The Unseen Work: Stewart Brand on Maintenance and Civilization

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Today is February 26th, 2026 and my guest is Stuart Brand. He was the co-founder and editor of the whole Earth catalog.

He founded the Well, the Global Business Network

and the Long Now Foundation. His latest book and the subject of today's conversation is Maintenance of Everything Part One. Stuart, welcome to econtalk. - Well, thank you and nice to be here.

Now, I have to confess, I loved your book. It's incredibly wide ranging and fascinating. It's every page, it's something interesting on it. But the subject matter of maintenance is something I have to confess I have little in my life.

I live in Jerusalem, we don't own a car, which used to be a part of my American maintenance life. I brush my teeth in the morning and in the evening. And I recently started going to the gym and I work out three times a week.

But I have no tools, I have no other than my toothbrush. I have no tools and my computer. I have no tools that I use regularly. I have a feeling you would have a different life. So I'm curious about the things in your life

that you maintain regularly in the tools that you use regularly. - Then you get to be 87, like I am.

“I think you'll find that the biggest maintenance item”

is your health. And when I was a young hippie, we all lived in the moment and it took us a while to figure out that I did do things like change the oil, even if you didn't feel like it.

So there's a discipline about maintenance, I think the emerges and some people find a way to make it kind of a enjoyable ritual. - Is it an enjoyable ritual for you, but not the health department, which is usually,

I'm talking about the use of tools or maintaining machinery or tools that you own or your home. Is that part of the course? - I've had boats, cell boats a lot and motor boats, and that's has been said.

Messing about with boats is a pleasure in its own right. I think people who have guns enjoy cleaning, and oiling it, and people who have motorcycles, I have a friend who had a Harley Davidson who was growing it up, and every Christmas,

he took it all the way to part all the way down to the last washer and screw, and we're bold. And then we put it back together again, and it was like he was putting his life together. - That's fun.

Is there, but other things like that in your life, over your lifetime, that we're meaningful to you, or the zen-like aspect of that ritual of something that's well-made. You know, my computer's very well-made.

I don't, the only maintenance I do to it is to occasionally clean the screen, but you're most of human history, the things that you needed to do your work had to be maintained, and I'm curious if in your life

that that was important has been a portable maintainer. - I do not maintain well it, and I think it goes along with being an optimist, and I have this sort of, probably,

the place of essential sense of things,

and in Plato's world, things never need maintenance, they're all so essencey, they're just standard way by themselves, and you know, I have an pessimist,

“well, I think the truth is that good maintainers”

are basically reals, and which probably looks to other people like pessimism, 'cause they look at their motorcycle, and they're looking for signs of oil weeks. They're wondering if they need to adjust this

Of course, that was to all the combustion engines, motorcycles and new ones that are electric, have almost no moving parts, no fluids worth mentioning, and maintenance on them is almost non-existent. - I remember when I was in my 20 early 20s

at Rana Marathon, and I paid attention, very slowly, four hours at 20 minutes, first Chicago Marathon. My most vivid memory of that experience was paying attention. For four hours and 20 minutes,

I was monitoring my body in a way I never would have to.

I was constantly aware of breaking down. The realism there was to vivid, I had to pay attention to the reality, but I like you an optimist, and when the timing belt of my Honda,

“I think it was my Honda, a court snapped,”

and my car stopped in the middle instantly. I consulted the man who found out, I had failed to replace it at 50,000 or 70. That whatever it was, I didn't make that mistake again, but in general, it takes an event like that

or a bad entry running, which I had before, which is why I was monitoring every step, to pay attention for me.

But I think there are a lot of people who take care

of their tools better than I do. - Well, I think your computer, you probably do a certain amount of computer hygiene on there to keep things basically updated, and I'm trying to get rid of the things

that are cluttering the world there. And so as we move into more and more of the general way of life, or just covering other kinds of maintenance needed happen,

“I think one of the potential great things”

will come from AI being applied is software people who are first, who are boring maintenance, who they have to do all the time with back in, and sometimes they're front end of software, they're referred to as toil.

And they're always trying to automate basically out in front,

but to see other things about the fail, and have the software just notice that and put in the fix. I think the AI is gonna help a lot with that, but then we'll be in this weird circumstance.

We're gonna spend more and more of our life arguing with robots. These things have automatic procedures based on somebody else's idea of what will be obvious and not obvious when you're messing with it.

“And you have to figure out what they thought”

you should behave like now to do that. And so there's a lot of this kind of guessing into what the AI is up to, because it's not quite limited just to talk to you, but it's not human.

- Yeah, I said when I was running, I was paying attention. I think the other, the better word, might be vigilance. And when you're in danger, when you're in danger, risk, your vigilant, and you have a natural incentive to be vigilant.

And I think about AI, and I'm thinking now about self repairing software programs, yourself updating, you talk about the Tesla, updating itself constantly through the cloud and web. But if we, it'll be interesting to see the effect

of the loss of our own normal habits of vigilance has so many uncertainties, our, we relegate, delegate those to other agents, and they won't be human ones, probably. - Well, it's, I must ask all the way down.

And you know, governor's on the steam engines, and a lot of things, which take care of, of keeping something in proper running mode, and it's a lot to circumstances, the temperature goes down to the room,

and the furnace turns on or whatever. So we've been dealing with this kind of thing a long time, and it's just part of being alive is being in communication with the systems we rely on. And it's time goes by and civilization gets

ever more complex and rich and interesting and great. It has plenty of things to have to figure out how you'd deal with it.

for people that when you're mystified by something,

you know, you put in a couple of words that make and model of the thing in the way you think it's broken. And I'll look around on YouTube, I'm pretty sure you find somebody who's ready to help you.

