← Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
341 | Stewart Brand on Maintenance as an Organizing Principle
01:12:41
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- [00:00]
A
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I don't know if you know, but recently the Golden Globes happened. This is one of those award shows where they give prizes to movie stars and TV stars and things like that. But they had a new category at the Golden Globes this year, Best Podcast. The Mindscape Podcast did not win Best Podcast. It was not nominated. It was probably not even noticed by the people who did the nominating and deciding who was going to be on the list. You know, what can we say this? Our civilization continues to let me down in various ways, but I can't complain too much. The winner of Best Podcast this year was Amy Poehler, who won for her podcast Good Hang with Amy Poehler, which I think I've mentioned previously. And it's a good podcast. You know, all of the people who actually were nominated, you know, entertainers, comedians and whatever, not a lot of natural philosophers were represented. But I bring this up not just because I want to put the idea in the minds of anyone listening that maybe I should be nominated in the future, but there was an episode of Good Hang with Amy Poehler featuring Kate McKinnon. I haven't actually heard this episode, but Jennifer, my wife, has heard it. I've heard other episodes. And one of the things that happened in the interview with Kate McKinnon is that she expressed her enthusiasm for. For a YouTube channel by an Australian guy named Bruce the plumber. And the YouTube channel is called Drain Cleaning Australia. Yes, you heard that correctly. It's all about cleaning clogged drains. Bruce the Plumber, who, in a hilariously cartoonish, over the top Australian accent, goes to various kitchens and restaurants and things like that and finds clogs and cleans grease traps and basically pulls out these ugly metal that have accumulated over the years in the pipes. You might think this is somewhat of a niche kind of activity to have as a popular YouTube channel, but it's not just Kate McKinnon's favorite. Every one of these videos that he puts up gets millions of hits. They are intrinsically interesting to, I guess, a whole bunch of people. And that does warm my heart, because maintenance of our world is kind of important, right? Things. Fixing things is something that has an endless fascination for a lot of people. Of course, it also has a repulsion for a lot of people. Plenty of people don't have anything to do with doing important maintenance. That's why these drains get clogged in the first place. But, you know, we live in a society that is increasingly Interconnected, complicated, hierarchical, networked in various ways. There's a lot of infrastructure, a lot of stuff that needs to be kept up, from our cars, to our kitchens, to our houses, to our electronic infrastructure, through which you're listening to this podcast right now. And there's just a simple fact about the laws of nature and the second law of thermodynamics that things are going to break. There's a lot more ways to be broken than to be in good working order. And what we do to keep things from breaking is we maintain them in various ways. You can think of the act of maintenance as generating entropy somewhere in the universe and in the service of lowering it somewhere else, lowering it, either in some mechanical thing or some electronic thing, or in a biological thing. Biology can be thought of as a set of systems that have solved the problem of self maintenance, at least to some accuracy. But despite the importance of maintenance for living in a world with the second law of thermodynamics as a subject, we all know about it, but we don't sort of take it as a particular theme of interest in its own right. Maybe drain cleaning or fixing your car or something like that is of interest, but the general aspect of maintenance overall is not given a lot of attention. It should be because the world is becoming more complicated and there's even sort of flashpoints of controversy. Increasingly, various companies don't want to let you fix their stuff. They want to make it unfixable. And people have fought against this with the notion of the right to repair things. They want to have legislation passed saying, I get to fix things when they break. I don't need to buy a new iPhone or whatever from you. So today's guest, Stuart Brand, has written a book that does in fact focus on this theme. His book is called Maintenance and it's volume one. There's going to be more volumes coming up. So this is volume one, which is Maintenance of everything. Just talking about the general concept of maintenance. And he's a storyteller, steward, and he tells various stories about people and single sailor sailing ships that have to fix their sails and riggings in the middle of a storm in the ocean, all the way up to fixing modern electronic infrastructure in various ways. Now, of course, Stuart Brand is a famous guy. He was the originator of the whole Earth catalog. None of you were alive for that. But back in the 60s and 70s, this was a big deal. The whole Earth catalog was a way to like, know where you could find the stuff you needed to exist in the world, which could be as simple as, you know, food or tools, but also where to learn, you know, computer programming or whatever. Of course, these days we have the Internet to teach us this stuff. Stewart knows this very, very well. He talks about it in his book. So the Whole Earth catalog is no longer published. But he also was one of the founders of the. Well, the well. W E L L stands for Whole Earth Electronic Link, which is one of the first online communities, really, as well as a co founder of the Long now foundation, which tries to focus humanity's attention on the fact that there are things that last more than a couple years and maybe we should think about the further future than we usually do. So he's an iconic figure in various fields, and I find it just fascinating that this idea of maintenance is what he's turned his attention to. And the book, as Stewart explains in the interview, he's writing the book in real time, or at least he's writing it sequentially. So he puts chapters online and then just collects them into a book. So if he feels like, oh, I need to have a digression about motorcycles, then, okay, we're gonna have a digression about motorcycles. Oh, we did a digression about rust. Okay, we're gonna digress about rust. And if you're into that thing, if you go along to the spirit of the discovery in real time, it's a wonderful read. So let's go. Stuart Brand, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
- [07:12]
B
Wow. Thank you. It's an honor to be here.
- [07:15]
A
So we're going to be talking about your new book, which is about maintenance. I mean, feel free, by the way, to chip in with any stories you have over a very colorful career, thinking about big ideas and doing fun things. But I wanted to start just by thinking, rather than about maintenance, about the book, because you've written a book in quite a compelling but somewhat quirky style. I would say, as someone who's written books, you have your own way of doing it. And I just want to know, is that a conscious choice or is this just. That's the only way you know how to write a book, and that's the way you're going to do it.
