Maintenance: The Hidden Force Behind Success and Collapse

- Today is February 26. 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. Stewart, welcome to EconTalk. Well, thank you and nice to be here. Now, I have to confess, I loved your book. It's, it's incredibly wide ranging and fascinating. It's every page is 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, 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, I have a feeling you have a different life. So I'm curious about the things in your life that you maintain regularly and the tools that you use regularly.

- When 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 you had to do things like change the oil even if you didn't. Do you like it? So there's a, a discipline about maintenance, I think that 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 healthcare part, which is usually, I'm talking about the use of tools or maintaining machinery or, or tools that you own or your home. Is that part of an

- Important Well, I, I've, I've, I've had boats, sailboats a lot and, and motorboats. And as has been said, messing about with boats is a pleasure in its own right. I think people who have guns enjoy cleaning it and oiling it, and people have motorcycles. I have a friend who had a Harley Davidson when he was growing up, and every Christmas he took it all the way apart, 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, that's fun. Is, is there, but are there things like that in, in your life over your lifetime that were meaningful to you? Or, or, you know, the zen-like aspect of that ritual of, 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 I clean the screen, but through 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 important. I'm a terrible maintainer. I, I do not maintain, well, it, and I think it goes along with being an optimist, and I have this sort of, probably Plato is, you know, essential sense of things. And in, in in Plato's world, things never need maintenance. They're all, they're also SNC. They're just, they stand and live by themselves and, and, and pessimists. Well, I mean, the truth is that good maintainers are basically realists and which probably looks to other people like pessimism. 'cause they, they look at their motorcycle and they're looking for signs of oil leaks. They're wondering if they need to, but adjust this, that, or the other thing. Of course, that was the old combustion engineering motorcycles. The 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 twenties, early twenties, I ran a marathon and I paid attention very slowly. Four hours and 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, I was afraid, afraid of breaking down the realism there was too, too vivid. I had to pay attention to the reality. But I, like you am an, an optimist. And when the timing belt of my Honda, I think it was my Honda Accord snapped and my car stopped, stopped in the middle. Instantly I consulted the manual and found out I had failed to replace it at 50,000 or 70,000, whatever it was. I didn't make that mistake again. But in general, it takes an event like that or a, a bad injury running, which I'd 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, and you know, I think your computer, you probably do a certain amount of computer hygiene on there

- Yeah.

- To keep things basically updated and try to get rid of things that are cluttering the world there. Yeah. And so, you know, as we move into more and more of the digital way of life, discovering other kinds of maintenance that need to happen, I think one of the potential great things that'll come from AI being applied is software. People refer to boring maintenance, which they have to do all the time with backend. And sometimes the front end of software, they, they're referred to it as toil, and they're always trying to automate, basically out in front of it to see everything is about to fail and, and, and, and have the software just notice that and, and put in the fix. I think that AI is gonna help a lot with that. But then we will be in this weird circumstance of we're we're gonna spend more and more of our life arguing with robots.

- Yeah.

- These things have automatic procedures based on somebody else's idea of what will be obvious and not obvious when you're, 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 human, it's just talks human, 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 word, when you're in danger, when you're in danger at risk, you're vigilant and you have a natural incentive to be vigilant. And I think when I think about ai, and I'm thinking now about self-repairing software programs or self self updating, you talk about the Tesla updating itself con you know, constantly through the, through the cloud and the web. But you know, if we, it'll be interesting to see the effect of the loss of our own normal habits of vigilance as so many uncertainties are we, we relegate delegate those to, to other agents and they won't be human ones, probably.

- Well, it's thermostats all the way down and, you know, governors on steam engines and a lot of things which take care of, of keeping something in, in proper mode. And it's alert to circumstances. The temperature goes down in 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, is being in communication with the systems we rely on. And as time goes by and civilization gets ever more complex and rich and interesting and great, it has, you know, plenty of things to have to figure out how you deal with it. This is why I think YouTube is such a breakthrough for people that when you're mystified by something, you know, you put in a couple of words and make and model the thing and the way you think it's broken. And look around at YouTube, pretty soon you find somebody who's ready to help you show you how to actually make that fix or do that maintenance or understand the, the basic functioning of how the thing that you're mysteriously that you're feeling is too mysterious to, to either understand or, or fix. You understand it and you fix it.