Show you how to actually make that face or do that mean. And so understand the basic functioning of how the thing that you're mysturiously, that you're feeling is too mysterious to either to understand or fix your understanding,

and you fix it, it's fantastic. - Well, my mom passed away about three weeks ago, so she's on my mind. - I like that much. - And I've told this story before,

but my mom would call me about trying to figure something out

“and I think to myself, and sometimes I tell her,”

but after a while I realize that's a serer, but it's just Google it, just look it up. In this case, you can't figure out something works. You don't have the manual, you throw away the manual, you don't come with the manual, just what are you doing?

And now it's, you know, get happy to me today. I was having a Zoom problem, and I asked a colleague, you know, what do I do with what I said this works? She said, well, did you ask Claude yet? Oh, you know, of course I didn't ask Claude,

but it took me a while to realize that my mom, of course I'm becoming my mom and my dad. But my mom, she wasn't calling me to find out how to fix the computer problem. She was dealing with, she's kind of talked to me.

And she was, and that whole way that we've now delegated so much of our problems in life to algorithm's systems and machines, it's something's lost there, something gained too, right?

“It's a really, there's something marvelous about it”

and something, it's a little bit sad. Yeah, well, I used to be in the case, and no, one of the things that was interesting about the hippie generation that I was part of, is not only were we deciding to be a little attention

or just respectful attention to our parents. We were doing that to experts of every kind and even neighbors. And this is sort of what made the whole earth catalog succeed in the way it was, most of the stuff

that was in the whole earth catalog back in the sixies who was booked, how two books. And hippie's eight types of stuff up. You know, we got the various guide fixing your books walking and went through the step by step process.

It was in there and actually there's not a fixer of all of the slogans. But we can learn from a mechanic, we learn from a book that my mechanic wrote, that's really sweet, that's lovely. Now, your book starts with something called

the Sunday Times Gold and Globe Race of 1968. And I confess I had not heard about it. It's a extraordinary set of things that happened in that race

that you chronicle really in a very, very powerful way.

I just, I want to read the rules to our listeners and then I want to ask you something about it. This is from an article written on boats.com about what the rules were. Competitors had to, it was announced on March 17th.

“So the announcement goes out that you have to leave”

on the race between the months of June and October. And that was to avoid the Southern one. At the goal of the race is to circumnaficate the globe. So you had to sail south of all the great capes, good hope, Lewin and Caporn, you could have no outside assistance,

or anyone aboard the ship during the voyage, including mail delivery. So it's a single human being on the boat, circling the globe on a sail boat.

And the first to finish back in England

from any port north of Florida to Greece, North. So you could start from a Mediterranean port. If necessary, though, none did, would be awarded the Golden Globe trophy. So the first finisher, leaving after March,

who got back to England, would get a trophy, but there was a monetary prize for winning on a lapstime. The person did it the most quickly. Would get about, would be awarded 5,000 British pounds, a sizeable sum in those days, enough to buy a house in London.

That's the end of the announcement of the rules. And we learn that out of the nine people-- - You are the true economists in this area. - Well, I love that. - You figured out what 5,000 pounds did you do?

- That's not my line. - No, I didn't do that.

I'm sorry.

- I would as the economists point out

that it would be a big difference

“between a house in London and 1968 in a house today.”

- Because there's been-- - Oh yeah. - Not just inflation. There's been particularly high increases in the price of housing relatively.

But anyway, put that aside. So nine people end of the race, one finisher, that's Robin Knox Johnson. He takes 312 days to go around the globe and thinking about this.

He's spent 312 days completely alone. And the rest failed. So the two questions that we're going to-- I want you to expound on what you do in the book for you beautifully.

What did Robin Knox Johnson do right?

“And what are the other folks do wrong, do poorly?”

And there's a-- there's an asterisk that there is one of the nine who though he doesn't finish is rather interesting. - Yeah. - Yeah.

So you had 3 people that had books written by them or about them. On John the Crowhurst and Bernard Montesciais. Sailor, I knew about when he lived on his boat and saw so he don't call for you.

And Robin Knox Johnson was a young guy, 29.

He was the third guy written by him.

And he had a pretty short sailboat, 20, some feet that went slower than any other boats because of that. But he had sailed it from India to England with friends. And he felt he knew it very well.

“He had been trained by the merchant marine”

and doing maintenance. And so he felt that even though it wasn't boat and we didn't go fast nevertheless, so it was what he had, and he would make you and men, as they said.

John Crowhurst entered the race very late and thought that he was so smart that he would use a new kind of sailboat called the Firemorean, which is a central home with a two big sides on the reach out.

And so it doesn't trip over, except that when it does trip over and turns upside down, you can't write it up. But it's much faster because it doesn't go deep in the water, it's not a lot of friction. And so Bernard Montesciais had done

actually some of the longest sailing of anyone including on the southern ocean, which is violent. And so he had a steel boat made. And it was fast and it was solid and it was simple. So John Crowhurst tried to take care of everything

with Cleopernus, and he actually hated doing men and he called it sailorizing. And he surfed it quite a lot. And pretty quickly discovered that it's both had been built so hastily that it was going

to follow a part of he went into the southern ocean. So another lesson had a big opening and one of the pond tunes. And so he started cheating by calling a shore and pretending to be somebody else and getting a fix and then going back out.

And then radio at that time, these guys in 1968, that was pretty primitive. They were basically sailing away and sister had for 100 some years at that point, which was a major own weather forecast based on what you were seeing

with the clouds and the wind and the swell on that sort of thing. And here in the southern ocean, it's means the rocious storms from time to time and it went blasting from the west all the time. So crawfish, rocious radios.

And he figured out a way to pretend to be going around the world, all the signals, basically the telegram.

So he was sending back and meanwhile, he never left

the Atlantic Ocean by the time it was getting toward the end of the way.

We were going to discover it, it would be a horrible scandal. He would have failed his family.

“They wouldn't be any money, there'd be lots of blame.”

And he could be interested in suicide. Went off the boat. And we discovered, we discovered his journal. Eventually, where he chronicled his thoughts and he had serious mental issues, it appeared in what he was writing.