- [07:50]
B
This one is extra quirky. And what I decided to do is write it sequentially and write it available online. So in a sense, it's like Charles Dickens doing a serial version of his novels and so on. And what that does is forces me into the same situation as the reader, which is that I don't know what's coming, and they don't know what's coming. And so we're in a similar situation. And then because I'm sort of moving through the material and sort of doing research live as I'm. As I'm writing, with each section, things come up and I realize, oh, dear. I have to explain about why precision is important for Henry Ford to be able to do interchangeable parts on the Model T. And so I'm just going to stop everything and go through the history of precision in the 19th century and how that led to all sorts of things, including darpa, because it was the military that was pushing for interchangeable parts because they wanted the soldiers to be able to fix their weapons in the field instead of having to go to a gunsmith. And that drove, basically, America into the leadership of the Industrial Revolution.
- [09:25]
A
It's a very effective way, I think, with. With the digressions, like, as long as the reader goes along with you in the spirit in which it's attended. Life is full of digressions. Right. Life is just not a simple process from A to B. And so learning things in that way, I think kind of works.
- [09:42]
B
Yeah. And it's. So then the other thing I've got is, like the reader, I know what I've read so far. I'm assuming they're reading the book sequentially, even though it is kind of fraggy and something you can dive into anywhere and be captured by it. Partly because of the illustrations, which I put a lot of effort into. Yeah, yeah. Part of being a good writer is surprising the reader. And partly you can surprise them with content, you can surprise them with news that they didn't know. And because I've been a general editor most of my life, I sort of know what most people know. Steven Pinker would be so pleased. And so I sort of know somewhat better than Donald Trump does what's actually surprising news. And, you know, he's surprised by stuff that he sees in his. The transcript that he's reading. I don't do that. And if I'm surprised and kind of delighted by something I discover I'll put it across to the reader in that mode. You know, somewhat deadpan.
- [11:02]
A
Yeah.
- [11:02]
B
I'm not. I don't use many exclamation points, but it's ideally, you want to read the next page for the next revelation of something surprising. And that's a large part of how it proceeds.
- [11:19]
A
So with that in mind, the topic is maintenance. Now, the implication of the title of the book is that this is part one. There'll be a part two at some point. But I just wanted to ask about that subject matter. I mean, maintenance is something that seems a little bit prosaic for having a whole book about it. What is it that really focused you in on that as the theme?
- [11:46]
B
That has not been a subject in its own right ever. It's sort of like the discovery of infrastructure. When the term infrastructure was introduced in kind of the middle of the 20th century, it was like a new way to think about things, new way to think about cities, new way to think about civilization as we've been building up a global infrastructure. It's a new way to think about a global civilization and the things that it has to maintain basically to keep going. And the ambition to grasp basically the whole world of maintenance is crazy. But fun.
- [12:29]
A
It is.
- [12:29]
B
And fun for the reason as well as me. So the, you know, most of us are doing maintenance most of the time in one form or another. And I can tell you when you get to be 87, you're doing which I am, you get to be doing quite a lot of maintenance just to get through the day and that. And you talk to software engineers and most of them are basically doing maintenance, trying to keep all the stuff that's changing in the universe where the programs they care about are operating up to speed, debugging, where things that come in from new dependencies that were introduced, blah, blah, blah. And most engineers, mechanical engineers, are taken up on maintenance. I have. And what's going to be the next part of the book? A history of blacksmithing. And people talk about blacksmiths, the amazing things they made. Mostly they spent most of their time like doctors fixing stuff that was broken.
- [13:38]
A
Yeah.
- [13:39]
B
And so that's. It is an all encompassing and therefore hard to get your head around domain. And I, I don't think there's any like deep insights into. Okay, this is the way to think about maintenance and all will be well. Other than that, you bear in mind the system that the thing that you're maintaining is immersed in. And so you get some systems perspective on it. And really what you want to do is maintain the thing that the system is in and probably the system that that system is in at least two levels up hierarchically. And that's about it for generalizations that are that have any. So then you want to start looking at way different kinds of maintenance. How come Japanese culture is so incredibly careful about maintenance? How come the military is so incredibly careful about maintenance or aerospace or manufacturing since Toyota basically developed systems that are highly, highly maintenance oriented. So it's a survey, I guess.
- [14:56]
A
Yeah.
- [14:58]
B
Focusing on details, there's very little opinion. My voice is in there. Sometimes my personal experiences are in there. They relate. But by and large, I want to go into the details of how various kinds of maintenance play out and what happens when they don't play out well. And what do you do then? If you're shopping while working, eating, or even listening to this podcast, then you know and love the thrill of a deal. But are you getting the deal and cash back? Rakuten shoppers? Do they get the brands they love? Savings and cash back. And you can get it too. Start getting cash back at your favorite stores like Target, Sephora, and even Expedia. Stack sales on top of cash back and feel what it's like to know.
- [15:44]
A
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- [15:46]
B
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- [16:05]
A
N rakuten.com I have to relate an anecdote that I think I've probably told on the podcast before, but there is this field called quantum error correction in the study of quantum computer.
- [16:19]
B
I heard of that. Great.
