Stewart Brand, Silicon Valley’s Favorite Prophet, on Life’s Most Important Principle

Stewart Brand might be the most influential philosopher of the internet – at least in its more idealistic era. In the 1960s, Brand was the central bridge figure between the San Francisco counterculture and the emerging technology scene. He created the legendary Trips Festival with Ken Kesey in 1966, and was there at “the mother of all demos” in 1968. And he created and edited the Whole Earth Catalog, which Steve Jobs called “one of the bibles of my generation” and “Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along.” Brand has seen Silicon Valley evolve in the decades since. And along the way, he has written many brilliant books about our relationship to technology, the built environment and the natural world. His latest book is “Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One.” In this conversation, we discuss everything from dropping acid to the genesis of the Whole Earth Catalog, what he thinks A. I. will reveal about humanity, the 40 years he’s spent living on a tugboat and the importance of maintenance in a culture that prizes novelty and disposability. Mentioned: Ezra is moderating a forum on housing and affordability with some of the top California gubernatorial candidates. The event is on Friday, May 8, in Oakland, CA. You can buy tickets here. Use the code EKSHOW for 20 percent off your order. Maintenance: Of Everything, Part One by Stewart Brand “We Didn’t Ask for This Internet” with Cory Doctorow and Tim Wu, The Ezra Klein Show I And Thou by Martin Buber Book Recommendations: The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester The Scottish Enlightenment by Arthur Herman Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Kelsey Lannin. Our recording engineers are Aman Sahota and Johnny Simon. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Michelle Harris, Rollin Hu, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Fred Turner.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ezra Klein?

  We've got an announcement before we begin the show today. I am going to be hosting a forum on housing and affordability with some of the top California governors candidates on Friday, May 8th. We're going to discuss why housing in California, my beloved home state, is so damn expensive and what each candidate hopes to do about it. The event is being co-hosted by the New York Times Housing Action Coalition and the Turner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Foundation. Tickets are on sale now, so get them while they're available. We'll include a link and a promo code in the show notes.

• 1:04Ezra Klein?

  I think if you were to look for the philosopher, the thinker who is most influential in the culture that became the internet, who sort of laid down the way Silicon Valley thought, at least in its more idealistic era, the person who come up with it, Stuart Brand. Brand has one of these amazing lives where he seemed to be present, at least for a part of the culture, at almost everything that mattered. There in the 60s, in the moment of the hippies, in a $20 a month apartment in San Francisco with other beatniks. There at the mother of all demos that creates much of the structure for modern computing that foresees many of the places we're ultimately going to go. There creating the well, one of the earliest online communities.

• 1:49Ezra Klein?

  There with the Whole Earth Catalog, which Steve Jobs describes as an early inspiration for what we now think of as the internet.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand, not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 60s, before personal computers and desktop publishing. So it was all made with typewriters, scissors and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

• 2:33Ezra Klein?

  A list of all the places Brand was and all the things he influenced, from The Clock of the Long Now to his long-running correspondence with Brian Eno. It is very, very long. And along the way, Brand has been writing these very beautiful, unusual books. Not just The Whole Earth Catalog, but How Buildings Learn in 1994, which I love, and if you've not read, you really should. And then most recently, this book, The Maintenance of Everything, Part One, which explores something many of us would rather avoid. The constant and almost spiritually important work of fixing our cars, of doing home repairs, of caring for each other. Brand makes maintenance sound philosophically potent, even beautiful. And one thing I think is interesting about this book at this moment,

• 3:17Ezra Klein?

  to be written by somebody with the weight of Brand, is that it points towards maybe a different way of thinking about technology. It points towards maybe a different ethos on which Silicon Valley, with its, you know, great man of history, conquerors of the world, dimensions now, can maybe move towards something a little bit more humble, something a little bit more rooted in the natural relationship we all have to each other and that we all have to aging and to loss. So I wanted to have Brand on to talk to him about that and so much else that he's seen and thought over the years. As always, my email is [email protected].

• 4:11Ezra Klein?

  Stuart Brand, welcome to the show.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  Well, thank you, Mr. Glad to be here.

• 4:16Ezra Klein?