Yeah, you weren't crazy. And for 10 days, he was imagining that he could stipulate reality. And he came up with a whole theory of how Einstein and him were smart enough to be able to stipulate reality.

And that lasted just to the 10 and 10 states. And he realized it wasn't going to work. And I came over, and as I said, he had or he crossed his own financial line into the ocean.

And he never did leave the Atlantic Ocean.

So that was the terrible maintainer for a model day. But I'm a testier. I've done so much sailing. He was older than many of the other competitors. And he designed his boat to be not need much maintenance

and to be easy to maintain. And for example, he had steps that went up the mast. So if you needed to do something at the top of the mast, which you do when you're at sea for a long time, under dire circumstances, he could just go straight up.

There's no exhaustion at a boson's chair who you didn't try to haul himself up, and you can only do that in a dead calm. He tried to, one time, I went away as well, and he almost got killed. So the way things wound up is that an arm protestier loved

being a sea alone, sailing fast. He just loved it. And by the time he was rounding the bottom of both South America and heading back toward England, he decided not-- and he was going to win.

He was probably going to win both prizes. And I mean, even though he left later, his boat was faster.

So he was going to win to the finish line first.

And his last time would beat. Yeah.

“So that's what everybody was expecting to do.”

France was a group of fleet or naval vessels that couldn't meet him, and take him home to France. He was going to get a village in a water. But Matashi ate really dreaded all of that. I hated it.

He thought all of that fuss and stuff. He was loving it. He was doing so much. And he just decided to keep going. And he had lived until he was four.

So he didn't want the allowed to keep going alone without living up at all over the world. And he went on to the heady. So he sailed and decided not to finish. And he wrote a beautiful book called The Long Way

that knocked Johnson's book with the world of my own.

The one about Robin Crow first was

the strange voice of Donald Trump first. And that was where they basically examined his log books and the cell boat was intact. So all of the bad maintenance was clearly visible. And so on.

There are three great stories. And they come together in a way that I'm saying basically it wasn't just will. It was maintenance styles that differentiate these three. And Robin Knox Johnson's was whatever comes,

kill with it. And he was incredibly resourceful at dealing with problems. And my mind, in my mind, I'm thinking of, well, you know, it's hard to sail in storms.

“And OK, and you have to bring enough food and water and OK.”

And but he was constantly fixing his boat, sewing his sails, straightening things that got bent by broken by storm, constantly innovating. And as you point out, many times, most of the solutions were an obvious at first.

He had to sort of sit and think and struggle with the fact that nothing was happening and that it was broken and then figured out. - Incredible. - Yep.

He needed to solder a joint. But he completely equipped the boat, but he didn't have any solder.

“But he had some extra bulbs that he carefully”

just assembled. There were little tiny dots with solder and there, he collected those enough and found a way to heat it and melt it and re-sauder that connection. And that was classic Robin enough Johnson.

He was later ignited, of course, by the queen, the surre of them. On, so his, this was making an advantage and, whatever becomes steel with it, the stance of the optimist,

the kind of the pathological optimist

of Donald Crow first was, oh, for the past.

(laughing) You know, I killed him. Life was a cheat and the cheat killed him.

“But I'm a Tashi, it was the paraphernal worst.”

And in my view, it freed him. That gave him the sense that, so even in a storm, there were plenty of them, he got knocked down, capsized several times.

But he was relatively relaxed about it because even though single handings through a storm is extremely tiring, he didn't worry about it as equipment failing

because he built it very strong in the first place

and then maintained it daily. When he told me when I talked to him, I was, and I said, yeah, I've been very fed, cell-boat here, and he said the rule is new every day. Basically, a cell-boat, it's just been made.

“So that ones are being the beginning of the block,”

'cause it's just a nice, kind of beautifully soft package to the fable, to tell. And the point I'm making is the first line of the checks for the block is probably a great many famous stories can be retolds

in terms of maintenance. Here's one, and then I tell the goal of golf story. But in a way, the old book is revisiting various famous situations, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Egyptian invasion of the Sinai across the Suicide

was canal in 1973, or with this rule. In those cases, the army that was better at maintenance prevails. And militaries are really the place to look for a good theory in practice on maintenance.

So I wound up chapter two of the book was gonna be vehicles, but I had a call of vehicles, parentheses, and weapons, 'cause I wound up telling a lot of weapons stories. - Well, the story you tell of the the AK-47 in Vietnam, which was the Vietnamese Russian-supplied machine,

assault rifle, whatever you wanna call it, automatic rifle, and the American army equipped with, what is an iconic name in weapons, but the time was an abstract failure, which I knew nothing about, which was fascinating,

is the M-16. So the M-16 was essentially not functional. The American military equipped its soldiers in a lethal situation with a gun that constantly jammed and could not be repaired easily.

The AK-47, which is quote an inferior weapon, it didn't, wasn't as elegant or smooth, or fire quite as well, but you could keep firing, and when it didn't fire, you could fix it, and it made all the difference.

It's an incredible example.

- It made all the difference. - Yeah, and so in fire fights, and they go fights, you know, first really bloody combat between the BC and the American troops and Marines, was I used to be in the army, and then tried rifle training

among other things. The AK-47s, the animation, were incredibly reliable and incredibly easy to clean and fit, and they had, when it solved rifle jammed,

You can't get it out, any other way,

except running basically a cleaning rod down the barrel

from the front and poke it out from inside. You can't slide out, and so a number of American soldiers were found next to their disassembled M-16, trying to get the bullet in the chamber out. The AK-47s has a cleaning rod mounted right under the barrel.

“And so, for the chance, you should grab that, run it down,”

it's the length of the least we've run it down, and you won't jam the rifle and it'll carry on just fine. American troops eventually, but not at the beginning, they didn't have a thing in rods with them in the field. Then they started to put some energy in the butt

in a little compartment that you would have to open up. The AK-47s fully up rod, matching here in combat, you're running or you're flat on the ground trying to do all this stuff. Unfold the things glued together, and it was running down the barrel.