- [16:21]
A
Yeah, you should. Well, all I want to say about it is John Preskill, who's a good friend of mine and a great physicist, former podcast guest here, he was a pioneer in quantum error correction. If you have a quantum computer and you have these qubits, they're entangled, what do you do if one of the qubits gets messed up? It turns out to be much, much harder than for a classical computer because of the entanglement between different qubits. And when I first heard the term that sounds like the most boring thing in the world, quantum error correction. But I was super wrong. It turns out to be absolutely central not just to building quantum computers, but to many ideas in theoretical physics. So hopefully I've learned my lesson.
- [17:06]
B
Yeah, say a little more about it. What do you have to do to maintain your quantum?
- [17:15]
A
Well, if you send a classical message. So let's say you send a single bit, right? A zero or a one. There's a very simple strategy which is just to send three copies of it, right? And if there's some noise and there's some chance that one of the bits gets flipped, but It's a small chance. Then at the end you get your three copies and if one of them is wrong, you just discard it. You know, like, you take the majority rules and that, that works very, very well classically. But quantum mechanically, if you mess up one of those bits, it's entangled with the others and it ruins everything. So you need to have a. You need to invent a new kind of quantum redundancy, which I'm not going to explain right now, but it turns out that that idea of quantum redundancy might be crucial to understanding the origin of space and time. So it's the universe kind of doing maintenance on its own.
- [18:15]
B
What does the researcher working in that domain do to maintain basically fix error correctly? The message?
- [18:27]
A
Well, the first thing you need to do is some theory. You need to decide how can you encode a quantum entangled set of qubits in such a way that there is an algorithm for doing the equivalent of voting right, you know, picking the majority rule. And so people have done that. And then you need to build into your quantum computer steps in the algorithm that along the way, massage the qubits to make sure that they have not been. Have not been subject to noise. So you're going to have to build. It's going to be an important step if you want to build quantum computers that can do commercially useful applications.
- [19:10]
B
That's fantastic. And do you think that's solvable and all this going forward with quantum computers?
- [19:17]
A
I do, I do. It's going to be trickier than we thought to build large quantum computers. They're very, very fragile. And so the theory is there, the technology for building qubits is there, but keeping them all decohered, et cetera, you know, or coherent, I suppose I should say, is going to be tricky.
- [19:40]
B
So, yeah, so you have David Deutsch on Mindscape. Where is he and all of that? He's in the thick of quantum computing, I thought.
- [19:50]
A
Absolutely, yeah. I mean, he was one of the people who invented the idea of quantum computing. But, you know, now there's money involved. So lots of people are very, very active in both the theory side and the technology side. And so the people like David, who are, you know, the big picture creative thinkers, they're thinking about other things these days.
- [20:16]
B
Well, it's interesting, he's become very popular in the tech world here we're all reading David Deutsch and basically getting the kind of cosmic level optimism that goes with his understanding that all problems are solvable. But problems never go away. There's always New ones to solve. And that's what progress is made of. And in that sense, progress is in inevitable.
- [20:43]
A
Yes.
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B
So techies like that. This technological process progress feels. Scientific progress feels like it's kind of built into the universe.
- [20:53]
A
Yeah. And I think that these are fascinating questions, actually. That's. That's a good segue. I do want to get back to your book here. Maintenance, the need for maintenance is built into the universe because of the second law of thermodynamics. Right. Things want to dissolve back into equilibrium, and if we have a complex system doing something useful, we have to keep it from falling apart. Is that a way of thinking about maintenance?
- [21:19]
B
Spell it out a little further from the second law perspective.
- [21:24]
A
Well, you know, if entropy always increases in a closed system, the ultimate end state for anything is just equilibrium. Right. You know, the temperatures all smooth out. Everything becomes kind of boring. The kinds of things that are complex systems doing interesting things, whether they're mechanical or technological or biological, are very, very, very far from equilibrium because they're in very specific organizational patterns. And so there's a lot more ways for a machine to be broken than working. That's an aspect of the second law. So I take it that fighting against that can be thought of as what maintenance is all about in some spiritual.
- [22:07]
B
One of the aspects of maintenance that emerged for me relates to that, which is, as you say, there's way more ways a thing can go wrong than couldn't go right. As a consequence, skilled maintainers actually wind up having to know more about the system than the people who designed it and built it. A lot of whether a thing is kind of mature and resilient and robust in the world is if the makers, the designers and the manufacturers pay very close attention to what the maintainers are learning about their system, then all is well, because they will design for lower, better, easier maintenance. And if they don't, the system can be really, really stupid and not getting smarter. And so one of the things I keep coming across is when the makers of things are paying close attention to the maintainers of those things, all goes well. And if not. Yeah.
- [23:27]
A
Well, you start the book with these wonderful examples of the sailing race. I forget what the race was called, but the race that started in England. The gold. Right, right. And you picked on. There's several people who were in the race, but you chose three sailors. These were a solo trips, literally circumnavigating the oceans. And they. These three people you talk about had very different attitudes toward. Towards maintenance. And it showed.
- [23:58]
B
Yeah. So, as I said, at the beginning of that story, there were nine competitors in the Golden Globe race of 1968, all sailing from England. And the three who became basically immortal is the one who won, the one who didn't bother to win, and the one who cheated and wound up committing suicide because he had cheated, that was Donald Crowhurst. And Bernard Metssier is one who didn't bother to win. And he had really designed basically a wonderfully low maintenance vessel, which I've seen the Joshua. And Robert Knox Johnson was just an irrepressible fixture of anything under any circumstances in a rather small wooden boat that he wound up being the only one who finished the race. So they had completely different attitudes toward maintenance. Donald Crawhurst, the one who cheated and suicided, hated doing maintenance. He called it sailorizing. And if it was kind of unpleasant, he would reward himself with a drink after completing an unpleasant piece of maintenance. And pretty soon he ran out of rum and wine and then went crazy instead.
