockford where I was the only person left alive. So I had a certain built-in apprehension, and among things that led to, as you may remember, I think you're old enough to remember when the mushroom cloud of the atomic explosion was the sort of symbol of human civilization at that point. That was the way global everything thought about itself was the threat of nuclear annihilation. And the photograph of the Earth from space that came along, 68 and 69, 70 from the Apollo program, completely replaced that nuclear cloud with an image of a very hopeful-looking Earth. And it's interesting because I realize now the Earth is sort of being deployed, that photograph which was so hopeful and green and better than the mushroom cloud is now evoked a lot in context of climate change. And once again, it's sort of an image of a threat rather than a promise. So am I correct in thinking of you of somehow taking the research environment of World War II, the notion of threat, but redeveloping the ideas of the computer and the network forum to put forward some more optimistic, also more decentralized vision of the future? Yeah, I think there's some motivations for all of that. And I paid very close attention, as I started to pay attention to things, to the research library and electronics that was going on at MIT. And they were studying Shannon's version of information. They were studying how communications, electronic communications, and then digital communications were transforming humanity, basically. And so that was a set of premises. This was before we had Moore's Law, but I had a sense of a self-enhancing process that was going to not just change everything once, but change it many times. That's what exponentials do, if they keep going. And so I sort of rode that wave of an engineering understanding of civilization that I have to this day. And how is it that you became such a decentralized? Oh, God, decentralized. That's entry. You're right. Well, I mainly, I think you probably see this with the artists that you study. I got a degree in biology from Stanford and then was going off to be an army officer. But in the course of that, I started hanging out with artists and bohemians in North Beach in San Francisco. This is the late 50s, early 60s. And so my first calling was as a professional photographer that then turned into a so-called creative photographer doing art. And I was doing multimedia with a group called USCO in New York and basically took on the role as an artist in the world. And that kind of stuck. And so my media would change a lot. I would start nonprofits and sometimes businesses and various things, but it was always this not part of a hierarchical organization and not trying to build a hierarchical organization. It was basically enhancing creativity at the individual level. And so with the whole earth catalog that led to a kind of a lazy libertarianism that I later got over when I worked for Governor Brown of the state of California. But it was and remember also as a biologist and evolution, Darwinian evolution is the most decentralized thing that you can imagine. It's way beyond the market economy is something that runs itself and is self-organizing at every level and at every scale. And so I haven't answered that question before. So answering at this time, I think I've talked myself into being a Darwinian. What was the influence of Nikos Kazensakis on your thought? The Greek author, Zorba the Greek, right? Yeah, Zorba the Greek and the just the modern sequel and so on, which I think I'm the only person who read. There was a strong committed romanticism there. It was also clear in Ein Rand, who I also paid attention to for a while before the preposterousness of it all took it over. But Kazensaki had this sort of commit everything to your theory of the world, even if it's wrong. And I got over that also because that's that way lies madness and also great destruction. But it was fun to go down that road with him. He's a beautiful writer and thinker. In which ways is your thought drawing from America's pre-industrial past? Well, I old enough to have actually lived with ice boxes. Ice is what kept the refrigerators cold in Michigan in our summers, and we used outhouses. So to a certain extent, I'm just grounded in Midwestern forest living. But also I for some reason picked up a strong through a writer named Kenneth Roberts, a strong identification with New England and kind of traditional New England. Book Minister Fuller later played right into that for me. And so all of that has a kind of grounded continuity. I was one of the three guns Midwesterners where I started with a BB gun and then got a pellet rifle and then a 22 and then a more serious rifle. So hunting and fishing were part of the world I was in. I didn't do much of either one, but that was who we were. He wanted to be a good outdoorsman. Alfred Hitchcock's rear window. How did it matter for you? Oh, God. Well, you know, because of the name James Stewart, because he was kind of lanky and laconic. I identified with him. My older brother, Mike, I figured it was Bert Lancaster, but I was James Stewart. And so two movies that Stewart made were rear window where he was with Grace Kelly, and he was a photojournalist. And that looked exciting. And I later became a photojournalist. And then also he was in a movie called Broken Arrow, which was the first movie that was liberal about American Indians. It was really, really well written, well researched on Chiricahua Apache culture. And James Stewart there is the guy who connects with Indians.  And we just played that stuff out. So James Stewart was a handy character to identify with for me. And what do you think is the major intellectual influence from Native American or Indian perspectives on your thought? Is it the idea of maintenance, something else? Well, part of it is that, I mean, it surprised for me. I've been surprised a couple of times. I was surprised in Venice that it was basically an Asiatic town. I was surprised by the Indians I was photographing in Oregon in 1963, I guess it was, that it was such a rich and active culture. These was not people in the past with feathers and teepees. These was people in the present. They were doing a wild horse round up. They were cowboys, not, you know, cowboys and Indians together. And rather different cowboys than the ones I'd seen. The white cowboys tended to be very ferociously individualistic and competitive. And the Indian cowboys I saw were much, much more collaborative. And there was a gentleness, a constant humor, welcome