So the AK-47 was designed from the start to be incredibly reliable. It was going to be used by Russian conscripts who many from three reads. There was not going to be a silhouette training, there was not going to be a manual. It had to be pretty obvious how it worked,

and so it was easy to feel strep, easy to clean, easy to put back together. That was the opposite case for the M16, which I love. The other thing you learn from the book that are not directly related to maintenance,

but the unseen aspect of things that should maintenance your pointing out as one of them is very powerful.

On the surface, the M16 is a quote "better rifle." Then the AK-47, just not practice.

“The only thing that matters is practice.”

They weren't, they weren't test the model out in the field. They tested it on firing ranges where you don't have mud, and you don't have stress, and you don't have dust, and it's a fantastic lesson about what best we can do. In Vietnam, they seem to be in the environment, they were bushing out pretty quickly,

and it's great out to 500 meters, but generally you can't see 500 meters between the jungle, and things are all close and personal. Some of the Marines wound up using their rifles is clogged, and they can't cop out in the jungle. But then again, in Iraq, the guy got 500 meters of distance sometimes to the enemy,

but the sand just gets into everything, and everything you oil, the sand gets into it, and then that turns out to be something that bades the weapon. So basically, they had to keep an M16 surgically clean to really function well, which is implausible, as a strategy. The Egyptian invasion in 1973, what's extraordinary about that story,

is that for cultural reasons and the way their army was functioning, there was very little role for initiative and trust among the troops in Egypt, and as a result, when things broke, people just, they left them, they didn't know how to fix them, knowledge was very, you point out knowledge was very secretive, because it conferred honor and privilege,

and so the Egyptians and the Syrians, by the way, lost, as you point out, enormous numbers of tanks and battles where they had an incredible numerical advantage, whereas the Israelis are constantly repairing and getting things back into the interaction, often the Egyptians were abandoning, and the Russians similarly in the Ukrainian war,

and that's a piece of that story, that war I've never heard, it was fascinating.

“And remember the Egyptians were equipped and trained by the Russians,”

and the Russian army is equipment and troops are disposable, dispensable,

They're often good on maintainability, AK47 is a Russian weapon, and the K-55 tanks that they feel that free Egyptians in that war,

“were pretty solid, I think the most probably used tank in the history of the world.”

But, you know, it was desert warfare, and it was warfare, and the weapons go down, and like you say, there was a kind of a problem. I love this, because one of the things about the American army and the NATO military is they all have non-commissioned officers, sergeants, they have a lot of power, a lot of respect. They're usually the most experienced person in any unit, the officers' respects them,

and the troops' respects them, and there's people responsible for maintenance and for teaching. So the, which in a way is how they maintain troops is by training. So the,

“and there was pretty good on COS, and it was really army, and they've been training them up in the Ukrainian army,”

because originally they had a sort of Russian system, but it became closer and closer with NATO, they started developing at COS schools. The Arab army is generally in the Egyptian city, and one is in a particular, have a kind of a case system where officers see themselves as quite superior to the troops.

And they are not hands-on, and any respect they're probably never touched anything.

That's for what troops do, and again, maintenance all is just done by the troops. But if you don't have officers who connect with that and have NCOs in the middle, which mostly the Arab army's don't, then the whole thing falls apart. And that turned out to be in both cases in Ukraine and in Israel. Pretty much the difference between victory and defeat.

I mean, you point out that the British auto industry, a similar problem perhaps is responsible for their locality, a class system where people don't easily give over authority to people seen as beneath them. I want to say two things about the Israeli army. One is their famous for allowing initiative and a flat under bottom up initiative system where people are encouraged to take charge of things. But I would also add that on October 7th and the weeks that followed when

reservists came back to serve, they discovered that many of the stockpiled equipment, much of the stockpiled equipment had not been maintained, was needed replacement badly.

And enormous, to me, one of the incredible stories of the war that has been told well,

but an enormous private voluntary effort came about where units were often provisioning themselves by making their own purchases using donations from American Jewish community and elsewhere, because the ceramic vessel was outdated or the helmet was outdated. Now, part of that is not rational to stockpile large sums of equipment when you don't expect to often have to mobilize 120% of your reserves. I wish what they ended up with. But the other thing I would

“argue though, which is also, I think, very Middle Eastern is that Israel is very bad at preventive”

behavior, which is a form of maintenance. And really, yeah, very bad. Very bad. They don't.

You have an explanation for that. I'll try and a second, but the flip side of that is they're

extraordinary adaptive behavior. So things go wrong because they weren't prepared. We weren't prepared here. But the ability of the average is really soldier and it goes way beyond the military to come in the aftermath of failing to prepare for something is quite extraordinary. And it's a little like Robin Knox Johnson. You know, it's true that we didn't prepare for everything and well, I think they're going to break, but we're really going to fix them. And that's true in the

it probably is something to with the Middle Eastern culture generally. So it's that optimism, foolish optimism

“combined with the belief that you will be able to cope with it eventually. But you don't have the”

caste system to mess up the response, maybe. I want to ask you a personal question. You could duck it if you want. But I don't think there are a lot of hippies from the 60s who were rifle instructors and I'm curious why in your with that past what that was like did that make challenging conversation with your friends? What was that about? Well, I grew up in the Midwest in Rockford, Illinois. And serving in the military was kind of a routine thing. This is before the Vietnam War

“and so places like Stanford where I eventually went had ROTC programs for serve officer training.”

And my older sister had married a West Point officer at Tillerman. And my older brother Mike at Stanford, I guess gone to ROTC and then went off to serve for two years after duty. And so I liked the idea of the military. I like to I love training and both doing it and especially receiving it. So I did parachute training and at least part of Ranger training to cold the water to make it through that.

