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

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“- I think if you were to look for the philosopher,”

the thinker who is most influential in the culture that became the internet, who laid down the way Silicon Valley thought, at least in its more idealistic era. The person you come up with is Stuart Brandt.

Brandt 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. They're in the 60s and the moment of the hippies in a $20 amount of apartment in San Francisco

with other beat nicks. They're at the mother of all demos that creates much of the structure for modern computing. Before sees many places were ultimately gonna go, they're creating the well,

one of the earliest online communities that they're with the whole earth catalog, which Steve Jobs described as an early inspiration for what we now think of as the internet. - When I was young, there was an amazing publication

called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the Bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brandt, 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 and paperback form,

35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic overflowing with neat tools and great notions. - A list of all the places Brandt was and all the things he influenced

from the clock of the long now to his long running correspondence with Brandt, you know, it is very, very long. And along the way, Brandt has been writing these very beautiful unusual books.

Not just the whole earth catalog, but how buildings learn in 1994, which I love and if you've not read, you really should. And then most recently, we spoke the maintenance of everything part one,

which explores something many of us would rather avoid. They're the constant and almost spiritually important work of fixing our cars, of doing home repairs, of caring for each other.

Brandt makes maintenance sound, philosophically potent, even beautiful.

“And one thing I think is interesting about this book”

at this moment to be written by somebody with the weight of Brandt, is that it points towards maybe a different way of thinking about technology. And it points towards maybe a different ethos

on which Silicon Valley, with its, you know, great man of history, Congress 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 then we all have to aging and to loss. So I want to have Brandt on to talk to about that and so much else that he's seen and thought over the years.

As always, my email as recline show at mytimes.com.

(upbeat music) Stuart Brandt, welcome to the show. - Well, thank you, Richard, glad to be here. I want to start a little bit back in your history. In the 1960s, you were part of a movement

that got called "The Back to the Landers, Communards." - What was that? - Hippies, what, what was that? How would you describe the vision there for society?

basically in college in the early '60s, and on through into the early '70s,

“thought they needed to reinvent civilization.”

The '50s had been so successful. It became kind of bland. And the beatenic 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 some civilization had to be reinvented and able to go with the gathering of their peers, and go back to the countryside and farm and build their own buildings

and have their own rules and start over. They all failed, but they were all highly educational. We learned the free love isn't free. We learned that if we expect the women to do all of the really hard work of carrying the water

and cooking on the hills and take care of the kids, like pioneer women used to have to do, well 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 in addition, 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 happiest and the whole earth catalog was speaking in a way to the fact that he was for college drop-ups who didn't know how many things worked. They had not been raised on a farm or an inch. - How did you describe what the whole earth catalog looked

in felt like to somebody who's never seen one?

- It was pretty big. Actually, books shows complaining about it 'cause it's the bottom of his biggest laptop now. Basically, folio size. - And thicker than a laptop now, I've seen them there.

It's big. - Yeah, yeah. By the time now, we did the... - So, called the next toilet catalog, it was a several pounds of everything. But I think our Steve Jobs and his famous commencement

field service, like Google, Jackage 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, where actually candles have been. So, that was what theller's catalog was. And it turned out that it really did is what YouTube does now.

It conferred agency. - You mentioned that among the common arts, some of them did too many drugs.

I've always wondered if this story about you is true,

that the reason we have NASA's picture of the whole earth came from you doing psychedelics on a roof one day. - Yeah, I was in San Francisco and kind of bored, and one of the things she did was bored on that time was 12 or so massive and see what happens.

It was kind of my hypothesis, about 100 micrograms. And I went off on the roof of a $20 or month placed, I lived in North Beach. And $20 a month in North Beach. - Yeah.

- Wow. - Yeah, okay, I saw already how to believe. First true. - So, Matt, it's easier to believe that you got NASA to take a picture of the earth

and that anything in North Beach ever costs $20. - Well, it turns out I didn't really get NASA to do that. You know, we've done space for 10 years at that point. We in the Soviet Union.

