Stewart Brand, Silicon Valley’s Favorite Prophet, on Life’s Most Important Principle

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Ezra Klein Show

Episode: Stewart Brand, Silicon Valley’s Favorite Prophet, on Life’s Most Important Principle
Date: April 24, 2026
Host: Ezra Klein
Guest: Stewart Brand

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Overview

In this episode, Ezra Klein sits down with Stewart Brand, legendary founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and enduring influence on both the counterculture and Silicon Valley. The conversation centers around Brand’s latest book, The Maintenance of Everything, Part One, exploring how the principle of maintenance—caring for what we have—can reshape our relationship to technology, community, civilization, and ourselves. The discussion traverses Brand’s storied history, the ethos of Silicon Valley past and present, the rise of AI, the politics of “right to repair,” the deep meaning of maintenance, and its parallels with care in human relationships.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Stewart Brand and the “Back to the Land” Movement

[04:45–07:18]

• Brand’s Hippie Roots: Brand recounts being part of the 1960s “Back to the Land” movement, aiming to reinvent civilization by returning to rural living and self-sufficiency.
  • “The 50s had been so successful it became kind of bland… we figured out ways to go wild and go deep… have their own rules and start over. They all failed, but they were all highly educational.” – Stewart Brand [05:01]
  • “We learned that free love isn't free... and the countryside is actually kind of boring, especially if you don't connect with your neighbors.” – Stewart Brand [06:09]
• The Whole Earth Catalog was created to empower these experimenters with knowledge, serving as a manual for those who “didn’t know how anything worked.”

What Was the Whole Earth Catalog?

[07:18–08:14]

• Described as a physically massive catalog, bigger than a laptop, filled with tools and books for self-sufficiency.
  • “Steve Jobs in his famous commencement speech said it was like Google, decades before Google came along… What it really did is what YouTube does now. It conferred agency.” – Stewart Brand [07:35]

Psychedelics and Perspective

[08:14–10:02]

• Brand clarifies the myth that LSD on a rooftop led him to campaign for NASA’s “whole Earth” photograph, noting his role was to popularize the vision and campaign for it.
  • “...It led to understanding the picture. I think for a lot of people.” – Stewart Brand [10:02]

Maintenance as an Ethos and Principle

[10:41–11:49]

• Definition: “It's gonna keep things going. I'm a biologist by training. Everything alive spends a lot of its time basically maintaining being alive, even to the extent of reaching outside itself.” – Stewart Brand [10:41]
• Maintenance is both personal (teeth, home repairs) and civilizational (cities, planet).
• “Civilization is something to maintain as a whole. And even the planet. We've now stepped up to terraforming.” – Stewart Brand [11:38]

Learning Maintenance and Technological Change

[11:49–15:20]

• Brand admits he’s a “bad maintainer,” which fuels his intellectual interest [11:53].
• Intelligibility in technology: Contrasting Ford’s Model T—a car designed for user maintainability and agency—versus Rolls Royce, designed for perfection but closed to user repairs.
  • “Ownership... is actually possessing the knowledge of what it's really about, how it functions… Doing maintenance on something is basically how you really take ownership of it…” – Stewart Brand [15:20]
• The shift from hackable, comprehensible tech toward sealed, opaque systems, especially in consumer electronics and AI.

AI, Intelligibility, and Human Agency

[19:26–23:13 | 21:01–23:56]

• Brand reflects on early Silicon Valley’s intelligibility versus current AI’s opacity.
  • “There was something almost ironic about this catalog that was so dedicated to making the world intelligible at this place where they… didn’t understand… their systems…” – Ezra Klein [19:26]
  • “They’re kind of alien intelligences… We can engineer at these levels more than we can understand.” – Stewart Brand [21:01]
• Pace and rhythm: How maintenance requires patience and thoughtfulness—the opposite of tech’s drive toward frictionless automation.