- It's fantastic. Well, my mom passed away about three weeks ago, so she's on my mind. Oh my goodness. And I've told the story. I've told the story before, but you know, my mom would call me about trying to figure something out and I'd think to myself, and sometimes I'd tell her, but after a while I realized that isn't necessary. But, so I'd say, mom, just just Google it, you know, just look it up. In this case, you can't figure out if something works. You don't have the manual. You threw away. The manual didn't come with a manual just right. What are you doing? And now it's, you know, get happened to me. Today I was having a Zoom problem and I asked a colleague, you know, what do I do with it? Why doesn't this work? She said, well, did you ask Claude yet? Oh, you know, of course I, why didn't I ask Claude? But it took me a while to realize that my mom, and 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 just calling to talk to me. Right. And she was, and, and that whole way that we've now delegated so much of our problems in life to algorithms, systems, machines, something's lost there. Something's gained too. Right. It's a really, there's something marvelous about it and something it's a little bit sad.

- Yeah. Well that used to be the case. And, and one of the things that was interesting about the hippie generation that I was part of is not only were we deciding to pay little attention or disrespectful 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 a way. It, it was every, most of the stuff that was in the whole Earth Catalog back in the sixties was books how to Books and Hippies ate that stuff up. You know, we, we got The Idiot's Guide to Fixing Your Volkswagen and, and went through the step-by-step process that was in there. And, and actually we learned how to fix our Volkswagen, but we didn't learn it from a mechanic. We, we, we learned it from a book that a mechanic wrote.

- That's that, that's really sweet. That's lovely. Now your book starts with something called the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race of 1968. And I confess I did not, had not heard about it. It's an extraordinary set of things that happen in that race that you chronicle really in a very, very powerful way. I just, I wanna read the rules to my, to our listeners and I wanna ask you something about it.

- Okay. - This is from an article written on boats.com about what the rules were competitors had to, it was announced on March 17th. So 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 wind of, the goal of the race is to circumnavigate the globe. So you had to sail south of all the great capes, good hope, Lewin and Cape Horn. You could ha 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 sailboat. And the first to finish back in England from any port north of 40 degrees North. So you could start from Aranian 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 elapsed time. The person who did it the most quickly would get about would be awarded 5,000 British pounds, a sizable 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, nine

- People, you're the true economist in this interview. I love that.

- Why? Why - You figured out what 5,000 pounds could do? Oh, that's not my

- Line in 1968. No, I didn't do that. That's a quote from an article about it. I

- Oh, okay.

- Never, I'm sorry. I would, as the economist point out that it would be a big difference between a house in London and 1968 and a house today. 'cause there's been, oh yeah. Not just inflation, there's been particularly high increases in the price of housing. But anyway, put that to the side. So nine people entered the race, one finishes, that's Robin Knox Johnson. He takes 312 days to go around the globe. And, you know, thinking about this, he spent 312 days completely alone, and the rest failed. So the, the two questions that we're gonna, I want you to expound on what you do in the book very beautifully. What did Robin Knox Johnson do? Right? And what did the other folks do wrong? Do poorly. And there's a, there's an asterisk 'cause there's a, there is one of the nine who though he doesn't finish is rather interesting, right?

- Yeah, yeah. So you had three people that had books written by them or about them. Donald Horst and Bernard Monte. Tessier Sailor, I knew a little bit when he lived on his boat in Sausalito, California. And Robin Knox Johnson was a young guy. He was 29.