And the cameras had always been looking outward

or at pieces of earth, but they could have been looking back to see the earth that's a whole. And I was pretty sure that would change everything. I wanted to start a campaign. There was a button said, "Why haven't we seen photograph

"of the whole earth yet?" And I know I got looked at by a lot of people in Congress and NASA and so on. But I got to know some of the astronauts like Rusty Schweiker when they took photographs.

It came just the year of two later after my campaign. - God, it's a little coincidental. You had the idea on the roof, but it didn't, the roof is not what led to the picture.

- But it led to understanding the picture,

I think, for a lot of people.

“- That metaphor of the camera pointing outward”

is supposed to inward at what we don't yet have is supposed to what we do have. That actually feels like a nice metaphor for maintenance. And I hear this in the whole earth catalog, too, that in a way it feels like a lot of your career

and thinking has been building up to this topic, but the whole catalog was also a manual for maintaining your life or maintaining the things you had. Let's begin with the most basic question. What is maintenance?

- It's for the key things going. I'm a biologist by training. And so you find that everything alive spends a lot of its time basically maintaining being alive even the extent of reaching outside itself.

So you're not just eating, if you're a beaver, you're busy cutting down trees to maintain your dam, which is what protects your lodge. Most plants spend a lot of time basically helping the soil around them

do things that work well for the plant. And the soil itself is alive.

And we're always maintaining our bodies.

We maintain our vehicles and our houses and homes and cities that we live in. And we're catching on a civilization or something or maintain it 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 consistency of it is a given. - How did it come to occupy so much of your mind?

- Well, because I'm a bad man-changer, I bust my chiefs when I felt like it. And it comes quite a way 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”

'cause it began to mind. But I just grew up with a father who was doing yourself kind of guy with a good bench in the basement, and I had a bench in the basement, and as you know,

many software programmers began by building chief kit radios and stuff. Well, that was me too. I was building chief kit radios. - You grew up in a time when the technologies

we use were more intelligible. And something you track in the book is that some of them were designed to be that way. One of the really interesting stories you tell us I hope you could tell here is about the forward model

he versus the Rolls Royce. I had known about the forward model tea. I didn't realize it was, the Rolls Royce was a contemporary. So tell me about the difference between those two cars.

“- Well, it both began basically in 1908,”

and Ford was building a car that could manage American driving when it was all dirt roads. And it showed me pretty rough and ready. And rugged and robust, and he figured out the interchangeable parts by then,

so they could manufacture a chief plate. Rolls Royce went the other way, which was to have a car so perfectly tuned with every part filed to exactly fill all the other parts around it.

And it was really, really reliable or lost run. But he couldn't do my answer to self, 'cause everything was so perfectly tuned and assembled that you would have to take it back to Rolls Royce to do any upkeep on it.

But if you got a model tea,

it was basically just a platform

for adding things that you wanted and doing the repair yourself. - There's a dimension of the way you describe what that made possible in the Ford, which is it, it became, as you say, a platform,

it became a space of creativity. People sold all these kits to change what the model tea 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 a gel break, and I phone 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 errors, but also the earlier periods of the web and personal computers versus where a lot of these systems

and companies have gone.

but it's also, I think, a question of what we are capable of doing both symbolically and technically with our technologies, which makes it also a decision made by the companies. How do you think about that? - Well, I'm just working up on writing

about the right to repair issues going on now. There's a question of ownership.

“Ownership, I think, is not just a question of having paid for”

and having legal possession of something, it's actually possessing the knowledge of what it's really about how it functions, how to look for problems, how to diagnose problems when they come up, how to fix it,

and doing maintenance on something is basically how you really take ownership of it. And here, not just physical life for your mental and social life, this will be another thing that AI, I think is gonna 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 what a problem is coming

and it really gets itself to go around it. And I'm sure that AI is gonna bring many more levels of that. As the upside, the downside is to spend more of your life arguing with robots, because we have a theory of mind so you and I are talking,

we need to have a pretty good idea for the others doing it, mentally, with the AI's, that's not the case, and they're all different.

