Silicon Valley’s Favorite Prophet on What the Tech Industry Forgot | The Ezra Klein Show

0:00 I think if you’re looking for who

0:02 is the most influential philosopher of the internet,

0:05 who laid down the way Silicon Valley thought,

0:08 at least in its more idealistic era,

0:12 the person you come up with is Stewart Brand.

0:14 Brand has one of these amazing lives where he seemed to be present,

0:17 at least for a part of the culture, at almost everything that mattered.

0:23 There in the 60s, and the moment of the hippies

0:26 in a $20 a month apartment in San Francisco with other beatniks,

0:29 there at the mother of all demos,

0:32 that creates much of the structure for modern computing

0:36 that foresees many of the places we’re ultimately going to go,

0:39 there creating The Well,

0:40 one of the earliest online communities there with the Whole Earth Catalog,

0:44 which Steve Jobs describes as an early inspiration

0:47 for what we now think of as the internet.

0:50 "When I was young, there was

0:52 an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog,

0:56 which was one of the bibles of my generation.

0:59 It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park,

1:03 and he brought it to life with his poetic touch.

1:06 It was Google in paperback form 35 years before Google came along.

1:11 It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great

1:15 notions." A list of all the places Brand was,

1:18 and all the things he influenced from the Clock

1:21 of the Long Now to his long running correspondence with Brian Eno.

1:24 It is very, very long,

1:25 and along the way brand has been writing these very beautiful,

1:29 unusual books, not just the whole Earth Catalog,

1:31 but "How Buildings Learn" in 1994, which I love.

1:35 And if you’ve not read, you really should.

1:36 And then most recently, this book "The Maintenance of Everything, Part One",

1:40 which explores something many of us would rather avoid

1:44 the constant and almost spiritually important work of fixing our cars,

1:48 of doing home repairs, of caring for each other.

1:52 Brand makes maintenance sound philosophically potent, even beautiful.

1:56 And one thing I think is interesting about this book at this moment,

2:00 to be written by somebody with the weight of Brand,

2:03 is that it points towards maybe a different way of thinking about technology.

2:08 It points towards maybe a different ethos on which Silicon Valley,

2:14 with its great men of history, conquerors of the world dimensions,

2:19 now can maybe move towards something a little bit more humble,

2:23 something a little bit more rooted in the natural

2:27 relationship we all have to each other,

2:29 and that we all have to aging and to loss.

2:33 So I want to have Brand on to talk to him about

2:36 that and so much else that he’s seen and thought over the years.

2:40 As always, my email ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

2:49 Stewart Brand, welcome to the show.

2:51 Well, thank you, Ezra Glad to be here.

2:53 I want to start a little bit back in your history in the 1960s,

2:57 you were part of a movement that got called the back-to-the-landers, communards.

3:03 What was that?

3:05 Hippies.

3:05 Well, what was that?

3:07 How would you describe the vision there for society?

3:12 For various reasons, a whole lot of people basically in college

3:19 in the early 60s and on through into the early 70s,

3:25 thought they needed to reinvent civilization.

3:30 The 50s had been.

3:34 So successful they became kind of bland.

3:38 And the Beatnik poets who preceded us showed a kind

3:45 of a revolutionary path of going wild and going deep.

3:51 And so we figured out ways to go wild and go deep.

3:55 Many dropped out of college.

3:57 Drop out where?

3:58 Well, they decided that since civilization had to be reinvented,

4:04 they would deal with the gathering of their cohort

4:07 of the people same age as them and their peers, and go off base basics.

4:14 They go back to the countryside and farm and build

4:18 their own buildings and have their own rules and start over.

4:24 They all failed, but they were all the communists were highly educational.

4:34 We learned that free love isn’t free.

4:37 We learned that if you expect the women to do all

4:42 of the really hard work of pioneer women used to have to do,

4:47 carrying the water and cooking the meals and taking care of the kids

4:49 and doing everything else while the guys

4:52 were building domes and other interesting buildings.

4:58 Another thing that we discovered was

5:01 that the countryside is actually kind of boring,

5:03 especially if you don’t connect with your neighbors, which we did not mostly.

5:09 And so we fled back to the cities.

5:12 Some of us figured out how to do too many drugs,

5:17 and some of the rest of us noticed that and didn’t do that.

5:22 But it was a wonderfully fearless time.

5:27 We undertook wild and crazy things.

5:30 We had this aesthetic of the most wonderful adventures you could,

5:35 with the least amount of money that you could.

5:38 And you have to be creative under those circumstances.

5:42 So that was the hippies, and the Whole Earth Catalog was speaking in a way,

5:47 to the fact that these were for college

5:50 dropouts who didn’t know how anything worked.

5:53 They had not been raised on a farm or ranch.

5:56 How would you describe what the Whole Earth Catalog

5:58 looked and felt like to somebody who’s never seen one?

6:01 It was pretty big, actually.