to people like me. So when I started hanging out, I was inspired by that experience to visit a lot of reservations and just hang out with the Indians. I eventually did a multimedia show called America Needs Indians. And that turned out to become a point of reference for the hippie subculture. And it was basically one subculture paying attention to another subculture for inspiration and a sense of identity. So the long hair convergence, as it was called, was a way for the older Indians, the long hair gentlemen, and the younger Indians who were trying to decide who to be because they had a lot of choices, realizing that the continuity of their native culture was a really valuable thing. Not something to feel bad about or to flee from. And that's played out very well. So Indians are in way better shape now than they were when I first started paying attention. Or when Marlon Brando did, before I got to know Marlon, he was basically at every place that I went to before I was hanging out with the fish Indians in Washington with the sort of revolutionary Indians in Oklahoma. And it was regarded with affection and respect by the Indians that I met. Now if I try to place you in the earlier part of your career, and if I compare you to Buck Minster Fuller, Norbert Wiener, Gregory Bateson, what are the key variables for you disagree with them? How should I sum up intellectually that difference? I bought Robert Wiener, I guess, first, and he shelled up very well. Buck Minster Fuller, the artist I was hanging out with, were paying close attention to him and to Marshall McLuhan. And he was this amazing thinker who sort of revolutionized his whole behavior and his whole thought patterns around what he thought was a more productive way to behave from the think in the world. The only person I know who's that radical with himself is Kevin Kelly, who occasionally takes an ocean and just goes all the way down just to see what's there. So Buck only really changed himself once, but it was an impressive change. When I came across Gregory Bateson, he was sort of the corrective for Buck Minster Fuller for me, because Fuller was so totally an engineer, what Bateson would call a kind of an input-output approach to understanding and solving everything, whereas Bateson was much more, he was aware that every system is basically self-referential to some degree, which that's the kind of thing Fuller would never take on, and hierarchically organized at a very deep conceptual level, and that we are always immersed in the system that we think we're isolating something from. And so Gregory was wonderfully dubious about engineering solutions, about naive intention, and went a little far in the mystical direction for me, and so there were later corrections for that for me, because I've kind of gone a mystical route back when I studied comparative origin at Stanford, and that turned out to be eventually non-productive, and I think counterproductive, often people go down a mystical or romantic route, but that was all stuff that I was kind of working through, and I got to know Fuller, I got to know Gregory Bateson very well, I never met Wiener, but I hung out later with people like Marvin Minsky and other part of the MIT intelligentsia, who are really still my frame of reference. So in 1968, the whole earth catalog, you have the view that what the world needs is a photo of the earth appearing to be one thing. What is the photo we need today? Well, interesting is the various photos of earth, and one of the things I learned early on is people fixed on basically two photographs, the earth rise photograph of the moon in the foreground, which was powerful because he saw in one frame of reference a dead planet and a living planet, and boy, the difference is striking, and you're glad that you're on the living planet, and it sort of incites you to want to make sure that it stays living. And then there's the so-called blue marble where the photograph is taken with the sun behind the spaceship, behind the camera, and so you see there's no crescent, there's no gibbous earth, it's just a big round earth like people expect, which of course is the rarest photograph you can take, you have to be right in line with the sun to get that image. But there were thousands of other photographs of earth. Soviets took some, we took countless ones, and eventually I found their drawer at the NASA headquarters in Washington, where they all are. I just paged through her and, you know, picked out these amazing images and started using them, and later whole earth catalogs. I think one of the best things that's happened in this last century is that outside the planet perspective, and every astronaut comes back with stories of how amazing it was, even though they're trained for and prepared for being amazed. They are then really amazed by getting out there in the photograph. It's just a glimpse of how powerful it is to be off-planet and see the planet as a whole. So that, I think, will continue as we explore the rest of the solar system, mostly with robots sometimes with humans. Lately, I don't think we're going to the stars, Tyler. No. I think it's too far. What do you think? I don't think we are either. I think it's impossible. Because of the distance. Because, and the wear and tear on bodies, even if you freeze them. And, you know, physical space is not what is scarce. So why not Nevada, I like to say. Okay, right. How about space colonies? Where are you on those? Right outside the Earth, I think there will be some. But I've not for a long time been very optimistic about space as the future of progress. I just don't see what's the scarce input out there that we really need.  