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
One of the things you lose in the course of that is people being
skills and maintenance.
We saw this when personal computers first came along and I happened to be in the thick of that, it turned out, in the Bay Area and the user groups
For a good while, we're carefully attended by the manufacturers because the users were, one, showing the problems, and two, showing the workarounds.
And then the manufacturers needed to know about that.
And then they could try to do a workaround way back to the manufacturing level so that particular kind of problem would not keep occurring.
With software, this is much harder to do because software keeps moving, whereas hardware stays the way it is.
And that just is part of the history of these things.
I'm going to be going into the right to repair issues shortly because people like John Deere, who used to be famous for making it easy for their customers to repair their tractors, lately have made it very, very difficult and expensive and problematic for the customers to fix their high-tech tractors.
Right.
And so, you know, Senator Elizabeth Warren is all over this, and the guys at iFixit, Kyle Weins, and others in the public world are...
are basically, it's a form of insistence on the owner of repair rights to, if I own it, if you sell it to me and I own it now, I've gotta be able to fix it or I don't really own it.
And I should not have paid a sale price.
Back in the day, Xerox was one of the first companies to sort of discover, how about we continue to own the copiers that you get from us, and you lease them, but we own them.
And by the way, then we can take the amortized tax write-off on it, and you can't.
But we're then responsible for keeping it working.
And they did that not as well as they needed to because the early copiers were really, really flaky.
They were great, and Xerox became an enormously famous and rich corporation, and then they lost it, partly because it was just mismanagement in various directions, but they mismanaged the technicians that were repairing people's copiers, and that's why they didn't make it.
Yeah, and it's tricky because you can see from the company standpoint, if you control everything about the ongoing usage and upkeep and so on of these particular devices and you don't let non-company people fix them or the owners fix them,
um you get a lot more income and often it is uh like car sales the dealerships for cars up until when tesla came along were making more money off of fixing their cars than off of selling them and um
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