  I'll start a little bit back in your history. In the 1960s, you were part of a movement that got called the Back to the Landers, Communards. Hippies. What was that? Hippies? What was that? How would you describe the vision there for society?

• 4:31Speaker 02

  For various reasons, a whole lot of people, basically in college, in the early 60s and on through into the early 70s, thought they needed to reinvent civilization. The 50s had been so successful, it became kind of bland. And the beatnik poets who preceded us showed a kind of a revolutionary path of going wild and going deep. And so we figured out ways to go wild and go deep. Many dropped out of college, decided that since civilization

• 5:13Speaker 02

  had to be reinvented, they have to do with the gathering of their peers and go back to the countryside and farm and build their own buildings and have their own rules and start over. They all failed, but they were all highly educational. We learned that free love isn't free. We learned that if you expect the women to do all of the really hard work of carrying the water and cooking the meals and taking care of the kids, like pioneer women used to have to do while the guys were building domes and other interesting buildings. Another thing that we discovered was that the countryside is actually kind of boring,

• 5:57Speaker 02

  especially if you don't connect with your neighbors, which we did not mostly. And so we fled back to the cities. Some of us figured out how to do too many drugs. And some of the rest of us noticed that and didn't. But it was a wonderfully fearless time. We undertook wild and crazy things. We had this aesthetic of the most wonderful adventures you could with the least amount of money that you could. And you have to be creative under those circumstances.

• 6:34Speaker 02

  So that was the hippies and the Whole Earth Catalog was speaking in a way to the fact that they were college dropouts who didn't know how anything worked. They had not been raised on a farm or ranch.

• 6:48Ezra Klein?

  How would you describe what the Whole Earth Catalog looked and felt like to somebody who's never seen one?

• 6:52Speaker 02

  It was pretty big. Actually, bookstore's complained about it because it's about as big as a laptop now, basically folio sized.

• 7:02Ezra Klein?

  And thicker than a laptop now. I've seen them. They're it's big.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah. By the time we did the so-called next Whole Earth Catalog, it was several pounds of everything. But I mean, Steve Jobs and his famous commencement speech, it was like Google, decades before Google came along. The Whole Earth Catalog had all those books, you know, how to be a beekeeper, how to grow sheep, how to make candles. We were actually candle dipping. So that was what the Whole Earth Catalog was. And it turned out what it really did is what YouTube does now. It conferred agency.

• 7:44Ezra Klein?

  You mentioned that among the communards, some of them did too many drugs. I've always wondered if this story about you is true, that the reason we have NASA's picture of the whole earth came from you doing psychedelics on a roof one day?

• 8:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was in San Francisco and kind of bored. And one of the things he did with boredom at that time was drop some acid and see what happens. It was kind of minor doses, about 100 micrograms. I went up on the roof of a $20 a month place that I lived in North Beach and.

• 8:23Ezra Klein?

  $20 a month in North Beach?

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:26Ezra Klein?

  Wow.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay, that's already hard to believe, but it was true. And.

• 8:32Ezra Klein?

  Somehow it's easier to believe that you got NASA to take a picture of the earth than that anything in North Beach ever costs $20.

• 8:37Speaker 02

  Well, it turns out I didn't really get NASA to do that. You know, we'd been in space for 10 years at that point, we and the Soviet Union. And the cameras had always been looking outward or at pieces of the earth, but they could have been looking back to see the earth as a whole. And I was pretty sure that would change everything. I wanted to starting a campaign. There was a button that said, why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet? And I know I got looked at by a lot of people in Congress and NASA and so on, but I got to know some of the astronauts like Rusty

• 9:19Speaker 02

  Shriver when they took photographs. It came just a year or two later after my campaign.

• 9:25Ezra Klein?

  Got it. So it was it was a little coincidental. You you have the idea on the roof, but it didn't. The roof is not what led to the picture.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  I think that's correct. But it led to understanding the picture, I think, for a lot of people.

• 9:39Ezra Klein?

