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
You know, just changing the lights of a street lamp.
There's guys in uniform.
They have a special routine they do with a ladder where they go up the pole and do a little formal thing at the beginning and another little formal thing at the end.
And it turns the simple task into a somewhat more complex dance.
Moving together in time is one of the profound things that humans have been doing for a very long time.
And having a uniform where you're doing something, especially a service, we make a kind of a big deal of it.
So ritual is one way to make really, really repetitive maintenance less onerous.
One of the problems with repair is it's a trauma for the system that you're trying to fix.
And it's easy to get things wrong.
So a couple years ago, they were in the process of doing maintenance on the Notre Dame steeple, the tallest part.
It was kind of rotted out, and they were doing work there.
Because they were up there doing stuff that introduced flame,
in an area that then took off and burned down the cathedral.
Chernobyl, they were doing just a routine maintenance and were careless and it got out of hand.
So that's just reason to be cautious and take thought, often for diagnosing the problem.
And on that particular case, Bernard Matessier had a steel boat that was pretty much waterproof.
But he had a collision with a ship that bent the bowsprit 20, 25 degrees off.
it meant that a storm might take down his whole rig because it was no longer symmetrical.
And so he knew what the problem was, but how could he fix it by himself at sea?
And that was where he took the advice he had heard from other maintainers.
Showing 161–180 of 734 · page 9 of 37
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