But if you've lived in New Jersey or the Netherlands or, you know, South Korea, that hardly seems like an imperative. Exactly. I think I share that. I think it'll be basically voluntary and of interest. Science fiction can make great use of the generationships and so on. But Kim Stanley Robinson recently did a book called, I think, Aurora, where basically makes your point in my point that, even if you get people out that far, the wear and tear on the social fabric, on the biology, on everything, you cannot isolate a very complex biological system like humans for that long and expect to get anywhere that's useful. What was the nature of your mother's interest in space and space colonies? She seemed almost obsessed with it. Yeah, she was an ambassador girl who was a liberal in probably a not very liberal town in Northern Illinois. And she kind of fell in love with Wernher Van Braun and the very early space stuff. And so she got all the Willy Lay and the other kind of popular colliers and Saturday Evening Post magazines and books that came out at that time. Lauding, Going to the Moon, Going to Mars. She loved all that stuff. And later in life, I got to know an astronaut named Rusty Schweiker. I took and we went to see the movie, The Right Stuff. My mother and Rusty, this astronaut, went to that movie together. And that was a real connection for her to the dream. Do you think the images of the Navy UFO videos will have cultural resonance the way the image of a single whole earth did? Oh, I don't track on that at all. But evidently, you do. What do you see there? I see a very serious puzzle that our military and CIA cannot figure out at all. I suppose I think there's a modest chance it's an actual alien drone probe. Probably not a very interesting drone probe just sent out to follow us and then run away. I've given that five or 10% in my estimations, but I find it very puzzling. It forces me to think about our world a lot, that we could have multiple sensory sources of data measuring an object that moves very quickly. And we simply cannot figure out what it is. And it dates back to at least 2004, possibly much longer. So to simply say, oh, it's the China or it's laser induced plasma, a lot of explanations just don't quite seem to cut it. Good. Well, I'll keep some mystery in your life. There's things like that that I sort of just shrug and adopt a two-minded approach. It might be true. Is it something I can do anything about? Is it something that's going to affect me? If not, I'll just stay open to further news. But in the meantime, kind of shrug at it. Because one of the things you probably notice as you get older is you've seen a lot of illusions come and go. And I've seen a lot of the world has doomed illusions come and go. Y2K, when we got all the computers are going to stop because they don't know how to handle the year 2000 and stuff like that. On and on, peak oil and one thing after another. So I've become a trying to encourage a certain sense of perspective and realism about when people say that the world is going to end because of this that or the other thing. Humanity has been around for a long time now. The world has been around for a long time now. Biology is incredibly resilient and robust. And I think the world ending trope is just a waste of mind. When you put out the whole earth catalog, how much did you think about the font and style of the early editions? Well, I was I stole everything. The typeface, the Windsor typeface I used on the the whole earth catalog, there's sort of become now the typeface and hippied on apparently when I look at some of the nostalgia stuff. That was the L.L. Bean type font that they used. As I admired, I was building on my father's interest in in mail order catalogs. And L.L. Bean was one of the ones we really liked. And there was a kind of a straightforward New England honesty about it that I really appreciated. And so he would have a leather belt in there for $2 and 25 cents. And the write up on it instead of, you know, this will make you more of a man. I just said, it's pretty good, a little leather belt, $2 and 25 cents. And that kind of pragmatic clarity and succinctness, it took us a model of how to review things in the whole earth catalog. Do you know what I think of when I see editions of that catalog? I wonder, how did you manage to typeset the whole thing? Oh, well, a couple of things made possible, self publishing a book that ambitious. And one of them was the IBM Selectric Composer. It was the golf ball striker where you could take one golf ball that had all of the letters on it, in a particular size in font, put on another one italic or whatever. And so you could do very complex typesetting with basically a kind of a jumped up electric typewriter. And so that let us do really good compositing right there in real time. And likewise photography, getting half tones, there was a brand new device that would let you make half tones.  We originally used beeswax to in a big old frying pan, electric frying pan with a mouth of beeswax, and you just paste that in the back of something and slap it down on the page. And that was how we laid it down. How is it that the whole earth catalog ended? It was a best seller, had big cultural impact, I reached Steve Jobs, why did it stop? You could have just sold the rights and sold out, right?  The original one was 64 pages and $5. And the idea was each one would be bigger and cost less and be better. And that went on. And as you can imagine, we were doing this every six months. And that put a, I didn't know about taking breaks or vacations or things like that. So I was bearing down pretty incessantly on this thing and getting it right and getting it better. And I was like, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. So I was bearing down pretty incessantly on this thing and getting it right and getting it better each time and all of that. And so I went down my own kind of asymptotic black hole. And one writer said, by the end of the whole earth catalog, Stuart Brander's a wreck. And I was a wreck. So rather than just, you know, retire and hand it over to somebody else, again, kind of with an artist impulse, I wanted to see what happens if you take a full blown success and just stop it and see what happens. My turned out wrong hypothesis was that others would immediately step into that very obvious opportunity in the market and fill it perhaps better in many different ways that did not happen. But what did happen is as soon as I named the last whole earth catalog, the last whole earth catalog, that turned out to be the best possible marketing device you'll ever come up with. And calling something the last anything turns out to, if it's honest, which it was at the time, it gets people. And so that book became best seller, it became, got the National Book Award. It was a big deal. And in fact, two different Broadway producers got in touch with me saying that they wanted to do a Broadway play titled The Last Whole Earth Catalog. And with, you know, people playing volleyball between scenes and Paul Simon was going to write the lyrics and songs. I asked Paul Simon if that was really true. He said, you know, went away like things do. So, but I was, I was on a real downward slope by the marriage falling apart, my fault. And so I was on the wreck for a few years. Why aren't the top entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley more interested