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
which also puts incentives in a funny place, because then you sort of want them to need service, and so you might design them in ways that look great, but after two months, you're going to have to go into the shop, and they own the shop, and they own the parts, and so it goes.
But it's short-term gain.
This is kind of one of those acidification issues that once you're successful enough to really sort of control a domain of stuff and customers, the temptation is to start trying to extract rents.
That is basically unearned income from the system.
If that's what you're counting, and that's what the senior executives tend to do, certainly what happened at Xerox, we want to have the least expense and the most income because we all got these tremendous bonuses, and that's what we're living for, and that's what we're measuring, and that's what is more important to us than satisfied customers.
satisfied customers are necessary in the long run.
So it's a short gain versus the long loyalty that is the
mix there and it's kind of like it's easy to forget what's fundamental, which is that you've got to have satisfied customers and they will come and get you after a while if they're not satisfied.
Well, this turned out to be the answer to a question I got a lot because I started a thing called the Whole Earth Catalog back in the 60s that had a lot of impact.
And people say, well, gosh, we really need that now.
Why don't you do the Whole Earth Catalog again?
And I can answer with a happy, freed grin that I don't need to do that because YouTube has done that.
And part of what the catalog did is it kind of conferred agency.
It gave people a sense that they could just do things.
And when you have a problem with whatever it is that you've got, a refrigerator or a motor or whatever, you go online, you look up the make and model of it and year,
And you will find not just the manual, but a dozen different people offering their videos of how to fix various issues.
And you go straight to the issue that you're concerned with.
And there's five different flavors of how to fix that issue and that model and that year of that make.
So it's fascinating.
it's an astonishingly, I suppose, democratic, but distributed, uh, wise system that, uh, kind of like Wikipedia is, is just this thing of, you have access to, uh, the world's experience, uh, in a way that's really easy.
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