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 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

um donald rogers the one who cheated and suicided uh hated doing maintenance he called it sailor rising and uh if it was kind of unpleasant he would reward himself with a drink after uh after completing an unpleasant piece of maintenance and uh pretty soon he ran out of uh rum and wine and then went crazy instead

Yeah, exactly.

And I knew the Joshua and I knew Bernard Metessier a little bit.

I said, boy, you're both pretty fit.

And he said, yeah, the idea for me is it has to be a new boat every day.

It has to have everything in perfect working condition.

And he could do that because he also insisted that nothing be complicated.

And so his self-healing device

Instead of being complex, like most people where there's a bunch of ploys and hinges and whatnot that would operate the tiller, he developed a very simple device which was right on the axis of the rudder itself.

And so the angle of the wind kept the angle of the rudder at a certain steady point.

And if something broke it, which did, he couldn't fix it.

Whereas Robin Knox Johnston, he lost, when he was south of Australia, lost a part of his self-steering device that he couldn't replace.

And from then on, he had to figure out how to self-steer just by setting the sails in certain ways on his catch.

So...

And then he had to worry about when he was sleeping below decks.

And if it jibed, which you can do with the sail whams over to the other side, he had to know that was happening or about to happen.

And so he took from his bunk the sideboard so that when the boat was about to jibe, it would change its angle, dump him on the floor,

And he would pick his bruised body up, go out on deck and reset the whole system.

And that was his idea.

That was the way he did maintenance was it was more important to maintain the rigging, which was becoming fragile, than maintaining his own personal bodily integrity.

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