  That metaphor of the camera pointing outward as opposed to inward at what we don't yet have as opposed to what we do have, that actually feels like a nice metaphor for maintenance. And I hear this in the the Whole Earth Catalog, too, that that in a way, it feels like a lot of your career and thinking has been building up to this topic, that the Whole Earth Catalog was also a manual for maintaining your life, for maintaining the things you had. Let's begin with the the most basic question. What is maintenance?

• 10:11Speaker 02

  It's for to keep things going. I'm a biologist by training. And so you find that everything alive spends a lot of its time basically maintaining being alive, even to the extent of reaching outside itself. So you're not just eating. If you're a beaver, you're busy cutting down trees to maintain your dam, which is what protects your lodge. Most plants spend a lot of time basically helping the soil around them do things that work well for the plant. And the soil itself is alive. And we're always maintaining our bodies. We maintain our vehicles and our houses and homes and cities that we live

• 10:55Speaker 02

  in. And we're catching on that civilization is something to maintain as a whole. And even the planet, we've now stepped up to terraforming. So we've been terraforming badly, and we need to terraform well. So the levels of maintenance are enormous. And the constancy of it is a given.

• 11:19Ezra Klein?

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

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Oh, because I'm a bad maintainer.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  I brushed my teeth when I felt like it and consequently I lost quite a few. And looking into the things that you're not good at, especially intellectually, I think is one way to stay young because you've got beginner's mind. But I did grow up with a father who was a do it yourself kind of guy with a big bench in the basement and I had a bench in the basement. And as you know, many software programmers began by building teeth kit radios and stuff. Well, that was me too. I was building teeth kit radios.

• 12:04Ezra Klein?

  You grew up in a time when the technologies we use are more intelligible. And something you track in the book is that some of them were designed to be that way. One of the really interesting stories you tell, I was hoping you could tell here, is about the Ford Model T versus the Rolls Royce. I had known about the Ford Model T. I didn't realize it was, the Rolls Royce was a contemporary. So tell me about the difference between those two cars.

• 12:27Speaker 02

  Well, we both began basically in 1908 and Ford was building a car that could manage American driving, when it was all dirt roads. And so it had to be pretty rough and ready and rugged and robust. And he'd figured out interchangeable parts by then so they could manufacture cheaply. Rolls Royce went the other way, which was to have a car so perfectly tuned with every part filed to exactly fit with all the other parts around it. And it was really, really reliable. It would always run.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  But you couldn't do maintenance yourself because everything was so perfectly tuned and assembled that you would have to take it back to Rolls Royce to do any upkeep on it. But if you got a Model T, it was basically just a platform for...

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Adding things that you wanted and doing the repair yourself.

• 13:38Ezra Klein?

  There's a dimension of the way you describe what that made possible in the Ford, which is it, it became, as you say, a platform. It became a space of creativity. People sold all these kits to change what the Model T was. And it struck me reading this, and you know, you're very intertwined in the history of Silicon Valley, that it had a lot of the feeling of early technology, which people could hack and alter and add to in all kinds of ways versus later technology where you got to jailbreak an iPhone to do anything with it, where we now have AI systems. We don't even really understand what's happening inside of them.

• 14:16Ezra Klein?

  So there is this tension between the builder hacker ethos that was so present, you know, in other technological eras, but also the earlier periods of the web and personal computers versus where a lot of these systems and companies have gone. You describe maintenance as an ethos, but it's also, I think, a question of what we are capable of doing, both somewhat legally and technically with our technologies, which makes it also a decision made by the companies. How do you think about that?

• 14:50Speaker 02

  Well, I'm just working up on writing about the right to repair issues going on now. There's a question of ownership. Ownership, I think, is not just a question of having paid for and having legal possession of something. It's actually possessing the knowledge of what it's really about, how it functions, how to look for problems, how to diagnose problems when they come up, how to fix it. And doing maintenance on something is basically how you really take ownership of it into your, not just physical life, but your mental and social life.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  This will be another thing that AI, I think, is gonna raise another level of discourse on. Because one of the things software engineers are always trying to do, they hate doing endless simple maintenance, taking care of dependencies and stuff like that. They call it toil, good word, and they try to automate it so that the system can be capable of seeing what a problem is coming and immediately get itself to go around it. And I'm sure that AI is gonna bring many more levels of that. That's the upside.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  The downside is you spend more and more of your life arguing with robots. Because, you know, we have a theory of mind. So you and I are talking, and we each have a pretty good idea of what the other's doing and mentally. With the AIs, that's not the case, and they're all different. So in a way, we're dealing with all these new species who talk our language but are from a different frame and some deep perspectives. I think that AIs are gonna teach us more about being human because we're gonna see what a not-quite-human is like and getting more and more acquainted with the difference.

