Ezra Klein: I think if you’re looking for who is the most influential philosopher of the internet, who laid down the way Silicon Valley thought, at least in its more idealistic era, the person you come up with is Stewart 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, and 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 there with the Whole Earth Catalog, which Steve Jobs describes as an early inspiration for what we now think of as the internet.

Ezra Klein: "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 Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. It was Google in paperback form 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions." 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.

Ezra Klein: And one thing I think is interesting about this book at this moment, 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 great men 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 want 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 ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. Stewart Brand, welcome to the show.

Stewart Brand: Well, thank you, Ezra Glad to be here.

Ezra Klein: I want to 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. What was that?

Stewart Brand: Hippies.

Ezra Klein: Well, what was that? How would you describe the vision there for society?

Stewart Brand: 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 they 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.

Ezra Klein: Drop out where?

Stewart Brand: Well, they decided that since civilization had to be reinvented, they would deal with the gathering of their cohort of the people same age as them and their peers, and go off base basics. They 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 the communists were 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 pioneer women used to have to do, carrying the water and cooking the meals and taking care of the kids and doing everything else while the guys were building domes and other interesting buildings. Another thing that we discovered was that the countryside is actually kind of boring, 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 do that. 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.

Stewart Brand: So that was the hippies, and the Whole Earth Catalog was speaking in a way, to the fact that these were for college dropouts who didn’t know how anything worked. They had not been raised on a farm or ranch.

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

Stewart Brand: It was pretty big, actually. Bookstores complained about it because it’s about as big as a laptop now. Basically folio sized and thicker than a laptop.

Ezra Klein: Now I’ve seen them. It’s big.

Stewart Brand: Oh, yeah. By the time we did the so-called next Whole Earth Catalog, it was three, several pounds of everything. But I mean, Steve Jobs and his famous commencement speech that it was like Google decades before Google came along, the Whole Earth Catalog had all those books, how to be a beekeeper, how to grow sheep, how to weave and to all of the goddamn make candles. We’re actually candle dipping. So that was what the Whole Earth Catalog was. And it turned out it really did is what YouTube does now. It conferred agency. It was a whole bunch of half open doors that you could peek through into a world of, you can make a guitar. And some people thought, well, I got if I can make a guitar, there’s this book on how to do it, I’ll just do it. And then that turned out to be a whole life for them.

Ezra 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

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

Ezra Klein: $20 a month in North Beach. Yeah, wow

Stewart Brand: Yeah O.K. That’s already hard to believe. But it was true.

Ezra Klein: And somehow it’s easier to believe that you got NASA to take a picture of the Earth and that anything in North Beach ever costs $20.

Stewart Brand: Well, it turns out I didn’t really get NASA to do that. 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 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 wound up 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 NASA and in Congress and so on. I got to know some of the astronauts like Rusty Schweickart. So when they took photographs, it came just a year or two later after my campaign.

Ezra Klein: Got it. Cause and effect. It was a little coincidental.

Stewart Brand: You had the idea on the roof, but it didn’t.

Ezra Klein: The roof is not what led to the picture.

Stewart Brand: I think that’s correct. But it led to understanding the picture.

Ezra Klein: I think for a lot of people 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 Whole Earth Catalog, too. That in a way, it feels like a lot of your career and thinking has been building up to it, 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 most basic question. What is maintenance?

Stewart Brand: It’s good 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 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.

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

Stewart Brand: Well, because I’m a bad maintainer. 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 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 we were as many software programmers began by building Heathkit radios and stuff. Well, that was me, too. I was building Heathkit radios.

Ezra Klein: You grew up in a time when the technologies we used were 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 that 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.

Stewart Brand: Well, they both began basically in 1908, and Ford was building a car that could manage American driving when it was all dirt roads and so had to be pretty rough and ready and rugged and robust, and he’d figured out interchangeable parts by then so he 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 didn’t. It was really, really reliable. It would always run. The Rolls-Royce. 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 adding things that you wanted.

Stewart Brand: And doing the repair yourself. It just to get it to run you had to do maintenance.