6:03 Bookstores complained about it because it’s about as big as a laptop now.

6:09 Basically folio sized and thicker than a laptop.

6:14 Now I’ve seen them.

6:15 It’s big.

6:16 Oh, yeah.

6:17 By the time we did the so-called next Whole Earth Catalog,

6:21 it was three, several pounds of everything.

6:27 But I mean, Steve Jobs and his famous commencement speech

6:32 that it was like Google decades before Google came along,

6:36 the Whole Earth Catalog had all those books, how to be a beekeeper,

6:42 how to grow sheep, how to weave and to all of the goddamn make candles.

6:53 We’re actually candle dipping.

6:56 So that was what the Whole Earth Catalog was.

6:59 And it turned out it really did is what YouTube does now.

7:03 It conferred agency.

7:04 It was a whole bunch of half open doors that you

7:07 could peek through into a world of, you can make a guitar.

7:13 And some people thought, well, I got if I can make a guitar,

7:19 there’s this book on how to do it, I’ll just do it.

7:21 And then that turned out to be a whole life for them.

7:25 You mentioned that among the communards, some of them did too many drugs.

7:29 I’ve always wondered if this story about you is true,

7:31 that the reason we have NASA’s picture of the whole Earth

7:36 came from you doing psychedelics on a roof one day Yeah,

7:41 I was in San Francisco and kind of bored.

7:45 And one of the things you did with boredom

7:47 at that time was drop some acid and see what happens.

7:52 It was kind of a minor dose was about 100 micrograms.

7:56 And I went up on the roof of a $20

8:00 a month place that I lived in North Beach, and...

8:04 $20 a month in North Beach.

8:08 Yeah, wow Yeah O.K.

8:11 That’s already hard to believe.

8:15 But it was true.

8:16 And somehow it’s easier to believe that you got NASA to take

8:19 a picture of the Earth and that anything in North Beach ever costs $20.

8:23 Well, it turns out I didn’t really get NASA to do that.

8:26 We’d been in space for 10 years at that point.

8:30 We and the Soviet Union and the cameras had

8:34 always been looking outward or at pieces of Earth,

8:38 but they could have been looking back to see the Earth as a whole.

8:43 And I was pretty sure that would change everything.

8:46 I wound up starting a campaign.

8:50 There was a button that said,

8:51 why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?

8:54 And I know I got looked at by a lot of people in NASA and in Congress and so on.

9:02 I got to know some of the astronauts like Rusty Schweickart..

9:06 So when they took photographs,

9:08 it came just a year or two later after my campaign.

9:12 Got it.

9:13 Cause and effect.

9:13 It was a little coincidental.

9:15 You had the idea on the roof, but it didn’t.

9:17 The roof is not what led to the picture.

9:19 I think that’s correct.

9:21 But it led to understanding the picture.

9:24 I think for a lot of people

9:26 that metaphor of the camera pointing outward as opposed

9:28 to inward at what we don’t yet have as opposed to what we do have.

9:33 That actually feels like a nice metaphor for maintenance.

9:38 And I hear this in the Whole Earth Catalog, too.

9:41 That in a way, it feels like a lot

9:43 of your career and thinking has been building up to it,

9:46 building up to this topic,

9:47 that the Whole Earth Catalog was also a manual for maintaining your life,

9:53 for maintaining the things you had.

9:55 Let’s begin with the most basic question.

9:58 What is maintenance?

10:00 It’s good to keep things going.

10:03 I’m a biologist by training, and so you find that everything alive spends

10:08 a lot of its time basically maintaining being alive,

10:12 even to the extent of reaching outside itself.

10:17 So you’re not just eating.

10:19 If you’re a beaver, you’re busy cutting down trees to maintain your dam,

10:24 which is what protects your lodge.

10:26 Most plants spend a lot of time basically helping the soil

10:31 around them do things that work well for the plant,

10:35 and the soil itself is alive, and we’re always maintaining our bodies.

10:43 We maintain our vehicles and our houses and homes

10:46 and cities that we live in, and we’re catching on.

10:51 That civilization is something to maintain as a whole,

10:55 and even the planet we’ve now stepped up to terraforming.

10:59 So we’ve been terraforming badly, and we need to terraform well.

11:04 So the levels of maintenance are enormous, and the constancy of it is a given.

11:13 How did it come to occupy so much of your mind?

11:17 Well, because I’m a bad maintainer.

11:22 I brushed my teeth when I felt like it, and consequently, I lost quite a few.

11:29 And looking into the things that you’re not good at, especially intellectually,

11:35 I think is one way to stay young.

11:40 Because you got beginner’s mind.

11:44 But I did grow up with a father who was a do

11:50 it yourself kind of guy with a big bench in the basement.

11:54 And I had a bench in the basement and we were

11:58 as many software programmers began by building heathkit radios and stuff.

12:06 Well, that was me, too.

12:07 I was building heathkit radios.

12:09 You grew up in a time when the technologies we used were more intelligible.