So in a way, we're dealing with always new species

who talk on language, but are from a different frame and some keep for facts.

“I think that AI is gonna teach us more about being human,”

because we're gonna see, well, not quite human, but it's like getting more and more acquainted with the difference. (upbeat music) I'm Vivian Wong, I'm a journalist at the New York Times. I've covered China for years,

and it's really, really hard to get information. I go on plenty of wild goose chases. One time I went to meet a woman who said that she had been the victim of horrific domestic violence and was trying to get support from the legal system,

she lived in a super remote part of Southwestern China. So I took a three hour flight from Beijing and several hours of train also. When I got there, local officials showed up, insisted on trying to interrupt the interview

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- 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 floss for Matthew Crawford is that there is a necessity to the intelligibility, this word that comes used,

of the things we use. Am I right 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 a remarkable deep catalog of all these way 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 when I visited them before it started, this was 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're creating something that one of its most fundamental characteristics was an intelligibility. And as somebody has just been around Silicon Valley

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.

“And a way that I think is also gonna change”

who we are in what we are as human beings. - So AI is moving very fast and is solving a whole lot of problems. And of course it is creating a whole lot of new problems. There are kind of alien intelligences in a way.

And one of the good things that happened

with large language models is they train basically

on human communication. And so they are, in that sense, intelligible as human intelligence. How it actually functions in there in terms of the extreme nice cities of what's going on down at the bits and bytes level

is not so intelligible. Put so far we're kind of making them in real imitation of human communication under some extent human thought. It's gonna move beyond human thought pretty quickly.

“And it's certainly reaching out in terms of data space,”

much wider than any human can in a much shorter time. And that fact alone puts us feeling like redwood trees trying to communicate with the hummingbird. They're linked. They live together in the hummingbird maybe lives

in the redwood tree, but the redwood tree isn't capable of paying much attention. So who's in expanses or how fast they're moving? We're introducing new kind of pace players into the world we live in.

And the cellular, the brain moves really quickly and these computers 'cause they don't have to use chemicals the way our brain does, they go a lot faster. We can inseam here 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 that devs

that can speak up and say, well here's what

we're pretty sure is going on. - I guess my question on this and I'm gonna be thinking about that redwood and hummingbirds and I'll see 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 keys and even if somebody was precision calibrating every single bolt in the Rolls Royce,

somebody knew what those bolts did. - Yes. - And in that way this book struck me as almost countercultural that it was arguing for virtues that it feels our society is pulling further away from.

- I tried to take out the session I've never

shaking my finger and saying,

“"You should, mushroom tea should change your oil,”

you should be in any to your behavior." To your child 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 mean it for a living obviously, don't even have that frame of mind. I mean, online access to information and parts is just astounding now.

And that's I think the great solution for people that'll have a problem with something they've owned for three or four years and it came with a manual but they've misplaced that for sure. Well in terms of how 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.

I don't want no to bleed better than the other and you follow that and another thing is fixing. You're all powerful. You've totally taken agency in that particular device

YouTube has replaced manuals.

It's replaced the whole earth catalog

“in terms of conferring agency on anybody”

to learn anything or effects or anything. So it's mostly a happy story. But you've got to go online and you've got to see aggregate wisdom of humanity on the case. You've lived on a tugboat for 40 years?

Yeah. That must require fair amount of maintenance. Well especially if the tugboat was made before it was in built in 1912. Wouldn't most not usually last more than a century

ours has because of a whole lot of maintenance. And boats are so loveable. We call them sea.

They are all it stands between us

and the wind arc sea trying to kill us. They're like a motorcycle and that respect of their kind of hazardous.

“It's so relying on them is an intimate process.”

So maintaining a boat has a deeringness quality to it that is attractive. It was not attractive to see a lot of it in the cost of it. And those specializedness of the work that has to be done. It's like living inside a beautiful violin

where all of the curves and all of the nuances are very carefully crafted. And replacing parts crafted in that detail takes some viewing. But it's worth going.