Modern Maintenance—Digital and Analog

[24:10–27:21]

• On YouTube as today’s “Whole Earth Catalog,” democratizing repair knowledge.
  • “YouTube has replaced manuals. It's replaced the whole Earth catalog in terms of conferring agency…” – Stewart Brand [24:50]
• Owning and living on a 1912 wooden tugboat as an experiment in perpetual, loving maintenance.
  • “Wooden boats don’t usually last more than a century. Ours has, because of a whole lot of maintenance.” – Stewart Brand [26:06]
  • “It's like living inside a beautiful violin…” [26:57]

Maintenance as Contemplative and Spiritual Practice

[27:21–29:52]

• “Treat the boring task as a ritual alive with aesthetic nuance…” – Stewart Brand [27:48]
• Japanese ritualization of everyday maintenance.
  • “Ritual is one way to make really, really repetitive maintenance less onerous.” – Stewart Brand [28:59]
• The discipline of “not moving too quickly”—diagnostic patience is essential, whether fixing a boat at sea or preserving a cathedral [29:52].

Maintenance and Care—Parallels in Human Relationships

[31:47–34:03]

• Maintenance theorized as “care” when it comes to people.
  • “Maintenance is what we call care when it is applied to things as opposed to people.” – Ezra Klein [31:47]
  • “Your children care back. That makes maintaining them completely different than maintaining your vehicles.” – Stewart Brand [34:03]
• The longing for “vehicles that care back” – and if AI will ever provide genuine reciprocal care [34:00–34:53].

The Internet, Agency, and Algorithmic Attention

[36:24–43:37]

• The dream that the Internet would empower users; the contemporary reality where users often feel acted upon by algorithms.
  • “You opened up the whole Earth catalog and you are the person turning the page… Over time things have become algorithmic and you can feel the systems sort of like moving around you…” – Ezra Klein [39:18]
• “Insatification” and the dominance of sponsored content, search manipulation, and declining user agency.
  • Brand describes the John Deere “right to repair” controversy: legacy manufacturers locking out users from repairing their own equipment.
  • “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.” – Stewart Brand [43:16]

Right to Repair and Policy

[43:37–45:57]

• Legislative efforts (e.g. in Massachusetts, Colorado) are gaining ground to guarantee user rights to maintain and repair what they own.
  • “Some companies… have such a… grip on their field… 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.” – Stewart Brand [45:47]

Practical Advice for Individuals

[45:57–48:13]

• How do you become a maintainer?
  • “I have the child.” – Stewart Brand [46:24]
  • Develop a relationship with things like you would with a child or pet. Use, respect, and care for quality tools and possessions.
  • Honor and recognize the importance—and status—of those who maintain, equating them to “the pillars of civilization.”
  • “The folk singer Pete Seeger said, you should consider that the essential art of civilization is maintenance.” – Stewart Brand [48:01]

Brand’s Changing Relationship with Maintenance

[48:13–50:00]

• Admits that age has forced him to confront maintenance more—of body, self, and environment.
  • “By the time you’re in your 80s, just being old is a halftime job… Maintainers are realists… always looking for what could go wrong and how can I get ahead of that... My shortcoming is I'm an optimist.” – Stewart Brand [48:40–50:00]

Book Recommendations

[50:06–52:29]

• David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: “Optimism at a cosmic level.”
• Simon Winchester, Exactly (formerly The Perfectionists): “How precision engineers created the modern world.”
• Diderot’s Encyclopedia & Encyclopedia Britannica: “Maintaining the Enlightenment values—‘the engagement with science, with engineering, with open discourse… that really needs to be maintained if we want to maintain civilization and the planet.’” – Stewart Brand [51:33]

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Notable Quotes

with timestamps and attribution

• “We learned that free love isn’t free… The countryside is actually kind of boring, especially if you don’t connect with your neighbors.”
  – Stewart Brand [06:09]

• “The Whole Earth catalog had all those books, you know, how to be a beekeeper, how to grow sheep… what it really did is what YouTube does now. It conferred agency.”
  – Stewart Brand [07:35]

• “Ownership… is actually possessing the knowledge of what it’s really about… Doing maintenance on something is basically how you really take ownership of it…”
  – Stewart Brand [15:20]

• “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.”
  – Stewart Brand [22:06]

• “Treat the boring task as a ritual alive with aesthetic nuance and a welcome respite from the clamor of thinking.”
  – Stewart Brand [27:48]