in the visual arts? You have been your entire life, but it seems they are not. Why is that? I have no idea. Hippies in general were not very good on the visual arts, except for comics, Robert Kromm and so on. We were terrific on music. I'm not no good on music at all. But I was trained as and then worked as a graphic photographer. I studied graphic design. I even studied magazine design back at Stanford and then took a bunch of classes afterwards at San Francisco State College and in the San Francisco Art Institute. So I think the exception there is Steve Jobs who basically studied visual design somewhat at Reed College and and when he became fascinated by design as design that really played out with, you know, Apple and I'm glad I got Apple stock because I knew Steve Jobs. So what do you think is missing in Silicon Valley because of the slack of interest in the visual arts? Jobs aside. Well, you and I both know Patrick Collison and I see Patrick as a kind of a whenever anybody says something kind of disparaging about Silicon Valley and tech bro and so on. I think that Patrick can think well that's because he's sort of personally the one I know of the current set. You know, I've had some people who said have gotten touch and said admiring things like Mark Andreessen and Jack at Twitter and Chris Cox at Facebook. So I feel some personal connection there, but what I'm jibbering about here is I have no theory of Silicon Valley at all, Tyler. What's yours? Well, striped press books are beautiful. I would stress that. But maybe maybe there's something about the engineering mindset that in some ways runs counter to the aesthetic mindset. That's interesting. They may come together with psychedelics, but not in the arts. Okay, I sort of buy that. And that would be a program for I think engineering and you see a fair amount of MIT of trying to keep their engineers from being too mentally siloed into just solving problems with numbers. Now, you first took LSD, if I understand correctly, as part of a military experiment, military, but there's probably military money in it. What led you to take that plunge? Someone said do this. It wasn't a known thing back then. Why did you do it? I wouldn't have done it. Well, you know, I was young and careless. I was jumping out of airplanes and climbing things and doing all the dangerous stuff that you do when you're young and witless. But that one, I think, was an outgrowth of the Bay Area, Mid Peninsula, tea groups that developed the kind of confrontational personal interaction in group sessions that developed in the 50s at Stanford and in that area. And that led to a very transformational approach to ideas of human potential and so on. When Esalen Institute got started, I had already been doing seminars of my own with students from Stanford at Slate's Hot Springs. It later became Esalen and got to be friends with Mike Murphy when he was here. And Richard Price was starting Esalen Institute. And so all of that human potential stuff was looking at religion, looking at meditation, looking at drugs. We were, you know, reading about Aldous Huxley and what he got from peyote. And I was hanging out with peyote Indians a lot, increasingly in the 60s. And so friends in the Stanford areas and LSD was just starting to turn up. And it was still legal through the early 60s. And there was a so-called therapeutic model, which is now completely revived. It's interesting that it had to go through a long hiatus of that psychedelics can be useful as metal in significant personal therapy. And the idea then was, remember before that, when psychoanalysis first came along, all the anthropologists felt they had to get psychoanalyzed. And this was sort of a similar thing that, okay, there's this new therapy and it's supposed to be used on sick people. But if it works for sick people, let's try it on healthy people to see if it makes them even healthier. And so that was kind of the theory we were going on. As it happened in that set and setting, as they said, of therapy, I basically flunked out. It was just a not very pleasant long episode. But later on, I had personal LSD experiences that were transformative, including one that got me going on what a difference the photograph of the whole earth would make.  So why did it, and not Los Angeles, become the center of hippie culture? That's a fair question. Los Angeles never had 49ers. Los Angeles never burned to the ground. And so San Francisco, the Phoenix city, they still say sometimes, has waves of boom and bust. It's not particularly infrastructural. Los Angeles is completely based on oil and then water infrastructure and major shipping even more than the Bay Area. And there's a frivolousness that the Bay Area is good at. It has two universities of significance, with Stanford and Cal. And I mean, so does LA. But LA does not feel like a college intellectual world, whereas San Francisco somewhat does. And so Silicon Valley really is an outgrowth of the industrial park at Stanford that was invented by one guy. And then those things, as you know, take off economically. They feed themselves and then they become their own storm system. There's a lot of people like me from Midwest that come to places like California. And one of the things that I sort of saw, because I spent time on the East Coast from prep school and then in New Jersey as an military officer and then a lot of New York as an artist. And the sense I got is that people go to New York and LA to be successful. And, you know, if you can make it in the Big Apple, you can make it anywhere, that sort of thing. Nobody says that about San Francisco. They never have and I bet they never do. People go to San Francisco to be happy, by and large. And then that leads to this sort of devil may care creativity, which is actually good for business startups of certain kinds, especially ones that have a low threshold like anything digital or anything online. And so screwing around is not only possible, but encouraged. And screwing around is the way you discover new useful things in the world, I think. So I knew by the time I graduated from Stanford that I wanted to stay in the Bay Area, I went away to be in the Army and then I came right back. What was the creative peak of Jefferson Airplane? I have no idea. You didn't know them? Well, no. Who I knew was Grateful Dead pretty well. You know, the trip successful that I organized with the Merrick Banksters with Ken Kesey's group. Grateful Dead had just renamed themselves from the Warlocks and they really took over the three-day