This is the reason interview with Nick Gillespie. My guest today is the legendary Stuart Brand,

who has been more than half a century shaping how we think about technology, the environment,

and the future. He first came to prominence in the 1960s as a merry prankster and the co-creator

of the Whole Earth Catalog, the counterculture Bible that helped inspire personal computing, the hacker ethic, and the co-creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, the Counterculture Bible that helped inspire personal computing,

the hacker ethic, and the modern environmentalist movement.

Since then, he's launched the Long Now Foundation, champion nuclear power and de-extinction,

and he's pushed us to think in 10,000-year time horizons.

He's also been the subject of two biographies

and an excellent documentary in 2020 called We Are as Gods. In his new book, Maintenance of Everything,

Part 1, the 87-year-old brand argues that the real work of civilization isn't flashy invention,

but the long-patient care of complex systems.

We talk about that and whether his vision

of planetary stewardship conflicts with libertarian values

of individualism and decentralized power.

Here is the Reason interview with Stuart Brand.

Stuart Brand, thanks so much for talking to Reason. Well, it's a pleasure. As usual, we've done this before.

That's right. And hopefully we'll do it again. So, you know, the book,

Maintenance of Everything, which is out from Strike Press, and it was on a site. People can find

this. It'll be in the show notes, but just Google it on a site called Works in Progress,

where you were writing drafts, and then people were writing in and kind of saying, well, I don't

like that or this or whatever. But, you know, maintenance is the hidden foundation of everything that we do.

You know, maintenance, not, you know, the big new thing, the shiny new things.

...