- [25:25]
A
But my favorite was Mo Tessier, who was super good at planning ahead and had all the equipment and when he was close to getting back to England, said, nope, I'm just going to keep going. I like this too much. I don't want to finish this race.
- [25:42]
B
Yeah, exactly. And I knew the Joshua and I knew Bernard Metastier a little bit. He said, I said, boy, your boat's pretty fit. And he said, yeah, the idea for me is it has to be a new boat every day. It has to have everything in perfect working condition. And he could do that because he also insisted that nothing be complicated. And so his self steering device, instead of being complex like most people, where there's a bunch of pulleys and hinges and whatnot that would operate the tiller, he developed a very simple device which was right on the axis of the rudder itself. And so the angle of the wind kept the angle of the rudder at a certain steady point. And if something broke it, which did, he couldn't fix it. Whereas Robin Knox Johnston, he lost when he was south of Australia, lost a part of his self steering device that he couldn't replace. And from then on he had to figure out how to self steer just by setting the sails in certain ways on his catch. So, and, and then he had to worry about when he was sleeping below decks and if it jibed, which you can do where the sail whams over to the other side, he had to know that was happening or about to happen. And so he took from his bunk the sideboard so that when the boat was about to jive it would change its ankle, dump him on the floor and he would pick his bruised body up, go out on deck and reset the whole system. And that was his idea, that was the way he did maintenance, was it was more important to maintain the rigging, which was becoming fragile, than maintaining his own personal bodily integrity. And so he got kind of bruised up.
- [27:56]
A
You have to make some choices there. But I like the idea that maintenance is as much about psychology as it is about mechanics. Like there's an attitude one halves toward it and whether or not you're willing to get into it and enjoy it and take pride in it makes a huge difference about how effective you're going to be.
- [28:20]
B
I think you do whatever you have to do. For some people, they make it a ritual that they enjoy as a ritual. It's like praying or something. Others do it as they, they can do it mindlessly while they are thinking or listening to something else entirely. There's a book called Round the Bend I'll be writing about soon that is basically an air tells in the 1920s of airlines taking shape in, in the Middle East. And one of the aircraft mechanics is very interested in religion and he becomes a kind of a sage that people come to and listen to. And he's teaching maintenance as basically a form of spiritual practice, which is pretty interesting because Arab cultures are not so good on maintenance. That's why they always lose water in the Middle East. And there's a whole section in the, in the print book about that. So a lot of these things are culture deep. And if your culture is making it hard for you to be a good maintainer, you've got to figure out the workarounds, maybe make it a spiritual practice, maybe ensure that the officers are involved in doing maintenance and that way they will respect it and take it seriously. In the US and in NATO militaries, it's the non commissioned officers that are responsible for maintenance. And basically the sergeants train everybody in maintenance and they are the ones responsible for making sure that maintenance happens. And the Russian military does not really have NCOs, non commissioned officers, sergeants, and most of the Arab militaries do not. And when you don't have that, maintenance doesn't get done and you lose the war.
- [30:34]
A
So in other words, in those organizations it goes right from like high level officers to low level soldiers. And there's not enough people in the middle to overlap.
- [30:44]
B
They overlap and they take responsibility and they keep the layers respecting each other. Right. This is a big part of, so that every single officer in The U. S. Military has a non commissioned officer who is with them at all times, keeping them alert to what the soldiers themselves need and want and maintenance issues and all of that sort of thing. And so the, that keeps it from becoming a case system where casts where officers look down from a great height on the troops and do not respect them, but they expect to be respected themselves because they are so high and mighty officers. That is a recipe for losing a war.
- [31:45]
A
Well, this idea of spiritual practice is also appearing in another book that you quote there early in the book, in your book Zen and the art of Motorcycle maintenance, which is one of my favorites from long ago. And an extended meditation on the motorcycle is a metaphor, obviously. Right. You're fixing the motorcycle, but you're also fixing yourself. He says this very explicitly. Robert Persig, the author.
- [32:12]
B
Yes. What's interesting is unlike many metaphors, he actually was a very good maintainer of his own bike. And it was a. He had screwed up a couple of times and then he watched mechanics screw up with his motorcycle. And that was when he decided, okay, if I'm going to get somebody reliable to take care of my motorcycle, I guess it's going to have to be me. And he really did and just immerse himself totally in becoming really skilled as a mechanic dealing with his bike. And then because he was also thinking about values and philosophy, he used that as a frame for talking about his philosophy, which is interesting stuff, but not nearly as interesting as the clarity he had about maintenance itself. And so what I did was I basically skimmed all that cream out of his book about maintenance and put it in my book.
- [33:24]
A
Well, one of the things that he does, which you do refer to in your book, is he goes into quite a lot of detail about ways that you can lose the will to maintain your motorcycle or anything else very effectively. The gumption traps that he talks about.
- [33:42]
B
Gumps and traps are wonderful. It's the sort of thing that's, you know, now the buzzword is agency. Do you have agency? Can you confer agency? Yeah. How are you going to get agency in this otherwise helpless situation? And instead of saying agency, he said gumption, which is a nice kind of funky old word.
- [34:08]
A
Yeah.
