The Ezra Klein Show - Stewart Brand, Silicon Valley’s Favorite Prophet, on Life’s Most Important Principle

Episode Date: April 24, 2026

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

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

We'll include a link. and a promo code in the show notes. I think if you were to look for the philosopher, the thinker who is most influential in the culture that became the internet, who sort of laid down the way Silicon Valley thought, at least in its more idealistic era, the person you'd come up with is Stuart Brand. Brand has one of these amazing lives where he seemed to be present,

at least for a part of the culture, and almost everything that mattered. They're in the 60s and the moment of the hippies in a $20 a month apartment in San Francisco with other beatniks. They're at the mother-of-all demos that creates much of the structure for modern computing that foresees many places we're ultimately going to go. They're creating the well, one of the earliest online communities. They're with the whole Earth catalog, which Steve Jobs describes as an early inspiration for what we now think of as the Internet. When I was young, there was an amazing publication. called the Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the Bibles of my generation.

It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand, not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 60s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools, and great notions. 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, rather avoid. The constant and almost spiritually important work of fixing our cars, of doing home repairs, of caring for each other. Brand makes maintenance sound philosophically potent, even beautiful. And one thing I think is interesting about this book at this moment 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 man of history, conquers of the world, dimensions now, can maybe move towards something a little bit more humble, something a little bit more rooted in the natural relationship we all have to each other and that we all have to aging and to loss. So I wanted to have Brandon to talk to him about that and so much else that he's seen and thought over the years. As always, my email Asreclines show at nwitimes.com. Stuart Brand, welcome to the show. Well, thank you, Mr. I'm glad to be here.

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?

Hippies. What was that? How would you describe the vision there for society? For various reasons, a whole lot of people basically in college in the early 60s and on through into the early 70s

thought they needed to reinvent civilization. The 50s had been so successful, it became kind of bland, and the Beatnik poets who preceded us showed a kind of a revolutionary path of going wild and going deep. And so, We figured out ways to go wild and go deep.

Many dropped out of college. We decided that since civilization had to be reinvented, they had to do with the gathering of their peers, and go back to the countryside and farm and build their own buildings and have their own rules and start over. They all failed. But they were all highly educational.

We learned the free love is. isn't free. We learned that if you expect the women to do all of the really hard work of carrying the water and cooking the meals and take care of the kids. Like pioneer women used to have to do, well, the guys were building domes and other interesting buildings. The other 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.

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

How would you describe what the Whole Earth Catalog looked and felt like to somebody who's never seen one? 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 now. I've seen them. It's big. Oh, yeah, yeah.

By the time we did the so-called next whole earth catalog, it was several pounds of everything. But, I mean, Steve Jobs in his famous commencement speech that it was like Google, decades before Google came along. The Whole Earth Catalog had all those books, you know, how to be a beekeeper, how to grow sheep, how to make candles. we were actually candle dipping.

So that was what the old catalog was. And it turned out what it really did is what YouTube does now. It conferred agency. 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. Yeah, it was in San Francisco.

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

Wow. Yeah. Okay. That's already hard to believe. But it was true. 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 cost $20. Well, it turns out I didn't really get NASA to do that. You know, we've been in space for 10 years at that point.

We in the Soviet Union. And the cameras had always been looking outward or at pieces of the Earth, but they could have been looking back to see the Earth as a whole. And I was pretty sure that would change everything. I wanted to start a campaign. There was a button and said, why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet? And I know I got looked at by a lot of people in Congress and NASA and so on. But I got to know some of the astronauts like Rusty Schroiker when they took photographs.

It came just a year or two later after my campaign. Got it. So it was a little coincidental. You had the idea on the roof, but it didn't. The roof is not what led to the picture. I think that's correct. But it led to understanding the picture, 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 in thinking has been building up to this, topic that the whole 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? It's for to keep things going. I'm a biologist by training, and so you find that everything alive spends a lot of its time basically maintaining being alive, even 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.

