The Unseen Work: Stewart Brand on Maintenance and Civilization

What does a lone sailor circling the globe have to do with the fall of empires, the Model T, and the rise of AI? Everything--because maintenance, the quiet act of keeping things going, turns out to be the hidden force behind success and failure in nearly every domain of human endeavor. EconTalk's Russ Roberts speaks with Stewart Brand --creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, founder of the Long Now Foundation, and one of the great connective thinkers of the last half-century--to explore why some people and civilizations thrive while others collapse. From the 1968 Golden Globe Race, where three sailors' radically different attitudes toward maintenance determined their fates, to the M-16's deadly design flaws in Vietnam, to the cultural reasons Israel excels at crisis response but struggles with prevention, Brand ranges across history, warfare, technology, and philosophy. Along the way, they discuss John Deere's war against its own farmers, the Model T as democratic revolution, and what AI might mean for human vigilance and connection. A wide-ranging, endlessly surprising conversation about the unglamorous work that holds everything together.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to EconTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  Today is February 26, 2026, and my guest is Stuart Brand. He was the co-founder and editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. He founded The Well, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. His latest book, and the subject of today's conversation, is Maintenance of Everything, Part One. Stuart, welcome to Econ Talk.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  Well, thank you. A nice beer.

• 1:01Speaker 00

  Now, I have to confess, I loved your book. It's incredibly wide-ranging and fascinating. Every page has something interesting on it. But the subject matter of maintenance is something, I have to confess, I have little in my life. I live in Jerusalem. We don't own a car, which used to be a part of my American maintenance life. I brush my teeth in the morning and in the evening. And I recently started going to the gym, and I work out three times a week. But I have no tools. Other than my toothbrush, I have no tools and my computer. I have no tools that I use regularly. I have a feeling you have a different life. So I'm curious about the things in your life that you maintain regularly

• 1:46Speaker 00

  and the tools that you use regularly.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  When you get to be 87, like I am, I think you'll find that the biggest maintenance item is your health. And when I was a young hippie, we all lived in the moment. And it took us a while to figure out that you had to do things like change the oil, even if you didn't feel like it. So there's a discipline about maintenance, I think, that emerges.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Some people find a way to make it kind of a enjoyable ritual.

• 2:31Speaker 00

  Is it an enjoyable ritual for you, but not the health part, which is usually, I'm talking about the use of tools or maintaining machinery or tools that you own or your home. Is that part of your...

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Well, the concept, I've had boats, sailboats a lot and motorboats. And as has been said, messing about with boats is a pleasure in its own right. I think people who have guns enjoy cleaning it and oiling it. And people who have motorcycles, I have a friend who had a Harley Davidson when he was growing up. And every Christmas, he took it all the way apart, all the way down to the last washer and screw. And we're bold. And then he put it back together again. And it was like he was putting his life together.

• 3:30Speaker 00

  That's fun. Is there, but are there things like that in your life, over your lifetime, that were meaningful to you? Or, you know, the Zen-like aspect of that ritual of something that's well-made? You know, my computer's very well-made. I don't, the only maintenance I do to it is to occasionally clean the screen. But through most of human history, the things that you needed to do your work had to be maintained. And I'm curious if in your life, that was important?

• 4:03Speaker 01

  No, I'm a terrible maintainer. I do not maintain well. And I think it goes along with being an optimist. And I have this sort of probably...

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Plato was, you know, essential sense of things and in Plato's world, things never need maintenance. They're all so essentiary, they're just, they stand and live by themselves. And pessimists, well, I mean, the truth is that good maintainers are basically realists, which probably looks to other people like pessimism, because they look at their motorcycle and they're looking for signs of oil leaks. They're wondering if they need to adjust this,

• 5:01Speaker 01

  that, or the other thing. Of course, that was the old combustion engine motorcycles. The new ones that are electric have almost no moving parts, no fluids worth mentioning, and maintenance on them is almost nonexistent.

• 5:20Speaker 00

  I remember when I was in my 20s, early 20s, I ran a marathon. And I paid attention, very slowly, four hours and 20 minutes, for Chicago Marathon. My most vivid memory of that experience was paying attention. For four hours and 20 minutes, I was monitoring my body in a way I never would have to. I was constantly aware of breaking, I was afraid of breaking down. The realism there was too vivid. I had to pay attention to the reality. But I, like you, am an optimist. And when the timing belt of my Honda, I think it was

• 5:59Speaker 00

  my Honda, cord snapped and my car stopped in the middle instantly, I consulted the manual and found out I had failed to replace it at 50,000 or 70,000, whatever it was. I didn't make that mistake again. But in general, it takes an event like that, or a bad injury running, which I'd had before, which is why I was monitoring every step, to pay attention for me. But I think there are a lot of people who take care of their tools better than I do.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Well, you know, I think your computer, you probably do a certain amount of computer hygiene on there.

• 6:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  To keep things basically updated and try to get rid of the things that are cluttering the world there.

• 6:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  And so, you know, as we move into more and more of the digital way of life, discovering other kinds of maintenance that need to happen, I think one of the potential great things that'll come from AI being applied is software people refer to boring maintenance, which they have to do all the time with back end and sometimes the front end of software, they refer to it as toil. And they're always trying to automate basically out in front of it to see everything that's

• 7:26Speaker 01

  about to fail and have the software just notice that and put in the fix. I think that AI is going to help a lot with that. But then we'll be in this weird circumstance of we're going to spend more and more of our life arguing with robots.

• 7:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  These things have automatic procedures based on somebody else's idea of what will be obvious and not obvious when you're messing with it. And you have to figure out what they thought you should behave like now to do that. And so there's a lot of this kind of guessing into what the AI is up to because it's not quite human. It's just a talk to human, but it's not human.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, I said when I was running, I was paying attention. I think the other, the better word might be vigilance. And when you're in danger, when you're in danger or risk, you're vigilant and you have a natural incentive to be vigilant. And I think, when I think about AI and... I'm thinking now about self repairing software programs, your self updating. You talk about the Tesla updating itself constantly through the cloud and the web. But if we, it'll be interesting to see the effect of the loss of our own normal habits of vigilance as so many uncertainties are, we delegate those to other agents and they won't be human ones probably.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  Well, it's thermostat's all the way down. And governors on the steam engines and a lot of things which take care of keeping something in proper running mode and it's alert to circumstances, the temperature goes down in the room and the furnace turns on or whatever. So we've been dealing with this kind of thing a long time and it's just part of being alive is being in communication with the systems we rely on.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  And as time goes by and civilization gets ever more complex and rich and interesting and great, it has plenty of things to have to figure out how you deal with it. This is why I think YouTube is such a breakthrough for people that when you're mystified by something, you put in a couple of words and they can model the thing and the way you think it's broken and look around at YouTube and pretty soon you'll find somebody who's ready to help you, show you how to actually make that fix or do that maintenance or understand

