Stewart Brand

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.

And that's a large part of how it proceeds.

that it's not been a subject in its own right ever.

It's sort of like the discovery of infrastructure.

When the term infrastructure was introduced in kind of the middle of the 20th century, it was like a new way to think about things, a new way to think about cities, a new way to think about civilization.

As we've been building up a global infrastructure, it's a new way to think about a global civilization and the things that it has to do.

maintained, basically, to keep going.

And the ambition to grasp, basically, the whole world of maintenance is crazy, but fun.

And fun for the region as well as me.

So the

Most of us are doing maintenance most of the time in one form or another.

And I can tell you, when you get to be 87, you're doing, which I am, you get to be doing quite a lot of maintenance just to get through the day.

And you talk to software engineers, and most of them are basically doing maintenance, trying to keep all the stuff that's changing in the universe where the programs they care about are operating, up to speed, debugging, weird things that come in from new dependencies that were introduced, blah, blah, blah.