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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Both word is agency.
Do you have agency?
Can you confer agency?
How are you going to get agency in this otherwise helpless situation?
And instead of saying agency, he said gumption, which is a nice kind of funky old word.
Yeah.
And it isn't highfalutin.
The agency's kind of highfalutin.
Gumphin is very something one of your grandparents, one of their grandparents might have talked about.
And a gumption trap is an interesting concept that basically you get into a situation, sometimes technically with the motorcycle itself, but often just inside your own mind.
You get frustrated and mad because you have a wrong theory of what the problem with your motorcycle is.
Why is it cutting out when I take it on the road, but I can't find out what's making it cut out when I'm back in the shop?
And you get a wrong theory, and you can really—
wind up hurting your motorcycle because you start panicking and, well, it must be this, it must be this, it must be this, and you go down some wrong path and you're doing harm on the way.
One of the important things about repairs, a repair is a trauma for the thing that you're trying to fix.
And if you do it wrong, you can make the problem, either the original problem worse or introduce some new problem.
So now you've got two layers of confusion in there.
So one wants to be delicate.
And one of the things that skilled maintainers talk about is if it's a problem you don't completely understand, just stop and ponder.
and uh pressing is especially good you just stare at it just stare at it you're like a fisherman waiting for a nibble and a nibble may well come yeah uh and if that doesn't quite do it then just read everything don't pose it ahead with all your wrong theory because uh it's going to make things worse
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