So and training been trained as an officer, you basically it's a skill and so you develop a command

voice and I respect you of being charged with something. And so when I started things like the Holocaust catalog, I wasn't preferential or uncertain about just taking charge and doing it, then being responsible for other people's behavior and doing the things I've been taught to encourage good work and correct bad work. So I mean one of the things you learn in the military is at least the American military is commanding people to do a thing. It doesn't mean it's going to

“happen. You have to monitor it. And then after you know any kind of action, you do an after action”

review. Right after when everybody still sweating and wiped out and so on, but everything's fresh in their mind. Well, one of the lessons here. What do we do different next time? It's how you do stuff. So among hippies, I and other people I knew Ken Kesey's Mary Prens III said in a group, it's military people. And there's Ken Kesey's best friend, Ken Babes, had been a helicopter pilot an officer in Vietnam. And he was an easy commander. Right, right, right. Let's get into this.

Yeah, it's one of the things you got to learn to do and then take for granted.

And some of, I'm sure a few, just a couple of our listeners have never seen the whole Earth Ken

log, one of the aspects of it was, the subtitle was access to tools and it was a catalog, but it also had a philosophy underlying it. It had a picture of the whole Earth, which of course was an available until the late 60s from NASA. And what were you trying to, what were you trying to achieve with that? And what was it, tell people what it was? Well, it was a little, I had an LSD one day in San Francisco and spring in 1966 gone up on the roof for the apartment I would have lived in

at North Beach and over the kind of a low-dose hundred micrograms with LSD and was just

buildings were on a spherical surface and that they actually found out a little bit. And then

“I imagined myself going further and further out and I could see the curve and then the curve”

that closed all around itself of the Earth. You know, kind of we've been in space for 10 years at this point, which we had, Sputnik was back in 56, but I asked him to have been here photographs a lot of the girls as well as all from a distance. So I figured, okay, I'm going to make this happen, I'm going to make a button. And the button is going to say in a mobile mobile menu, I want up with, like said, slightly paranoid question. Why happened? We've seen a photograph

of the whole Earth yet. And I sent him up, give up Politburo and Soviet Union and I sent him to people in American Congress and their secretaries and I sent him to NASA. I got to know some

“of the astronauts later, and of course, wondering if any of that had gotten to them and I was”

trying to strike it with the one I know was, he said, no, you know, we were surprised when that photograph was taken on what came to be called Earth's rise. That is where the Earth comes around the way of the moon. And that photograph of a dead planet at the foreground of the moon and freely living beautiful, true, like blue and white Earth from a distance was just inspiring. And it's a time, an environmentalist, which I was one of those biologists by training and ecologist

specifically. They had been completely against the spacecraft program. My mother had loved it, and so I grew up loving it. And the Earth day followed immediately after that photograph

for the Earth from space. And basically the whole environmental movement took off with that photograph,

so the environmentalists want the wrong thing. Yeah. I want to, but the catalog itself was a set of, you said, much of it were of it consisted of books about how to do things, so you wouldn't need other authorities and so on. But it had, it was a, it was a serious catalog

“for Mark, do it yourself, motivated people. It was a catalog of literally of tools, right?”

Yeah, tools and skills. And I mean, I was a kid who was going out, thanks to my father, who was a banker. He was a civil engineer out of MIT. You know, he had a, a bench in the basement, and I had a bench in the basement, and I was building his kid ready, I was along with everybody else who wound up doing software. And that, that's probably part of why I was comfortable around the beginnings of the personal computers later on.

Yeah, and I, you know, just to be, again, for people who don't know, we do, the catalog had a much larger influence than being merely a place you could find stuff you didn't know where it was. It had a philosophy underlying it. So just say something about that. Well, I tried at the beginning of an opening page, you know, it was in a big issue. We are as gods, and might as well get good at it. And by which I meant lowercase gods,

just very powerful. We have these amazing tools and capabilities. And they are what

would have been seen in earlier times as gods like powers. And so step up to it. Of the heart of the hippiest they go into two back away from it, and to be anti-technology. And once you take the idea of tools seriously, which I picked up from Mr. Fuller, then baritools are great interest, and baritools are often increasingly high-tech. So whenever, you know, like the first calculators, and then a programable calculator,

we were pushing those things in the Holars catalog. I guess that became part of the bridge,

I spent some time working with them, and realized it was self-canceling. So I was more in the 10KC, very youngsters, version of counter-culture. And what I knew was that people who were starting communes, and I was involved in several of them, were basically college graduates, or college dropouts, who had really no idea how many things worked. So they were mentioning they were going to go back to basics and garden,

but they didn't know how to garden. I didn't know how to be surrounded with goats, or why you might wanted to do that, or anything. I was just earnest, and ignorant. So gold opportunity for to come up with a place where I'd like you to now, in the Holars catalog, then here's all the skills

“you need to do, whatever you want. It's very beautiful. I want to talk for a minute about the”

a contrast that you highlight in the book and you use the Rolls Royce and the Model T.

And I've always thought of the Model T as being important because of an assembly line,

and that that assembly line allowed relatively inexpensive vehicle to be available to the masses, and that that was really an important, mostly wonderful thing. But what I didn't appreciate was the simplicity of the Model T, and its ability, like the Volkswagen later, to attract tinkers and people who wanted to replace things, and I want to just give a couple of facts here that you highlight, the two approaches to precision deployed by Henry Royce and Henry Ford,

“led to two versions of success. Rolls Royce produced the best cars in the world, nearly 8,000”

of them. In 20 years, in the same 20 years, Ford made the most popular cars over 15 million,

close quote, that I love this statistic, the Rolls Royce factory produced two cars a day, which is an enormous achievement. Let's not under value, but the Model T factory produced a car every three minutes, and that is just, I just find that, it gives me goosebumps actually. It's extraordinary how unleashing the power of the assembly line as the simplicity of the design. But the other part of it, and this is the part that's more directly related to your book,

and it reminded me of Southwest Airlines. Southwest Airlines only has one kind of plane. They have