• 17:26Ezra Klein?

  Let me pick up on the AI question. Something that you write about in Maintenance of Everything, and in this section you're quoting the philosopher Matthew Crawford, is that there is a necessity to the intelligibility, is the word that gets used, of the things we use. And I read that I was thinking about a moment I had with one of your creations that relates to AI, which is you mentioned the Whole Earth Catalog, which is this remarkable, deep catalog of all these way, tools and ways to fix things and ways to know about things and to create a whole life in a do it yourself way. And the first place I ever saw one physically was in the offices of OpenAI.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  Really?

• 18:06Ezra Klein?

  When I visited them before ChatGPT. This is probably 2021 or 2022. And I remember thinking that there was something almost ironic about this catalog that was so dedicated to making the world intelligible. At this place where they were explaining to me that they didn't understand the fundamental center of how their systems worked, that they're creating something that one of its most fundamental characteristics was unintelligibility. And as somebody who's just been around Silicon Valley a long time, I wonder what you make of that as somebody who cares about whether or not we understand things well enough to work on them. We are now, all the energy is creating things we don't understand.

• 18:48Ezra Klein?

  So we can offload more of our work onto these systems. We don't understand in a way that I think is also going to change who we are and what we are as human beings.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  So AI is moving very fast and is solving a whole lot of problems. And of course, it is creating a whole lot of new problems. They're kind of alien intelligences in a way. And one of the good things that happened with large language models is they trained basically on human communication. And so they are, in that sense, intelligible as human intelligence.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  How it actually functions in there in terms of the extreme niceties of what's going on down at the bits and bytes level is not so intelligible. But so far, we're kind of making them in real imitation of human communication and to some extent, human thought. It's going to move beyond human thought pretty quickly. And it's certainly reaching out in terms of data space much wider than any human can in a much shorter time. And that fact alone puts us feeling like redwood trees trying to communicate with a hummingbird.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  They're linked, they live together, and the hummingbird maybe lives in the redwood tree, but the redwood tree isn't capable of paying much attention to who's in its branches or how fast they're moving. We're introducing new kind of paste layers into the world we live in. And it's cellular. The brain moves really quickly in these computers because they don't have to use chemicals the way our brain does. They go a lot faster. We can engineer at these levels more than we can understand.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  Part of being a human society now is having a range of specialists that understand these things at depth, that can speak up and say, oh, here's what we're pretty sure is going on.

• 21:12Ezra Klein?

  I guess my question on this, and I'm going to be thinking about that redwoods and hummingbirds analogy for a little bit, is what role maintenance and the associated virtues and knowledge have in a world where technologically it's requiring now so much sophistication and specialization to understand things and some of them, like AI, we don't even, even the people making it can understand. A lot of the examples in the book, which I often found very, very moving, are sailboats and Model Ts. And even if somebody was precision calibrating every single bolt in the Rolls Royce, somebody knew what those bolts did.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:56Ezra Klein?

  And in that way, this book struck me as almost countercultural.

• 22:01Ezra Klein?

  That it was arguing for virtues that it feels our society is pulling further away from.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  I try to take a position of never shaking my finger and saying, "You should brush your teeth, you should change your oil, you should be a nanny to your behavior, to your child, wake up and be a grown up and take care of things."