show that we did. People just wanted to dance their guts out all night long. And the Dead had the way to do that and all the other artistic stuff that I brought in there was sort of interesting, amusing, frippery, but the Dead really won the day. And so that's how I got to know them early on and stayed somewhat in touch through the years. What did you learn from David Crosby? Not a thing. I love his songs. We apparently had this conversation. I guess you've been reading John Markov's biography. Of course, yes. It's a good book. And what I remember is being shamefully out of it when I talked to David Crosby. People would show up at the Whole Earth Truck Store where we had this kind of retail outlet for Whole Earth catalog stuff and wanted to chat with me. And like Philip Morrison, a fantastic book reviewer, a scientific American showed up like that. And David Crosby showed up like that. I guess you and Romney must have brought him. So wave at gravy. And lost to me. Maybe David remembers the conversation. What is it about the early days of San Francisco culture that most people still do not know? Which early days? There's a lot of them. Say the 1960s, hippie days. I don't think people know the extent to which the mob took over. That first pornography, there was some really, really creative pornography coming out of basically hippie artists having a good time and turning the camera on. And then the whole dope culture, no hope without dope, everybody was selling or buying marijuana and these other drugs from each other. And then one of the guys named Super Spade was his arms and legs cut off and his torso was hung out by Ocean Beach from a tree.  So that was the end of that. And everybody was selling dope and sort of learned a little bit of business from doing it, then went into business, legitimate business and they were good at it. And so hippies became basically a very good commercial startup folks partly because of that sequence of experiences. Is Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry a good movie? I don't remember. Clint Eastwood is an incredible movie director, except for this last one. You know, it shows San Francisco and I think 1971 and the city is supposed to be falling apart. Maybe in some ways it is, but what's striking to me is how much cleaner San Francisco was then than now and also how few new buildings have been put in. It looks almost like the same city, except for parts of downtown. Well that's interesting. You saw it again recently. About a year ago during pandemic, you gave it another watch. Well, it was a good and I think respectable dialogue that was set in motion between a kind of conservative approach and a probably excessively liberal framing that was going on at the time in the Bay Area. And so make my days became a kind of a conservative line. Now, given your long history with San Francisco, do you think you see its current problems differently since you know so much of the past? I think I don't see them clearly enough. I think Patrick Cullis and I was a lot more substantial to say on this issue because he's in the thick of it. He's got to figure out where his workers live and where his point of place of business is and so on. I think that a major shift that occurred is the, to me, completely understandable retreat from Silicon Valley, from the mid peninsula. I lived there when we were doing the whole earth catalog. It's actually a kind of a horrible place to live compared to Marin County, where I am now. Marin County being north of Golden Gate and Silicon Valley being south of San Francisco. So with Salesforce, with Twitter, with these various web-based organizations that moved into the city and built their headquarters there and tried to house all their workers there and so on, that is a disgust with suburban working and living and a seeking out of downtown. You've seen it in Seattle with Amazon, you know staying in downtown Seattle and so on. And because I've been thinking about writing about or researching about cities from about 1998 on, that all seemed completely sensible to me. Cities are highly centriple. They attract talent, they attract all these things and you know so Jeffrey West's book scale and the studies going on at Santa Fe Institute on how cities accelerate everything. They're the major economic engines of any region or any culture they're in. If you're ambitious and talented, you're going to go to a town. And in the Bay Area, town of San Francisco still. Now in the last two decades or maybe even a bit more, you've become very interested in this idea of the long view. There's the Long Now Foundation trying to take a very long-term perspective on things. This attempt to build a clock that will last for 10,000 years. But if I look at your own career, a lot of the most influential things you have done have been quite finite. So you ended the whole earth catalog, the Mary pranksters with Ken Kesey, right? That ended a long time ago. The online bulletin boards you were a part of, which were very important for the early years of the internet, those in their earlier form, those are gone. So why seek durability if your own influence has typically come through the supposedly transient? Well, some of us just getting older. And I developed when I was studying buildings and then later writing about civilization and this kind of pace-layered understanding that part of what makes a dynamically self-stabilizing and learning system is that some parts of anything complex and dynamic move very fast and some parts move very slow. And we tend to pay attention to the fast parts like fashion and commerce and not pay attention to the really powerful parts like nature and culture. And once I sort of had that perspective, and plus I'd been a professional futurist for 20 years with the Global Business Network, where I saw that people doing scenarios would treat 25 years as a very long timeframe. Military we did scenarios for would sometimes grow up 50 years. And I thought, you know, that's considering the level of stuff going on, changes going on, it's understandable people would pay attention to the short term. But meanwhile, these basic dynamics of the really slow stuff is where the power is calls for a reorientation of focus. And so when Danny Hillis, computer scientist MIT, who I've gotten to know at the Media Lab, wrote an email saying, I'd like to build a clock, the scale of Stonehenge that keeps a very long term time and ticks once a century, bongs every thousand years. He sent that out to everybody new, but nobody responded but