12:13 And something you track in the book is

12:15 that some of them were designed to be that way.

12:17 One of the really interesting stories you tell that I was hoping you

12:20 could tell here is about the Ford Model T versus the Rolls Royce.

12:25 I had known about the Ford Model T,

12:26 I didn’t realize it was the Rolls-Royce was a contemporary.

12:29 So tell me about the difference between those two cars.

12:32 Well, they both began basically in 1908,

12:38 and Ford was building a car that could manage American driving when it was all

12:48 dirt roads and so had to be pretty rough and ready and rugged and robust,

12:56 and he’d figured out interchangeable parts

12:58 by then so he could manufacture cheaply.

13:01 Rolls-Royce went the other way, which was to have a car so perfectly tuned,

13:10 with every part filed to exactly fit with all the other parts around it.

13:15 And it didn’t.

13:17 It was really, really reliable.

13:19 It would always run.

13:21 The Rolls-Royce.

13:22 You couldn’t do maintenance yourself because everything

13:25 was so perfectly tuned and assembled that you

13:30 would have to take it back to Rolls-Royce to do any upkeep on it.

13:37 But if you got a Model T,

13:39 it was basically just a platform for adding things that you wanted.

13:47 And doing the repair yourself.

13:51 It just to get it to run you had to do maintenance.

13:55 There’s a dimension of the way you describe what that made possible in the Ford,

14:00 which is that it became as you say, a platform.

14:02 It became a space of creativity.

14:04 People sold all these kits to change what the Model T was.

14:08 And it struck me reading this.

14:10 And, you’re very intertwined in the history of Silicon Valley,

14:13 that it had a lot of the feeling of early technology,

14:17 which people could hack and alter and add to in all kinds of ways,

14:22 versus later technology where you got to jailbreak

14:24 an iPhone to do anything with it,

14:26 where we now have AI systems, maybe we’ll talk about this.

14:30 We don’t even really understand what’s happening inside of them.

14:34 And so there is this tension between

14:38 the builder hacker ethos that was so present, in other technological eras,

14:45 but also, earlier periods of the web and personal computers

14:49 versus where a lot of these systems and companies have gone.

14:53 You describe maintenance as an ethos, but it’s also,

14:56 I think, a question of what we are capable of doing,

15:01 both somewhat legally and technically with our technologies,

15:05 which makes it also a decision made by the companies.

15:08 How do you think about that?

15:11 Well, I’m just working up on writing about the right to repair issues going on.

15:18 Now.

15:18 There’s a question of ownership.

15:21 Ownership, I think is.

15:25 When it’s not just a question of having

15:28 paid for and having legal possession of something.

15:32 It’s actually possessing the knowledge of what

15:36 it’s really about how it functions, how to look for problems,

15:43 how to diagnose problems when they come up, how to fix it.

15:47 And doing maintenance on something is basically how you really take

15:53 ownership of it and enter it into your not just physical life,

15:59 but your mental, and social life.

16:02 So this will be another thing that the coming of AI, I think,

16:09 is going to raise another level of discourse on, because one

16:14 of the things that software engineers are always trying to do,

16:18 they hate doing endless simple maintenance,

16:22 taking care of dependencies and stuff like that.

16:25 And they call it toil.

16:27 Good word.

16:29 And they try to automate it.

16:32 Get ahead of so that the system can be made capable of seeing

16:38 when a problem is coming and immediately get itself to go around it.

16:44 And I’m sure that AI is going to bring many more levels of that.

16:49 That’s the upside.

16:51 The downside is you spend more and more of your life

16:55 arguing with robots because we have a theory of mind.

17:00 So you and I are talking.

17:02 We each have a pretty good idea what the other’s doing.

17:05 And mentally.

17:06 With the AI, that’s not the case.

17:09 And they’re all different.

17:12 So in a way we’re dealing with all these new species who talk our language.

17:18 But are they come from a different frame in some deep respects.

17:24 And I think that AIs are going to teach us more about being human,

17:29 because we’re going to see, well, not quite human.

17:34 Is like and getting more and more acquainted with the difference.

17:40 Let me pick up on the AI question,

17:43 something that you write about in "Maintenance

17:46 of Everything" And in this section,

17:48 you’re quoting the philosopher Matthew Crawford,

17:50 is that there is a necessity to the intelligibility is

17:54 the word that gets used of the things we use.

17:58 And I read that I was thinking about a moment

18:00 I had with one of your creations that relates to AI,

18:03 which is you mentioned the Whole Earth Catalog, which is this remarkable.

18:06 I mean, you can describe it maybe,

18:07 but this remarkable deep catalog of all these ways,

18:11 tools and ways to fix things and ways to know about things

18:14 and to create a whole life in a do it yourself way.

18:19 And the first place I ever saw one physically was

18:22 in the offices of OpenAI when I visited them before ChatGPT,

18:27 this was probably 2021 or 2022.