• “Maintenance is what we call care when it is applied to things as opposed to people.”
  – Ezra Klein [31:47]

• “Your children care back. That makes maintaining them completely different than maintaining your vehicles.”
  – Stewart Brand [34:03]

• “The folk singer Pete Seeger said, you should consider that the essential art of civilization is maintenance.”
  – Stewart Brand [48:01]

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Key Timestamps

• [05:01] – Brand on hippie era & Whole Earth vision
• [07:35] – The Whole Earth Catalog as proto-Google, source of agency
• [10:41] – Defining maintenance as biology, civilization
• [15:20] – Model T vs. Rolls Royce: Ownership as knowledge
• [21:01] – Brand on AI as “alien intelligence,” risk of opacity
• [24:50] – YouTube as the new Whole Earth Catalog
• [26:06] – Life on a wooden tugboat, analog maintenance
• [27:48] – Maintenance as contemplative practice
• [34:03] – Distinction between maintenance (things) and care (people, children)
• [39:18] – Ezra on the Internet shifting from user agency to algorithmic control
• [43:16] – John Deere, right-to-repair, and the politics of maintenance
• [45:47] – On when government must step in to guarantee right to repair
• [48:01] – Pete Seeger’s “art of civilization is maintenance”
• [50:06] – Brand’s three book recommendations

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Memorable Moments

• Redwoods and Hummingbirds Analogy: Brand likens the relationship between humans and AI to redwood trees and hummingbirds—“They’re linked… but the redwood isn’t capable of paying much attention to who’s in its branches.” [21:44]
• “Maintenance is half the job of being old”— Brand humorously reflects on how aging increases life’s maintenance demands. [48:40]
• DIY and Digital Agency: The shift from seeing technology as a platform for creativity (Model T, early Internet) to feeling “acted upon” by algorithmic systems (current Internet, AI). [39:18–41:09]

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Tone and Language

The conversation is reflective, insightful, and gently philosophical, with Brand offering a mix of personal anecdote, historical perspective, and a dash of wry humor. Klein’s tone remains curious, probing, and open, deftly connecting past ideals with present realities.

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Summary Takeaway

Stewart Brand’s philosophy, and this episode, draw a vital throughline from the hands-on, do-it-yourself ethos of the 1960s to today’s debates about technology, AI, and human agency. Maintenance—physical, mental, civilizational—is not merely tedium but a necessary, even noble, art that underpins civilization, fosters agency, and connects us to each other and the world. The challenge for the future is to ensure that, as our tools grow more complex and opaque, society preserves the ability—and the right—to maintain, repair, and understand the systems upon which we depend.

Transcript

[Tinos]

She knows how did you blab?

[Ezra Klein]

No.

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[Ezra Klein]

We've got an announcement before we begin the show. Today I am going to be hosting a forum on housing and affordability with some of the top California governor's 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

[Ezra Klein (Narration)]

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 to come up with is Stewart Brandt. Brand has one of these amazing lives where he seemed to be present, at least for a part of the culture, at almost everything that mattered there in the 60s, in 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 there with the Whole Earth Catalog, which Steve Jobs describ as an early inspiration for what we now think of as the Internet.

[Stewart Brand (Narration)]

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called the Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park. And he brought it to life with his poetic touch. 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.

[Ezra Klein (Narration)]

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 correspondent, Brian Eno. It is very, very long.

[Ezra Klein]

And along the way Brand has been

[Ezra Klein (Narration)]

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. And then most recently this book, the Maintenance of Everything, Part one, which explores something many of us would rather avoid, the constant and almost spiritually important work of fixing our cars, of doing home repairs, of caring for each other. Brand makes maintenance sound philosophically potent, even beautiful.

[Ezra Klein]

And one thing I think is interesting

[Ezra Klein (Narration)]

about this book at this moment, to be written by somebody with the weight of Brand is, 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, you know, 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.

[Ezra Klein]

So I want to have Brandon to

[Ezra Klein (Narration)]

talk to him about that and so much else that he's seen and thought over the years. As always, my email Ezra kleinshowytimes.com.

[Ezra Klein]

Stuart Brand, welcome to the show.

[Stewart Brand]

Well, thank you Esther. Glad to be here.