• 22:28Speaker 02

  Those things work pretty damn well, most of the time. When they don't, it comes as a surprise. Suddenly there's a problem and, "Oh dear, oh dear." People who do maintenance for a living, obviously, do not have that frame of mind. I mean, online access to information and parts is just astounding now. And that's, I think, the great solution for people. They'll have a problem with something they've owned for three or four years and it came with a manual, but they've misplaced that for sure. Well, it turns out they go online and here comes some recommendations for some videos

• 23:10Speaker 02

  for exactly your problem and exactly your make and model and year of the device that you're having trouble with. Actually, there's four different versions of the issue you have and four different solutions to doing it. One notably better than the other, you follow that and the thing is fixed. And you're all powerful, you've totally taken agency and that particular device is now more legible to you. YouTube has replaced manuals, has replaced the whole Earth catalog in terms of conferring agency on anybody to learn anything or fix anything. So it's mostly a happy story.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  But you've got to go online to get the aggregate wisdom of humanity on the case.

• 24:00Ezra Klein?

  You've lived on a tugboat for 40 years?

• 24:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:03Ezra Klein?

  That must require a fair amount of maintenance.

• 24:06Speaker 02

  Well, especially if the tugboat is made of wood and built in 1912. Wooden boats don't usually last more than a century. Ours has because of a whole lot of maintenance.

• 24:21Speaker 02

  Boats are so lovable. We call them she. They are all that stands between us and the wine dark sea trying to kill us. They're like a motorcycle in that respect of their kind of hazardous. And so relying on them is an intimate process. So maintaining a boat has an endeariness quality to it that is attractive. What is not attractive is the amount of it and the cost of it. And the specialiseness of the work that has to be done.

• 25:01Speaker 02

  It's like living inside a beautiful violin where all of the curves and all the nuances are very carefully crafted. And replacing parts crafted in that detail takes some doing, but it's worth doing.

• 25:21Ezra Klein?

  One thing I enjoyed about the book is the way that it recasts work that can be described or thought of as tedious as almost a spiritual practice. You write, "Treat the boring task as a ritual, alive with aesthetic nuance, and a welcome respite from the clamor of thinking. Find your own contemplative practice." Tell me about that idea of maintenance as a contemplative practice.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  Well, I can't do meditation. I get bored. But people who do meditation sort of embrace the boredom and utilize it. It's a way to calm their mind and maybe center their mind on something they don't usually go to mentally. For example, often things of maintenance are done by Japanese with a great deal of ceremony, you know, just changing the lights of a street lamp. There's guys in uniform. They have a special routine. They do the 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.

• 26:37Speaker 02

  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, where you make a kind of a big deal of it. So ritual is one way to make really, really repetitive maintenance less onerous.

• 26:58Ezra Klein?

  The other dimension that struck me as interesting when I read Contemplative Practice is that there's a lot of ideas about thinking in the book. And you quote quite a lot from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is a classic book. I was also very struck, in the first chapter, you're writing about this sailboat race. And you talk about a sailor thinking about how to fix a problem on his boat and forcing himself to think for two days before acting because, quote, "I did not want to crystallize my thinking prematurely."

• 27:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 27:34Ezra Klein?

  And I really liked that line, "did not want to crystallize my thinking prematurely." Tell me about maintenance and speed, maintenance and rhythm. It comes up often in the motorcycle part of the book as well, about not moving too quickly.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  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 when a couple of years ago, they were in the process of doing maintenance on the Notre Dame steeple, the tallest part, where it was kind of rotted out, and they were doing work there. Because they were up there doing stuff, they 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.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  So this is reason to be cautious and take thought, often for diagnosing the problem. And on that particular case, Bernard Matisse had a steel boat that was pretty much waterproof. But he'd had a collision with a ship that bent the Vauze bit.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  Twenty, twenty-five days 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. Don't just jump to the solution because you might make the problem worse. Think through the solution, disrupt the system minimally in the process of figuring out what needs to be fixed, fixing all of that, and then backing carefully out so the rest of the system doesn't get disrupted.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  It's a highly intellectual process doing diagnosis and repair.

• 29:47Ezra Klein?

  And so there are dimensions of it that are highly intellectual. And then, as you said at the beginning, it's what living things are doing all the time. One thought I had while reading the book was that maintenance is what we call care when it is applied to things as opposed to people. And a lot of the book felt, I mean, I was thinking, where do I do the most maintenance in my life? I mean, aside from on my own body, brushing my teeth and, you know, sharing, but I have kids and the act of parenting is, it's ongoing maintenance, all among, among many other things.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:19Ezra Klein?

