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 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
We're all reading David Deutsch and basically getting the kind of cosmic level optimism that goes with his understanding that all problems are solvable, but problems never go away.
There's always new ones to solve.
And that's what progress is made of.
And in that sense, progress is inevitable.
And so techies like that, because technological process progress feels, scientific progress feels like it's kind of built into the universe.
Spell it out a little further from the second law perspective.
One of the aspects of maintenance that emerged for me relates to that, which is, as you say, there's way more ways a thing can go wrong than can go right.
And as a consequence, skilled maintainers actually wind up having to know more about the system than the people who designed it and built it.
And a lot of whether a thing is kind of mature and resilient and robust in the world is if the makers, the designers and the manufacturers pay very close attention to what the maintainers are learning about their system.
then all is well because they will design for lower, better, easier maintenance.
And if they don't, the system can be really, really stupid and not getting smarter.
And so one of the things I keep coming across is when the makers of things are paying close attention to the maintainers of those things, all goes well.
And if not, not.
Yeah, so as I said at the beginning of that story, there were nine competitors in the Golden Globe race in 1968, all sailing from England.
And the three who became basically immortal was the one who won, the one who didn't bother to win, and the one who cheated.
and uh and wound up committing suicide because he had cheated uh that was donald crowhurst
And Bernard Metessier is one who didn't bother to win.
And he had really designed basically a wonderfully low maintenance vessel, which I've seen, the Joshua.
And Robin Knox Johnson was just an irrepressible fixer of anything under any circumstances in a rather small wooden boat that he wound up being the only one who finished the race.
So they had completely different attitudes toward maintenance.
Showing 381–400 of 734 · page 20 of 37
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