me. And I responded, so let's do it. I think because of the stuff I just mentioned, as realizing, Danny's framing of it was, this is all through the 80s and 90s, everybody referred to the future as the year 2000. And Danny was growing up during that time. He said, so for my entire life, the future has been getting shorter by one year per year. That does not seem like a healthy frame of mind for a civilization that wants to be healthy to have. And what could pop through that membrane of the year 2000? And so coming up with the idea of a very durable, basically perpetual motion machine of a clock. The clock, by the way, it is not trying to be built, it is built. It's almost completed in Texas on Jeff Bezos' mountain range. It's not a perpetual motion machine in the sense that it takes the temperature difference on the very high mountain. It's on between night and day and runs an air bladder that then provides energy that keeps the clock knowing what time it is for thousands of years. Would the younger Stuart Brandt say in his 20s be disappointed in the future that has come to pass? Oh, mixed bag. A whole lot of stuff developed fantastically, I think. As a biologist of low seeing biotechnology, finally relink with field biology, conservation biology. I'm involved in that doing co-founding, revive, and restore to use biotech for the help of conservation wildlife projects. So that's played out pretty well. But in large, when I was optimistic about stuff, I turned out to be right. When I was pessimistic about stuff, I turned out to be wrong. Often enough that it has kept optimism alive. Right now, the political conundrum of the United States has me worried and I don't know what to do about it.  I don't see automatic solutions either of those or ones that I can help with, except that focusing on long term frame, the long now, we describe it as the last 10,000 years and the next 10,000 years. So there's the now that is an hour long, the hour now that is two weeks long, the year in the middle off, and then there's the somewhat longer now that is 20,000 years long. And I think human civilization is earned and needs the perspective of that is a foundation for thinking about everything. Do you look much to science fiction for ideas and inspiration or not? Yeah, I mean, the new Steele Neuvenson, Neil Stevenson termination shock is brilliant in terms of really playing out the geoengineering schemes that are out there. Neil did fantastic research on it, better than most people I know, including many professionals. And likewise, Kim Stanley Robinson, with the Ministry for the Future, again, fearful research on what overheating wet bulb high temperatures can mean for human survival in places like India. And then playing that out in kind of politically astute terms. This is some of the best thinking going on in society. And science fiction has always opened that door to thinking about the future in creative ways. Marvin Minsky, who I knew at MIT, was always quoting Isaac Asimov. And he just said, look, these are artists who thought about this stuff a lot, and I pay close attention. I feel the same. How did your year working with California Governor Jerry Brown make you less libertarian? Hasn't California governance turned out to be a big mess? No, California governance was and still is pretty damn good. What I learned is that the libertarians I knew, and they sort of clustered around the whole earth catalog because in central earth catalog, it was saying, you know, this is right after Jack Kennedy said, that's not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. We sort of said, that's not what your country can do for you.  And so there was a do it yourself thing that translated for many as a screw the government. And then the whole hippie period was counterculture and a lot of that was played out politically in the new left and so on. So working for in the governor's office in Sacramento and wearing a three-piece suit. One of the things we started was that I started was a water atlas of California. And then the research that was that we set in motion from the governor's office to bring about this actually quite beautiful and somewhat influential book. California's hydraulic civilization as you know, we move our water around and that's what makes agriculture the main event here. That's what makes Los Angeles possible and so on and so forth. I saw the people at the water resources department. I saw what they did all day. And we would show up saying, look, we need we need some data on the Smith River, which is the only undamned Smith only undamned river in California. And you know, what's the patterns of flow and that and how deep your records go. And somebody's deputy assistant would say, we thought you'd never ask. And they had been, you know, carefully keeping this data and trying to correlate it with things and keep it up to date and then various computer systems and so on for decades. And the low paid high quality selfless work that these folks were doing. And in the governor's office, you always knew who was Republican, who was a Democrat and why and all this kind of stuff. Down in the departments, nobody knew and nobody cared. There were Republican Democrats scattered throughout the whole system. And it was part of the ethic of that part of government to just not be political in the divisive sense at all. And so I was seeing something that the libertarian folks I knew knew nothing about and were not the slightest bit interesting and they weren't actually interested. I think here as a somewhat of a libertarian are interested in how government works. Most of the ones I knew were not. And they were interested in how election works and they thought the absurdities that they saw in elections and electioneering was government and it's not. And so I finally got the perspective of what is now vilified as the deep state. And the deep state at least in California is damn impressive. And so I came out being way less interested in who was the governor. I basically came out saying, well, Jerry's a good governor as near as I can tell. But then later on, unfortunately, there was a pretty good governor. Reagan had been a pretty good governor. And the realization I had is Donald Duck could be governor and it wouldn't be the end of the state.  