  And, you know, there's been a lot of work and thinking on, on care work in, in recent years. And I was curious about how those connections existed in your mind as you wrote the book. Like the, how do you think about the relationship between maintenance and just interpersonal care?

• 30:35Speaker 02

  Well, I wound up, most of the book is chapter two, vehicles. And the land vehicle that humans have used for 6,000 years is a horse.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  And the horse takes a lot of maintenance. I think I'll read something here from the book if I may. There's this philosopher named Albert Barmann who wrote, "You cannot remain unmoved by the genous and conformation of a well-bred, well-trained horse, more than a thousand pounds of big-boned, well-muscled animal, slick of coat and sweet of smell, obedient and mannerly, and yet forever menace with its innocent power and irritable inclination to seek refuge and flight. And owes a burden with its need to be fed and warmed and shod

• 31:30Speaker 02

  with its liability to constant infections, to laming and heaves. But when it greets you with a nicker, nuzzles to your chest, and regards you with a large and liquid eye, the question of where you want to be and what you want to do has been answered." And I end with, "I wonder if that might come again someday, a vehicle that can care back."

• 32:00Ezra Klein?

  Tell me what you make of that.

• 32:02Speaker 02

  Your children care back. That makes maintaining them completely different than maintaining your vehicles. I think this is one of the things we may ask our AIs to do for us, give us things that care back in some sense. Now, the question is, are they faking it? Or do they mean it? And maybe part of the design will be that they do mean it. There is somebody there caring.

• 32:54Ezra Klein?

  You've been around Silicon Valley a long time. We've mentioned the Whole Earth Catalog. You were involved in sort of early versions of the World Wide Web, personal computer. And there was a lot of idealism in all of that. When you look around, which of your hopes feel like they were borne out? Which of the hopes feel like they ended up corrupted? Or something that you look on with more skepticism now?

• 33:23Speaker 02

  Well, it's a classic case of David Deutsch's line about, you know, you solve certain problems and other problems emerge. The problems that we thought were being solved, especially communication, that understanding that computers were communication devices. And isn't it amazing that we all still use email? Which was one of the first things invented for the microcomputers, as they were called then. Lots of other stuff has been added on. And the social systems have connected lots and lots of people in really profound ways.

• 34:06Speaker 02

  And lots of the things available through the internet, from Wikipedia to the Internet Archive, to iFixit, to YouTube. So in that sense, it's really surpassed the dreams that we had. But then, of course, it introduced problems that we didn't completely anticipate. The very first social media started to have flame wars. Started to have these people being rude to each other because they were not in the same room. Nobody could punch anybody. And they could gang up on each other. And things like that started to become...

• 34:46Speaker 02

  Semi pathological online. But it was sort of like when advertising was explored way back when it became more and more persuasive and interesting. And then with AdSense on Google, it wasn't just Nicholas Negroponte used to say, it wasn't just advertising as noise, it was advertising as news that, you know, was focused on your expressed interests. And then that felt like, well, that was an invasion of our privacy that it knew what I was interested in. And in some cases, that's not welcome, but in other cases, oh yeah, I didn't know about that thing. Thank you for letting me know. Except nobody ever thanks it. But they do act on it.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  And so that's what keeps these things going. So yeah, these problems keep coming up and they keep getting solved partially or other stuff comes along that is replaces that whole domain and but it has problems. That's the nature of life.

• 35:48Ezra Klein?

  Something you said a second ago, that we act upon it. I have the feeling more and more when I am online, on social media, on YouTube, on TikTok, that I am being acted upon. You know, you opened up the Whole Earth Catalog and you are the person turning the page. You are the actor deciding whether or not to have your eyes stop on a certain box and read into that box. I mean, the tagline that was so beautiful of the Whole Earth Catalog was, we are, was it, we are as gods and we might as well be good at it?

• 36:26Speaker 02

  Get good at it.

• 36:27Ezra Klein?

