The Unseen Work: Stewart Brand on Maintenance and Civilization

Stewart Brand: Well, thank you. Nice to be here.

Stewart Brand: When you get to be 87 like I am, I think you’ll find that the biggest maintenance item is your health.

Stewart Brand: 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 the discipline about maintenance, I think, that emerges. And, some people find a way to make it kind of a enjoyable ritual.

Stewart Brand: I 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, or bolt. And, then he put it back together again, and it was like he was putting his life together.

Stewart Brand: 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 Platoist, essential sense of things. And, in Plato’s world, things never need maintenance: they’re all so essency, 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, that, or the other thing. Of course, but 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 non-existent.

Stewart Brand: Well, I think your computer–you probably do a certain amount of computer hygiene on there to keep things basically updated and try to get rid of things that are cluttering the world there. And so, 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 [artificial intelligence] 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 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. 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 just–it talks human, but it’s not human.

Stewart Brand: Good word.

Stewart Brand: Well, the thermostat is all the way down. And, governors on steam engines, and a lot of things which take care of keeping something in proper running mode, and it’s [?] 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. 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.

And, 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–the make and model of the thing, and then the way you think it’s broken, and look around on YouTube. And pretty soon you find somebody who is ready to help you–show you how to actually make that fix or do that maintenance, or understand the basic functioning of how the thing that you’re feeling is too mysterious to either understand or fix. You understand it, and you fix it. It’s fantastic.

Stewart Brand: Oh, my goodness–

Stewart Brand: Yeah, that used to be the case. 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. Most of the stuff that was in the Whole Earth Catalog back in the 1960s was books, how-to books. And, hippies ate that stuff up. We got the Idiot’s Guide to Fixing Your Volkswagen, and went through the step-by-step process that was in there, and actually learned how to fix our Volkswagens. But, we didn’t learn it from a mechanic. We learned it from a book that a mechanic wrote.

Stewart Brand: You are the true economist in this interview; I love that–

Stewart Brand: You figured out what 5,000 pounds would do–

Stewart Brand: Oh, okay, nonetheless.

Stewart Brand: Oh, yeah–

Stewart Brand: Yeah. Yeah, so you had three people that had books written by them or about them: Donald Crowhurst and Bernard Moitessier, a sailor I knew a little bit when he lived on his boat in Sausalito, California. And, Robin Knox-Johnston was a young guy who was 29. He had a–

Stewart Brand: Yeah. And, he had a pretty short sailboat, 20-some feet, that–and it 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 though it was a wooden boat and wouldn’t go fast, nevertheless, it was what he had, and he would make do. And, man, as he said.

Donald Crowhurst entered the race very late and thought that he was so smart that he would use a new kind of sailboat called the Trimaran, which was 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, so you can’t right it up. But, it’s much faster because it doesn’t go deep in the water; there’s not a lot of friction.

And then, third, Bernard Moitessier had done actually some of the longest sailing of anyone, including in the Southern Ocean, which is violent. And so, he had a steel boat 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. He called it sailorizing. And shirked it quite a lot. And, pretty quickly he discovered that his boat had been built so hastily that it was going to fall apart if he went into the Southern Ocean. 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, it was pretty primitive. They were basically sailing the way ancestors had for a hundred-some years at that point. Which was: you made your own weather forecast, 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.

So, Crowhurst loved his radios, and he figured out a way to pretend to be going around the world–the signals, basically the telegrams that 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. And, he committed suicide. Went off the boat. And, there’s a boat called–

Stewart Brand: Yeah, yeah. He went crazy. And for 10 days he was imagining that he could stipulate reality, and he came up with a 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 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.

Bernard Moitessier had done so much sailing, he was older than many of the other competitors, and he designed his boat to not need much maintenance, and to be easy to maintain.

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, he’d just go straight up. Whereas Knox-Johnston had a Bosun’s Chair where he would try to haul himself up, and you could only do that in a dead calm. He tried it one time when it was violent, and he almost got killed.

So, the way things wound up is that Bernard Moitessier loved being a sea alone, sailing fast. He just loved it. And, by the time he was rounding the bottom of South America and heading back toward England, he decided not–and he was going to win, he was probably going to win both prizes.

Stewart Brand: He was going to be first and [inaudible 00:22:42].