How did it come to occupy so much of your mind? Oh, because I'm a bad maintainer. I brushed my cheeks 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 if you've got a beginner's mind. But I did grow up with a father who was a do-it-yourself kind of guy with a big bench in the basement, and I had a bench in the basement. And as you know, many software programmers began by building Keith Kit radios and stuff. Well, that was me, too. I was building Heist Kit radios.

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, though, I hope 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. Well, we both began basically in 1908,

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

It would always run. But you couldn't do maintenance yourself because everything was so perfectly tuned and assembled that you would have to take it back to Rolls-Royce. choice to do any opi coupon. But if you got a Model T, it was basically just a platform for adding things that you wanted and doing the repair yourself. There's a dimension of the way you describe what that made possible in the Ford, which is it became, as you say, a platform. It became a space of creativity. People sold all these kits to change what the Model T was. And it struck me reading this, and you know, you're very intertwined in the history of Silicon Valley, that it had a lot of the feeling of early technology, which people could hack and alter and add to in all kinds of ways versus later technology where you got a jailbreak an iPhone to do anything with it, where we now have AI systems.

We don't even really understand what's happening inside of them. So there is this tension between the builder-hacker ethos that was so present, you know, in other technological errors, but also at the earlier periods of the web and personal computers, versus where a lot of these systems and companies have gone. You describe maintenance as an ethos, but it's also, I think, a question of what we are capable of doing, both somewhat legally and technically with our technologies, which makes it also a decision. made by the companies. How do you think about that? Well, I'm just working up on writing about the right to repair issues going on now. There's a question of ownership. Ownership, I think, is not just a question of having paid for and having legal possession of something. It's actually possessing the knowledge of what it's really about, how it functions, how to look for, problems, how to diagnose problems when they come up, how to fix it. And doing maintenance on

something is basically how you really take ownership of it, into your not just physical life, but your mental and social life. This will be another thing that AI, I think, is going to raise another level of discourse on. Because one of the things, software engineers, are always trying to do. They hate doing endless, simple maintenance, taking care of dependencies and stuff like that. They call it toil, good word. And they try to automate it

so that the system can be capable of seeing 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. The downside is you spend more and more of your life arguing with robots. Because, you know, we have a theory of mind. So you and I are talking.

We each have a pretty good idea of what the other is doing mentally. With the AIs, that's not the case. And they're all different. So in a way, we're dealing with all these new species who talk our language but are from a different frame in some deep respects. I think that AIS are going to teach us more about being human because we're going to see what a not quite human is alike and getting more and more acquainted with the difference.

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 a word that gets used of the things we use. And when I read that, I was thinking about a moment I had with one of your creations that relates to AI, which is you mentioned the Whole Earth Catalog,

which is this remarkable deep catalog of all these 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 open AI. When I visited them before Chat Chagin 2. This is probably 2021 or 2022. And I remember thinking that there was something almost ironic about this catalog that was so dedicated to making the world intelligible at this place where they were explaining to me that they didn't understand the fundamental center of how their systems worked, that they were creating something that one of its most fundamental characteristics was unintelligibility.

And if somebody's just been around Silicon Valley a long time, I'm. 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. 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 train 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. But so far, we're kind of making them in real imitation of human communication and, to some extent, human thought. It's going to move beyond human thought pretty quickly. and it's certainly reaching out in terms of data space much wider than any human can in a much shorter time. And that fact alone puts us feeling like redwood trees