- [34:09]
B
And it, and it, and it's, it isn't highfalutin. The agency is kind of high flute. And gumption is, is very. Something one of your grandparents, one of their grandparents might have talked about. And a gumption trap is, is an interesting concept that basically you get into a situation sometimes technically with the motorcycle itself, but often just inside Your own mind, you get frustrated and mad because you have a wrong theory of what the problem of your motorcycle is. Why is it cutting out when I take it on the road, but I can't find out what's making it cut out when I'm back in the shop? And you get a wrong theory and you, you can really wind up hurting your motorcycle because you start panicking and, well, it must be this, it must be this, it must be this. And you go down some wrong path and you're doing harm all the way. One of the important things about repair is a repair is a trauma for the thing that you're trying to fix. And if you do it wrong, you can make the problem either the original problem worse or introduce some new problem. So now you've got two layers of confusion in there. So one wants to be delicate. And one of the things the skilled maintainers talk about is if it's a problem you don't completely understand, just stop and ponder. And pushing is especially good. You just stare at it. Just stare at it. You're like a fisherman waiting for a nibble, and a nibble may well come. If that doesn't quite do it, then just read everything. Don't pose ahead with your wrong theory because it's going to make things worse.
- [36:13]
A
So is there some unified approach to maintenance that makes sense? Can we look at all the examples that you look at in your book and say, okay, here's the right attitude to have, or is it more personal? Is it more pluralistic?
- [36:30]
B
It's dependent on the situation, the system, the person, the tools they have at hand. One of the great things about Robin Knox Johnson, the guy who won the Golden Globe sailboat race, was that he could improvise solutions where nobody else could. For example, his charger stopped working and he went inside it and figured out, oh, yeah, okay, there's a place where there's some grease on the system here. And greased that off and then put it back together and, oops, I don't have a way to measure the distance. They're supposed to be in the gap here.
- [37:19]
A
And.
- [37:21]
B
Without that, how could he set the gap right for the spark plug, I guess, or something like that. And then he figured out, wait a minute, let's see, how many pages of my logbook here does it take to make an inch? And I. Let's see, this is a tiny fraction of minutes. That would be like five pages. So I use five pages as a way to figure out the gap and measured that, and it worked again. Another time he had to solder something in his radio, but he didn't have any solder on board. So he took apart a bunch of tiny extra bulbs that he had where there was solder inside of where it hooked up through the filament and carefully melted all those together, and then he had enough solder to fix the radio. That's the kind of improvisation it's often called for.
- [38:23]
A
Am I correct that you live on a boat?
- [38:26]
B
I do, or have done. We have a 64 foot tugboat that we're finally moving off of and it's for sale. Your listeners want to get, or we'll.
- [38:39]
A
Put that out there. If anyone wants a tugboat in San Francisco. But you're not out there doing circumnavigations of the globe. You're mostly at the pier.
- [38:49]
B
No, the, the, the tugboat has, it's, she's a blue water boat. She was, she's been to Alaska and so on. But the way we refitted her, both as a home and as a working tugboat, is that we can cruise around the Bay area in safety.
- [39:05]
A
Is there a lot of maintenance involved in that endeavor?
- [39:08]
B
This is a wooden boat that was built in 1912, and you can imagine that there's an enormous amount of maintenance. I can tell you that she was in such bad shape when we got her in 1982 that the guy we paid $8,000 to get the vote couldn't believe he got away with that much money because she was in terrible shape. But we brought her back up to a pretty cheery condition. But, you know, wooden boats are basically made out of celery. Wood is a wonderfully adaptable medium, but it is, as we know, especially in buildings, water wants to turn it into something that isn't wood and something that doesn't keep leaks away. So a lot of maintenance do.
- [40:03]
A
I get the feeling, though, that it's becoming harder in the modern world for people to do routine maintenance on the gadgets that they have. I mean, a Model T you could fix, but a car that I would buy new right now, I, I, no one even knows what's going on there. At least the typical person in the garage.
- [40:22]
B
Well, partly it's because the products are lower and lower maintenance. And so you don't have occasion like you did with a Model T to constantly having to redo things, putting in grease, putting in oil, cleaning up this, cleaning up that. One of the interesting things is that electric cars when they first were built back in the, around 1900, were very low maintenance compared to the gasoline cars. And that was a major attraction among many other things. Then gas went out because they could go longer distances. And there were oil discoveries in the US and so on. But then once Tesla came along, once again, people realized, wow, these electrical vehicles have way, way less maintenance and their energy efficiency is enormously high. Whereas a gasoline internal combustion engine, as they say, spends most of its energy just getting out of its own way. So that efficiency of energy and efficiency of maintenance is part of the story of progress. You see that also in the ways that we have dealt with corrosion, with rust over the years. There's a whole story of that in my book about how from way back, like 4,000 years ago, people have been trying to make a kind of a steel that doesn't rust. The problem with steel is that, or iron is that the, when it oxidizes into rust, that's a bigger molecule than the straightforward iron or steel molecule. And so it puffs up and then falls off and exposes more. It's not protecting against future rust. So that became a big quest. And finally stainless steel was discovered. And with enough chromium, you can make it so that there is a oxidized layer of chromium on there that does protect the steel. But you still have to be careful.
- [42:50]
A
Well, one thing that seemed to be a thread running through the book, and I don't even know whether this is intentional or not, but there's sort of a relationship, a tension maybe between innovation and maintenance. There's like one pull to just do things really quickly and get them to work. There's another that says, well, let's slow down, let's make sure this is going to last a long time. Am I, am I correct in perceiving that?