One thing I enjoyed about the book is the way that it recasts work they 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. Talk to me about that idea of maintenance as a contemplative practice. Well, I can't do meditation.

“I get bored, but people who do meditation”

serve and embrace the bottom and utilize it in a way to calm their mind and maybe send it to their mind on something that they don't usually go too mentally. For example, often things from maintenance are done by the Japanese with a great deal of ceremony.

It's just changing the lights of a street lamp. But it's guys from uniform. They have a special routine. They do the latter when they go off the pole and do a little formal thing at the beginning

and another little formal thing at the end. And it turns the sinful task into a somewhat more complex of 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 in a service, we make it kind of a big deal of it. So ritual is one way to make really, really repetitive maintenance less honest.

The other dimension that struck me is interesting when I read contemplative practices that there's a lot of ideas about thinking in the book. And you quote quite a lot from Zen in the Art of motorcycle maintenance, which is a classic book.

I was very struck in the first chapter

you're writing about this cell boat race. And you talk about a sailor thinking about how to fix a problem on his boat and forcing himself to think for two days before acting because, quote, "I did not want to crystallize my thinking

prematurely." 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. Well, the problem with repair is that 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, there were the process

of doing maintenance on the Notre Dame Schiefel, the tallest part of it was kind of brought it out. 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 it just a routine maintenance and were careless in a gotta hand. So that's his reason to be cautious and take thought,

And on that particular case, Bernard Mathesier had a steel boat

that was pretty much waterproof.

“But he had a collision with a ship that bent the vowspit”

on 20, 25 days 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, for 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 'cause you might make the problem worse. Think through the solution.

Just rot the system minimally in the process of figuring out what needs to be fixed, fixing all of 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 a rough pair. 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 it 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, brush my teeth, and you know, shine, but I've kids. And the active parenting is it's ongoing maintenance

all among many other things.

Yeah. And you know, there's been a lot of work and thinking on care work in recent years. And I was curious about how those connections existed in your mind as you wrote the book.

Like how do you think about the relationship between maintenance and just interpersonal care? Well, I wanted to have most of the book as 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'll read something here from the book, if I may. There's this philosopher named Albert Bartman who wrote, "You cannot remain unmoved

by the panelists and confirmation of a well-bred and well-trained horse more than a thousand pounds of big bone, well-muscle animal, slick of coat and sweet of smell, obedient and mannerally, and a further or minus

with a sense of power and illerateable inclination to seek refuge and flight." And it all is a burden for this need to be fed, warm, and shy with its liability of constant infection still lay me in a heave,

but when it creates you for the nectar, no so fear chest ever got you with a large and slick with eye, the question of where you want to be, and what you want to do has been answered. And I end with, I wonder if that might come

again someday, a vehicle that can tear back. Tell me what you make of that. Your children tear back. That makes me changing them completely different than maintaining your vehicles.

“I think this is one of the things we may ask our AIs”

to do for us. Kill those things that tear back in some sense. Now, the question is, are they fake in it? What do they mean? They may be part of the design will be that they give me it.

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“- You've been around, so come ballet, long times.”

We've mentioned the whole earth catalog. You were involved in sort of early versions of the worldwide web personal computer, and there was a lot of idealism in all of that. When you look around,

which of your hopes feel like they were born out, which of the hopes feel like they ended up corrupted or something that you look on with more skepticism now? - Well, it's a classic case of James Joyce's line

about yourself from problems and other problems emerge. The problems that we thought were being solved and from especially communication, the understanding of computers or communication devices,

and isn't it amazing that we all still use email,

which was one of the first things intended for the micro computers as they were called them. Lots of other stuff has been added on, and the social systems have connected lots and lots of people in really profound ways.