18:29 And I remember thinking that there

18:31 was something almost ironic about this catalog

18:33 that was so dedicated to making the world intelligible at this place,

18:37 where they were explaining to me that they didn’t

18:41 understand the fundamental center of how their systems worked,

18:43 that they were creating something that one

18:45 of its most fundamental characteristics was unintelligibility.

18:50 And as somebody who’s just been around Silicon Valley a long time,

18:54 I wonder what you make of that.

18:56 As somebody who cares about whether or not

18:57 we understand things well enough to work on them.

19:01 We are now.

19:03 All the energy is creating things we don’t understand,

19:06 so we can offload more of our work onto these systems.

19:10 We don’t understand in a way that I think is also going

19:13 to change who we are and what we are as human beings.

19:17 Well this is.

19:21 So AI is moving very fast and is solving a whole lot of problems.

19:28 And of course it is creating a whole lot of new problems.

19:33 They’re kind of alien intelligences in a way.

19:37 And one of the good things that happened with large

19:41 language models is they trained basically on human communication.

19:47 And so they are, in that sense, intelligible as human intelligence,

19:54 how it actually functions in there in terms of the.

20:00 Extreme niceties of what’s going on down

20:03 at the bits and bytes level is not so intelligible.

20:08 But so far, we’re kind of making them in a real

20:13 imitation of human communication and to some extent, human thought.

20:20 It’s going to move beyond human thought pretty quickly,

20:25 and it certainly reaching out in terms of data space

20:30 much wider than any human can in a much shorter time.

20:35 And that fact alone.

20:39 Puts us feeling like redwood trees, trying to communicate with the hummingbird.

20:45 They’re linked.

20:47 They live together in the hummingbird.

20:49 Maybe lives in the redwood tree.

20:51 But the redwood tree isn’t capable of paying much attention

20:54 to who’s in its branches or how fast they’re moving.

21:00 And so these we’re introducing new kind

21:03 of pace layers into the world we live in.

21:09 And it’s cellular.

21:12 The brain moves really quickly.

21:14 And these computers because they don’t have

21:18 to use chemicals the way our brain does.

21:21 They go a lot faster.

21:23 We can engineer at these levels more than we can understand.

21:28 I think that part of being a human society now is

21:35 having a range of specialists that understand these things at depth,

21:40 that can speak up and say, well, here’s what we’re pretty sure is going on.

21:46 I guess my question on this, and I’m going to be

21:49 thinking about that redwoods and hummingbirds analogy for a little bit is

21:55 what role maintenance and the associated virtues and knowledge have

22:01 in a world where technologically it’s

22:04 requiring now so much sophistication and specialization.

22:07 Understand things.

22:08 And some of them, we don’t even the people making

22:11 it can understand a lot of the examples in the book,

22:14 which I often found very, very moving.

22:17 Are sailboats and Model Ts, and even if somebody was precision

22:21 calibrating every single bolt in the Rolls-Royce,

22:26 somebody knew what those bolts did.

22:29 And in that way, this book struck me as almost countercultural,

22:34 that it was arguing for virtues that it feels our society is pulling further

22:42 away from I try to take a position of never shaking my finger and saying,

22:51 no, you should brush your teeth, you should change your oil.

22:55 You should be a nanny to your behavior,

23:02 your child wake up and be a grown up and take care of things.

23:06 Well, a lot of it is quite reasonable because

23:10 of the precision that goes into manufacturing starting now,

23:15 most things work pretty damn well most of the time.

23:21 And so when they don’t, it comes as a surprise.

23:28 It’s been a while since we bought it,

23:30 or since we first started renting it or whatever, and suddenly it was a problem.

23:36 And oh dear, oh dear.

23:39 People who do maintenance for a living obviously do not have that frame of mind.

23:45 It’s oh yeah, it’s broken.

23:47 Let’s see.

23:48 This familiar thing.

23:49 Great I can fix that right now.

23:51 Oh, I don’t have the part for that.

23:53 Well, I’ll go online and get the part.

23:56 I mean, online access to information and parts is just astounding now.

24:04 So all kinds of things that and that’s I think,

24:08 a great solution for people that have a problem with something they’ve

24:12 owned for three or four years and it came with a manual,

24:16 but they misplaced that for sure.

24:18 Well, it turns out they go online and here comes some recommendations

24:22 for some videos for exactly your problem and exactly your make and model,

24:29 and year of the device that you’re having trouble with.

24:34 Actually, there’s four different versions of the issue

24:37 you have and four different solutions to doing it,

24:41 one notably better than the other.

24:44 You follow that and then the thing is fixed and you’re all powerful.

24:48 You’ve totally taken agency,

24:49 and that particular device is now more legible to you.

24:53 YouTube has replaced manuals.

24:56 It’s replaced the Whole Earth Catalog in terms of conferring

25:00 agency on anybody to learn anything or fix anything.

25:06 So it’s mostly a happy story.