• 10:31Speaker 01

  the basic functioning of how the thing that you're mysteriously, that you're feeling is too mysterious to either understand or fix. You understand it and you fix it. It's fantastic.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  Well, my mom passed away about three weeks ago, so she's on my mind.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Oh, my goodness.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  And I've told this story, I've told this story before, but, you know, my mom would call me about trying to figure something out, and I'd think to myself, and sometimes I'd tell her, but after a while I realized that isn't necessary. But so I'd say, Mom, just Google it, you know, just look it up. In this case, if you can't figure out if something works, you don't have the manual, you threw away the manual, didn't come with a manual, just, what are you doing? And now it's, you know, get, happened to me today, I was having a Zoom problem, and I asked a colleague, you know, what do I do with, why isn't this working? And she said, well, did you ask Claude yet? Oh, yeah, of course I, why didn't I ask Claude? But it took me a while to realize that my mom, and of course I'm becoming my mom and my dad, but my mom,

• 11:37Speaker 00

  she wasn't calling me to find out how to fix the computer problem she was dealing with, she was calling to talk to me. And she was, and that whole way that we've now delegated so much of our problems in life to algorithms, systems, machines, something's lost there, something's gained too, right? It's a really, there's something marvelous about it and something, it's a little bit sad.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that used to be the case, and, and one of the things that was interesting about the hippie generation that I was part of, is not only were we deciding to pay little attention, or just respectful attention to our parents, we were doing that to experts of every kind, and even neighbors. And this is sort of what made the Whole Earth Catalog succeed, in a way, it was, most of the stuff that was in the Whole Earth Catalog back in the sixties was books, how-to books. And hippies ate that stuff up. You know, we got

• 12:47Speaker 01

  the Idiot's Guide to Fixing Your Volkswagen, and went through the step-by-step process that was in there, and actually, we started to fix our Volkswagens. But we didn't learn it from a mechanic, we learned it from a book that a mechanic wrote.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  That's really sweet. That's lovely. Now, your book starts with something called the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race of 1968. And I confess, I did not, had not heard about it. It's an extraordinary set of things that happened in that race that you chronicle really, in a very, very powerful way. I just, I want to read the rules to my, to our listeners, and I want to ask you something about it. This is from an article written on boats.com about what the rules were. Competitors had to, it was announced on March 17th. So, the announcement goes out that you have to leave on the race between the months of June and

• 13:50Speaker 00

  October. And that was to avoid the southern wind. The goal of the race is to circumnavigate the globe. So you had to sail south of all the great capes, Good Hope, Lewin and Cape Horn. You could have no outside assistance or anyone aboard the ship during the voyage, including mail delivery. So it's a single human being on the boat, circling the globe on a sailboat. And the first to finish back in England from any port north of 40 degrees north, so you could start from a Mediterranean port if necessary, though none did, would be awarded the Golden Globe Trophy. So the first finisher leaving after March, who got back to England, would get a trophy. But there was a monetary prize for winning on

• 14:35Speaker 00

  elapsed time. The person who did it the most quickly would get about, would be awarded 5,000 British pounds, a sizable sum in those days, enough to buy a house in London. That's the end of the announcement of the rules. And we learn that out of the nine, nine people...

• 14:55Speaker 01

  You are the true economist in this interview. I love that.

• 14:58Speaker 00

  Why?

• 14:59Speaker 01

  You figured out what 5,000 pounds could do...

• 15:01Speaker 00

  That's not my line. No, no.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  In 1968.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  No, I didn't do that. That's a quote from an article about it. I'm, that, sorry.

• 15:09Speaker 00

  I would, as the economists point out, that it would be a big difference between a house in London in 1968 and a house today because there's been not just inflation, there's been particularly high increases in the price of housing relatively. But anyway, put that to the side. So nine people entered the race, one finishes, that's Robin Knox-Johnson. He takes 312 days to go around the globe. And thinking about this, he spent 312 days completely alone, and the rest failed. So the two questions that we're gonna, I want you to expound on, which you do in the book very beautifully. What did Robin Knox-Johnson

• 15:49Speaker 00

  do right? And what did the other folks do wrong, do poorly? And there's an asterisk because there is one of the nine who, though he doesn't finish, is rather interesting.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you had three people that had books written by them or about them. Donald Crowhurst and Bernard Montesier, sailor I knew a little bit when he lived on his boat in South Toledo, California. And Robin Knox-Johnson was a young guy, he was 29.

• 16:26Speaker 00

  He was the third. Good guy, written about.

• 16:29Speaker 01

  And he had a pretty short sailboat, 20 some feet, that went slower than the other boats because of that. But he had sailed it from India to England with friends, and he felt he knew it very well. And he'd been trained by the Merchant Marine in doing maintenance. And so he felt that even those who wouldn't boat and wouldn't go fast, nevertheless, it was what he had, and he would make you and men, as he said.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Donald Crowhurst entered the race very late and thought that he was so smart that he would use a new kind of sailboat called a trimaran, which is a central hull with two big sides on it that reach out and so it doesn't tip over, except that when it does tip over, it turns upside down and you can't ride it up. But it's much faster because it doesn't go deep in the water, there's not a lot of friction.

• 17:42Speaker 01

  And then Bernard Machessey had done actually some of the longest sailing of anyone, including in the Southern Ocean, which is violent. And so he had a steelboat made and it was fast and it was solid and it was simple. So Donald Crowhurst tried to take care of everything with cleverness and he actually hated doing maintenance.

• 18:21Speaker 01

  He called it sailorizing and shirked it quite a lot. Pretty quickly he discovered that his boat had been built so hastily that it was gonna fall apart if he went into the Southern Ocean. So, and nevertheless it had a big opening in one of the pontoons. And so he started cheating by going ashore and pretending to be somebody else and getting it fixed and then going back out. And the radio at that time, these guys, in 1968, that was, it was pretty primitive.

• 19:03Speaker 01

  They were basically sailing the way ancestors had for a hundred and some years at that point, which was you made your own weather forecasts based on what you were seeing with the clouds and the wind and the swell and that sort of thing. And you're in the Southern Ocean, which means ferocious storms from time to time and the wind blasting from the west all the time.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  So Krohehers loved his radios and he figured out a way to pretend to be going around the world of the signals, basically the telegram, so he was sending back. And meanwhile, he never left the Atlantic Ocean. By the time it was getting toward the end of the race, he realized that he wasn't going to get away with it. People were going to discover it, it would be a horrible scandal, he would have failed his family, there wouldn't be any money, there'd be lots of blame.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  And he committed suicide, went off the boat.