[Ezra Klein]

I want to start a little bit back in your history. In the 1960s, you were part of a movement that got called the Back to the Landers Communards. What was that? Hippies? What was that? How would you describe the vision there for society?

[Stewart Brand]

For various reasons, a whole lot of people basically in College in 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, decided that since civilization had to be reinvented, they had to deal 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 that free love 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 taking care of the kids like pioneer women used to have to do while the guys were building Domes and other interesting buildings. Another thing that we discovered was that the countryside is actually kind of boring, especially if you don't connect with your neighbors, which we did not mostly. And so we fled back to the cities. Some of us figured out how to do too many drugs and some of the rest of us noticed that and didn't. 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.

[Ezra Klein]

How would you describe what the Whole Earth catalog looked and felt like to somebody who's never seen one?

[Stewart Brand]

It was pretty big, actually. Bookstores complained about it because it's about as big as a laptop now, basically folio size and thicker than a laptop now.

[Ezra Klein]

I've seen them. It's big.

[Stewart Brand]

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 said 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 Whole Earth catalog was. And it turned out what it really did is what YouTube does now. It conferred agency.

[Ezra Klein]

You mentioned that among the communards, some of them did too many drugs. I've always wondered if this story about you is true, that the reason we have NASA's picture of the whole Earth came from you doing psychedelics on a roof one day.

[Stewart Brand]

Yeah, I was in San Francisco and kind of bored. And one of the things he did with 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 up on the roof of a $20 a month place that I lived in North Beach.

[Ezra Klein]

$20 a month in North Beach?

[Stewart Brand]

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Okay, that's already hard to believe, but it was true.

[Ezra Klein]

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.

[Stewart Brand]

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 wound up starting a campaign. There was a button that said, why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet? And I know it 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 Schweikert, when they took photographs. It came just a year or two later after my campaign got it.

[Ezra Klein]

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.

[Stewart Brand]

I think that's correct. But it led to understanding the picture. I think for a lot of people,

[Ezra Klein]

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 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 Earth catalog was also a manual for maintaining your life, for maintaining the things you had. Let's begin with the most basic question. What is maintenance?

[Stewart Brand]

It's going to keep things going. I'm a biologist by training. And so you find that everything alive spends a lot of its time basically maintaining being alive, even to the extent of reaching outside itself. So you're not just eating if you're a beaver. You're busy cutting down trees to maintain your dam, which is what protects your lodge. Most plants spend a lot of time basically helping the soil around them do things that work well for the plant. And the soil itself is alive. And we're always maintaining our bodies. We maintain our vehicles and our houses and homes and cities that we live in. And we're catching on that civilization is something to maintain as a whole. And even the planet. We've now stepped up to terraforming. So we've been terraforming badly, and we need to terraform well. So the levels of maintenance are enormous, and the constancy of it is a given.

[Ezra Klein]

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

[Stewart Brand]

Because I'm a bad maintainer. I brushed my teeth when I felt like it, and consequently I lost quite a few. And looking into the things that you're not good at, especially intellectually, I think is one way to stay young, because you got beginner's mind. But I did grow up with a Father who was a do it yourself kind of guy with a big bench in the basement. And I had a bench in the basement. And as you know, many software programmers began by building Heathkit radios and stuff. Well, that was me, too. I was building Heathkit radios.

[Ezra Klein]

You grew up in a time when the technologies we use are more intelligible. And something you track in the book is that some of them were designed to be that way. One of the really interesting stories you tell that I 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.

[Stewart Brand]

Well, they both began basically in 1908, and Ford was building a car that could manage American driving when it was all dirt roads. And so 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 have to take it back to Rolls Royce to do any upkeep on it. But if you got a Model T, it was basically just a platform for adding things that you wanted and doing the repair yourself.

[Ezra Klein]

There's a dimension of the way you describe what that made possible in the Ford, which is that it became, as you say, a platform. It became a space of creativity. People sold all these kits to change with the model. Table was. And it struck me, reading this, and you're very intertwined in the history of Silicon Valley, that it had a lot of the feeling of early technology, which people could hack and alter and add to in all kinds of ways, versus later technology, where you got to jailbreak an iPhone to do anything with it, where we now have AI systems. 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 in other technological eras, but also 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?

