Why Everything Falls Apart—And How to Keep It Going (Stewart Brand)
The Michael Shermer Show
Michael Shermer
4.3 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 5 May 2026
⏱️ 64 minutes
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Summary
Stewart Brand has spent a lifetime thinking about tools, systems, civilization, and the long future. Best known as the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, Brand joins Michael Shermer to discuss his new book, Maintenance of Everything, a sweeping look at what it takes to keep bodies, machines, buildings, institutions, planets, and civilizations from falling apart.
The conversation ranges from the hidden work of maintenance to electric vehicles, bicycles, nuclear power, AI, and even human populations.
Brand makes the case that life itself is maintenance: everything alive must keep itself going, and everything humans build must be repaired, improved, updated, and cared for.
Stewart Brand is the cofounder and president of The Long Now Foundation and cofounder of Global Business Network, the Hackers Conference, and the WELL. He created and edited the National Book Award-winning Whole Earth Catalog from 1968 to 1998. He was the subject of the documentary We Are As Gods (2020). He graduated from Stanford with a degree in biology and served as an infantry officer in the US Army. His new book is Maintenance of Everything.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | But do you think the life of the internal combustion engine car will be gone by, say, I don't know, 2050 or so, |
| 0:06.3 | and that the entire length of internal combustion engine will be like 150 years, and that's it. |
| 0:10.9 | It'll just be a phase in civilization. |
| 0:12.9 | Well, nothing goes away totally. |
| 0:15.4 | Human vehicle for 6,000 years was the horse. |
| 0:18.8 | Horses have not gone away. |
| 0:20.2 | They've been replaced on the highways than the streets, but there's probably more horses in America |
| 0:24.9 | now than there was when, was what everybody used to get around. |
| 0:28.6 | And I think combustion vehicles will move into that category. |
| 0:32.7 | Is this our destiny to go into space and be a multi-planetary species? |
| 0:37.2 | Even if Elon doesn't get us to Mars, maybe some day we'll get there and continue on out to the |
| 0:42.3 | outer solar system, to other star systems and so on. |
| 0:45.5 | Some other skeptics tell me this is totally unrealistic. |
| 0:48.3 | What are your thoughts? |
| 0:50.0 | What do you think of these radical life extension people, a lot of these tech billionaires that want to live forever by, it's really a maintenance program? Tech billionaires have an interesting design problem, which is what do you do with a lot of money. One of the first things it kind of comes to their mind is, well, you don't get to do all sorts of things, but there's all sorts of things you can't do, and the main one is live forever. So they get interested in that. |
| 1:12.3 | The whole history of civilization is really energy capture in two words, right? |
| 1:16.3 | That's what we're always doing. |
| 1:17.7 | And so it seems like nuclear has to be in the equation along with, I don't know, |
| 1:21.8 | what is your opinion of solar and geothermal and some of these other renewables? |
| 1:25.7 | Well, the section of the book I'm working on now will be in part two is all farms are solar |
| 1:31.0 | farms. Food that's raised for fuel for vehicles rather than fuel for people and animals is a big |
| 1:37.0 | deal. And it's attractive politically because it's a way to subsidize farmers and they like that. |
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