25:10 But you’ve got to go online to get the aggregate wisdom of humanity on the case.

25:17 You’ve lived on a tugboat for 40 years

25:21 Yeah that must require a fair amount of maintenance.

25:24 Well, especially if the tugboat is made of wood and built in 1912,

25:28 which I guess was Yeah boats are always suicidal.

25:33 They’re always trying to sink themselves.

25:35 And especially wooden boats.

25:39 Wooden boats don’t usually last more than a century.

25:44 Ours has, because of a whole lot of maintenance.

25:48 But boats are so lovable.

25:52 We call them she.

25:55 They are all that stands between us and the wide dark sea trying to kill us.

26:03 They’re like a motorcycle in that respect they’re kind of hazardous.

26:08 Oh and so relying on them is an intimate process.

26:13 So maintaining a boat has an endearing quality to it that is attractive.

26:24 Well, it’s not attractive.

26:25 It’s the amount of it and the cost of it

26:29 and the specialized of the work that has to be done.

26:33 It’s like living inside a beautiful violin where all of the curves and.

26:41 And all the nuances are very carefully crafted,

26:44 and replacing parts crafted in that detail takes some doing,

26:52 but it’s worth doing.

26:53 One thing I enjoyed about the book is

26:56 the way that it recasts work that can be described,

27:00 or thought of as tedious as almost a spiritual practice.

27:05 You write treat the boring task as a ritual,

27:08 alive with aesthetic nuance and a welcome respite from the clamor of thinking.

27:14 Find your own contemplative practice.

27:17 Tell me about that idea of maintenance as a contemplative practice.

27:22 Well, I can’t do meditation.

27:26 I get bored.

27:28 But people who do meditation embrace the boredom

27:32 and utilize it as a way to at least calm their mind and maybe center their mind

27:40 on something that they don’t usually go to mentally.

27:45 And often things for maintenance are done

27:50 by Japanese with a great deal of ceremony.

27:52 Just changing the lights of a street lamp.

27:57 There’s guys in uniform.

28:00 They have a special routine.

28:02 They do with a ladder where they go up the pole and do

28:06 a little formal thing at the beginning

28:10 and another little formal thing at the end.

28:12 And it turns the.

28:16 A simple task into a somewhat more complex dance.

28:22 Moving together in time is one of the profound things

28:25 that humans have been doing for a very long time.

28:28 So ritual is one way to make really, really repetitive maintenance less onerous.

28:37 The other dimension that struck me

28:39 as interesting when I read contemplative practice,

28:42 is that there’s a lot of ideas about thinking in the book.

28:48 And you quote quite a lot from "Zen

28:52 and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," which is a classic book.

28:57 I was also very struck in the first chapter.

29:00 You’re writing about this sailboat race,

29:02 and you talk about a sailor thinking about how to fix a problem

29:05 on his boat and forcing himself to think

29:08 for two days before acting because quote,

29:11 I did not want to crystallize my thinking prematurely.

29:15 And I really liked that line.

29:16 Did not want to crystallize my thinking prematurely.

29:21 Tell me about maintenance and speed maintenance and rhythm.

29:26 It comes up often in the motorcycle part of the book as well,

29:30 about not moving too quickly.

29:33 Well, one of the problems with repair is it’s

29:39 a trauma for the system that you’re trying to fix.

29:43 And it’s easy to get things wrong.

29:46 So a couple of years ago, they were in the process of doing maintenance

29:52 on the Notre Dame steeple, the tallest part.

29:55 It was kind of rotted out.

29:57 And they were doing work there because they were up there doing stuff

30:00 that introduce flame in an area that then

30:04 took off and burned down the cathedral.

30:07 At Chernobyl they were doing just a routine maintenance

30:10 and were careless and it got out of hand.

30:15 So this is reason to be cautious

30:19 and take thought often for diagnosing the problem.

30:25 And on that particular case,

30:28 Bernard Moitessier had a steel boat that was pretty much waterproof,

30:35 but he had a collision with a ship

30:40 that bent the bowsprit about 20 to 25 degrees off.

30:45 It meant that a storm might take down

30:47 his whole rig because there was no longer symmetrical.

30:51 And so he knew what the problem was.

30:54 But how could he fix it by himself at sea.

30:58 And that was where he took the advice he had heard from other maintainers.

31:05 Don’t just jump at a solution because you might make the problem worse.

31:11 Think through the solution.

31:13 Disrupt the system minimally in the process

31:16 of figuring out what needs to be fixed,

31:19 fixing only that, and then backing carefully out

31:22 so the rest of the system doesn’t get disrupted.

31:26 It’s a highly intellectual process.

31:30 Doing diagnosis and repair.

31:33 And so there are dimensions of it that are highly intellectual.

31:35 And then as you said at the beginning,

31:37 it’s what living things are doing all the time.

31:39 One thought I had while reading the book was that maintenance is what

31:43 we call care when it is applied to things as opposed to people.