• 20:20Speaker 00

  And we discovered, we discovered his journal, eventually where he chronicled his thoughts and he had serious mental issues, it appeared, in what he was writing.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, he went crazy. And for 10 days, he was imagining that he could stipulate reality. And he came up with the whole theory of how Einstein and him were smart enough to be able to stipulate reality. And that lasted just the 10 intense days and he realized it wasn't going to work and game over. And as I said, he entered, crossed his own finish line into the ocean. And he never did leave the Atlantic Ocean. So that was a terrible maintainer, to put it mildly.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Bernard Matisse had done so much sailing, he was older than many of the other competitors in

• 21:29Speaker 01

  He designed his boat to be, um, not need much maintenance and to be easy to maintain. Um, and for example, he had steps that went up the mast. So if he needed to do something at the top of the mast, which you do when you're at sea for a long time, under dire circumstances, uh, he could just go straight up. Whereas Knox Johnston, um, had a bosun's chair where he would try to haul himself up and you could only do that at dead calm. He tried it one time, it went a little wild and he almost got killed. So the, um, the, the, the way things wound up is that Bernard Matisse loved being at

• 22:12Speaker 01

  sea alone, sailing fast. He just loved it. And by the time he was rounding the bottom of, of South America and, and heading back toward England, um, he decided not, and he was gonna win. He was probably gonna win both prizes.

• 22:34Speaker 00

  Meaning, meaning even though he left later, his boat was faster. So he was gonna win to the finish line first and his elapsed time would be, yeah.

• 22:45Speaker 01

  So, um, that's what everybody was expecting him to do. France was, uh, gonna have a fleet, uh, naval vessels coming to meet him and take him home to France. He was gonna get the Legion of Honor. Um, but Matisse really dreaded all of that and he hated it. He's all of that fuss and stuff. Uh, he was loving, he was doing so much that, uh, he just decided to keep going. And he had lived in Tahiti before, so he's, you know, what the hell, just keep going, alone, without, you know, living up on all the rules. Uh, and he went on to Tahiti. So he sailed, um, and he decided not to finish.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Um, and he wrote a beautiful book called The Long Way.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  That Knox Johnson's book was A World of My Own. The one about Robin Crowhurst was Strange Voyagers of Donald Crowhurst. And that was where they basically examined his logbooks and the sailboat was intact. So, all of the bad maintenance was clearly visible and so on. There are three great stories and they come together in a way that I'm saying basically, it wasn't just will, it was maintenance styles that differentiated these three.

• 24:19Speaker 01

  And Robin Knox Johnson's was, whatever comes, deal with it. And he was incredibly resourceful at dealing with problems.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  In my mind, in my mind, I'm thinking of, well, you know, it's hard to sail in storms and okay, and you have to bring enough food and water and okay, and but he was constantly fixing his boat, sewing his sails, straightening things that got bent by, broken by a storm, constantly innovating. And as you point out many times, most of the solutions weren't obvious at first. He had to sort of sit and think and struggle with the fact that nothing was happening and that it was broken and then figure it out. Incredible.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  Yep. Yeah, he would do a thing like, one, he needed to solder a joint, but he had to completely equip the boat, but he didn't have any solder. But he had some extra bulbs that he carefully disassembled and there were little tiny dots of solder in there. And he collected those enough and found a way to heat it and melt it and resolder that connection. And that was a classic Robin Knox Johnson. He was later knighted, of course, by the Queen, Sir Robin.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  So his was making an advantage and whatever comes to deal with it. The stance of the optimist, the kind of the pathological optimist of Donald Crowhurst, was, "Well, for the best." You know, it killed him. It led to the cheat and the cheat killed him. Bernard Matisse was prepared for the worst. And in my view, it freed him. That gave him the sense that, so even in a storm, and there were plenty of them, he

• 26:27Speaker 01

  got knocked down capsized several times, but he was relatively relaxed about it because even though single handing through a storm is extremely tiring, he didn't worry about his equipment failing because he built it very strong in the first place and then maintained it daily. What he told me when I talked to him was, and I said, "Yeah, I have a pretty fit sailboat here." And he said, "The rule is new every day." Basically, a sailboat, as I said, it was just been made. So that winds up being the beginning of the book.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  It's just this nice, kind of beautifully self-packaged fable to tell. And the point I'm making at the beginning, the first line of the text of the book is, "Probably a great many famous stories can be retold in terms of maintenance. Here's one." And I tell the global story. But in a way, the whole book is revisiting various famous situations, including the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, the Egyptian invasion of Sinai across the Suez Canal in 1973, or with Israel.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  In those cases, the army that was better at maintenance prevailed. And militaries are really the place to look for good theory and practice on maintenance. So I wound up, chapter two of the book was going to be vehicles, but I had to call it vehicles parentheses and weapons, because I wound up telling a lot of weapon stories.

• 28:23Speaker 00

  Well, the story you tell of the AK-47 in Vietnam, which was the Vietnamese Russian-supplied assault rifle, whatever you want to call it, automatic rifle, and the American assault rifle, and the American army equipped with what is an iconic name in weapons, but at the time was an abject failure, which I knew nothing about, which is fascinating, is the M16. So the M16 was essentially not functional. The American military equipped its soldiers in a lethal situation with a gun that constantly jammed and could not be repaired easily.

• 29:07Speaker 00

  The AK-47, which is, quote, "an inferior weapon," it didn't, wasn't as elegant or as smooth or fire quite as well, but you could keep firing it, and when it didn't fire, you could fix it. And it made all the difference. It's an incredible example.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  It made all the difference. Yeah, and so in firefights in the hill fights, the first really bloody combat between the VC and the American troops and Marines was, I used to be in the army and then taught rifle training, among other things.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  The AK-47s that the Vietnamese had

• 29:57Speaker 01

  were incredibly reliable and incredibly easy to clean and fix. And they had, when an assault rifle jams, you cannot get the bullet, when it jams in the chamber, you can't get it out any other way except running basically a cleaning rod down the barrel from the front and poke it out from inside. You can't claw it out. And so a number of American soldiers were found dead next to their disassembled M16, trying to get the bullet that jammed out.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  The AK-47 has a cleaning rod mounted right under the barrel. And so if it jams, you should grab that, run it down. It's the length it needs to be, just run it down and you've unjammed the rifle and it'll carry on just fine. The American troops eventually, but not at the beginning, they didn't have cleaning rods with them in the field. Then they started to put them into the butt in a little compartment that you would have to open up, take out this folded-up rod. Imagine you're in combat, you're running

• 31:25Speaker 01

  or you're flat on the ground trying to do all this stuff. Unfold the thing, screw it together, and run it down the barrel. So the AK-47 was designed from the start to be incredibly reliable. It was going to be used by Russian conscripts who many of them couldn't read. There was not going to be much in the way of training. There was not going to be a manual. It had to be pretty obvious how it worked. And so it was easy to field strip, easy to clean, easy to put back together. And that was the opposite case for the M16.