It could be really destructive. And the deep state was not as successful as it usually is of working around it. But that's reflective of a whole bunch of other stuff going on that I do not comprehend, frankly. Now you've written a good deal about architecture. Do you view the forthcoming smart home as a blessing or a curse? Well, it's always been a curse. The Internet of Things is making stuff a lot more convenient and a lot more handy. But people are banging away on making home smart for decades and decades. I think that one of the things we'll be figuring out increasingly for the next few decades is what things to hand over to robots and what things not to. And there'll be lots of stuff that surprises us. It's just great that robots are doing that. Frankly, I love the autopilot on the Tesla drive. I don't use it to get all the way from here to there. I use it so I don't have to pay close attention to traffic, just peripheral attention. And the difference there is fantastic.  It kind of winds up like those remote clickers for television. They have too many buttons and people finally learn the three buttons to do what they mainly want and pay no attention to the rest. And then the younger members of the family sort them all out and become adept at it. And then the next generation of excessive choices comes along and they don't know. And they've got to ask their kids, how the hell does this complex thing work? So I think there's a kind of an endless quest for complete handiness. And I think generally people who go for simplicity rather than robotized complexity in terms of personal living are happier. And if we, in proper Hayekian fashion, want more than organically evolving architecture, what can we do to get there? Well, I wrote a whole book called How Buildings Learn. It's probably my best book. And it's certainly most successful. It's now treated as a classic and taught in classes and so on. And it's basically that building is not something you finish a building, something you start. The building is ongoing process that is in a perpetual dialogue with the user, the users of the building and the uses of the building. And it's standing in the real estate market and so on. And professional high concept architecture is sort of allergic to all of that. And they want to make work of our signature piece of something or other with the look of that particular architect. And they hope that the function will work out. So the buildings that tend to go best are ones that are really durable, like the old brick factories of the East Coast or some of the total concrete spaces, what I call long road buildings. For example, at Stanford, when I was there, there were temporary buildings left over from World War II and at MIT, the Rad Lab, the Building 20, was where most of the real, well, much of the real innovation that happened in curriculum, in science, engineering happened in the trailers. It happened in Building 20. And because those were buildings that nobody cared about, you could do anything you wanted in there. You could adapt the building, whatever kind of research you were doing, and it was cheap. And you could throw things together and have them fall apart and not care or have them take over the world. And because it started cheap, you were able to get there without having to over invest. And so buildings that adapt well over time are basically built strong for certain reasons. And then stay strong as the decades go by and the different uses go by. In the book, I wound up sorting out various things that have those qualities and things that don't. I had a chapter on maintenance because everything, buildings are sort of the most maintenance, needing and maintenance-defying things that we build.  I don't have a short answer to your question of what makes them more adaptable, but really looking at what buildings do over time sure helps. Why does Japan fascinate you so much? They're the most advanced material culture in the world, I think. You know, how to wrap five eggs and things like that are a matter of enormous interest and craft. And I'm paying attention to them now because my friend Kevin Kelly, who's traveled all over Asia and including all over Japan, he said he's looked and looked for a broken roof tile in Japan and he can't find it. And there's an attention to detail of caring about the physical essence of stuff that the Japanese are surpassing it. On the other hand, there's a lot of so screwed up in Japanese culture, the cities are massive, buildings most of them are kind of haphazardly built. I first fell in love with Japanese architecture through a book written by a Japanese home and it's surrounding 1896 by a New Englander and he just spelled out the traditional Japanese home and the Genkan and they're used to the tatami mats and the relationship with the garden and the banjo and all that stuff for the bathroom. And the aesthetic practicality of it just knocked me out. I actually got to stay in the house like that in Kyoto for a season, one year and it was fantastic. So the Japanese craft at its best is just the best there is. In what year will we bring back the woolly mammoth? What's your point estimate? Certainly in the century I think we'll have what looks like and acts like woolly mammoths back. I would like to see them back in large herds in the Siberian and in the Northern Canadian steppes doing their old job of eating the grass and therefore causing the grass, grazers make grass and so the so-called mammoth step which was once the world's largest biome reaching all the way across the around the North Pole and Arctic and subarctic. Climate logically is much more stable but mainly it was the Serengeti of the North. This was where endless large animals and incredibly rich animal and vegetable ecosystem compared to what's there now. That's a case where humans to some extent climate but mainly humans got rid of all the megafauna by killing them and eating them and that keeps happening. And as they come back they will the way the elephants and rhinos and what not do in Africa they will bring back the mosaic landscape that is drastically richer and by the way much more stable in terms of climate. And what's stopping us from doing this within the next say 20 years? It might happen in the next 20 years. The outfit called colossal has decided to put in serious commercial money with George Church at Harvard and others that are working on bringing genes from the extinct mammals that we know what they are now because of paleo genetics and putting them into Asian elephant genomes and start bringing back the Arctic capability of the blood system and the thick hair and the rest of it that makes it possible for an elephant to not only survive but thrive in the far North. As it happens Asian elephants already live in Canada and like