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.

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Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas · 341 | Stewart Brand on Maintenance as an Organizing Principle · 19 Jan 2026 podcast

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.

And so I sort of know somewhat better than Donald Trump does what's actually surprising news.

And he's surprised by stuff that he sees in the transcript that he's reading.

I don't do that.

And if I'm surprised and kind of delighted by something I discover, I'll put it across to the reader in that mode.

You know, some are deadpan.

I don't use many exclamation points.

But...

Ideally, you want to read the next page for the next revelation of something surprising.

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