• 32:07Speaker 00

  Which I love. I mean, the other thing, or many things you learn from the book that are not directly related to maintenance, but you know, the unseen aspect of things, which maintenance you're pointing out is one of them, is very powerful. And on the surface, the M16 is a quote better rifle than the AK-47, just not in practice. And the only thing that matters is practice. They weren't used, they weren't, they didn't test the model out in, quote, in the field. They tested it on firing ranges where you don't have mud, and you don't have stress, and you don't have dust. And it's a fantastic lesson about what best really means.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, so in Vietnam, it's a humid environment. They were busting out pretty quickly. And you know, it's great out to 500 meters, but generally, you can't see 500 meters because you're in jungle. And things are all up close and personal. Some of the Marines wound up using their shamed rifles as clubs in hand-to-hand combat in the jungle. But then again, in Iraq, yeah, you got 500 meters of distance sometimes to the enemy, but the sand and dust gets into

• 33:31Speaker 01

  everything. And anything you oil, the sand gets into it, and then that turns out to be something that abates the weapon. So you basically had to keep an M16 surgically clean to really function well.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  Which is implausible as a, as a strategy. Yeah. The Egyptian invasion in 1973, what's extraordinary about that story is that for cultural reasons and the way their army was functioning, there was very little role for initiative and trust among the troops in Egypt. And as a result, when things broke, people just, they left them. They didn't know how to fix them. Knowledge was very, you point out, knowledge was very secretive because it conferred honor and privilege.

• 34:33Speaker 00

  And so Egyptians and Assyrians, by the way, lost, as you point out,

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  enormous numbers of tanks in battles where they had an incredible numerical advantage. Whereas the Israelis are constantly repairing and getting things back into the, into action. Often Egyptians were abandoning their, and the Russians similarly in, in the Ukrainian war. And that's a piece of that story, of that war, I've never heard. It was fascinating.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  Well, it's, remember the Egyptians were equipped and trained by Russians.

• 35:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  And the Russian army is that equipment and troops are disposable, dispensable.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  And, and they don't try to bear down on, on maintenance. They're often good on maintainability. AK-47 is, is a Russian weapon. And the T-55 tanks that they fielded for the Egyptians in, in that war.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  Were pretty, pretty solid. I think the most valuable used tank in, in the history of the world.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  But, you know, it was desert warfare and it was warfare and, and the weapons go down. And like you say, the, well, there was a kind of a, a problem. I, I love this because one of the things about the American army and the NATO militaries is they all have non-commissioned officers, sergeants, that have a lot of power, a lot of respect. They're usually the most experienced person in a, in any unit.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  The officers respect them and the troops respect them. And they're the, they're the people responsible really for maintenance and for teaching. So the, which in a way is how you maintain troops is by training. So the, and there was pretty good NCOs in, in the Israeli army and, and they've been training them up in the Ukrainian army.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Cause originally they had a sort of Russian system. But as they became closer and closer with NATO, they, they started developing NCO schools.

• 36:55Speaker 01

  Arab armies generally in the Egyptian and Syrian ones in particular have a kind of a caste system where officers see themselves as quite superior to the troops and they are not hands-on in any respect. They're proudly, never touch anything. And that's for what troops do. And indeed, maintenance is done by the troops. But if you don't have officers who connect with that and have NCOs in the middle, which mostly the Arab armies don't,

• 37:39Speaker 01

  then the whole thing falls apart. And that turned out to be, in both cases, in Ukraine and in Israel, pretty much the difference between victory and defeat.

• 37:57Speaker 00

  And you point out that in the British auto industry, a similar problem perhaps is responsible for their low quality, a class system where people don't easily give over authority to people seen as beneath them. I want to say two things about the Israeli army. One is they're famous for allowing initiative and a flat, under bottom-up initiative system where people are encouraged to take charge of things. But I would also add that, you know, on October 7th and the weeks that followed, when reservists came back to serve, they discovered that many of the stockpiled equipment, much of the stockpiled equipment

• 38:39Speaker 00

  had not been maintained, was needed replacement badly. An enormous, to me, one of the incredible stories of the war that hasn't been told well, but it, an enormous private voluntary effort. Came about where units were often provisioning themselves by making their own purchases using donations from American Jewish community and elsewhere because the ceramic vest was outdated or the helmet was outdated. Now, part of that is not rational to stockpile large sums of equipment when you don't expect to often to have to mobilize 120% of your reserves, which is what they ended up with. But the other thing I would argue, though,

• 39:23Speaker 00

  which is also, I think, very Middle Eastern, is that Israel is very bad at preventive behavior, which is a form of maintenance and really-

• 39:32Speaker 01

  Is that right?

• 39:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, very bad, very bad. They don't-

• 39:35Speaker 01

  Do you have an explanation for that as an economist?

• 39:39Speaker 00

  I'll try in a second, but the flip side of that is they're extraordinary at adaptive behavior. So, things go wrong because they weren't prepared. We weren't prepared here. But the ability of the average Israeli soldier, and it goes way beyond the military, to cope in the aftermath of failing to prepare for something is quite extraordinary. And it's a little like Robin Knox Johnson. You know, it's true that we didn't prepare for everything, and a lot of things are going to break, but we're really good at fixing them. And that's true in the software industry here and in the military. So, I don't have a theory about that, but I think it probably has something to do with the Middle Eastern culture generally.

• 40:23Speaker 00

  So, it's that optimism, foolish optimism, combined with a belief that you will be able to cope with it eventually. And but you don't have the caste system to mess up the response, maybe. I want to ask you a personal question. You can duck it if you want, but I don't think there are a lot of hippies from the 60s who were rifle instructors. And I'm curious why in your with that past, what that was like. Did that make challenging conversation with your friends? What was that about?

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Well, I grew up in the Midwest, in Rockford, Illinois. And serving in the military was kind of a routine thing. This was before the Vietnam War. And so places like Stanford, where I eventually went, had ROTC programs, which are officer training. And my older sister had married a West Point officer, a tillerman. And my older brother Mike had at Stanford, I guess, gone to ROTC and then went off to serve for two years, active duty.

• 41:45Speaker 01

  And so, and I liked the idea of the military. I liked, I loved training, and both doing it and especially receiving it. So I did parachute training and at least part of Ranger training. Too cold in the winter, didn't make it through that. So, and training, being trained as an officer, you basically, it's a skill. And so, you develop a commanding voice, and you expect to be in charge or something.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  And so, when I started things like the Whole Earth Catalog, I wasn't deferential or uncertain about just, you know, taking charge and doing it, and then being responsible for other people's behavior and, you know, doing the things I've been taught to, and encourage good work and correct bad work. So...

