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
And basically, the sergeants train everybody in maintenance, and they're the ones responsible for making sure that maintenance happens.
And the Russian military does not really have NCOs, non-commissioned officers, sergeants, and most of the Arab militaries do not.
And when you don't have that, the maintenance doesn't get done, and then you lose the war.
They overlap and they take responsibility and they keep the layers...
respecting each other.
This is a big part of... So that every single officer in the U.S.
military has a non-commissioned officer who is with them at all times, keeping them alert to what the soldiers themselves need and want and maintenance issues and all of that sort of thing.
And so the...
That keeps it from becoming a caged system where cats, where officers look down from a great height on the troops and do not respect them, but they expect to be respected themselves because they're so high and mighty officers.
That is a recipe for losing a war.
Yes.
What's interesting is, unlike many metaphors, he actually was a very good maintainer of his own bike.
And he had screwed up a couple of times, and then he watched mechanics screw up with his motorcycle.
And that was when he decided, OK, if I'm going to get somebody reliable to take care of my motorcycle, I guess it's going to have to be me.
And he really did just immerse himself totally in becoming really skilled as a mechanic dealing with his bike.
And then because he was also thinking about values and philosophy, he used that as a frame for talking about his philosophy.
which is interesting stuff, but not nearly as interesting as the clarity he had about maintenance itself.
And so what I did was I basically skimmed all that cream out of his book about maintenance and put it in my book.
Gumption traps are wonderful.
It's the sort of thing that's, you know, now the...
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