Ezra Klein: There’s a dimension of the way you describe what that made possible in the Ford, which is that 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’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, maybe we’ll talk about this. We don’t even really understand what’s happening inside of them. And so there is this tension between the builder hacker ethos that was so present, in other technological eras, but also, earlier periods of the web and personal computers versus where a lot of these systems and companies have gone.

Ezra Klein: 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?

Stewart Brand: 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. When it’s 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 and enter it into your not just physical life, but your mental, and social life.

Stewart Brand: So this will be another thing that the coming of AI, I think, is going to raise another level of discourse on, because one of the things that software engineers are always trying to do, they hate doing endless simple maintenance, taking care of dependencies and stuff like that. And they call it "toil". Good word. And they try to automate it. Get ahead of so that the system can be made capable of seeing when a problem is coming and immediately get itself to go around it. And I’m sure that AI is going to bring many more levels of that. That’s the upside.

Stewart Brand: The downside is you spend more and more of your life arguing with robots because we have a theory of mind. So you and I are talking. We each have a pretty good idea what the other’s doing. And mentally. With the AI, 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 they come from a different frame in some deep respects. And I think that AIs are going to teach us more about being human, because we’re going to see, well, not quite human. Is like and getting more and more acquainted with the difference.

Ezra 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. I mean, you can describe it maybe, but this remarkable deep catalog of all these ways, 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 when I visited them before ChatGPT, this was probably 2021 or 2022.

Ezra Klein: 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 were 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, 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.

Stewart Brand: Well this is. 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, 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.

Stewart Brand: But so far, we’re kind of making them in a real imitation of human communication and to some extent, human thought. It’s going to move beyond human thought pretty quickly, and it 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 the hummingbird. They’re linked. They live together in 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. And so these we’re introducing new kind of pace layers into the world we live in. And it’s cellular. The brain moves really quickly. And 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.

Stewart Brand: I think that 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, well, here’s what we’re pretty sure is going on.

Ezra 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. Understand things. And some of them, we don’t even the people making it can understand.

Ezra Klein: 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. And in that way, this book struck me as almost countercultural, that it was arguing for virtues that it feels our society is pulling further away from I try to take a position of never shaking my finger and saying, no, you should brush your teeth, you should change your oil. You should be a nanny to your behavior, your child wake up and be a grown up and take care of things.

Stewart Brand: Well, a lot of it is quite reasonable because of the precision that goes into manufacturing starting now, most things work pretty damn well most of the time. And so when they don’t, it comes as a surprise. It’s been a while since we bought it, or since we first started renting it or whatever, and suddenly it was a problem. And oh dear, oh dear.

Stewart Brand: People who do maintenance for a living obviously do not have that frame of mind. It’s oh yeah, it’s broken. Let’s see. This familiar thing. Great I can fix that right now. Oh, I don’t have the part for that. Well, I’ll go online and get the part. I mean, online access to information and parts is just astounding now. So all kinds of things that and that’s I think, a great solution for people that have a problem with something they’ve owned for three or four years and it came with a manual, but they misplaced that for sure. Well, it turns out they go online and here comes some recommendations for some videos 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 then the thing is fixed and you’re all powerful. You’ve totally taken agency, and that particular device is now more legible to you.

Stewart Brand: YouTube has replaced manuals. It’s 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. But you’ve got to go online to get the aggregate wisdom of humanity on the case.

Ezra Klein: You’ve lived on a tugboat for 40 years Yeah that must require a fair amount of maintenance.

Stewart Brand: Well, especially if the tugboat is made of wood and built in 1912, which I guess was Yeah. Boats are always suicidal. They’re always trying to sink themselves. And especially wooden boats. Wooden boats don’t usually last more than a century. Ours has, because of a whole lot of maintenance. But boats are so lovable. We call them she. They are all that stands between us and the wide dark sea trying to kill us. They’re like a motorcycle in that respect they’re kind of hazardous. Oh and so relying on them is an intimate process. So maintaining a boat has an endearing quality to it that is attractive.

Stewart Brand: Well, it’s not attractive. It’s the amount of it and the cost of it and the specialized of the work that has to be done. It’s like living inside a beautiful violin where all of the curves and. And all the nuances are very carefully crafted, and replacing parts crafted in that detail takes some doing, but it’s worth doing.