31:48 And a lot of the book felt, I mean,

31:51 I thinking, where do I do the maintenance in my life.

31:54 I mean, aside from on my own body brushing my teeth and sharing.

31:57 But I have kids.

31:58 And the act of parenting is its ongoing maintenance among many other things Yeah

32:05 And there’s been a lot of work and thinking on care work in recent years.

32:11 And I was curious about how those connections existed in your mind as you wrote

32:17 the book how do you think about

32:19 the relationship between maintenance and just interpersonal care?

32:23 Well, I wound up basically most of the book is Chapter Two,

32:29 "Vehicles" And the vehicle,

32:31 the land vehicle that humans have used for 6,000 years is a horse.

32:38 And the horse takes a lot of maintenance.

32:43 I think I’ll read something here from the book, if I may.

32:47 There’s this philosopher named Albert Borgmann who wrote.

32:50 You cannot remain unmoved by the endless

32:54 and confirmation of a well-bred and well-trained horse.

32:58 More than 1,000 pounds of big boned, well-muscled animal,

33:02 slick of coat and sweet of smell, obedient,

33:07 and mannerly, and yet forever a menace with its

33:10 innocent power and ineradicable inclination to seek refuge in flight,

33:16 and always a burden with its need to be fed

33:20 and warmed and shod with its liability to cuts and infections,

33:24 still laming and heaves.

33:27 But when it greets you with a nicker,

33:31 nuzzles to your chest and regards you with a large and liquid eye,

33:37 the question of where you want to be and what you want to do has been answered.

33:44 And I end with I wonder if that might come again some day.

33:49 A vehicle that can care back.

33:52 Tell me what you make of that.

33:54 Your children care back.

33:58 That makes maintaining them completely different than maintaining your vehicles.

34:07 I think this is one of the things we may ask our eyes

34:11 to do for us is give us things that care back in some sense.

34:19 Now the question is, are they faking it or do they mean it.

34:22 And maybe part of the design will be that they do mean it.

34:28 There is somebody there caring.

34:31 You’ve been around Silicon Valley long time.

34:35 We’ve mentioned the Whole Earth Catalog.

34:39 You were involved in early versions of the World Wide Web, personal computer,

34:44 personal computer, and there was a lot of idealism in all of that.

34:48 When you look around, which of your hopes feel like they were born out.

34:52 Which of the hopes feel like they ended up

34:55 corrupted or something that look on with more skepticism now.

35:01 Well, it’s a classic case of David Deutsch’s

35:05 line about solve certain problems and other problems emerge.

35:11 But the problems that we thought were

35:13 being solved in terms of especially communication,

35:17 that understanding that computers were communication devices.

35:22 And isn’t it amazing that we all still use email,

35:26 which was one of the first things basically invented for the microcomputers,

35:32 as they were called then.

35:36 And we still do the same way.

35:39 Now lots of other stuff has been added on.

35:45 And the social systems have connected lots

35:49 and lots of people in really profound ways,

35:53 and lots of the things available through the internet,

35:56 from Wikipedia to the Internet Archive to iFixit to YouTube.

36:06 So in that sense, it’s really surpassed the dreams that we had.

36:10 But then, of course,

36:11 it introduced problems that we didn’t completely anticipate.

36:15 The very first social media started to have flame wars

36:19 started to have these other people being rude to each other

36:24 because they were not in the same room and nobody

36:27 could punch anybody and they could gang up on each other,

36:32 and things like that started to become semi pathological online.

36:40 But it was when advertising was explored way back

36:44 when it became more and more persuasive and interesting.

36:47 And then with AdSense on Google,

36:50 it wasn’t just as Nicholas Negroponte used to say,

36:54 it wasn’t just advertising as noise,

36:57 it was advertising as news that was focused on your expressed interests.

37:04 And then that felt like, well, that was an invasion of our privacy,

37:08 that it knew what I was interested in.

37:11 In some cases, that’s not welcome, but in other cases.

37:15 Oh, yeah.

37:15 I didn’t know about that thing.

37:17 Thank you for letting me know.

37:19 Except nobody ever thanks it.

37:22 But they do act on it.

37:24 And so that’s what keeps these things going.

37:26 So yeah, these problems keep coming up and they keep getting solved

37:31 partially or other stuff comes along that is replaces that whole domain.

37:37 But it has problems.

37:39 That’s the nature of life.

37:42 Something you said a second ago that we act upon it.

37:47 I have the feeling more and more when I am online, on social media, on YouTube,

37:54 on TikTok that I am being acted upon you open up

38:01 the Whole Earth Catalog and you are the person turning the page.

38:06 You are the actor deciding whether or not to have

38:09 your eyes stop on a certain box and read into that box.

38:13 I mean, the tagline that was so beautiful of The Whole Earth Catalog

38:16 was we are as gods and we might as well get good at it.

38:21 And the internet emerges and you’re typing search terms into Google

38:25 and you’re using your bookmarks and you’re looking through your email.

