Stewart Brand

speaker

734 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 24 Apr

Stewart Brand’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.

Appearances

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The Ezra Klein Show · Stewart Brand, Silicon Valley’s Favorite Prophet, on Life’s Most Important Principle · 24 Apr 2026 podcast

There is somebody there caring.

Well, it's a classic case of David Deutsch's line about, you know, you solve certain problems and other problems emerge.

The problems that we thought were being solved, especially communication, understanding that computers were communication devices.

And isn't it amazing that we all still...

use email, which was one of the first things invented for the microcomputers, as they were called then.

Lots of other stuff has been added on, and the social systems have connected lots and lots of people in really profound ways.

And lots of the things available through the Internet, from Wikipedia to the Internet Archive to iFixit to YouTube.

So in that sense, it's really surpassed the dreams that we had.

But then, of course, it introduced problems that we didn't completely anticipate.

The very first social media started to have flame wars, started to have these people being rude to each other because they were not in the same room, and nobody could punch anybody, and they could gang up on each other, and things like that started to become semi-pathological online.

But it was sort of like when advertising was explored way back when it became more and more persuasive and interesting.

And then with AdSense on Google, it wasn't just, Nicholas Negroponte used to say, it wasn't just advertising as noise, it was advertising as news that was focused on your expressed interests.

And then that felt like, well, that was an invasion of our privacy that it knew what I was interested in.

And in some cases, that's not welcome.

But in other cases, oh, yeah, I didn't know about that thing.

Thank you for letting me know.

Except nobody ever thanks it.

But they do act on it.

And so that's what keeps these things going.

So, yeah, these problems keep coming up and they keep getting solved partially or partially.

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