Ezra 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.

Stewart Brand: Well, I can’t do meditation. I get bored. But people who do meditation embrace the boredom and utilize it as a way to at least calm their mind and maybe center their mind on something that they don’t usually go to mentally. And often things for maintenance are done by Japanese with a great deal of ceremony. Just changing the lights of a street lamp. There’s guys in uniform. They have a special routine. They do with a 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. A simple task into a somewhat more complex dance.

Stewart Brand: Moving together in time is one of the profound things that humans have been doing for a very long time. So ritual is one way to make really, really repetitive maintenance less onerous.

Ezra 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. 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.

Stewart Brand: Well, 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 a couple of years ago, they were in the process of doing maintenance on the Notre Dame steeple, the tallest part. It was kind of rotted out. And they were doing work there because they were up there doing stuff that introduce flame in an area that then took off and burned down the cathedral. At Chernobyl they were doing just a routine maintenance and were careless and it got out of hand.

Stewart Brand: So this is reason to be cautious and take thought often for diagnosing the problem. And on that particular case, Bernard Moitessier had a steel boat that was pretty much waterproof, but he had a collision with a ship that bent the bowsprit about 20 to 25 degrees off. It meant that a storm might take down his whole rig because there 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 at a 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 only that, and then backing carefully out so the rest of the system doesn’t get disrupted.

Stewart Brand: It’s a highly intellectual process. Doing diagnosis and repair. 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.

Ezra Klein: 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 thinking, where do I do the maintenance in my life. I mean, aside from on my own body brushing my teeth and sharing. But I have kids. And the act of parenting is its ongoing maintenance among many other things Yeah And there’s been a lot of work and thinking on care work in recent years. And I was curious about how those connections existed in your mind as you wrote the book how do you think about the relationship between maintenance and just interpersonal care?

Stewart Brand: Well, I wound up basically most of the book is Chapter Two, "Vehicles" And the vehicle, the land vehicle that humans have used for 6,000 years is a horse. 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 Borgmann who wrote. You cannot remain unmoved by the endless and confirmation of a well-bred and well-trained horse. More than 1,000 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 and warmed and shod with its liability to cuts and infections, still 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 some day. A vehicle that can care back. Tell me what you make of that. Your children care back. That makes maintaining them completely different than maintaining your vehicles.

Stewart Brand: I think this is one of the things we may ask our eyes to do for us is 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.

Ezra Klein: You’ve been around Silicon Valley long time. We’ve mentioned the Whole Earth Catalog. You were involved in early versions of the World Wide Web, personal computer, 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 born out. Which of the hopes feel like they ended up corrupted or something that look on with more skepticism now.

Stewart Brand: Well, it’s a classic case of David Deutsch’s line about solve certain problems and other problems emerge. But the problems that we thought were being solved in terms of 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 basically invented for the microcomputers, as they were called then. And we still do the same way. Now lots of other stuff has been added on. And the social systems have connected lots and lots of people in really profound ways, and lots of the things available through the internet, from Wikipedia to the Internet Archive to iFixit to YouTube.

Stewart Brand: 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 other people being rude to each other because they were not in the same room and nobody could punch anybody and they could gang up on each other, and things like that started to become semi pathological online. But it was 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 as Nicholas Negroponte used to say, it wasn’t just advertising as noise, it was advertising as news that was focused on your expressed interests.

Stewart Brand: And then that felt like, well, that was an invasion of our privacy, that it knew what I was interested in. 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. 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. But it has problems. That’s the nature of life.

Ezra 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 open 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 as gods and we might as well get good at it.

Ezra Klein: And the internet emerges and 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 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 obviously people enjoy it on some level or they wouldn’t use the systems. But I do wonder how they’re changing us. I mean, so much of the message it feels to me of early computer thinking, early web thinking was about 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. It feels like the decisions are being made in some way you can’t quite figure out.

Ezra Klein: I think you knew Marshall McLuhan back in the day.

Stewart Brand: I did.

