Stewart Brand: “[Maintenance] is what keeps things going. I’m a biologist by training, so you find that everything alive spends a lot of its time basically maintaining being alive. Even the extent of reaching outside itself — you’re not just eating. If you’re a beaver, you’re busy cutting down trees to maintain your dam, which is what protects your lodge. Most plants spend a lot of time basically helping the soil around them do things that work well for the plant. The soil itself is alive. We’re always maintaining our bodies. We maintain our vehicles and our houses and homes and cities that we live in. We’re catching on that civilization is something to maintain as a whole. And even the planet — we’ve now stepped up to terraforming. We’ve been terraforming badly, and we need to terraform well. So the levels of maintenance are enormous, and the constancy of it is a given.”
Tracy Brower: “The ways that our connections shape our cognitive performance—and even our decision-making—are very powerful. There have been some fascinating social experiments. One thing to start with is understanding that the more we talk to others, the more we socialize, the more we connect, the better our cognitive function. That doesn’t mean everyone has to be an extrovert. But it does mean that we all require some level of connection. The hypothesis behind that research is that when we’re connecting with other people, we’re asking questions, processing what they say, listening, and empathizing. And all of those actions are very effective because they’re engaging our brain and building on our cognitive capability. Our cognitive capability is tied to connection. In addition, there is interesting research on decision-making and how we make decisions when we’re connected.”
NYTimes: “Most of us experience our dreams — we’re chased through our childhood school, our teeth fall out. The dream happens to us; we’re not deciding how it unfolds. Then there’s the much rarer lucid dreaming, in which the dreamer is aware that she is dreaming and can influence what happens. In a lucid dream, the dreamer can often determine how things play out.”
Thomas Kurian on Google Next 2026: “The framing this year is that as AI models have become more sophisticated, we see customers evolving the use of AI models from being used to answer questions in a chatbot-like fashion, to actually automating tasks on their behalf, and to automate process flows within the organization. By automating process flows, you both get efficiency improvements, productivity improvements, frankly, you can also change the way that you introduce new products and services to market, for example. In order to do that well, the technology, what you need is a world-class agent platform and to underpin the agent platform, you need world-class infrastructure. You need the way that the agents interact with your company’s data and your business — so you need capabilities to help an agent really understand the company’s business information and context.”