Stewart Brand: Yep. So, that’s what everybody was expecting he would do. France was going to have a fleet of naval vessels come and meet him, take him home to France. He was going to get the Legion of Honor. But, Moitessier really dreaded all of that, and he hated it. All of that fuss and stuff. He was loving what he was doing so much, that he just decided to keep going. And, he had lived in Tahiti before, so he’s ‘What the hell? Just keep going.’ Alone, without living up on all the rules. And, he went on to Tahiti; so he sailed and he decided not to finish.

And, he wrote a beautiful book called The Long Way, that–Knox-Johnston’s book was A World of My Own. The one about Robin Crowhurst was The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst. And, that was where they basically examined his log books, 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.

And, Robin Knox-Johnston’s was, ‘Whatever comes, deal with it.’ And, he was incredibly resourceful at dealing with problems. Well, Donald Crowhurst–

Stewart Brand: Yep. Yeah, he would do a thing, like, he needed to solder a joint. But he’d completely equipped the boat, but he didn’t have any solder. But he had some extra bulbs that he carefully disassembled, and little tiny dots of solder were in there. And, he collected those enough and found a way to heat it and melt it and resolder that connection. And, that was classic Robin Knox-Johnston.

He was later knighted, of course, by the Queen: Sir Robin. So, his was making [inaudible 00:25:48] and whatever comes, deal with it.

The stance of the optimist–the kind of the pathological optimist of Donald Crowhurst–was ‘Hope for the best.’

And, it killed him. It led to the cheat, and the cheat killed him.

Bernard Moitessier was: ‘Prepare 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 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, I said, ‘You have a nice pretty fit sailboat here,’ and he said, ‘The rule is: New every day.’ Basically, a sailboat as if it had just been made.

So, that winds up being the beginning of the book, because 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 then, I tell the Golden Globe lobe story.

But, in a way, the whole book is revisiting various famous situations, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Egyptian invasion of the Sinai across the Suez Canal in 1973, or with Israel. 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, 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 weapons stories.

Stewart Brand: Assault rifle, yeah–

Stewart Brand: It’s an incredible example. It made all the difference. Yeah. And so, in firefights, in the Hill fights, the first really bloody combat between the VC [Viet Cong] and American troops and Marines was–I used to be in the army and then taught rifle training, among other things. The AK-47s that the Vietnamese had were incredibly reliable and incredibly easy to clean and fix. When an assault rifle jams, 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 had jammed out.

The AK-47 has a cleaning rod mounted right under the barrel. And so, if it jams, you just grab that, run it down–it’s the length it needs reach–run it down. And you unjam 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 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.

Stewart Brand: Yeah. So, in Vietnam, it’s a humid environment. They were rusting out pretty quickly. And, 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 wounded up using their [inaudible 00:33:14] 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 everything. And, anything that you oil, the sand gets into it; and then that turns out to be something that abrades the weapon. So, you basically had to keep an M-16 surgically cleaned to really function well.

Stewart Brand: Well, remember the Egyptians were equipped and trained by the Russians. And, the Russian army is that equipment and troops are disposable, dispensable; and they don’t try to bear down on maintenance. They’re often good on maintainability. The AK-47 is a Russian weapon, and the T-55 tanks that they fielded for the Egyptians in that war were pretty solid. I think the most reliably-used tank in the history in the world.

But, you know, it was desert warfare. And it was warfare, and the weapons go down. And, like you say, there was a kind of a–a problem–I love this because one of the things about the American Army and the NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Association] 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 any unit. The officers respect them, and the troops respect them, and they’re the people responsible, really, for maintenance and for teaching, which in a way is how to maintain troops is made in training.

So, the–and, there’s pretty good NCOs [non-commissioned officers] in the Israeli army, and they’ve been training them up in the Ukrainian army, because originally they had a sort of Russian system. But, as they became closer and closer with NATO, they started developing NCO schools.

The Arab armies generally in–the Egyptian 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’ll proudly never touch anything. And, that’s for what troops do. And, indeed, maintenance always 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, 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.

Stewart Brand: Is that right?

Stewart Brand: Do you have an explanation for that as an economist?

Stewart Brand: 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 [Reserve Officers’ Training Corps] programs–Reserve Officer training. And, my older sister had married a West Point officer, tillerman[?]; and my older brother, Mike, at Stanford, I guess, gone to ROTC and then went off to serve for two years active duty. And so, I liked the idea of the military. I love 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.