Ezra Klein: And 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.

Stewart Brand: Well, have you had Cory Doctorow on your show Yeah,

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

Stewart Brand: Excellent so he’s quite right. There’s a lot of what he calls “enshittification” that’s happened to various entities where basically sponsored content comes more and more in front of the content that you’re asking for. And it’s on Amazon, it’s on Google and so on. What do you do.

Stewart Brand: A keyword search. But now with Google I use their Gemini 3, and it’s not so much a search for a word string anymore. It’s search for. Tell me about this subject, please. And it is drastically great. For example, in part two of the book, there’s a whole section on John Deere 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 his 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 up upside down. And they had to go through the corporation and the dealerships, and they just hated that.

Stewart Brand: So I asked Gemini 3, how can I find out what the argument was within John Deere, within the company. And he said, well, you’ll find it with 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 to 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.

Ezra Klein: This gets to me to a question. We were circling earlier. I mean to repair it, among other things, is a legislative idea. It would be potentially legislation that the government would pass saying companies have to do this. And one thing I was thinking about in the book 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. Open to maintenance. Whether you can get into the system, whether you can get into the innards, 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 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.

Ezra Klein: 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 that government has to insist that the companies permit.

Stewart Brand: Yes yeah. And there’s already some laws in place in 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 fought back for a little while and then realized, screw it, we’ve got all this information about your vehicle. We’ll share it with you.

Stewart Brand: And there are lots of companies like Patagonia that have whole videos teaching you how to repair their garments. And so it goes. 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. So if that’s the case, that’s where the government usually does need to step in.

Ezra Klein: So if somebody read this book and they wanted to make regular maintenance more of a part of their life, but didn’t quite know how or where or didn’t feel like they had anything obvious to fix. But see this as a virtuous skill, a discipline. Where do you advise them to start. 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.

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

Stewart Brand: Oh, yeah. Because part of this "I and Thou" stuff that Martin Buber 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, get the best you can because then you’re respect for the tool plays out in the care that you give to it. And honoring the process of taking care of things in yourself and in others.

Stewart Brand: Sometimes maintenance tasks are seen as of a case to level difference. Who cleans the toilets. Who takes care of the dead things. And so many maintenance tasks are not only low status. They’re low paid. 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.

Stewart Brand: Well, the really good maintainers are worth paying attention to the point that they do get recognized. They do get paid and basically honored as 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.

Ezra Klein: When we were when I was asking you what led to the writing of this book, you said the 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 is your relationship to maintenance changed. What do you maintain that maybe you didn’t before. What have you found is ways to do it that were not true before this project.

Stewart Brand: I’m 87 years old. Guess what. By the time you’re in your 80s, just being old is a half time job. By the way, in maintenance theory, this is called the bathtub curve.

Stewart Brand: With a building when it was brand new. There’s lots of problems, but then they even out and you can plug along and just stay ahead of the maintenance and it’ll be O.K. But then 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 high maintenance toward the end. When you’re in your 80s, you’re toward the end. Generically, you’re probably genetically. I’m somewhat of an optimist, and that’s fatal for maintainers. Maintainers are realists, and the pessimists are always looking for what could go wrong. And how can I get ahead of that or the hero, a questionable something and where I might say, oh, I don’t think I’m serious. I mean, it 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.

Ezra Klein: I think that’s a good place to end. So was our final question. What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

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

Stewart Brand: I recommend a book by Simon Winchester called "The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World." And then I wound up revisiting when I did a section on manuals. And so the great manuals of history, one of them, by the way, was the. Manual that the first thing you do when you open the book, it says, here’s how to completely dismantle your Model T all the way down to every nut and bolt and put it back together. But the one I was looking at was Diderot’s "Encyclopédie," which had diagrams, basically, of all the trades and crafts of the 18th century actually worked.

Stewart Brand: 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 the "Encyclopedia 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.

Stewart Brand: 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 and that there will be other problems. And being comfortable with that and moving with that and being as intelligent as we can be and managing all that. So those three books are what I recommend.

Ezra Klein: Stewart Brand, thank you very much.

Stewart Brand: Thank you Ezra.