  And you know, the internet emerges and you know, you're typing search terms into Google and you're using your bookmarks and you're looking through your email. And over time, things have become algorithmic and you can feel the systems sort of like moving around you and trying to figure out what you're interested in. And then you linger on something and then it starts serving you a lot of it. And, and obviously people enjoy it on some level or they wouldn't use the systems. But I do wonder how they're changing us. So much of the message, it feels to me of, you know, early computer thinking, early web thinking was about the

• 37:09Ezra Klein?

  The user and what they could do and how empowered they would be. And increasingly, it feels like we are being given many, many offers to be sometimes wonderfully disempowered. But particularly the way the systems use our attention now, it does feel like the volition has shifted. It feels like the decisions are being made in some way you can't quite figure out. I think you knew Marshall McLuhan back in the day.

• 37:38Speaker 02

  I did.

• 37:39Ezra Klein?

  And, you know, a lot of his ideas about how different ways of structuring a medium change the person using it feel very relevant here. I'm curious if you think that's true or if that feels overstated to you.

• 37:55Speaker 02

  Well, have you had Cory Doctorow on your show?

• 37:58Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, we had an episode with Tim Wu and Cory Doctorow that just came out recently.

• 38:02Speaker 02

  Excellent. So he's quite right, there's a lot of what he calls in just the case, and it's happened to various entities where basically sponsored content comes more and more in front of the content that they are asking for. And it's on Amazon, it's on Google and so on. When you do a keyword search. But now with Google, I use their Gemini three. And it's not so much a search for a word string anymore. It's a search for, tell me about this subject, please. And it is great.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  For example, in part two of the book, there's a whole section on the later history of John Geere, where they went from one of America's oldest companies that was absolutely revered by its customers to the poster child for right to repair because its customers were so furious at it for forcing them to delay getting fixes to their machines. And the whole business of a farmer being able to fix everything turns upside down and they had to go through the corporation and the dealerships. And they just hated that.

• 39:28Speaker 02

  So I asked Gemini three, how can I find out what the argument was within John Deere, within the company? And said, well, you'll find it at where their stockholders and take a look at Reddit, where you will find people who either used to work there or still work there, telling the secrets of what's going on behind the scenes. So thanks for AI. I hadn't really thought of those two ways to look inside the company. And it turned out that nobody was speaking up for the customers inside the company.

• 40:07Ezra Klein?

  This gets to me to a question we were sort of circling earlier. I mean, right to repair, it, among other things, is a legislative idea. It would be potentially legislation that the government were passing. Companies have to do this. And one thing I was thinking about in the book is it is treating maintenance often as a question of our knowledge about the things we are caring for. But it is also a question of first, whether the companies that make those things have made those things open to care, right? Open to maintenance, whether you can get into the system, whether you can get into the inners. You know, they do not want you getting inside an iPhone. And second, because often, as you say, with John Deere, the company would make more money by just

• 40:51Ezra Klein?

  having you replace these technologies on a structured timetable. Whether or not society, government comes in and says, we actually are going to force you to make maintenance something people can do. So as you're thinking about right to repair, and as you've been around technology for a long time, do you think it is something we should pass? Do you think that if we're going to make maintenance a social value, it's something the government has to insist that the companies permit?

• 41:23Speaker 02

  Yes. Yeah. And there's already some laws in place and places like Massachusetts and Colorado. It's moving pretty quickly. And some companies are getting out in front of it. So I have a Tesla and Tesla is somewhat ahead of this one. They they sort of fought back for a little while and then realized, screw it, we've got all this information about your vehicle and we'll share it with you. And there are lots of companies like Patagonia that

• 41:55Speaker 02

  You know, have whole videos teaching you how to repair their garments. And so it goes. The, uh, some of this can get sorted out in the marketplace. But some companies have such a kind of grip on their field, and John Deere is one of them, that they don't feel they have to worry about competition. And if that's the case, that's where the government usually does need to step in.

• 42:27Ezra Klein?

  So if somebody read this book and they wanted to make regular maintenance more of a part of their life, but, but didn't quite know how or where, didn't feel like they have anything obvious to fix, but see this as a virtue, a skill, a discipline, where do you advise them to, to start? How do you make this a, how do you weave this into a life in which you're not used to thinking about your possessions or even yourself in this way?

• 42:51Speaker 02

  Have a child.