And lots of the things available through the internet from Wikipedia to the internet archive to I fix it to YouTube. So in that sense, it's really surpassed the dreams that we had. But then of course, an introduced problem

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 'cause 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 a Nicholas Neckropani used to say, it wasn't just advertising as noise, it was advertising as news. That was focused on your expressed interests.

And then that felt like a lot was an invasion of our privacy that knew what I was interested in. Then in some cases, that's not welcome, but in other cases, oh yeah, I get no but that thing. Thank you for letting me know.

Except nobody ever thinks it.

“But you act on it and so that's what keeps its things going.”

So yeah, these problems keep coming off of me. You've got himself partially or other stuff come along that is replaced as that whole domain. And but it has problems. That's the nature of life.

- Something you said a second ago that we act upon it.

I have the feeling more and more when I am online on social media on YouTube, on TechDoc, that I am being acted upon. You know, you opened up the whole 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 catalog was weird, was it weird as gods?

And we might as well be good at it. And you know, the internet emerges and you know, you're typing search terms into Google and you're using your bookmarks and you're looking through your email.

And over time things have become algorithmic and you can feel the systems sort of like moving around you and trying to figure out what you're interested in and then you linger on something and then it starts serving you a lot of it

and obviously people enjoy it on some level 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 user and what they could do and how empowered they would be. And increasingly it feels like we're being given many, many offers to be sometimes wonderfully to some power.

But particularly the way the systems use our attention now it does feel like the volition has shifted. It feels like the decisions are being made in some way you can't quite figure out.

“I think you knew Marshall McLuhan back in the day.”

I did. And you know, a lot of his ideas about how different ways of structuring a medium change the person using it.

I'm curious if you think that's true or if that feels overstated to you.

“- Well, have you had Cory doctoral on your show?”

- Yeah, we had an episode of the Tim Will and Corridor that just came out recently. - Excellent. - So he's quite right, there's a lot of what he calls and simplification has happened to various entities

where basically sponsored content comes more and more

in front of the content that you're asking for. It's not Amazon, it's not Google and so on. When you would do a keyword search. - But now with Google, I use search M and I three. And it's not so much a search for word string anymore.

It's 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 Gear, where they went from one of America's oldest companies,

it was absolutely revered by its customers

“to the posture trials for right to repair”

because its customers were so furious at it for forcing them to delay getting fixes to their machines

and the whole business of a farmer being able to fix everything

turns upside down and they had to go through the corporation and the dealerships. And they just hated that. So I asked Chairman I three, how can I find out what the argument was

within John Gear within the company? I said, well, you'll find it with their stockholders and take a look at Reddit where you will find people who are 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 to the customers inside the company.

“- This gets to me to a question we were sort of circling”

earlier. I mean, right to repair it among other things is a legislative idea. It would be potentially legislation that the government was passing.

Companies have to do this. And one thing I was thinking about in the book is it is treating maintenance often as a question of our knowledge about the things we are caring for.

But it is also a question of, first, whether the companies

that make those things have made those things open to care, open to maintenance, whether you can get into the system, whether you can get into the innards, you know, they do not want you getting inside an iPhone. And second, because often as you say with John Deere,

the company would make more money by just having you replace these technologies on a structured timetable. Whether or not society, government comes in and says, we actually are going to force you to make maintenance something people can do.

So as you're thinking about right to repair and as you've been around technology for a long time, do you think it is something we should pass? Do you think that if we're going to make maintenance of a social value at something the government has to insist

that the company's permit? - Yes, yeah, and there's already some laws in place in places like Massachusetts and Colorado. It's moving pretty quickly, and some companies are getting out in front of it.

So I have a Tesla and a Tesla is somewhat ahead of this one. They sort of fought back for a while and then we like to grow. We've got all this information about your vehicle, and we'll share it with you. And there are lots of companies like Fatagonia

that have whole videos teaching you how to repair their garments. And so it goes, some of this can get sorted out in the market place. But some companies have such a kind of grip on their field and John Giro is one of them.