And, being trained as an officer, you basically–it’s a skill. And so, you develop a commanding voice, and you expect you to be in charge of something.

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

So, I mean, one of the things you learn in the military is–at least the American military–is commanding people to do a thing doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. You have to monitor it.

Stewart Brand: And then, after any kind of action, you do an after-action review. Right after, when everybody is still sweaty and wiped out and so on, but everything is fresh in their mind. What went well, what went badly, what are the lessons here, what do we do different next time. This is how you do stuff.

So, among hippies, I and other people I knew, Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters had a number of ex-military people in it. Ken Kesey’s best friend, Ken Babbs, had been a helicopter pilot and officer in Vietnam. And, he was a easy commander, ‘Right, right, right, let’s get into this.’ It’s one of the things you got to learn to do and then take for granted.

Stewart Brand: Well, it was a little–I had, on LSD [Lysergic acid diethylamide] one day in San Francisco and in the spring of 1966, gone up on the roof of the apartment I had lived 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 all the way on itself of the earth.

And, I thought, ‘God, we’ve been in space for 10 years at this point’–which we had. Sputnik was back in 1956. ‘Why haven’t there been any photographs of the earth as a whole from a distance?’ And, I figured, ‘Okay, I’m going to make this happen. I’m going to make a button.’ And, the button is going to say in mumble, mumble[inaudible 00:46:02] that I wound up with, it said, slightly paranoid question: ‘Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet?’ And, I sent them up to the Politburo and Soviet Union. I sent them to people in American Congress and their secretaries, and I sent them to NASA.

I got to know some of the astronauts later, and I, of course, wondered if any of that had gotten to them. And, Rusty Schweickart was the one I know best, he said, ‘Nah, we were surprised that when that photograph was taken–what came to be called Earthrise–that is where the earth comes around the rim of the moon.’ And, that photograph of a dead planet in the foreground–the moon–and the clearly living, beautiful, jewel-like, blue-and-white earth from a distance, was just inspiring. 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 loved it, and so I grew up loving it. And now Earth Day followed immediately after that photograph, the Earth from Space. And, basically the whole environmental movement took off with that photograph. So, the environmentalists fought the wrong thing.

Stewart Brand: Yeah, tools and skills. And, I mean, I was a kid who had grown up, thanks to my father, who was a tinkerer. He was a civil engineer out of MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology]. 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. And, that’s probably part of why I was comfortable around the beginnings of the personal computers later on.

Stewart Brand: Well, I said at the beginning of it on an opening page, and it wasn’t a big issue: ‘We are as gods and might as well get good at it.’ And by which I meant lowercase gods–just very powerful. We have these amazing tools and capabilities, and they re what would have been seen in earlier times as god-like powers. And so: Step up to it.

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

I guess that became part of the bridge for the–part of the counterculture was New Left, which I was not. I spent some time working with them and realized it was self-canceling. So, I was more in the Ken Kesey, Merry Pranksters-version of counterculture. And, what I knew was that the people who were starting communes–and I was involved in several of them–were basically college graduates or college dropouts who had really no idea how anything worked. And so, they were imagining they were going to go back to basics and garden, but they didn’t know how to garden. They didn’t know how to have bees or how to have goats, or why you might want to do that; or anything. It was just earnest. And ignorant. So, a golden opportunity to come up with a place where, like YouTube now and Whole Earth Catalog then: Here’s all the skills you need to do whatever you want.

Stewart Brand: Yeah, yeah–

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

And, the Model T was noisy. And it was basically an invitation to–just to get it to function properly, you had to buy some extra things to add in there, and you had to learn how to grease it and how to get it to start. And, 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 a 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.

The basic internal[?] 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, that then took off: that basically taught the world that you could buy something and then adjust it to your life, your ideas, your dreams. 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 it to do. When I and others put together a thing called the Hackers Conference in 1984, people had–just individuals–had come up with software that was used by everybody. 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 T and they could afford it, everybody had to have a personal computer and they could afford it.

And, I dare say that AI is going to be moving in the same direction. I certainly use it for research, Jim and I, three role; and it’s brilliant for me. It finds sources that I would never have found on my own. And that’s what you’re going to see more and more of in the forthcoming sections of Maintenance of Everything.