• 42:52Ezra Klein?

  That's a big, that's a big commitment to, to just learn about maintenance.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  This is this I-thou stuff that Martin Pober used to talk about. Having a relationship with your stuff that feels like the relationship you have with a child or with a pet, let it become shiny with use. With tools, the rulers get the best tools you can. If you use them all the time, that's the best you can. Cause then your sort of respect for the tool plays out in, in the care that you give to it. And honoring the process of taking care of things and yourself and in others.

• 43:41Speaker 02

  Sometimes maintenance tasks are seen as, uh, you know, of a caste level difference. Who cleans the toilets? Who takes care of the dead things? And so many maintenance tasks are not like low status, they're, they're low paid. And that doesn't need to be the case. And people don't notice the really good maintainers from the so-so maintainers because they're not paying attention. Well, the really good maintainers are worth paying attention to, to the point that they do get recognized, they do get paid.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  And it basically honored as sort of the way we honor librarians or libraries. These are actually the pillars of civilization. The folk singer Pete Seeger said, "You should consider that the essential art of civilization is maintenance."

• 44:43Ezra Klein?

  When I was asking you what led to the writing of this book, you said that maintenance is something that you yourself are not very good at or have not been good at traditionally. So since immersing yourself in it, both in terms of its technical questions and its spiritual and personal questions, how has your relationship to maintenance changed? What do you maintain that maybe you didn't before? What have you found as ways to do it that, you know, were not true before this project?

• 45:10Speaker 02

  I'm 87 years old. Guess what? By the time you're in your 80s, just being old is a half-time job. In maintenance theory, this is called the bathtub curve, like with a building. When it's brand new, there's lots of problems. But then they sort of even out and you can kind of plug along and just stay ahead of the maintenance, it'll be okay. But then when it gets pretty old, especially if it's a wooden building, problems increase. So the bathtub is high maintenance at the beginning, it levels out, and then high maintenance toward the end. When you're in your 80s, you're toward the end.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  Generically, or probably genetically, I'm somewhat of an optimist. That's fatal for maintainers. Maintainers are realists. They're pessimists. They're always looking for what could go wrong and how can I get ahead of that? Or they hear a questionable something and I might say, "Oh, I don't think that's serious." Or maintainers says, "That sounds like it's serious." So there's a whole attitude issue that one becomes aware of. And my shortcoming is I'm an optimist.

• 46:30Ezra Klein?

  I think that's a good place to end. So as our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 46:36Speaker 02

  I recommend David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity. It's basically optimism at a cosmic level, and it's full of the realization that there are always problems, and there are solutions. And that goes on infinitely. Your always is the beginning of infinity when it comes to that. I recommend a book that used to be called by Simon Winchester, it was called The Perfectionist, and then he changed it to Exactly. But it's how precision engineers created the modern world. And then I wound up revisiting, I did a section on

• 47:19Speaker 02

  manuals, and so the great manuals of history. But the one I was looking at was Diderot's Encyclopedia, which had diagrams, basically, of how the trades and crafts of the 18th century actually worked. But the French Revolution shot down all of the kind of rational optimism that was in that book. The Scottish Enlightenment, they were very impressed by, and they all studied Diderot's Encyclopedia. And they came up with their own encyclopedia called Encyclopedia

• 47:58Speaker 02

  Britannica, which went from strength to strength for 100 years. And basically, the Scottish Enlightenment was the source of our Constitution, which was an Enlightenment document of our Declaration of Independence. And that's what really needs to be maintained if we want to maintain civilization and the planet well, is the engagement with science, with engineering, with open discourse, with replacement of political leaders without bloodshed. Basically, dealing with problems in a way that we honor that they can be corrected.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  And that there will be other problems. And being comfortable with that and moving with that and being as intelligent as we can be in managing all that. So those three books are what I recommend. Stuart Brand, thank you very much. Thank you, Asper.

• 49:13Ezra Klein?

  This episode of Is It Conscious? Produced by Annie Galvin, fact checking by Michelle Harris. Our recording engineer is Aman Sahota. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Marie Cassillon, Marina King, Jack McCordick, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Griselda Semeluski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.