“the 737. They have some different models of it, but they're trying to even move to a single model”

now, the 737, and I understand, and the value of that is one of those hidden things. The hidden

thing is that you can always, all the people who work on what every plane looks like,

no matter where they are, they know how to clean it, they know how to repair it, they know how to maintain it, and then the parts are all the same. So it's much easier to provision the parts. So the Model T I never realized had that aspect. Every junkyard, which was a part of my youth, it's not a part of anyone's youth today, was a warehouse of parts, because your Model T was just like that one from 15 years ago, that broke for one reason, but the other parts are all good,

and you can use them. And the Model T was a sort of a platform, the Rolls Royce, you would not tailor it, because it was so perfectly assembled and exquisite, doing the things that it did very well. Running very powerfully, but very silently, the silver ghost was the name of that earliest one. And the Model T was noisy. And it was basically an interpretation to just to get to the function properly, he had to buy some extra things to add in there, and yet to learn

how to grease it, and how to get it to start. And everybody knew how to fix, they had to know how to fix so the Model T is, and so it was this great common knowledge. And even if you didn't understand

But then they turned it into tractors, they turned it into boats, they turned it into airplanes,

“the basic intern of the Model T was simple enough, and fixable enough, and adjustable. So you”

could really adapt it, any old which way. And in a way that, and that let's hook off, that basically they taught the world to then you could buy something, and then adjust it to your life, your ideas, your dreams, and it took off. I mean, it made farther, it just ran into the world, like quite a long bit. And when personal computers came along later, they went through the same process that individuals were empowered to basically start programming their machine,

and adjusted to things that they wanted to do when I put another split together and called the Hackers Conference in 1984. People had, you know, just individuals had come up with a software that was used by everybody, and it was sent software from place to place, and we did, and you had this democratically empowering and empowered massive event where everybody had some have a model seen, and they could afford it. Everybody had to have a personal computer, and they

could afford it. And I dare say that AI is going to be moving in the same direction. I certainly

use it for research, July 3, grow, and just brilliant for me. It finds sources that I would never

“have found on my own. And that's what you're going to see more and more up in the forthcoming”

sections, so for making it so everything. Yeah, this is only part one. But I want to say something about, and this is strange. Your book really prompted this thought. The model T is the early part of the 20th century, and it's a machine. It's very much a machine. It's replacing a very sensual physical breathing creature, a horse, with a machine. And yet I'm sure, and this is just speculation about I bet people have written about it, through this process of both having to be intimate with

it in repair, and intimate with it in customizing it to the uses that you wanted it to have.

“I think probably people had an emotional connection to that vehicle that maybe was foreshadowing”

the way we think about some of our machines and tools today. I think about my my my phone, which the app store allows of course allows me to customize this experience to my heart's desire. I don't repair it, and in certain we can contrast machines that were seedled. Do not touch it, do not open this. You would void your warranty, et cetera. Versus machines that people were

encouraged to tinker with. And the model T was one of the first ones, which is I'd never thought

about that. But I want to read a quote from the book from the philosopher Albert Bohrman, I'd never seen this quote. It's quite extraordinary. And then you can react to my speculations quote. You cannot remain unmoved by the gentleness and confirmation of a well bread and well-trained horse. More than a thousand bounds of big-bone, well-muscled animal, slick of coat and sweet of smell, obedient and manorly, and yet forever immense with its innocent

power in inerradicable inclination to seek refuge in flight and always a burden. But it's need to be

fed, warmed, and shod with its liability to cut sit infections, to laiming, and heaves. But when it greets you with a nicker, nuzzles your chest and regards you with a large and liquid eye, the question at where you want to be and what you want to do has been answered. Close quote. And in

placed it with the unliving tools that we still have a connection to. And you say something quite

“extraordinary after this quote, you say I wonder if that might come against some day of vehicle”

that cares back. And that's a reference to the possible sentience and consciousness of AI and other things. But I just talk about that whole idea of maintenance as building a connection between us and other things. Of course, parents feel this with their children. We take care of our children for anywhere from 20 years or more and we become close to them and more close to them than they are to us because we are giving the care. But anyway, I'm rambling just react to that. That's an interesting

asymmetry right about that. And I've always regretted that our hippies were mean to our parents.

That was just stupid. And I can tell you that when hippies were produced and they had children, they were shocked that their children were just loving. And not nasty. Well, they do have been told lots of regrets there. But one generation makes a mistake. The next generation knows there was

“a mistake. What do your thoughts about how maintenance can actually to things and non-breathing things?”

Do you agree with me or do you disagree? Oh, no, I agree. And part of one of the things we do with pets is to take on this intimate relation which is a whole lot to do with taking care of them and feeding them and taking them to the vet and so on. And they tear it back. I have an economic question for you. No, go ahead. I intend to have a lot of stuff on infrastructure in the book later on. And one of the

huge things of mega structures. Here I'm going to draw on the economist at Oxford who did a book call it how big things get done. And I got in touch with them and in college and said, okay, infrastructure maintenance, tell me how to see anything in your books about everything is about

“building. Well, or badly, these various mega structures of infrastructure. And what about maintenance?”

And he said, I can't tell you anything. And I'm okay, come on. You've looked at this stuff. You've looked at the comparative all over the world. You know all that all those inside out and said, I can't tell you anything about maintenance. And apparently what happens is that operations and maintenance are so blended together. Well, definitely an economic reporting terms that the expenditure of time and money and effort and resources into keeping the thing

going versus operating it to make it function for what it was built to do is not distinguished enough for somebody like him to do anything analysis on it. Is that, can you explain that? I can't, but I have a thought, which I mean, I haven't thought about. I'll share the thought.

The first thought is that as you point out maintenance is often unseen or the need for it is unseen.