Stewart Brand: 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. That was just stupid. And, I can tell you that when hippies reproduced and they had children, they were shocked that their children were just loving and not nasty the way you had been. So, lots of regrets there. But, one generation makes a mistake, and the next generation knows that it was a mistake.

Stewart Brand: Oh no, I greatly agree. And, it’s one of the things we do with pets: that 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.

Stewart Brand: I have an economic question for you, if you don’t mind.

Stewart Brand: I intend to have a lot of stuff on infrastructure in the book later on. And, 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 [Bent Flyvbjerg–Econlib Ed.] 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.’ And I’m, ‘Okay, come on, you’ve looked at this stuff. You’ve compared them all over the world. You know all of this inside out,’ and 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 the thing going, versus operating it to make it function for what it was built to do, is not distinguished enough for somebody like him–

Stewart Brand: to do any analysis on it. Can you explain that?

Stewart Brand: 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 of 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 they’re manufacturing.

And you know, so Honda developing the lean approach to all of that is very well thought out and very influential. And, that is a well-explored and theoretically rich–not soulful yet–but nevertheless, very detailed and a lot of thought is going into it.

So, manufacturing is really aware of all of this. Aerospace is tremendously aware of maintenance, behavior, and cost.

Stewart Brand: With airplanes, obviously, because when they fall out of the sky with people on board, 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 out in space and they’ve got to fix everything like Robin Knox-Johnston on a sailboat. They got to fix whatever goes wrong with whatever is on board. That’s it. Once we get to Mars–and 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? And, AI is getting into the thick of all of that now with coding.

And then, 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 the Japan that is broken. The rooves are that well maintained that they’re always going to look good. And, there may be something having to do with the shame culture and duty and giri[?Japanese?], and things like that, and always wanting to look good. But, there’s more to it than that, and it is kind of hidden.

I could find no Japanese poetry that talks about maintenance. And, in American poetry, you’ve got Robert Frost, the “Mending Wall”: ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,’ 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 chop[?] would carry water. But that’s it.

And so, these things can be quite hidden. And, I’m pretty sure that taking the look for pattern, 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 Flyvbjerg-like person who is going to walk into that, because he said he won’t: it’s too hard.

Stewart Brand: Well, Rights for Repair is a thing going on in the United States 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, and he invented a slightly better plow back in the days when plows were just taking off in the United States, 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 long-lasting company that can scale. And it really scaled. It’s still more than 50% of agricultural equipment in the United States and in the world, is from John Deere.

But then, the Right to Repair–so John Deere, the man, was highly dedicated to his customers, and he did everything with his customers and for his customers. And, the company became famous for that: that people 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.

But now, in the Right to Repair issue in this century, John Deere is famous and is sort of the poster boy for having your customers fight you and hate you, because the software that’s involved in precision agriculture, John Deere wants to totally own in 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 a hundred miles away from where you are in the plains. And, farmers have always fixed their own stuff, so they are offended at all of this.

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.

Stewart Brand: The laws are emerging on this. And I looked into: 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, ‘Oh, we take care of our customers. 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 that was between hard-liners and soft-liners. Soft-liners 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, just buy[?] 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 something as fundamental as ‘how repairable is your stuff by the user?’ becomes a fundamental issue in business. And, John Deere has been around for three centuries now, and–it started in the 1800s and it prospered all through the 1900s, and is 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?

Stewart Brand: Yeah, it’s huge. It’s the most profitable thing they do, is sequestered repair.

Stewart Brand: What do you think the nature of the misunderstanding is?

Stewart Brand: 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. 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 going to be some scary things that no doubt happen. But, that happened with gas, it happened with machine guns, it happened with various kinds of weapons over the–nuclear. And, one figures out a way. I mean, this is pure David Deutsch. Have you had him on the program?

Stewart Brand: The Beginning of Infinity–

Stewart Brand: Yeah, it’s basically a cosmic level optimistic perspective that there are always 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. And, the process comes from actual experience, not imagination, in the sense that–and 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, very creative notions 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 you do with any new technology, is embrace it and become comfortable with it, and 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 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.

Stewart Brand: Oh, good. Thank you.

Stewart Brand: Delightful to spend time with you.