38:30 And over time, things have become algorithmic.

38:32 And you can feel the systems moving around you

38:36 and trying to figure out what you’re interested in.

38:39 And then you linger on something, and then it starts serving you a lot of it.

38:42 And obviously people enjoy it on some level or they wouldn’t use the systems.

38:48 But I do wonder how they’re changing us.

38:50 I mean, so much of the message it feels to me of early computer thinking,

38:58 early web thinking was about the user and what

39:07 they could do and how empowered they would be.

39:11 And increasingly, it feels like we are being given many,

39:16 many offers to be sometimes wonderfully disempowered, but particularly the way.

39:24 The systems use our attention now,

39:27 it does feel like the volition has shifted it.

39:31 It feels like the decisions are being made

39:32 in some way you can’t quite figure out.

39:34 I think you knew Marshall McLuhan back in the day.

39:37 I did.

39:38 And a lot of his ideas about how different ways of structuring

39:43 a medium change the person using it feel very relevant here.

39:49 I’m curious if you think that’s true or if that feels overstated to you.

39:55 Well, have you had Cory Doctorow on your show Yeah,

39:59 we had an episode with Tim Wu and Cory Doctorow that just came out recently.

40:02 Excellent so he’s quite right.

40:06 There’s a lot of what he calls

40:09 “enshittification” that’s happened to various entities where basically

40:13 sponsored content comes more and more in front

40:18 of the content that you’re asking for.

40:22 And it’s on Amazon, it’s on Google and so on.

40:25 What do you do.

40:26 A keyword search.

40:27 But now with Google I use their Gemini 3,

40:33 and it’s not so much a search for a word string anymore.

40:39 It’s search for.

40:41 Tell me about this subject, please.

40:44 And it is drastically great.

40:49 For example, in part two of the book, there’s a whole section on John Deere

40:57 where they went from one of America’s oldest

41:01 companies that was absolutely revered by its customers

41:04 to the poster child for right to repair,

41:08 because his customers were so furious at it,

41:12 for forcing them to delay getting fixes to their machines,

41:18 and the whole business of a farmer being

41:21 able to fix everything turns up upside down.

41:25 And they had to go through the corporation and the dealerships,

41:28 and they just hated that.

41:30 So I asked Gemini 3,

41:31 how can I find out what the argument was within John Deere, within the company.

41:37 And he said, well, you’ll find it

41:39 with their stockholders And take a look at Reddit

41:43 where you will find people who either used to work there or still work there,

41:48 telling the secrets of what’s going on behind the scenes.

41:52 So thanks to AI, I hadn’t really thought

41:54 of those two ways to look inside the company, and it turned out that nobody was

42:01 speaking up for the customers inside the company.

42:04 This gets to me to a question.

42:07 We were circling earlier.

42:09 I mean to repair it, among other things, is a legislative idea.

42:14 It would be potentially legislation that the government

42:17 would pass saying companies have to do this.

42:20 And one thing I was thinking about in the book it is treating maintenance

42:26 often as a question of our knowledge about the things we are caring for.

42:31 But it is also a question of first whether the companies

42:34 that make those things have made those things open to care.

42:38 Open to maintenance.

42:39 Whether you can get into the system, whether you can get into the innards,

42:43 they do not want you getting inside an iPhone.

42:45 And second, because often, as you say with John Deere,

42:48 the company would make more money by just

42:50 having you replace these technologies on a structured timetable,

42:56 whether or not society, government comes in and says,

43:01 we actually are going to force you to make maintenance something people can do.

43:09 So as you’re thinking about right to repair.

43:11 And as you’ve been around technology for a long time,

43:13 do you think it is something we should pass.

43:15 Do you think that if we’re going to make maintenance a social value,

43:18 it’s something that government has to insist that the companies permit.

43:23 Yes yeah.

43:26 And there’s already some laws in place

43:27 in places like Massachusetts and Colorado.

43:32 It’s moving pretty quickly.

43:34 And some companies are getting out in front of it.

43:36 So I have a Tesla and Tesla is somewhat ahead of this one.

43:43 They fought back for a little while and then realized,

43:46 screw it, we’ve got all this information about your vehicle.

43:51 We’ll share it with you.

43:53 And there are lots of companies like Patagonia that have

43:57 whole videos teaching you how to repair their garments.

44:04 And so it goes.

44:05 Some of this can get sorted out in the marketplace,

44:11 but some companies have such a kind of grip on their field,

44:17 and John Deere is one of them,

44:19 that they don’t feel they have to worry about competition.

44:24 So if that’s the case, that’s where the government usually does need to step in.

44:31 So if somebody read this book and they wanted

44:33 to make regular maintenance more of a part of their life,

44:35 but didn’t quite know how or where or didn’t

44:37 feel like they had anything obvious to fix.

44:40 But see this as a virtuous skill, a discipline.

44:43 Where do you advise them to start.