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

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. I guess my question on this, and I'm going to be thinking about that Redwoods and Hummingbirds analogy for a little bit,

is what role maintenance and the associated virtues and knowledge have in a world where technologically it's requiring now so much sophistication and specialization to understand things. And some of them like AI, we don't even, even the people making it can understand. A lot of the examples in the book, which I often found very, very moving, are sailboats and model T's. And even if somebody was precision calibrating every single bolt in the Rolls-Royce, somebody knew what those bolts were. did. Yes. 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, you should brush your teeth, you should change your oil, you should be a nanny to your behavior. Do your child wake up and be a great? growing up and take care of things. Most things work pretty damn well most of the time. When they don't, it comes as a surprise. Suddenly there's a problem and, oh dear, oh dear, people who do maintenance for a living, obviously,

do not have that frame of mind. I mean, online access to information and parts is just astounding now. And that's, I think, the great solution for people that'll have a problem with something they've owned for three or four years. And it came with a manual, but they've misplaced that for sure. Well, it turns out they go online, and here comes some recommendations for some videos, 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, and 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. 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. You've lived on a tugboat for 40 years? Yeah. That must require a fair amount of maintenance.

Well, especially if the tugboat is made of a wood and built in 1912. Wooden boats don't usually last more than a century. Ours has because of a whole lot of maintenance. and boats are so lovable. We call them she. They are all that stands between us and the wind, dark sea, trying to kill us. They're like a motorcycle in that respect of.

They're kind of hazardous. And so relying on them is an intimate process. So maintaining a vote has an endearingness quality to it that is attractive. What is not attractive is the amount of it and the cost of it. And the specializedness of the

work that has to be done. It's like living inside a beautiful violin where all of the curves and all the nuances are very carefully crafted. And replacing parts crafted in that

detail takes them doing, but it's worth killing. 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.

Well, I can't do meditation. I get bored. But people who do meditation sort of embrace the bored and utilize it as a way to calm their mind and maybe center their mind on something they don't usually go to mentally. For example, often things of maintenance are done by Japanese with a great deal of ceremony. You know, just changing the lights of a street lamp.

There's guys in uniform. They have a special routine. They do the ladder where they go up the pole and do a little formal thing at the beginning and another little formal thing at the end. And it turns the simple task into a somewhat more complex dance. Moving together in time is one of the profound things

that humans have been doing for a very long time. And having a uniform where you're doing something, especially a service, where you make a kind of a big deal of it. So ritual is one way to make really, really repetitive maintenance less onerous. The other dimension that struck me is 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 in 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. Right. 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. 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, wrought it out, they were doing work there, because they were up there doing stuff, then introduced flame in an area that then took off and burned down the cathedral. Chernobyl, they were doing just a routine maintenance, and were careless and it got out of hand. So, that's this reason to be cautious and take thought, often for diagnosing the problem. And on that particular case, Bernard Matesier had a steel boat that was pretty much waterproof. But he had a collision with a ship that bent the voucherbilt 20, 25 degrees off. It meant that a storm might take down his whole rig because it was no longer symmetrical.

And so he knew what the problem was. but how could he fix it by himself at sea? And that was where he took the advice he heard from other maintainers. Don't just jump for the solution because you might make the problem worse. Think through the solution. Just rut 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.

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. One thought I had while reading the book was that maintenance is what we call care when it is applied to things as opposed to people.

And a lot of the book felt, I mean, I was thinking, where do I do the most maintenance in my life? I mean, aside from on my own body, brushing my teeth and, you know, sharing, but I have kids. And the act of parenting is, it's ongoing maintenance, all among many other things. Yeah. And, you know, 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.

Like the, how do you think about the relationship between maintenance and just interpersonal care? Well, I wound up most of the book. is Chapter 2 vehicles. And 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 Bargman who wrote, You cannot remain unmoved by the gentiless and confirmation 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 an irredicable inclination to seek refuge in flight, and it owes a burden with its need to be fed and wormed and shod with its liability to cuts and infections to lamine and heaves. But when it greets you with a knicker, nozzles of your chest,

and regards you with a large and liquid eye, the question of where you want to be and what you want to do has been answered. And I end with, I wonder if that might come again someday, a vehicle that can tear back. Tell me what you make of that. Your children tear back.

That makes maintaining them completely different than maintaining your vehicles. I think this is one of the things we may ask our AIs to do for us. Give us things that care back in some sense. Now the question is, are they faking it or do they mean it? And maybe part of the design will be that they do mean it. There is somebody there caring. You've been around Silicon Valley a long time. We've mentioned the Whole Earth Catalog.