[Stewart Brand]

Well, I'M just working up on writing about the right to repair issues going on now. There's a question of ownership. Ownership, I think, is not just a question of having paid for and having legal possession of something. It's actually possessing the knowledge of, 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 we have a theory of mind. So you and I are talking. We each have a pretty good idea of what the other's doing, and 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. But the difference.

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[Tinos]

She knows how did you blab? No.

[Movie Trailer Announcer]

The Devil Wears Prada too. He's the movie event 20 Years in the making.

[Tinos]

Honestly can't with the secrets anymore. So I think we just. We should tell her. Will you two please spit it out

[Movie Trailer Announcer]

already on May 1st be the first to experience it only in theaters.

[Advertisement Voice]

In light of the recent scandal. I'm here to restore your credibility.

[Tinos]

Oh, cause we're a team now. That's a nice story.

[Movie Trailer Announcer]

The Devil wears Prada the second of maybe PG13 may be inappropriate for children under 13 only in Peter's May 1st

[Ezra Klein]

let me pick up on the AI question. Something that you write about in Maintenance of Everything, and in this section you're quoting the philosopher Matthew Crawford, is that there is a necessity to the Intelligibility is the word that gets used to 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 tools and ways to fix things and ways to know about things and to create a whole life in a do it yourself way. And the first place I ever saw one physically was in the offices of OpenAI. Really, when I visited them before ChatGPT. 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 as somebody who's just been around Silicon Valley a long time, I wonder what you make of that. As somebody who cares about whether or not we understand things well enough to work on them. We are now all the energy is creating things we don't understand so we can offload more of our work onto these systems we don't understand in a way that I think is also going to change who we are and what we are as human beings.

[Stewart Brand]

So AI is moving very fast and is solving a whole lot of problems. And of course it is creating a whole lot of new problems. They're kind of alien intelligences in a way. And one of the good things that happened with large language models is they trained basically on human communication and so they are in that sense intelligible as human intelligence. How it actually functions in there in terms of the extreme niceties of what's going on down at the bits and bytes level, is not so intelligible. 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 a 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 its branches or how fast they're moving. When introducing new kind of paste layers into the world we live in. And it's cellular, the brain moves really quickly. And these computers, because they don't have to use chemicals the way our brain does, they go a lot faster. We can engineer at these levels more than we can understand. Part of being a human society now is having a range of specialists that understand these things at depth, that can speak up and say, well, here's what we're pretty sure is going on.

[Ezra Klein]

I guess my question on this, and I'm going to be thinking about that redwoods and hummingbirds analogy for a little bit, is what role maintenance and the associated virtues and knowledge have in a world where technologically it's requiring now so much sophistication and specialization 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 Ts. And even if somebody was precision calibrating every single bolt in the Rolls Royce, somebody knew what those bolts did.

[Stewart Brand]

Yes.

[Ezra Klein]

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.

[Stewart Brand]

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, wake up and be a grown 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. Online access to information and parts is just astounding now. And that's I think the great solution for people, they'll have a problem with something they've owned for three or four years, and it came with a manual, but they misplaced that for sure. Well, it turns out they go online and here comes some recommendations for some videos for exactly your problem and exactly your make and model and year of the device that you're having trouble with. Actually, there's four different versions of the issue you have and four different solutions to doing it, one notably better than the other. You follow that and everything 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.

[Ezra Klein]

You've lived on a tugboat for 40 years?

[Stewart Brand]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

That must require a fair amount of maintenance.

[Stewart Brand]

Well, especially if the tugboat is made of 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 sea. They are all that stands between us and the wine dark sea trying to kill us. They're like a motorcycle in that respect. They're kind of hazardous. And so relying on them is an intimate process. So maintaining a boat 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 some doing, but it's worth doing.

[Ezra Klein]

One thing I enjoyed about the book is the way that it recasts work that can be described or thought of as tedious as almost a spiritual practice. You write, treat the boring task as a ritual alive with aesthetic nuance and a welcome respite from the clamor of thinking. Find your own contemplative practice. Tell me about that idea of maintenance as a contemplative practice.