- [43:16]
B
Yeah, and I think lots of things might as well be short lived and not, you know, this is the whole idea of kind of disposable containers versus something that you're going to keep going. The COVID of the book honors the idea of kintsuki, the Japanese art of basically repairing broken pottery with a kind of a gold glue. And so it not only fixes it, but it makes it more beautiful. And you honor the mistake that broke it and you honor the repair and then you brag about it. So kintsugi is a way of kind of just honoring the fact that things do break, but nobody actually wants things to break. And so what is being done with scientific and engineering progress is things that are lower and lower maintenance. One of the things you lose in the course of that is people being skilled in maintenance. We saw this when personal computers first came along and I happened to be in the thick of that, it turned out in the Bay Area and the user groups for a good while were carefully attended by the manufacturers because the users were one, showing the problems and two, showing the workarounds. And then the manufacturers needed to know about that and then they could try to do a workaround way back at the manufacturing level so that particular kind of problem would not keep occurring with software. This is much harder to do because software keeps moving whereas hardware stays the way it is. That just is part of the history of these things. I'm going to be going into the right to repair issues shortly because people like John Deere, who used to be famous for making it easy for their customers to repair their tractors, lately have made it very, very difficult and expensive and problematic for the customers to fix their high tech tractors.
- [45:50]
A
Well, actually I was going to ask about that. So let's get into it a little bit. Am I right that the quote, right to repair is a movement now? There's people who stand up and say, like it should be illegal for corporations to sell me things that I'm not allowed or can't fix.
- [46:08]
B
Right. And so, you know, Senator Elizabeth Warren is all over this. And the guys that ifixit, Kyle Wiens and others in the public world are, are basically, it's a form of insistence on the owner repair rights to if I own it, if you sell it to me and I own it now, I've got to be able to fix it or I don't really own it and I should not have paid a sale price. Back in the day. Xerox was one of the first companies to start a discovery. How about we continue to own the copiers that you get from us and you lease them, but we own them. And by the way, then we can take the amortized tax write off on it and you can't. But we're then responsible for keeping it working. And they did that not as well as they needed to, because early copiers were really, really flaky. They were great. And Xerox became an enormously famous and rich corporation. And then they lost it, partly because it was just mismanagement in various directions, but they mismanaged the technicians that were repairing people's copiers and that's why they didn't make it.
- [47:47]
A
So just to be clear, you're a supporter of right to repair laws.
- [47:51]
B
Yeah. And it's tricky because you can see from the company standpoint, if you control everything about the ongoing usage and upkeep and so on of these particular devices and you don't let non company people fix them or the owners fix them, you get a lot more income. And often it is like car sales. The dealerships for cars often, till when Tesla came along, were making more money off of fixing their cars than off of selling them. Which also puts incentives in a funny place because then you sort of want want them to need service. And so you might design them in ways that look great, but you know, after two months you're going to have to go into the shop and they own the shop and they own the parts and so it goes. But it's short term gain. This is kind of one of those insidification issues that once you're successful enough to really sort of control a domain of stuff and customers, the temptation is to start trying to extract rents. That is basically unearthed income from the system. And if that's what you're counting and that's what the senior executives tend to do, certainly what happened at Xerox, we want to have the least expense and the most income because we all got these tremendous bonuses and that's what we're living for and that's what we're measuring and that's what is more important to us than satisfied customers. Satisfied customers are necessary in the long run. So it's a short gain versus the long loyalty that is the mix there. And it's kind of like it's easy to forget what's fundamental, which is that you've got to have satisfied customers and they will come and get you after a while if they're not satisfied.
- [50:18]
A
On the other hand, as you also point out in the book, there's a sense in which we could imagine entering a golden age of repairing things because the Internet helps us find both information and parts. I love the section on using YouTube videos to fix various things that you wouldn't otherwise have the knowledge to do.
- [50:40]
B
Well, this turned out to be the answer to a question I got a lot because I started a thing called the Whole Earth Catalog back in the 60s that had a lot of impact. And people say, well gosh, we really need that now. Why don't you do Whole Earth Catalog again? And I can answer with a happy, free to grin. I don't need to do that because YouTube has done that.
- [51:07]
A
Yeah.
- [51:08]
B
And part of what the catalog did is it kind of conferred agency. It gave people the sense that they could just do things. And when you have a problem with whatever it is that you've, that you've got a refrigerator outboard motor or whatever. You go online, you look up the make and model of it and year and you will find not just the manual, but a dozen different people offering their videos of how to fix various issues. And you go straight to the issue that you're concerned with. And there's five different flavors of how to fix that issue in that model, in that year of that make. So it's, it's, it's an astonishingly, I suppose, democratic but distributed, yeah, wise system that kind of like Wikipedia is just this thing of you have access to the world's experience in a way that's really easy. So you know, typically it'll be a, like a four minute video and that's all you needed and you may stop it at some particular still frame. Oh, that's how you actually get your hands into that place to open up that thing where the problem is. And it's awesome.
- [52:38]
A
And I was a little alarmed nevertheless that you mentioned how often surgeons use YouTube videos to check up on how to do a procedure.
- [52:48]
B
Well, hell, surgeons do and plumbers do, and the pros all do, and some of the pros are making videos. So that's the other thing is you're getting not just a conveniently detailed but often a highly skilled piece of information from a skilled person, but this system.