• 43:01Speaker 01

  I mean, one of the things you learn in the military is, uh, at least the American military is, uh, commanding people to do a thing, um, doesn't mean it's gonna happen. You have to, uh, monitor it. And then after, you know, any kind of action, you do an after-action review, um, right after, when everybody's still, um, sweaty and wiped out and so on, but everything's fresh in their mind. What went well? What went badly? What are the lessons here? Uh, what do we do different next time? Uh, that's how you do stuff.

• 43:40Speaker 01

  So, um, among hippies, I and other people I knew, Ken Kesey's Mary Pranksters had a number of, uh, ex-military people in it. Uh, his, uh, Ken Kesey's best friend, Ken Babs, uh, had been a helicopter pilot and officer in Vietnam. Um, and, uh, he was, uh, easy commander. Right, right, right, right, let's get into this. Um, you know, it's, it's one of the things you got to learn to do and then take for granted.

• 44:15Speaker 00

  Now, some, I'm sure a few, just a couple of our listeners have never seen the Whole Earth catalog. Uh, one, one of the aspects of it was, the subtitle was Access to Tools, and it was a catalog, but it also had a philosophy underlying it. Um, it had a picture of the whole earth, which of course wasn't available until, um, the late 60s, uh, from NASA. And what, what were you trying to, what were you trying to achieve with that? And what was it? Tell people what it was.

• 44:49Speaker 01

  Well, it was a little, um...

• 44:57Speaker 01

  I had on LSD one day in San Francisco in the spring of 1966. Gone up on the roof of the apartment I would live in in North Beach and with a kind of a low dose, a hundred micrograms of LSD and was just watching the afternoon happen, looking at downtown and I persuaded myself that I could see that the buildings were on a spherical surface and that they actually fanned out a little bit. And then I imagined myself going further and further out where I could see the curve and then the curve that closed already on itself of the Earth. And I thought, you know, God, we've been in space for 10 years at this point, which

• 45:42Speaker 01

  we had. Spudnik goes back in 56. Why hasn't everybody photographed of the Earth as a whole from a distance? And I figure, okay, I'm gonna make this happen. I'm gonna make a button. And the button is gonna say, and mumble, mumble, mumble, and I wound up with said slightly paranoid question, why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet? And I sent them off to the Politburo in Soviet Union and I sent them to the people in American Congress and their secretaries and I sent them to NASA.

• 46:24Speaker 01

  I got to know some of the astronauts later and I, of course, wondered if any of that had gotten to them. Rusty Schweitzer was the one I know best. He said, nah, you know, we were surprised at when that photograph was taken of what came to be called Earthrise. That is where the Earth comes around the limb of the moon and that photograph of a dead planet in the foreground, the moon, and the truly living, beautiful jewel-like blue and white Earth from a distance was just inspiring.

• 47:05Speaker 01

  And at the time, environmentalists, which I was one of, I was a biologist by training and an ecologist specifically, they had been completely against the space program. But my mother had...

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Loved it, and so I grew up loving it. And, um, the, you know, Earth Day followed immediately after that photograph of the Earth from space. And, um, basically, the whole environmental movement took off with that photograph. So, environmentalists thought the wrong thing.

• 47:44Speaker 00

  Yeah. I want to, and, but the catalog itself was a set, you said, much of it were, of it consisted of books about how to do things, so you wouldn't need other authorities and so on. But it, it had, it was a, it was a serious catalog for more do-it-yourself motivated people. It was a catalog of, literally of tools, right?

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, tools and skills. Um, and, I mean, I was a kid growing up, thanks to my father, who was a jinker. He was a civil engineer out of MIT. Um, you know, he had a bench in the basement, and I had a bench in the basement, and I was building Heathkit radios along with everybody else who wound up doing software. Um, and that, that's probably part of why I was comfortable around, uh, the beginnings of the personal computers later on.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I, you know, just to be, again, for people who don't know, the catalog had a, a much larger influence than being merely a place you could find stuff you didn't know where it was. It had a philosophy underlying it. So just say something about that.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Um, well, I started at the beginning, uh, on the opening page, and it was in a big issue. Uh, we are as gods, and might as well get good at it. And by which I meant lowercase gods, uh, just very powerful. Uh, we have these amazing tools and capabilities, and, uh, they're what would have been seen in earlier times as godlike powers. Um, and so, step up to it. Um.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Part of the hippie ethic was to back away from it and to be anti-technology. And, uh, once you take the idea of tools seriously, which I picked up from Mr. Fuller, um, then better tools are of great interest. And better tools are often increasingly high-tech. So, uh, whenever, you know, like the first calculators and then a programmable calculator, uh, we were pushing those things in the Whole Earth Catalog.

• 50:14Speaker 01

  Um, it, it, uh, I guess that became part of the bridge for the part of the, part of the counterculture was new left, which I was not. Um, I spent some time working with them and realized it was self-canceling. So, um, I was more in the, uh, Ken Kesey, Mary Frankstors, uh, version of, of, uh, counterculture. And, and what I knew was that the people who were starting communes, and I was involved

• 50:52Speaker 01

  in several of them, uh, were basically college, uh, graduates or, or college dropouts, uh, who had really no idea how anything worked. Um, and so they were imagining they were gonna go back to basics and garden, but they didn't know how to garden. Uh, they didn't know how to have bees or how to have goats or, uh, why you might want to do that, uh, or anything. It was just earnest and ignorant. So, uh, golden opportunity for, uh, um, to come up with a place where I like YouTube now and Whole Earth Catalog then, uh, here's the, here's all the skills you need to do whatever you want.

• 51:37Speaker 00

  It's very beautiful. I want to talk for a minute about the contrast that you highlight in the book, and you use the Rolls Royce and the Model T. And I've always thought of the Model T as being important because of an assembly line, and that that assembly line allowed a relatively inexpensive vehicle to be available to the masses, and that that was really an important, mostly wonderful thing. But what I didn't appreciate was the simplicity of the Model T and its ability, like the Volkswagen later, to attract

• 52:19Speaker 00

  tinkerers and people who wanted to replace things. And I want to just give a couple of facts here that you highlight. The two approaches to precision deployed by Henry Royce and Henry Ford led to two versions of success. Rolls Royce produced the best cars in the world, nearly 8,000 of them in 20 years. In the same 20 years, Ford made the most popular cars, over 15 million, close quote. That, and I love this statistic, the Rolls Royce factory produced two cars a day, which is an enormous achievement. Let's not undervalue it. But the Model T factory produced a car every three minutes.