[Stewart Brand]

Well, I can't do meditation. I get bored. But people who do meditation sort of embrace the boredom 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 with a ladder where they go up the pole and do a little formal thing at the beginning and another little formal thing at the end. And it turns the 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, may make a kind of a big deal of it. So ritual is one way to make really, really repetitive maintenance less onerous.

[Ezra Klein]

The other dimension that struck me as interesting when I read Contemplative Practice is that there's a lot of ideas about thinking in the book. And you quote quite a lot from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is a classic book. I was also very struck in the first chapter. You were 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 I did not want to crystallize my thinking prematurely.

[Stewart Brand]

Right.

[Ezra Klein]

And I really liked that line. Did not want to crystallize my thinking prematurely. Tell me about maintenance and speed, maintenance and rhythm. It comes up often in the motorcycle part of the book as well, about not moving too quickly.

[Stewart Brand]

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 when a couple years ago, they were in the process of doing maintenance on the Notre Dame steeple, the tallest part, where it was kind of rotted out, and they were doing work there because they were up there doing stuff that 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 this is reason to be cautious and take thought often for diagnosing the problem. In that particular case, Bernard Matissier had a steel boat that was pretty much waterproof, but he had a collision with a ship that bent the bowsprit 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 had heard from other maintainers. Don't just jump for the solution because you might make the problem worse. Think through the solution, disrupt the system minimally. In the process of figuring out what Needs to be fixed, fixing all 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.

[Ezra Klein]

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, among many other things.

[Stewart Brand]

Yeah.

[Ezra Klein]

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?

[Stewart Brand]

Well, I wound up most of the book is chapter two 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 Bergman who wrote, you cannot remain unmoved by the gentleness and confirmation of a well bred and well trained horse, more than a thousand pounds of big boned, well hostile animal, slick of coat and sweet of smell, obedient and mannerly, and yet forever menaced with its innocent power and ineradicable inclination to seek refuge in flight. And always a burden with its need to be fed and wormed and shod, with its liability to cuts and infections, to laming and heaves. But when it greets you with a knicker, nuzzles to your chest and regards you with a large and liquid eye, the question of where you want to be and what you want to do has been answered. And I end with I wonder if that might come again someday. A vehicle that can tear back.

[Ezra Klein]

Tell me what you make of that.

[Stewart Brand]

Your children care 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 who they are carrying.

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[Ezra Klein]

You've been around Silicon Valley 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?

[Stewart Brand]

Well, it's a classic case of David Deutsch's line about you solve certain problems and other problems emerge. The problems that we thought were being solved in terms of especially communication, that understanding that computers were communication devices. And isn't it amazing that we all still use email, which was one of the first things 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 iFixit 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 Negroponta used to say, it wasn't just advertising as noise, it was advertising as news that was focused on your expressed interest. And then that felt like, well, that was an invasion of our privacy, that it knew what I was interested in. In some cases, that's not welcome. In other cases, oh yeah, I didn't know about that thing. Thank you for letting me know. Except nobody ever thanks it, but they do act on it. And so that's what keeps these things going. So yeah, these problems keep coming up and they keep getting solved partially or other stuff comes along that replaces that whole domain, but it has problems. That's the nature of life.

[Ezra Klein]

Something you said a second ago that we act upon it. I have the feeling more and more when I am online, on social media, on YouTube, on TikTok, that I am being acted upon. You 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 catalog was we are. Was it? We are as gods and we might as well be good at it.

[Stewart Brand]

Get good at it.

[Ezra Klein]

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. 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, you know, early computer thinking, early web thinking was about the, the user and what they could do and how empowered they would be. And increasingly it feels like we are being given many, many offers to be sometimes wonderfully disempowered, but particularly the way the systems use our attention now it does feel like the volition has shifted. It 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.

[Stewart Brand]

I did.

[Ezra Klein]

And you know, a lot of his ideas about how different ways of structuring a medium change the person using it feel very relevant here. I'm curious if you think that's true or if that feels overstated to you.

[Stewart Brand]

Well, have you had Cory Doctorow on your show?

[Ezra Klein]

Yeah, we had an episode of Tim Wu and Cory Doctorow that just came out recently.