You were involved in sort of early versions of the World Wide Web, personal computer. And there was a lot of idealism in all of that. When you look around, which of your hopes feel like they were born out? Which of the hopes feel like they ended up corrupted or something that you look on with more skepticism now? Well, it's a classic case of David Deutsch's line about, you know, you solve certain problems and other problems emerge. The problems that we thought were being solved and from, especially communication, but understanding that computers were communication devices.

And isn't it amazing that we all still use email, which was one of the first things invented for the microcomputers, as they were called then? Lots of other stuff has been added on. and the social systems have connected lots and lots of people in really profound ways. And lots of the things available through the Internet, from Wikipedia to the Internet Archive to I-Fixit to YouTube. So in that sense, it's really surpassed the dreams that we had. But then, of course, it introduced problems that we didn't completely anticipate.

The very first social media started to have flame wars, started to have these people being rude to each other because they were not in the same room. Nobody could punch anybody. And they could gang up on each other. And things like that started to become semi-pathological online. But it was sort of like when advertising was explored way back when it became more and more persuasive and interesting.

And then with AdSense on Google, it wasn't just Nicholas Negropani used to say, it wasn't just advertising its noise, it was advertising its news, that, you know, it was focused on your expressed interests. And then that felt like, well, that was an invasion of our privacy that it knew what I was interested in. And in some cases, that's not welcome, but in other cases, oh, yeah, I didn't know about that thing. Thank you for letting me know.

except nobody ever thanks it. But they do act on it. And so that's what keeps its things going. So, yeah, these problems keep coming up and they keep getting solved partially or other stuff comes along that replaces that whole domain, but it has problems.

That's the nature of life. Something you said a second ago, that we act upon it, I have the feeling more and more when I am online on social media on YouTube, on TikTok, that I am being acted upon. You know, you opened up the Whole Earth Catalog and you are the person turning the page.

You are the actor deciding whether or not to have your eyes stop on a certain box and read into that box. I mean, the tagline that was so beautiful of the Whole Earth Catalogue was, we are, was it, we are as gods and we might as well be good at it? Yeah, good at it. And, you know, the internet emerges and, you know, you're typing search terms into

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

of 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 in many, many offers to be sometimes wonderfully disempowered. But particularly the way the systems use our attention now, it does feel like the volition has shifted. It feels like the decisions are being made in some way you can't quite figure out.

I think you knew Marshall McLuhan back in the day. I did. 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. Well, have you had Corey Doctoro on your show? Yeah, we had an episode of Tim Wu and Corey Doctora that just came out recently. Excellent. So he's quite right. There's a lot of what he calls it and

certification that has happened to various entities where basically sponsored content comes more and more in front of the content that they're asking for. for, and it's on Amazon, it's on Google, and so on, when you do a keyword search. But now with Google, I use their Gemini 3, and it's not so much a search for a word string anymore. It's a search for, tell me about this subject, please. And it is great. for example, in part two of the book, there's a whole section on the later history of John Deere

where they went from one of America's oldest companies who 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 upside down, and they had to go through the corporation and the dealerships. And they just hated that. So I asked Gemini III, how can I find out what the argument was within John Deere, within the company,

and 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 for AI. I hadn't really thought of those two ways to look inside the company. And it turned out that nobody was speaking up

for the customers inside the company. This gets to me to a question we were sort of circling earlier. I mean, right to repair, it among other things, is a legislative idea. It would be potentially legislation that the government were passing. Companies have to do this. And one thing I was thinking about in the book is it is treating maintenance often as a question of our knowledge about the things we are caring for. But it is also a question of, first, whether the companies that make those things have been. made those things open to care, right, open to maintenance, whether you can get into the system,

whether you can get into the innards. You know, they do not want you getting inside an iPhone. And second, because often, as you say with John Deere, the company would make more money by just having you replace these technologies on a structured timetable, whether or not society, government comes in and says, we actually are going to force you to make maintenance something people can do. So as you're thinking about right to repair and as you've been around technology for a long time, do you think it is something we should pass? Do you think that if we're going to make maintenance a social value, it's something that government has to insist that the companies permit? 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 sort of fought back for a little while, and then we like, screw it. We've got all this information about your vehicle, and we'll share it with you. And there are lots of companies like Patagonia that, you know, 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. And if that's the case, that's where the government usually does need to step in. 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, didn't feel like they have anything obvious to fix, But see, this as a virtue, a skill, a discipline. Where do you advise them to start? How do you make this a...