• 53:01Speaker 00

  And that is just, you know, I just find that, it gives me goosebumps, actually. It's extraordinary how unleashing the power of, you know, the assembly line and the simplicity of the design. But the other part of it, and this is the part that's more directly related to your book, and it reminded me of Southwest Airlines. Southwest Airlines only has one kind of plane. They have the 737. There are some different models of it, but they're trying to even move to a single model now, the 737, I understand. And the value of that is one of those hidden things. The hidden thing is that you can always, all the people who work on them know what every plane looks like, no matter where they are. They know how to clean it. They know how to repair it. They know how to maintain it.

• 53:43Speaker 00

  And then the parts are all the same. So it's much easier to provision the parts. So the Model T, I never realized, had that aspect. Every junkyard, which was a part of my youth, it's not a part of anyone's youth today. Was a warehouse of parts. Because your Model T was just like that one from 15 years ago that broke for one reason, but the other parts are all good and you can use them.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Yep. And the Model T was a sort of a platform. Rolls-Royce, you would not tailor it because it was so perfectly assembled and exquisite, you know, doing the things that it did very well. Running very powerfully but very silently. The Silver Ghost was the name of that earliest one.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  And the Model T was noisy.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  And it was basically an invitation to, just to get it to function properly, you had to buy some extra things they had in there. And you had to learn how to grease it and how to get it to start. And everybody, everybody knew how to fix. They had to know how to fix their Model Ts. And so it was this great common knowledge. And even if you didn't understand what was going on with the timer or something, somebody else would. And so everybody did it. But then they turned it into tractors. They turned it into boats. They turned it into airplanes.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  The basic engine of the Model T was simple enough and fixable enough and adjustable. So you could really adapt it any old which way. And in a way, and that took off. That basically taught the world to, that you could buy something and then adjust it to your life, your ideas, your dreams.

• 56:06Speaker 01

  And it took off. I mean, it made Ford the richest man in the world by quite a long bit. And when personal computers came along later, they went through the same process that individuals were empowered to basically start programming their machine and adjust it to do things that they wanted to do. When I put, I and others put together a thing called the hackers conference in 1984, people had, you know, just individuals had come

• 56:45Speaker 01

  up with software that was used by everybody. And because you send software from place to place, and we did, and you had this democratically empowering and empowered massive event where everybody had to have a Model C and they could afford it. Everybody had to have a personal computer and they could afford it. And I dare say that AI is

• 57:26Speaker 01

  going to be moving in the same direction. I certainly use it for research, Gemini 3 Pro, and it's brilliant for me. It finds sources that I would never have found on my own. And that's, so, and that's what you're going to see more and more of, and in the forthcoming sections of maintenance of everything.

• 57:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is only, this is only part one. But I want to say something about, and this is strange, your book really prompted this thought.

• 58:05Speaker 00

  You know, the Model T is the early part of the 20th century, and it's a machine. It's very much a machine. It's replacing a very sensual, physical, breathing creature, a horse, with a machine. And yet, I'm sure, and this is just speculation, but I bet people have written about it, through this process of both having to be intimate with it in repair and intimate with it in customizing it to the uses that you wanted it to have, I think probably people had an

• 58:41Speaker 00

  emotional connection to that vehicle that maybe was foreshadowing the way we think about some of our machines and tools today. I think about my iPhone, which the App Store allows, of course, allows me to customize this experience to my heart's desire. I don't repair it, right? And certain, we could contrast, machines that were sealed, do not touch, do not open this, you void your warranty, et cetera, versus machines that people were encouraged to tinker with. And the Model T was one of the first ones, which is, I'd never thought about that.

• 59:26Speaker 00

  But I want to, I want to read a quote from the book, from the philosopher Albert Borman. I'd never seen this quote, it's quite extraordinary, and then you can react to my speculations. Quote, "You cannot remain unmoved by the gentleness and conformation of a well-bred and 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 a menace with its innocent power and ineradicable inclination to seek refuge in flight, and always a burden with its need to be fed, wormed, and shod, with its liability to cuts and infections,

• 1:00:10Speaker 00

  to laming and heaves. But when it greets you with a knicker..." Nuzzles 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. Close quote. And in most of human history, we use the tool of the horse. But the horse was a living tool, and we replaced it with unliving tools that we still have a connection to. And you say something quite extraordinary after this quote. You say, "I wonder if that might come again someday, a vehicle that cares back." And that's a reference to the possible sentience and consciousness of AI and other things.

• 1:00:52Speaker 00

  But I want to just talk about that whole idea of maintenance as building a connection between us and other things. Of course, parents fill this with their children, right? We take care of our children for anywhere from 20 years on more, and we become close to them, and more close to them than they are to us, because we are giving the care. But anyway, I'm rambling. Just react to that.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  That's an interesting asymmetry there. You're right about that. And I've always regretted that us hippies were kind of mean to our parents. It was just stupid. And I can tell you that when hippies reproduced and they had children, they were shocked that their children were, you know, just loving. And, you know, not nasty, but you had been. So lots of regrets there, but, you know, one generation makes a mistake, then the next generation knows that it was a mistake.

• 1:01:56Speaker 00

  What are your thoughts about how maintenance connects you to things and non-breathing things? Do you agree with me, or do you disagree?

• 1:02:07Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I greatly agree. And as part of, it's one of the things we do with pets, is take on this intimate relation, which has a whole lot to do with taking care of them, feeding them, and taking them to the vet and so on. And they care back.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  I have an economics question for you, if you don't mind.

• 1:02:35Speaker 00

  No, go ahead.

• 1:02:39Speaker 01

  I intend to have a lot of stuff on infrastructure in the book later on.

• 1:02:50Speaker 01

  One of the huge things of mega-structures. Here I'm going to draw on the economist at Oxford, who did a book called How Big Things Get Done. And I got in touch with him and called him and said, "Okay, infrastructure maintenance, tell me how to..." I didn't see anything in your books about... You talk about... Everything is about building well or badly, these various mega-structures of infrastructure. And what about maintenance? And he said, "I can't tell you anything."

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  And I'm, "Okay, come on. You've looked at this stuff, you've compared them all over the world, you know all those inside downs." I, kind of angrily, he said, "I can't tell you anything about maintenance." And apparently what happens is that operations and maintenance are so blended together, definitionally and in economic reporting terms, that the expenditure of time and money and effort and resources into keeping a thing going

• 1:04:16Speaker 01

  versus operating it to make it function for what it was built to do,

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  is not distinguished enough for somebody like him

• 1:04:26Speaker 00

  Fascinating.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  to do any analysis on it. Is that... Can you explain that?

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  I can't, but I have a thought, which, I mean, I haven't thought about it. I haven't thought about it, but I'll share the thought.

• 1:04:42Speaker 00

  The first thought is that...