[Stewart Brand]

Excellent. So he's quite right. There's a lot of what he called insatification that's happened to various entities where basically sponsored content comes more and more in front of the content that you're asking for. And it's on Amazon, it's on Google, and so on 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, it was absolutely revered by its customers to the poster childs for right to repair because his customers were so furious at it for forcing them to julie 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. They just hated that. So I asked Gemini 3 how can I find out what the argument was within John Deere, within the company and said, well, you'll find it at 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.

[Ezra Klein]

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 would pass saying 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 made those things open to care, open to maintenance, whether you can get into the system, whether you can get into the innards. They do not want you getting inside an iPhone. And second, because often, as you say with John Deere, the company would make more money by just having you replace these technologies on a structured timetable. Whether or not society, government comes in and says, we actually are going to force you to make maintenance something people can do. 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 the government has to insist that the companies permit?

[Stewart Brand]

Yes. Yeah. And there's already some laws in place in places like Massachusetts and Colorado. It's moving pretty quickly and some companies are getting out in front of it. So I have a Tesla and Tesla is somewhat ahead of this one. They sort of fought back for a little while and then realized, 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 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.

[Ezra Klein]

So if somebody read this book and they wanted to make regular maintenance more of a part of their life, but didn't quite know how or where, 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

[Stewart Brand]

in this way I have the child

[Ezra Klein]

that's a big commitment to just learn about maintenance.

[Stewart Brand]

This is this I thou stuff that Martin Buber used to talk about having a relationship with your. Stuff that feels like a relationship you have with a child or with a pet. Let it become shiny with use with tools. The rulers. Get the best tools you can. If you use them all the time, get the best you can. Because then 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 taste 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, to the point that they do get recognized, they do get paid, and 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 the essential art of civilization is maintenance.

[Ezra Klein]

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 has 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?

[Stewart Brand]

I'm 87 years old. Guess what? By the time you're in your 80s, just being old is a halftime job. In the maintenance theory. This is called the vast sub 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 high maintenance toward the end. When you're in your 80s, you're toward the end, generically or probably genetically. I'm somewhat of an optimist. That's fatal for maintainers. Maintainers are realists. They're pessimists. They're always looking for what could go wrong and how can I get ahead of that. Or they hear a questionable something, and I might say, oh, I don't think that's serious. What maintains it says, that sounds like it's serious. So there's a whole attitude issue that one becomes aware of. And my shortcoming is I'm an optimist.

[Ezra Klein]

I think that's a good place to end. So as our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

[Stewart Brand]

I recommend David Deutsch's the Beginning of Infinity. It's basically optimism at a cosmic level, and it's full of the realization that there are Oz problems and there are solutions and that goes on infinitely your Oz at the beginning of infinity. When it comes to that, I recommend a book that used to be called, by Simon Winchester. It 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 was, 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 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, they were very impressed by and they all studied Diderot's encyclopedia and they came up with their own encyclopedia called the Encyclopedia Britannica, which went from strength to strength for 100 years. And basically the Scottish Enlightenment was the source of our constitution, which was an Enlightenment document of our Declaration of Independence. And that's what really needs to be maintained if we want to maintain civilization and the planet. Well, is the engagement with science, with engineering, with open discourse, with replacement of political leaders without bloodshed, basically dealing with problems in a way that we honor, that they can be corrected and that there will be other problems and being comfortable with that and moving with that and being as intelligent as we can be and managing all that. So those three books are what I recommend.

[Ezra Klein]

Stuart Brandt, thank you very much.

[Stewart Brand]

Thank you, Osra.

[Ezra Klein]

This episode of the israel clancho is produced by annie galvin. Fact checking by michelle harris. Our recording engineer is aman sahota. Our senior audio engineer is jeff geld. Our executive producer is claire gordon.

[Ezra Klein (Narration)]

The show's production team also includes roland

[Ezra Klein]

hu, marie cassion, marina king, jack mccordick, kristin lin, emma kalbeck and jan kobel. Original music by pat mccusker. Audience strategy by christina semiliewski and shannon busta. The director of new york times opinion audio is annie rose strasser.

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