- [53:15]
A
Well, I guess. Sorry, let's back up. One of the things that you do talk about in the book is it's not just a machine that needs maintenance, systems need maintenance overall. Right. It's a bigger kind of picture thing. And this system of having reliable YouTube videos might be under threat from AI generated nonsense, things like that. Now we're going to need maintenance to make sure that we're getting the right maintenance tips.
- [53:41]
B
Well, I've been predicting for years that we're going to spend most of our time arguing with robots because the robot kind of often is operating on a particular assumption of what the situation is. And if you have a slightly different situation, you've got to somehow persuade the robot or the AI that. Thank you, that's a nice answer for a question I haven't asked. This is the question I'm really asking. And I think that's generally good because it forces us. Arguing with robots is itself instructive. It's frustrating and often maddening. But it's part of mostly AIs are incredibly useful and when they're not useful, we are learning what to do next. Maybe use a different AI, maybe you try to avoid having an AI look at their problem and get an actual person to look at it. And because there's so many social media available, any particular kind of apparatus is going to have an online support group, a fan group, where they're rebuilding some old, particular old car. And 50 people from all over the world are deeply engaged in rebuilding that kind of old car. And they know where to either get or create anew the parts that you need. Or maybe some of them have decided they're going to get a printer and print the parts, and they'll sell them to the other people in the group, and they'll encourage each other, and they'll be amazed by some people that have got an incredible example of the thing that they all care about. And so you learn what skill looks like and what it takes to have that kind of skill. And so it goes. I think this. This aspect of the kind of old golden era we expected with the coming of the Internet has actually come to pass. And some of the commercial apparatus does go toward insertification. You also learn how to work around that. But by and large, anybody, anywhere has access to almost anything they need to know. Isn't that astonishing?
- [56:34]
A
It is. As someone who has their own podcast, I have to be overall in favor of the Internet. I think it's doing a lot of good things for a lot of good people.
- [56:43]
B
Well, yeah. So you're an example of the kind of enabling that is coming from all this.
- [56:49]
A
Trying to give out information. Yeah. Trying to give out thoughts and knowledge of different sorts in ways that weren't technologically feasible before. I should have asked this earlier, but there's an example of the importance of maintenance that you could have mentioned in the book, but you didn't, which is the clock of the Long Now. You're also. The Long now foundation is one of your projects, and one of their projects is building a clock that will last 10,000 years. So the physicist in me says, well, how hard can that be? But when I read about it, there's a number of issues that come up, and I'm like, oh, yeah, okay. That's actually really kind of tricky.
- [57:28]
B
Yeah. And so Danny Hillis is a computer designer and computer scientist who I got to know when I was at the media lab at MIT back in the 80s, and he was noticing as we got into the 1990s that people talk about the future as the year 2000. He said, They've been talking about the future is the year 2000 my whole life, and it's been getting shorter by one year per year. What can I do to pop people through these membranes of when we think the future is. And Danny's a guy who invents things and builds things. He builds a computer out of fishing line and tic tac toe, anyway, out of wood pieces. The computer museum. This was a machine that could be. You would tic tac that. Yeah, tic tac toe with string and wood. So he wanted to build a physical thing of the scale of Stonehenge that would be a mechanical device that would keep accurate time for 10,000 years. So it's not just a thing that lasts 10,000 years. It doesn't stop ticking for 10,000 years. And all that time is telling accurate time. So it's been built. It's in a mountain in Texas and will be visible by the public sometime in the next, probably 10 years. So they had to invent, he and the team that he built around it had to invent various things that it couldn't use any kind of lubrication because that becomes a source of a problem over time. So all of the places where there was friction, they wind up using ceramic surfaces. And it's a skeleton clock. So you can see if anything goes wrong, you see exactly where it's gone wrong. And there's a mountain of spare parts off in a separate part of the cave. This is a 300 foot high thing inside a mountain. And it resets itself to a perfectly accurate time at noon, solar noon, typically once a year, but it can do it more often. And that's done through a lens that lets in a ray of sunlight at the moment of noon. And if the clock, which is operating off a pendulum, which is operating off of energy provided by a bladder of air that shrinks and expands because of temperature differences day and night, that pendulum is kept going, but it can eventually lose a few seconds one way or the other. And then this ray of light comes in at perfect noon and resets the whole apparatus too. Perfect noon. And then it's a procession of the equinoxes that occurs over the next 10,000 years. And that also is accounted for and managed by a cam that changes the set point exactly the rate of the precession of the equinoxes. It turns out you can build a clock that will keep ticking for at least 10,000 years, probably more, if people are interested. There's a certain amount of upkeep, but very, very little that can be forgotten underground for centuries. And it'll be just fine.
- [61:37]
A
Well, that was what I wanted to get to. The idea would be you're allowed to do maintenance on it. There are spare parts that's not part of the rule book, but you don't have to. You're trying to make it as reliable as you can.
- [61:48]
B
Yep. And that turned out to be. There's ways, as you know, to the engineers to run parts of your system as if it's. For a very long time, it's running fast, and they've done that. And so these. The systems that are built into it are very, very, very robust.
- [62:13]
A
And we just have to worry that future generations don't go in there and break it for fun or cannibalize it for spare parts.