• 1:04:45Speaker 00

  As you point out, maintenance is often unseen, or the need for it is unseen. It doesn't call out. You know, my favorite example of this is one set a time management seminar and the facilitator said, "How many people wish they read more books?" And every hand went up. And he said, "Why don't you read more books?" And he answered his own question. He said, "Books don't ring." And that the devices in our life that yell out, you know, a book just sits there. You know, I have a, anyway. So, maintenance doesn't call out until it's too late. If it's not in your habit, it's too late.

• 1:05:26Speaker 00

  And I think, you know, books like yours encourage us to understand that that's, those are two different things. Maintaining a process on the path that it needs to accomplish its goal is a different thing than making sure that that process has longevity and is sufficiently, the resources spend efficiently to keep it going over a longer period of time. And obviously, some of the people who do both of those things are the same people, so it would be natural to confuse them.

• 1:06:07Speaker 00

  So that's my first thought, is it's just not obvious that you would want to separate them. And your book and your thinking, obviously, is an encouragement to make that insight. And I hope Ben Flyberg thinks about it, too.

• 1:06:20Speaker 00

  And we'll put a link up to that episode. But the other thing, I think, which is challenging is that, you know, both of those pieces are time-consuming, require vigilance, we talked about earlier.

• 1:06:34Speaker 00

  To do the purpose that the infrastructure or the project was created for also requires a significant amount of vigilance. It's not a straightforward thing, often. It doesn't just run itself. And then to maintain it doesn't happen automatically either. And often, these projects are not, the incentives to do those things are imperfect. And that's the nature of life. Many of them are public, where the people responsible for them are not necessarily going to bear, internalize the costs and benefits of the decisions they need to, that they make to get those things done. You know, I think about... World War II, we had an episode with Brian Potter on the credible productivity

• 1:07:16Speaker 00

  of World War II airplane production. And that was a group of mostly men, I was gonna say men, it's mostly men, almost exclusively at that point in life, in history, who were saving their country. They weren't making airplanes, they were saving their country, and that's the way they saw their job. And so all the things we're talking about, the creation of the assembly lines that create instead of making cars, they're now making, say, bombers, or fighter planes, or engines, those are people who are highly motivated, because they felt the world was at stake, and they were not wrong. It was God's work. It was crucial. And if you don't think that's true...

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  It's different than infrastructure. Manufacturing has a whole huge literature on maintenance. They love acronyms. It's all boring. I have not found a good soulful book, but there's no end to textbooks, with all of these acronyms. And they always refer to the entity that they're maintaining as the asset. And they're mostly talking about the machines that are their manufacturing. And, you know, so Honda developing the lean approach to all of that is very well thought out and very influential.

• 1:08:42Speaker 01

  And that is a well-explored and theoretically rich, not soulful yet, but nevertheless, very detailed, and a lot of thought has gone into it. So manufacturing is really aware of all of this. Aerospace is tremendously aware of maintenance, behavior, and costs.

• 1:09:11Speaker 00

  It's life and death, usually.

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  With airplanes, obviously, because they're, when they fall out of the sky with people onboard, people are really upset and don't want that to happen ever. So there's a lot of really, really highly disciplined study of maintenance issues in airplanes, and then in space, typically you've got something...

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  You know, out in space, they've got to fix everything like Robin Knox Johnson on a sailboat. They've got to fix whatever goes wrong with whatever's on board. That's it. And, you know, once we get to Mars, well, just the moon, but then to Mars, there's going to be serious issues like that of how do you, you don't have the tools for the job, but you've got to get this job done. How do you do that? Likewise, software. They talk about maintenance all of the time. How do you keep the links alive? How do you manage all the dependencies that develop? How do you deal with these different layers?

• 1:10:18Speaker 01

  And AI is getting in the thick of all of that now with coding. So, and then I was going to have a, I want to have a chapter on Japan. Because Japan is more like infrastructure in the sense that they are insanely good at maintenance. It's hard to find a roof tile in all of Japan that is broken. The roofs are that well maintained that they're always going to look good. And there may be something having to do with the same culture and duty and gear and things like that. And always wanting to look good.

• 1:11:03Speaker 01

  But there's more to it than that, and it's kind of hidden. I could find no Japanese poetry that talks about maintenance. And, you know, in American poetry, you've got Robert Frost, "A Mending Wall." "Young company, there isn't a lump of ball, wants it down, so on." And that winds up being about unnecessary maintenance, and he wants it to stop. And there's in Japan, the Buddhist chaff would carry water, but that's it. And so, these things can be quite hidden. And I'm pretty sure.

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  That taking the look for pattern, the inspecting for how does it actually work? How does maintenance separate out from operation of infrastructure, for example? I guess there needs to be another Fleiberg-like person who's gonna walk into that, because he says he won't. It's too hard.

• 1:12:19Speaker 00

  It could be you. I think you're on to something when you talk about the tile that's not broken. You said they want it to look good. I think there's a powerful aesthetic sense, obviously. It's not a deep insight about Japan. And, you know, Steve Jobs famously wanted the inside of his computers to be beautiful, even though no one saw them. Only a bad economist would say that that's inefficient. It created a culture of aesthetics, care, maintenance, et cetera, that extends way beyond that narrow, narrow application. The point I was trying to make about the World War II is that if you don't have a profit

• 1:13:04Speaker 00

  motive, which is a problem with much public infrastructure, maintenance gets, I think, overlooked. But if you think the world's at stake and civilization's at stake, that overcomes some of the lack of monetary incentive. There's a non-monetary incentive. And I, you know, I think about subway systems, the things that Fleiberg writes about, subway systems, giant, massive infrastructure projects. They struggle with maintenance because they're not profitable, which is fine, that's irrelevant. But it's more that the people in charge don't have the strong incentive, as sometimes is the case in, say, a private factory. So I think that's part of the challenge. That's all I was saying there.

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  The, well, "Right to Repair" is a thing going on in the US and I guess in Europe. And I'm about to write about that, so I've been studying up. And there's an online version of the book where I put it up for comment and so on. And there's a couple of sections that are not in the print book that are going to be part of, part two. And one of them is the history of blacksmithing. Where I wound up discovering that John Deere, the original guy behind the John Deere company was a blacksmith.

• 1:14:35Speaker 01

  And he invented a slightly better plow, back in the days when plows were just taking off in the US, in the Midwest. And it turned out to be a fascinating story, and he's one of the great success stories that's seldom told of how to really build a, um, a long-lasting company that can scale, and it really scaled. It's still more than 50% of agricultural equipment in the US and in the world is, is from John Deere. But then, "The Right to Repair," so, um, John Deere the man was highly dedicated to

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  his customers, and he did everything with his customers and for his customers. And the company became famous for that, that, that people, you know, would buy John Deere toys for their children, because it was that level of dedication, kind of like Harley Davidson did with motorcycle people. They're willing to tattoo it on their bodies. So, but now, in the "Right to Repair" issue, in this century, John Deere is famous as sort of the poster boy for...