to break through the ice in the pond or go swimming they wouldn't make it through the long Arctic night but they already like the cold when you're big and massive cold is not that harsh an event. So I think bringing grazers and megafauna back to the far North will be practical and beneficial. It's already going on at this place called Pleistocene Park in Far Northeastern Siberia. To close I have just a few questions about the Stewart brand production function. Are you ready? Sure. Now you're well into your 80s, correct? Correct, I'm 83. So what is it you do to stay so sharp? Pick parents with genes that make that possible that's the main thing. And what do you do after that? And after that frankly I don't understand people who go quiescent intellectually as they get older. You know as you get in a way getting older you get more control over your time and you have more savvy on how to do things and how to make things happen and who to call and you have a question and all that stuff. And so your ability to investigate stuff and especially with the internet now is growing up all the time. And why would you let curiosity fade? And many don't. You probably notice that people you know in their 70s are different from people that you knew in their 70s when you were a little kid. When they kind of you know was over they were settling down to play golf or whatever it was. And probably a whole lot of people you know in their 70s and 80s are hard at it. In some cases just hitting their stride and that's a change that has occurred in my lifetime that is a total treat. And as near as I can tell that one is permanent. I think that's with us now. People will live longer and thrive longer. The health span is not being referred to instead of lifespan and health span meaning how long you can be really engaged and productive and alive to things. So and I think that's very good in terms of long-term thinking. Because people are older are half a longer now. Their future may be getting shorter but their past is personal and significantly long. They've seen a lot of stuff come and go and they've seen a lot of skills that possibly they had time to pick up that they can now deploy. And all of that is makes at least a kind of intellectual life that we both seem to enjoy that much richer.  I mean medically it's possible for me to carry on in ways that would not have been possible a century ago. So there you have it we are we are living longer and we're finding ways to keep the human body and human brain functioning better longer. So why would you not take advantage of that? How has giving away money kept you creative? I'm not that good at it. I've now gotten to know a number of philanthropists who are really good at it and I know that I'm not. At one point I was a guy who was getting into philanthropy because he started eBay and I said you know if you like I can try to find some good things that I know about that maybe you don't that would be good to put your money into. He said sure fine here's an extra amount of money go ahead and make good things happen and I worked on it for about six months and just failed utterly. It was not good at that. So I would love to see a whole lot more really creative philanthropy. This is another thing that I think you and Patrick Collison like you've done with your fast grants can help move much more creative philanthropy. One of the things I've noticed all my life is that philanthropy should be the most creative thing going. It's got to be more creative than government. It's got to be more creative than anything that the commercial entities can do and that it is not is just a waste because especially in America we're most philanthropic society in the world and yet it's not as creative as it should be. Last question how do you decide what to pay attention to? Well it's a little different from Kevin Kelly's when you get Kevin Kelly on he'll tell you it's what he sees that nobody else is doing that only he can do and then he'll pay attention to that and try to make something useful happen. I'm I don't care as much about whether other people are doing something. What I'm looking for is things that will in Gregory Bachen's terms make circuit with the world and you see some of this in software development where people talk about the minimum viable product and you start to get a user base that you can co-evolve with and develop your products so it's actually being useful to them and Amazon talks about the minimum lovable product where it's not only useful it's compelling and that you don't let anything into the world unless it has its lovability or quality to it. I'm a little earlier in the process of I'm just feeling around for things that that feel like they're overlooked the whole earth catalog do-it-yourself was something that you know middle-aged gentlemen who'd retire is what they were doing in their garage and was kind of looked down on catalogs we kind of looked down on and basically I just took those two things that were regarded with disdain and turned them into something that turned out to be powerful. Likewise right now I'm focusing on maintenance partly because I noticed in myself and then everybody else are reluctant to think about maintenance because it's a chore it's a nuisance it's a problem there is no kind of economic short-term value in it and and and and and because with the Long Now Foundation we're looking at becoming a long-term institution to sort of stay with the clock that's based on noticing the difference between Stonehenge Egyptian pyramids and the Issei Shrine in Japan where nobody knows the hell of pyramid that what the Stonehenge was really for and we know a lot about Fahrenheit religion with the pyramids but it's dead as a doornail and yet Issei Shrine expressing Shinto culture in Japan is as alive today as it was 1500 years ago and it is the beating heart of Japanese culture so what's the difference and the difference is I guess maintenance and it's institutionalizing we've got a lot more respect for institutions and trying to understand their institutions and Alexander Rowe is the director of Long Now Foundation is actively funding and pursuing the study of longevity in institutions what actually makes it work what's makes them earn their longevity and keep it in a changing world well the whole concept of maintenance I think is in the thick of all of that and so I'm spending all my time now in this room with all these books sorting out how to think about maintenance in general Stuart Brand thank you very much thank you sir that was fun