But they don't feel they have to worry about competition. And that's the case that's where the government usually does need to step in. - So if somebody read this book and they wanted to make regular maintenance more of a part of their life,

but didn't quite know how or where, didn't feel like they had anything obvious to fix. But see, this is a virtuous skill, a discipline. Where do you advise them to start? How do you make this say, how do you weave this into a life

in what you're not used to thinking about your possessions

- I have to child. (laughs)

“That's a big, that's a big commitment to just learn about maintenance.”

- But this is this eye valve stuff that Martin Boover 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 rules get the best tools you can. If you use them all the time, it's the best you can. 'Cause then you're sort of respectful, 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 a case to level different who cleans the toilets, who chase care of the dead things.

And so many maintenance tasks are not like low status. They're low paid. And that doesn't need to be in the case. And people don't notice the really good maintainers from the so-so maintainers, 'cause they're not paying

in tension. Well, the really good maintainers, are worth paying attention to the fights that they do get recognized. They do get paid.

And it basically honor it is, sort of the way we honor life variance or life variance. These are actually the pillars of civilization.

“The folks in your pre-seeker said you should consider”

that the essential art of civilization is maintenance.

When I said to you what led to the writing of this book, you said that maintenance is something that you yourself are not very good at or have not been good at traditionally. So since immersing yourself in it,

both in terms of its technical questions and its spiritual and personal questions, how is your relationship in maintenance changed? What do you maintain? They maybe you did it before. What have you found is ways to do it

that we're not true before this project? - I'm 87 years old, guess what? By the time you're 80s, just being old and as I have to talk to John in the maintenance theory, this is called the Vath Sub Curve,

like with a building, always brand new.

There's a lot of problems. Because then they start even out and you're kind of plug along and just stay ahead of the maintenance. So be okay with that one, it gets pretty old, especially if it's a wasn't building.

Problems increase, so the Vath Sub is high maintenance at the beginning, it looks out and high maintenance toward the end. When you're 80s, you're toward the end. Generically, you're probably genetically

somewhat of an optimist, that's fatal. For maintenance, maintenance are realists. The pessimists are always looking for what could go wrong and how kind of get ahead of that. Or they hear a questionable something

and what I might say, oh, I don't think that's serious. What maintenance is that sounds like it's serious. So it's a whole attitude issue that becomes aware of in my shortcomings, I'm an optimist. I think that's a good place to end.

So I was our final question.

“What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?”

I recommend to David Joyce's the beginning of the insanity.

It's basically optimism at a cosmic level.

And it's full of the realization that there are all most problems, and there are solutions. And that goes on in front of your eyes at the beginning of insanity. When it comes to that, I recommend a book.

I used to be called by Simon Wincester. It was called the perfectionists. Then he changed it to exactly. But how precision engineers created the modern world? And then, I wound up revisiting a section on manuals.

And so they're great manuals of history. But the one I was looking at was the Deeterost and Cyclopidea, which had diagrams basically of hall, the trades and crafts of 18th century actually work. But French revolution shot down all of the kind

of rational optimism that was in that book. The Scottish Enlightenment, they were very impressed

And they came up with their own Cyclopidea,

“called the Cyclopidea Botanica, which went”

from France to France for 100 years.

And basically the Scottish Enlightenment

was the source of our Constitution, which was in a document of our Declaration of Independence. And that's what really needs to be maintained if we want to maintain civilization in the planet.

“Well, it 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 it will be uncomfortable without

“and moving without it being all those intelligence”

we could be in managing all that.

So those three books are what I've written about it.

Stuart Brandt, thank you very much. Thank you, I was very happy. [MUSIC PLAYING] This episode of This Clonches Produced by Any Galvan, fact-checking my Michel Harris.

Our recording engineer is Amin Sahota. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gelt. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Ho, Marie Cassione, Marina King, Jack McCordic,

Kristen Lynn, Emma Caldeck, and Yon Kobel, original music by Pat McCusher, audience strategy by Christina Simulusky, and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times opinion audio is Anywhere Strosper.

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