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

Here's the question, Sean.

We don't have a backup.

Of course, Elon wants to go to Mars, so we have a backup there.

But we sure don't have it yet.

So with the global civilization, we know backup.

Does that mean it's extra fragile or extra robust, extra resilient?

I'm pretty sure it's extra resilient, partly because so many parts of the civilization are quite different from each other.

And one may go down and the rest of the world shrugs because they went down for their own good or bad reasons.

The others can go along and everybody can learn from each other's mistakes.

Previous civilizations went down, didn't know about previous civilizations that had gone down.

So they didn't know they were fragile.

This is like when the passenger pigeon went extinct.

It was the first continental animal of great abundance to go extinct.

And basically the extinction of the passenger pigeons was what made Teddy Roosevelt and others realize that they were about to lose the bison, the American bison buffalo.

And so the death of the passenger pigeons arranged for the survival and revival of the buffalo.

That's the kind of knowledge that this global civilization has.

that it has fragilities, but that we are in the process of learning what it takes to maintain a global civilization.

We don't know exactly how to do that yet.

We've only had it for a while.

We've only thought about it for a while.

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