Stewart Brand

Wow, thank you.

It's an honor to be here.

This one is extra quirky.

And what I decided to do is write it sequentially and write it available online.

So in a sense, it's...

like Charles Dickens doing a serial version of his novels and so on.

And what that does is forces me into the same situation as the reader, which is that I don't know what's coming and they don't know what's coming.

And so we're in a similar situation.

And then because I'm sort of moving through the material constantly,

and sort of doing research live as I'm writing with each section, things come up.

And I realize, oh dear, I have to explain about why precision is important for Henry Ford to be able to do interchangeable parts on the Model T. And so I'm just going to stop everything and go through the history of precision in the 19th century.

And that led to all sorts of things, including DARPA, because it was the military that was pushing for interchangeable parts because they wanted the soldiers to be able to fix their weapons in the field instead of having to go to a gunsmith.

And that drove basically America into the leadership of the Industrial Revolution.

Yeah, and so then the other thing I've got is, like the reader, I know what I've read so far.

I'm assuming they're reading the book sequentially, even though it is kind of fraggy and something you can dive into anywhere and be captured by it, partly because of the illustrations, which I put a lot of effort into.

And part of being a good writer is surprising the reader.

And partly you can surprise them with content.

You can surprise them with news that they didn't know.

And because I've been a general editor most of my life, I sort of know what most people know.

Steven Pinker would be so pleased.