44:45 How do you weave this into a life

44:47 in which you’re not used to thinking about your possessions,

44:50 or even yourself in this way.

44:52 I have a child that’s a big commitment to just learn about maintenance.

45:00 Oh, yeah.

45:02 Because part of this "I and Thou" stuff that Martin Buber used to talk about,

45:12 having a relationship with your stuff that feels like

45:17 the relationship you have with a child or with a pet.

45:22 Let it become shiny with use, with tools.

45:27 The rulers get the best tools you can if you use them all the time,

45:32 get the best you can because then you’re respect for the tool

45:38 plays out in the care that you give to it.

45:43 And honoring the process of taking care of things in yourself and in others.

45:52 Sometimes maintenance tasks are seen as of a case to level difference.

46:00 Who cleans the toilets.

46:04 Who takes care of the dead things.

46:10 And so many maintenance tasks are not only low status.

46:15 They’re low paid.

46:21 That doesn’t need to be the case.

46:26 And people don’t notice the really good maintainers

46:30 from the so-so maintainers because they’re not paying attention.

46:35 Well, the really good maintainers are worth paying

46:38 attention to the point that they do get recognized.

46:41 They do get paid and basically honored

46:45 as the way we honor librarians or libraries.

46:50 These are actually the pillars of civilization.

46:55 The folk singer Pete Seeger said you should

46:59 consider that the essential art of civilization is maintenance.

47:06 When we were when I was asking you what led to the writing of this book,

47:09 you said the maintenance is something that you yourself are

47:11 not very good at or have not been good at traditionally.

47:14 So since immersing yourself in it, both in terms of its technical

47:20 questions and its spiritual and personal questions,

47:23 how is your relationship to maintenance changed.

47:25 What do you maintain that maybe you didn’t before.

47:30 What have you found is ways to do it that were not true before this project.

47:35 I’m 87 years old.

47:38 Guess what.

47:39 By the time you’re in your 80s, just being old is a half time job.

47:45 By the way, in maintenance theory, this is called the bathtub curve.

47:51 With a building when it was brand new.

47:54 There’s lots of problems, but then they even out and you can plug along

47:59 and just stay ahead of the maintenance and it’ll be O.K.

48:02 But then it gets pretty old, especially if it’s a wooden building.

48:08 Problems increase.

48:09 So the bathtub is high maintenance at the beginning.

48:13 It levels out and high maintenance toward the end.

48:17 When you’re in your 80s, you’re toward the end.

48:20 Generically, you’re probably genetically.

48:23 I’m somewhat of an optimist, and that’s fatal for maintainers.

48:31 Maintainers are realists,

48:33 and the pessimists are always looking for what could go wrong.

48:38 And how can I get ahead of that or the hero,

48:43 a questionable something and where I might say, oh, I don’t think I’m serious.

48:50 I mean, it says that sounds like it’s serious.

48:55 So there’s a whole attitude issue that one becomes aware of.

48:59 And my shortcoming is I’m an optimist.

49:02 I think that’s a good place to end.

49:04 So was our final question.

49:05 What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

49:09 I recommend David Deutsch’s "The Beginning of Infinity"

49:16 It’s basically optimism at a cosmic level,

49:19 and it’s full of the realization that there

49:22 are always problems and there are solutions, and that goes on infinitely.

49:28 You’re always at the beginning of infinity when it comes to that.

49:33 I recommend a book by Simon Winchester called "The Perfectionists:

49:36 How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World." And then I

49:43 wound up revisiting when I did a section on manuals.

49:48 And so the great manuals of history, one of them, by the way, was the.

49:58 Manual that the first thing you do when you open the book, it says,

50:05 here’s how to completely dismantle your Model T all the way

50:09 down to every nut and bolt and put it back together.

50:13 But the one I was looking at was Diderot’s "Encyclopédie," which had diagrams,

50:20 basically, of all the trades and crafts of the 18th century actually worked.

50:27 But the French Revolution shot down all of the kind

50:34 of rational optimism that was in that book, the Scottish Enlightenment.

50:44 They were very impressed by and they all studied Diderot’s encyclopedia,

50:48 and they came up with their own encyclopedia called the "Encyclopedia

50:53 Britannica," which went from strength to strength for 100 years.

50:59 And basically, the Scottish Enlightenment was the source of our constitution,

51:07 which was an Enlightenment document of our Declaration of Independence.

51:13 And that’s what really needs to be

51:16 maintained if we want to maintain civilization.

51:20 And the planet.

51:20 Well, is the engagement with science, with engineering, with open discourse.

51:30 With replacement of political leaders without bloodshed,

51:36 basically dealing with problems in a way that we honor,

51:42 that they can be corrected and that there will be other problems.

51:49 And being comfortable with that and moving with that and being

51:52 as intelligent as we can be and managing all that.

51:57 So those three books are what I recommend.

51:59 Stuart Brand, thank you very much.

52:02 Thank you Ezra.