I'm not sure that having lots of twitter followers, let alone a lunch date with Stewart Brand, is the sort of thing it is reasonable to ask of our learners ;-)
On the other hand the main theme of his post seems straight-forward, almost mundane: talk with people you know who might have interesting contributions, or with whoever you can find with similar interests, in whatever medium you find them. I think that is reasonable to expect of a learner, regardless of age or stage.
I think the ancillary point about being prepared, "priming being everything", is important too. Perhaps another way to consider it is to think of other types of learning aside from research that support and inform that research. For example, practice is obviously very important for programming. Someone who has actually written multi-threaded code and debugged a race condition is likely to have a much fuller appreciation of discussions about locking than someone who hasn't.