How do you weave this into a life in which you're not used to thinking about your possessions or even yourself in this way? I'm a child. That's a big commitment to just learn about maintenance. This is this I-Vow stuff

that Martin Bouver 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 rules get the best tools you can. If you use them all the time, that's the best you can. Because then your sort of 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.

Sometimes maintenance tasks are seen as, you know, of a case-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, and that doesn't need to be the case. And people don't notice the really good maintainers from the so-so maintainers because they're not paying attention. Well, the really good maintainers are worth paying attention to the point that they do get

recognized, they do get paid, and it basically honored as sort of the way we honor librarians or libraries. these are actually the pillars of civilization. The folk singer Pete Seeger said, you should consider that an essential art of civilization is maintenance. When I was asking you what led to the writing of this book, you said that maintenance is something that you yourself are not very good at or have not been good at traditionally.

So since immersing yourself in it, both in terms of its technical questions and its, spiritual and personal questions, how is your relationship to maintenance changed? What do you maintain that maybe you didn't before? What have you found as ways to do it that, you know, were not true before this project? I'm 87 years old. Guess what? By the time you're in your 80s, just being old is a half-time job in the maintenance theory. This is called the bathtub curve, like with a building. When it's brand new, there's lots of problems. But then they sort of even out, and you kind of plug along and just stay ahead of the maintenance. It'll be okay. But then

when it gets pretty old, especially if it's a wooden building. Problems increase. So the bathtub is high maintenance at the beginning, it levels out, and then high maintenance toward the end. When you're at any rate, you're toward the end. Generically, or probably genetically, I'm somewhat of an optimist. That's fatal for maintainers. Maintainers are realists. The pessimists are always looking for what could go wrong and how can I get ahead of that.

Or they hear a questionable something and where I might say, oh, I don't think that's serious. But Maintiff says that sounds like it's serious. So there's a whole attitude. issue that one becomes aware of. And my shortcomings is I'm an optimist. I think that's a good place to end. So, all is our final question.

What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? I recommend David Deutche's The Beginning of Infinity. It's basically optimism at a cosmic level. And it's full of the realization that there are always problems. And there are solutions. and that goes on infinitely your awe is at the beginning of infinity when it comes to that.

I recommend a book that used to be called by Simon Winchester who was called the perfectionist and then he changed it to exactly but it's how precision engineers created the modern world

and then I wound up revisiting when I did a section on manuals and so the great manuals of history. But the one I was looking at was Diderot's Encyclopedia, which had diagrams basically of how all the trades and crafts of the 18th century actually worked. But the French Revolution shot down all of the kind of rational optimism

that was in that book. The Scottish Enlightenment did a, they were very much. pressed by and they all studied Jadro's encyclopedia, and they came up with their own encyclopedia, called the Encyclopedia Britannica, which went from strengths to strength for a hundred 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 on the planet well is the engagement with science, with engineering, with open discourse, with replacement of political leaders without

bloodshed. Basically, dealing with problems in a way that we honor that they can be corrected 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. Stuart Brand, thank you very much.

Thank you, Asper. This episode of Isfranch is produced by Annie Galvin, fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our recording engineer is Amin Sahota. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gild. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Marie Cassione,

Marina King, Jack McCordick, Kristen Lynn, Emma Kelbeck, and Jan Kobel. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audio and strategy by Christina Samaluski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times pending audio is Annie Rose Strasser.