Does it call out my favorite example? This is one said a time management seminar and the facilitator said, how many people wish they read more books in every hand when up? And he said, why don't you read more books? And he answered his own question. He said, he said, books don't ring and that the devices in our life that yell out. You know, books just sits there. You know, I have a, anyway, so maintenance doesn't call out until it's too late. If it's not your habit,

two different things. Maintaining a process or on the path that it needs to accomplish its goal is a different thing than making sure that that process has longevity and, and is in a sufficiently, the resources are sufficiently to keep it going over a longer period of time. And obviously, some of the people who do both of those things are the same people. So it would be natural to

confuse them. So that's my first thought is it's just not obvious that you would want to separate them

in your book and, and you're thinking, obviously, is an encouragement to make that insight. And I hope Ben Flyberg thinks about it too. And we'll put a link up to that episode. But the other

“thing I think, which is, which is challenging is that, you know, both of those pieces are time”

consuming require vigilance when we talked about earlier, you know, to do the purpose that the infrastructure or the project was created for also requires a significant amount of vigilance. It's not a straightforward thing, often. It doesn't just run itself. And then to maintain it,

it doesn't happen automatically either. And often these projects are not the incentives to do

those things are imperfect. And that's the nature life, many of them are public, where the people responsible for them are not necessarily going to bear internalized the costs and benefits of the decisions they need to, that they make to get those things done. And I think about where we're too, we had an episode with Bram Potter on the credible productivity of where we're too, airplane production. And that was a group of mostly man, I was going to say man, and it's mostly

man, almost exclusively at that point in life in the history, who were saving their country.

They weren't making airplanes. They were saving their country. And that's the way they saw their job.

And so all the things we're talking about, the creation of the assembly lines that create instead of making cars that are making, now making, say, bombers or fighter planes or engines, those are people who are highly motivated because they felt the world was to say,

“can they were not? Bram, it was, it was God's work. It was crucial. And if you don't think that's”

true. That's true. That's true. And it's true for the infrastructure. Manufacturing has a whole literature on maintenance. They love acronyms. It's all boring. I have not found a good soulful book, but there's no internet space with all of these acronyms. And they also referred to the entity that they're maintaining as the asset. And they're mostly talking about the machines that are manufacturing. And you know, so the hunger developing, the lean approach to all of that,

it's a very well thought out and very influential. And the, that is a well-explored and theoretically rich, not so fully out, but nevertheless, very detailed and a lot of thought is going

“into its manufacturing is really aware of all of this aerospace. It's tremendously aware of maintenance”

behavior and costs on its life and death. You know what, aeroplane job is leaving because they're when they fall out of the sky with people on board of people who are really upset and don't want that to happen ever. So there's a lot of really, really highly disciplined study of maintenance issues. And airplanes, and then in space typically you've got something, you know, out in space, you've got to fix everything, like Robin Knox, Johnson, and his cell boat. They've got to fix

whatever goes wrong with whatever's on board. That's it. And once we get to Mars, and while just the moon, but in the Mars, there's going to be serious issues like that of how you, you don't have the tools for the job that you've got to get this job done. How do you do that? Like what is soft for? They talk about maintenance, all of the time. How do you keep the links alive? How do you manage all of the dependencies that you develop? How do you use different layers and AI just getting into

the thick of all of that now with coding? So, and then I was going to have a, I want to have a

good at maintenance. It's hard to find a roof tile in all of the Japan that is broken. The roof

“for that well maintained that they're all just going to look good. And there may be something”

happy to do with the same culture and duty you can hear even things like that. And I was wanting to look good, but there's more truth than that, and it's kind of hidden. I could find no Japanese poetry that talks about maintenance. And in American poetry, you've got Robert Frost amending wall, there isn't a lot of ball on it down so on. And he wanted to, that wanted to be

about unnecessary maintenance and any one such a job. And there is Japan, the Buddhist

childhood carry water. But that's it. And so these things can be quite hidden. And I'm pretty sure that taking the look for pattern, expecting for how does it actually work? How does maintenance separate out from operation of infrastructure, for example? I guess they may be another flavor like person who's going to walk into that because he said he won't. It could be you.

“I think you're under something when you don't have, I think you're under something when you”

talk about the tile that's not broken. You said they wanted to look good. I think there's a powerful

aesthetic sense. Obviously, it's not an insight about Japan. And you know, Steve Jobs famously one of the inside of his computers to be beautiful, even though no one saw them and only a bad economist would say that that's inefficient. It created a culture of aesthetics, air, maintenance, et cetera that extends way beyond that narrow, narrow application. The point I was trying to make about the world work, too, is that if you don't have a profit motive, which is a problem with

“much public infrastructure, maintenance gets, I think, overlooked. But if you think the world's”

at stake and civilizations at stake that overcome some of the lack of monetary incentive, there's a non-monitorial incentive. And I think about subway systems, the things that Flyberg writes about subway systems, giant, massive infrastructure projects. They struggle with maintenance because they're not profitable, which is fine. That's irrelevant. But it's more that the people in charge don't have the strong incentive as sometimes as the case in, say, a private factory. So I think that's

part of the challenge. That's all I was saying there. The well-rightful repair is a thing going on in the US and I guess in Europe. I'm about to write about that, so I've been studying up. There's an online version of the book where I put it up for a comment and so on. And there's a couple of sections, they're not in the bent book, they're going to be part of part two. And one of them is the history of Blacksmithing. Where I wound up discovering that John Deere,

the original guy behind the John Deere company, was a Blacksmith. And he invented it as slightly better bow back on the days when applause were just taking off in the US in the Midwest. And it turned out to be a fascinating story and he's one of the great success stories that's seldom told of how to really build a long-lasting company that can scale and it really scale is still more than 50% of agricultural equipment in the US and in the world is from John Deere.

