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

So the bathtub is high maintenance at the beginning, it levels out, and then high maintenance toward the end.

When you're at your age, you're toward the end.

Generically, or probably genetically, I'm somewhat of an optimist.

That's fatal for maintainers.

Maintainers are realists.

They're pessimists.

They're always looking for what could go wrong and how can I get ahead of that.

Or they hear a questionable something, and I might say, oh, I don't think that's serious.

Or maybe he says, that sounds like it's serious.

So there's a whole attitude issue that one becomes aware of, and my shortcoming is I'm an optimist.

I recommend David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity.

It's basically optimism at a cosmic level, and it's full of the realization that there are always problems and there are solutions.

And that goes on infinitely.

You're always at the beginning of infinity when it comes to that.

I recommend a book.

It used to be called, by Simon Winchester, it was called The Perfectionist, and then he changed it to Exactly.

But it's how precision engineers created the modern world.

And then I wound up revisiting, I did a section on manuals,

and some of the great manuals of history.

But the one I was looking at was Diderot's Encyclopedia, which had diagrams basically of how all the trades and crafts of the 18th century actually worked.

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