- [62:21]
B
Right. Which has happened with lots of things in the past and could happen with this, but it's hard to get to. It is pretty sequestered inside a mountain, inside airlocks and things like that. One would like that it be not like Stonehenge or the pyramids, where whatever the original spiritual reasons for have gone away, and be more likely Issei shrine in Japan, which is the beating heart of Shintoism for the Japanese. And the people, they rebuild this wooden temple every 20 years and have done for a couple thousand years now, more than a thousand, less than 2,000. And they rebuild it perfectly exactly like it was before. And the people that are doing it are espousing the Shinto frame of thinking about the world exactly the way it was done before. And so it'd be nice if. If our 10,000 year clock has a set of people who are continuous along with the clock and know about its history, know about its reasons for being. What is its reasons for being? It's, you know, we have a Statue of Liberty. How about a statue of continuity? And that's what this thing is.
- [64:05]
A
Do you know of any other projects for machines or artifacts or things that are supposed to hopefully keep moving for that length of time?
- [64:16]
B
It's become kind of a genre of land art, which in a sense, our clock is. It also happens that long. Now foundation owns the only privately owned grove of bristlecone pine trees up on top of a mountain in eastern Nevada. And one artist is going up there and is figuring out. Has figured out a way to measure Bristol and Pine time different from clock time in that it changes from year to year. He's measuring it basically by the growth characteristics of the bristlecones. And so this is an exhibit in Reno, Nevada, at art school there, showing bristlecone pine time for the next maybe 10,000 years.
- [65:16]
A
All right, that's good. Yeah. Maybe we'll figure out how to do maintenance on human beings to make them last that long. Eventually I'm not sure.
- [65:25]
B
Well, sure, a lot of people working on that. My goodness, you and I will probably die of old age, but I certainly will.
- [65:34]
A
But.
- [65:37]
B
That may become optional. I mean, there's a lot of people who want it to be optional. Yeah, I think it's downloading our mental capabilities and experience into something not so edible.
- [65:53]
A
Well, it's a tough area to have discussions about because there are respectable scientists who are thinking about longevity and things like that. But there's also a lot of somewhat flaky people out there who will sell you a line of goods if you're not too careful.
- [66:09]
B
And we've had those flaky people forever offering that kind of stuff, some of them the guys of religion. But we're also having some non flaky people. That's what's different now.
- [66:23]
A
So let me just ask you maybe as one of the final topics here, what are we ignoring in terms of maintenance? Like you say, we have this idea of infrastructure. We have all sorts of these technological systems that we're now pretty dependent on, whether it's the power grid or the Internet or whatever. Having thought about maintenance now for an extended period of time, is there something you're just shaking your head in disbelief that we're not doing maintenance wise?
- [66:52]
B
Part of the argument that this book is putting forward is humanity has gotten to the point of terraforming Earth. We have planetary scale impacts, and that's been going on actually for quite a while. But we now have, thanks to science, full awareness of it, full awareness of what the impacts largely are. And with climate change a major and for us, quite dangerous potential effect. So maintaining the planetary biosphere system. And by the way, civilization which is now global, it used to be various civilizations came and went and there was always some other civilization. You know, when Rome went down, actually it was just the Western Roman Empire. The Eastern Roman Empire went on for another thousand years. And then China was always up to something for a long time. And so civilizations come and go, but there's never been a time when we haven't had civilization actually going forward in the last 8,000 years, at least 10, maybe. So now that we have a global civilization, here's the question, Sean. We don't have a backup. Of course the line wants to go to Mars, so we have a backup there, but we sure don't have it yet. So with the global civilization, we know backup, does that mean it's extra fragile, are extra robust, extra resilient? And I'm pretty sure it's extra resilient, partly because so many parts of the civilization are quite different from each other. And one may go down and the rest of the world shrugs because they went down for their own good, bad reasons. The others can go along, and everybody can learn from each other's mistakes. Previous civilizations went down, didn't know about previous civilizations that had gone down. So they didn't know they were fragile. This is like when the passenger pigeon went exchanged. It was the first continental animal of great abundance to go exchange. And basically the extinction of the passenger pigeons was what made Teddy Roosevelt and others realize that they were about to lose the bison, the American bison, buffalo. And so the death of the passenger pigeons arranged for the survival and revival of the buffalo. That's the kind of knowledge that this global civilization has, that it has fragilities, but that we are in the process of learning what it takes to maintain a global civilization. We don't know exactly how to do that yet. We've only had it for a while. We've only thought about it for a while. We've only had parts of it suffer badly. And so we're still learning what it means to have that in mind. But one of the quotes I wound up using was from Pete Seeger when he was 85, and you may remember he was involved in a Hudson river sloop that they built to sort of go up and down the Hudson river busting industrial waste where it was coming out. And basically the hippies that built it lost track of taking care of it, maintaining it, wooden boat, very traditional gas rig and all that. And Pete Seeger saw that, and he said, because then they had to raise hundreds of thousands to completely refit the boat, basically rebuild it and get it back on the river in working condition. And Pete Seeger, who was behind all of this, said, you have to consider one of the major arcs of civilization is maintenance. That is, I think, an emergent perspective that will help us get through these turbulences that occur politically and militarily and so on, is that maintenance is profoundly. Is more essential than any of these other things that are flipping it around. And so I think it will be honored increasingly and engaged in a widely understood way. In Pinker's terms, everybody will not only know, but know how all of the maintenance of the issues and systems that we care about can go forward. And that can become a civilizational habit more knowledgeably held in mind than we have done before.
- [72:50]
A
You know, I always like to wind up the podcast on an optimistic note, and I think that you've just given us a wonderfully optimistic note. So I'm not going to press my luck and ask any more questions. Stuart Brand, thanks so much for being a guest on the Mindscape Podcast.
- [73:03]
B
Thank you, Sean.