But then the right repair, so John Deere, the man, was highly dedicated to his customers. He did everything with his customers and forest customers. And the company became famous for that.

dedication kind of like Harley Davidson and with the motorcycle people. They're willing to

tattoo it on their bodies. But now in the right repair issue, in this century, John Deere's famous and sort of the poster boy for having your customers bite you and hate you because of the software that's involved in precision agriculture. John Deere wants to totally own and a close garden

“and you are not allowed basically to fix things on your own. You have to do it with a dealer,”

even though the dealer may be under miles away from where you are in the planes. And far as

have always, you know, fixed their own stuff. So they are offended at all of this. And

and by the way, if you do try to mess with your machine, they're crippled through the air. They will make it so that you cannot use that machine in any bigger way than to get it back to the barn. And people really hate that. So, you know, the laws are emerging on this. And I looked into, you know, what was the dialogue inside the company? It's all of this started to break loose in the 2010s and 2020s. Whether some people say, "Oh, we'll take care of our customers,

let's figure out how to do that." And it turns out that nobody was doing that. There was a real

argument in the company that was between hardliners and softliners. The softliners said, "Well, what's the minimum we can do that looks like we're okay with getting people to repair a stop. We don't actually change things." Or others saying, "No, it's grown. It's our company." You know, just five these folks, they're not going to pass laws. So they're afraid to do that over too big of a fail.

“And all that kind of stuff. So that's how something as a fundamental is, how repairable is your”

stuff. By the user, these come to a fundamental issue in business. And John Deere has been our driver for three centuries now. And there's started in 1800s and prospered all through the 1900s. Now in the 1900s, I don't think it's going to make it through the century with that kind of action. What do you think? By, I don't think they named legislation to fix it. It sounds like the market's going to... They may have gotten a short term gain from it, right? Profitability of controlling

those repairs, but obviously, they've damaged the audience. This is the most profitable thing they do. This is a sequester repair. Which works if you have a company, but if you don't, he lives at all. We'll say, it'd be interesting to keep an eye on. I want to close with, we've referenced AI a couple of times. We're recording this in February, 2026. And it just so happens that on X this last week or two, there have been some very, very negative gloomy do-me forecasts about the

“impact of AI on our economy. I'm not worried about that, particularly. I think that's a misunderstanding”

of both what AI is going to do. What one of your things for nature is the best understanding of this? I think AI is mostly going to make us us, not certain people, us, much more productive, much wealthier. There'll be many, many more jobs created from the creativity of AI that will offset. There'll be many job losses like every technology. I'm not a pure optimist. I understand there is possibilities for darker things. But, again, I'm not referring to the issues of consciousness

or the worry that it'll turn to some of the paper clips or those kind of things. But just on the normal economic macroeconomic effects, I'm on the optimistic side. But I'm also, I think that part, which I think will be great overall. There'll be negative but also many good things.

part is what I think about a lot. It comes back to us talking about before, I use cloud this week to

do something that would have taken me, I don't know. There's not a coding problem. This is a thinking problem. A strategic question of my college faces. I wanted its thoughts, which means I wanted to talk to it and I did. I spent an hour and it produced at the end of that hour, a document that would have taken me weeks. I probably would have given up long before I would have pushed through

“to those levels. At one point, I said, you know, I think this is a strategic error to do this project.”

I laid out why. Then I asked Claude whether it agreed and it said, "Did." But it said, "You kind of forgot these other possible positives." I thought, you know, that's true. It's very thought-provoking. The whole experience was embarrassingly exhilarating. In particular, as many people have noticed, I like spending time with Claude, not just because he is obsequious, which he is, but you can tell not to be which helps. But by

point is that you know, we're moving away as human beings over the last 25 years into our screens, into our digital worlds. I wonder whether that's going to ultimately be a good thing. I'm worried about that. But forget me. I want your thoughts. You're a very optimistic person on average. I would say we talked about that. Does AI's impact on the human experience, fill you with hope, or fill you with

fear? What's your take on this really, really powerful tool that is suddenly coming into our world?

Well, what advantage of being in your 80s is that you've seen a lot of things come and go. And I've seen the personal computer coming and not go. I've seen the internet come and not go. When it clearly AI is going to be in that lineage of something that comes in and doesn't go away.

“It will fail in small ways. And that's how you do research. It will fail in big ways.”

And that's how our society comes to decisions on basically how to manage it and we'll fail in global ways in the sense that because different parts of the world will have different relationships with the AI and maybe maybe more military than others. And so on, there's going to be some scary things that no doubt happened. And that happened with gas, that happened with the machine guns that happened with a various kinds of weapons over the nuclear.

One figure is on the way. I mean, this is pure David George. Have you had your mind on the program? Well, about not about his view of human creativity and innovation, but on we talked about

“having summits as I'm actually, but his book obviously the beginning of the day is about our”

capability. We're very capable human beings. Yeah, it's basically a cosmic level

optimistic perspective that there are always problems. And then we come up with better explanations

that solve a particular problem. But that doesn't mean problems go away. You just have view problems that emerge with this new explanation as you are just gaining. And that's the engine of progress is finding ever better explanations for the problems that keep emerging. And the process comes from actually experience, not imagination. In the sense that this is one of the things we learned about check knowledge that early on is everything that came

long. Some people would say, "Oh, we can't do that because here's how I imagine things might go wrong." And very creative notions sometimes, but irrelevant because that isn't what went wrong. Bill stuff went wrong and then that had to be dealt with. So generally the thing you do with the new technology is embrace it and become comfortable with it and also become uncomfortable with

you understand it from inside from the actual behavior of that sort of tools in the world

and you correct a perceptual mistake, not an imaginary mistake. And that's the kind of explanations

“that I think move us forward from problem to problem, from technology to technology.”

My guest today has been Stuart Brandt. His book is maintenance of everything. We will link to his

online versions as well for people who want to see the next part. Is it work through the process?

“Thank you. Stuart, thanks for being part of E-Kontalk. It's delightful to spend time with you.”

This is E-Kontalk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more E-Kontalk, go to E-Kontalk.org

where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's

“conversation. The sound engineer for E-Kontalk is Rich Guayette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts.”

Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.