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  Having your customers bite you and hate you because the software that's involved in precision agriculture, John Deere wants to totally own and a closed garden. And you are not allowed basically to fix things on your own. You have to do it with a dealer, even though the dealer may be 100 miles away from where you are in the plains. And farmers have all this, you know, fix their own stuff. So they are offended at all of this.

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  And by the way, if you do try to mess with your machine, they cripple it through the air. They will make it so that you cannot use that machine in any bigger way than to get it back to the barn. And people really hate that. Yeah, I get that. Laws are emerging on this. And I looked into, you know, what was the dialogue inside the company as all of this started to break loose in the 2010s and 2020s? Where there are some people saying, no, we take care of our customers.

• 1:17:27Speaker 01

  Let's figure out how to do that. And it turns out that nobody was doing that. There was a real argument in the company. It was between hardliners and softliners. A softliner said, well, what's the minimum we can do that looks like we're okay with getting people to repair stuff, but we don't actually change things? Or others saying, no, screw them. It's our company. You know, just five of these folks, they're not going to pass laws. They're afraid to do that. We're too big to fail. All that kind of stuff. So that's how.

• 1:18:13Speaker 01

  Something as fundamental is how repairable is your stuff by the user becomes a fundamental issue in business. And John Deere has been around for in three centuries now. And it started in the 1800s and prospered all through the 1900s. And it's now in the 2000s. And I don't think it's going to make it through this century with that kind of attitude. What do you think?

• 1:18:42Speaker 00

  I don't think they need legislation to fix it. It sounds like the market's gonna, they're gonna, they may have gotten a short term gain from it. Right. Profitability of controlling those repairs. But obviously they've damaged the brand tremendously.

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  It's the most profitable thing they do is a sequestered repair.

• 1:19:02Speaker 00

  Which works if you have a company, but if you don't, you lose it all. We'll see. It'd be an interesting thing to keep, to keep an eye on. I want to close with, we've, we've referenced AI a couple of times. We're recording this in February 2026. And it just so happens that on X this last week or two, there've been some very, very negative, gloomy, doom-y forecasts about the impact of AI on our economy. I'm much, I'm not worried about that in particular. I think that's a misunderstanding of both what AI is going to do.

• 1:19:38Speaker 01

  What do you think the nature of the misunderstanding is?

• 1:19:40Speaker 00

  I, I think AI is mostly going to make us, us, not certain people, us, much more productive, much wealthier. There'll be many, many more jobs created from the creativity of AI that will offset, there'll be many job losses, like every technology. I'm not a pure optimist. I understand there is possibilities for darker things, but the, and again, I'm not referring to issues of, of consciousness or the worry that it'll turn us on to paper clips or those kinds of things. But just on the normal economic, macroeconomic effects, I'm, I'm, I'm on the optimistic side.

• 1:20:24Speaker 00

  But I'm also, I think that part, which I think will be great overall. There'll be negatives, but, but also many good things. The human aspect of it is what I think about a lot and not the non economist or the non financial part is what I think about a lot. And it comes back to what I was talking about before. I used Claude this week to do something that would have taken me, I don't know. I'm not, this is not a coding problem. This is a thinking problem. A strategic question my college faces, I wanted its thoughts, which means I wanted to talk to it. And I did, and I spent an hour and it produced at the end of that hour, a document that would have taken me weeks and I probably would have given up

• 1:21:08Speaker 00

  long before I would have pushed through to those levels. And at one point I said, you know, I think this is a strategic error to do this project. And I laid out why, and then I asked Claude whether it agreed and it said it did. But it said, you've kind of forgotten these other possible positives. And I thought, you know, that's true. It's very thought provoking and the whole experience was embarrassingly exhilarating. And in particular, as many people have noticed, I like spending time with Claude. Not just because he is obsequious, which he is, but and you can tell it not to be, which helps. But my point is, is that, you know, we're moving away as human beings

• 1:21:48Speaker 00

  over the last 25 years into our screens, into our digital worlds. I wonder whether that's going to ultimately be a good thing. I worry about that, but forget me. I want your thoughts. You're a very optimistic person on average, I would say. We've talked about that. Does AI's impact on the human experience fill you with hope or fill you with fear? What's your take on this really, really powerful tool that is suddenly coming into our world?

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  Well, one advantage of being in your 80s is you've seen a lot of things come and go. And I've seen the personal computer come and not go. I've seen the internet come and not go. And clearly AI is going to be in that lineage of something that comes and doesn't go away.

• 1:22:54Speaker 01

  It will fail in small ways, and that's how you do research. It will fail in big ways, and that's how society comes to decisions on, basically, how to manage it. And it will fail in global ways, in the sense that, because different parts of the world will have different relationships with their AI, and some may be more military than others and so on, there's gonna be some scary things that no doubt happen.

• 1:23:36Speaker 01

  But, you know, that happened with gas, it happened with machine guns, it happened with various kinds of weapons over there, you know, nuclear. And one figures out a way. I mean, this is, you know, pure David George. Have you had him on the program?

• 1:23:56Speaker 00

  Well, about, not about his view of human creativity and innovation, but on, we talked about antisemitism, actually, but his book, obviously, the...

• 1:24:06Speaker 01

  The beginning of the...

• 1:24:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, is about our capability. We're very capable human beings.

• 1:24:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a, it's a basically a cosmic level optimistic perspective, that there are all those problems, and then we come up with better explanations that solve a particular problem. But that doesn't mean problems go away. You just have new problems that emerge with this new explanation, this new understanding. And that's the engine of progress, is finding ever better explanations for the problems that keep emerging.

• 1:24:51Speaker 01

  And the process comes from actual experience, not imagination, in the sense that, this is one of the things we learned about technology early on, is everything that came along, some people would say, "Oh, we can't do that, because here's how I imagine things might go wrong." And...

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  Very creative notion sometimes, but irrelevant because that isn't what went wrong. Real stuff went wrong, and then that had to be dealt with. So generally, the thing to do with any new technology is embrace it and become comfortable with it and then also become uncomfortable with it so that you adjust it to fix that aspect. And then when things go wrong on a bigger scale, you understand it from inside, from the actual

• 1:25:51Speaker 01

  behavior of that sort of tools in the world, and you correct a perceptible mistake, not an imaginary mistake. And that's the kind of explanations that I think move us forward from problem to problem, from technology to technology.

• 1:26:16Speaker 00

  My guest today has been Stuart Brand. His book is Maintenance of Everything. We will link to his online versions as well for people who want to see the next part as it works through the process.

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  Oh, good. Thank you.

• 1:26:30Speaker 00

  Stuart, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:26:32Speaker 01

  Delightful to spend time with you.

• 1:26:41Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.