- He was the third big guy written

- About. And he had a, a pretty short sailboat, 20 some feet that, and went slower than the other boats because of that. But he had sailed it from India to England with friends. And he felt he knew it very well. And he had been trained by the Merchant Marine and doing maintenance. And so he felt that even though it was, who wouldn't vote and wouldn't go fast, nevertheless, it was what he had. And he would make two. And men, as he said, Donald Hurst entered the race very late and thought that he was so smart that he would use a new kind of sailboat called the Trian, which is a central hall with, with two big sides on it that reach out. And, and so it doesn't tip over, except that when it does tip over, it turns upside down. You can't write it up, but it's much faster. 'cause it, it doesn't go deep in the water. There's not a lot of friction. And, and then third Bernard Maier had done actually some of the longest sailing of anyone, including in the Southern Ocean, which is violent. And, and so he had a, a, a steel boat made and, and it was fast and it was solid and it was simple. So Donald Crowhurst tried to take care of everything with cleverness, and he actually hated doing maintenance. He called it Sailor Rising and, and shirked it quite a lot. And pretty quickly he discovered that his, his boat had been built so hastily that it was gonna fall apart if he went into the Southern Ocean. So, but, and nevertheless, it had a big opening in one of the pontoons. And so he started cheating by killing ashore and, and pretending to be somebody else and getting it fixed and then going back out. And then radio, at that time, these guys, in 1968, there was, it, it was pretty primitive. They were basically sailing the way ancestors had for a hundred and some years at that point, which was, you made your own weather forecast based on what you were seeing with the clouds and the wind and the swell and that sort of thing. And you're in the Southern ocean, which means ferocious storms from time to time, and the wind blasting from the west all the time. So Crowhurst loved his radios and he figured out a way to pretend to be going around the world. The signals, basically the, the telegrams that he was sending back. And meanwhile, he never left the Atlantic coaching. By the time it was getting toward the end of the race, he realized that he wasn't gonna get away with it. People were gonna discover it, it would be a horrible scandal. He would've failed his family. There wouldn't be any money, there'd be lots of blame. And he committed suicide, went off the boat, and then the

- Boat discovered. And we discovered his journal eventually where he chronicled his thoughts and he had serious mental issues. It it appeared in the, what he was writing.

- Yeah. Yeah. He, he went 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, and that lasted just the 10 and 10 stay. And he realized it wasn't gonna work and came over. And, and as I said, he entered, he crossed his own finish line into the ocean and he never did leave the ocean. So that was a terrible maintainer. To put it mild Bernard Masier had done so much sailing. He was older than many of the other competitors. And, 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 he 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. Whereas Knox Johnston had a bozen chair who he would try to haul himself up, and you could only do that in a dead calm. He tried it one time when it was violent and he almost got killed. So the, the, the, the way things wound up is that an Bernard attache loved being a sea alone sailing fast. He just loved it. And by the time he was rounding the bottom of, of South America and, and heading back toward England, he decided not. And he was gonna win. He was probably gonna win

- Both prizes and meaning, meaning even though he left later, his boat was faster. So he was gonna win to the finish line first and his elapsed time would be, yeah.

- So, and that's what everybody was expecting he would do. France was going to have a fleet, Naval vessels come and meet him and take him home to France. He was gonna get the Legion of Honor. But Sier really dreaded all of that. He hated it. He, all of that fuss and stuff, he was loving, he was doing so much that he just decided to keep going. And he had lived in Tahiti before, so he, what the hell? Just keep going alone without, you know, living up on all the rules. And he went on to Tahiti. So he sailed and decided not to finish. And he wrote a beautiful book called The Long Way that Knox Johnson's book was the World of my Own. The one about Robin Crowhurst was The Strange Voyage, Donald Crowhurst. And that was where they basically examined his logbooks and the, and the sailboat was intact. So all of the bad maintenance was clearly visible and so on. There are three great stories. And, and they come together in a way that I'm saying basically it wasn't just will, it was maintenance styles that differentiated these three. And Bobby Knox Johnson's was whatever comes deal with it. And he was incredibly resourceful at dealing with problems. Earl Donald

- In, in my mind, in my mind, I'm thinking of, well, you know, it's hard to sail and storms and okay. And you have to bring enough food and water and okay. And, but he was constantly fixing his boat, sewing his sails, straightening things that got bent by, broken by a storm, constantly innovating. And as you point out, many times, most of the solutions weren't 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 figure it out. Credible.

- Yep. Yeah. He would do a thing like one, he, he needed to solder a joint, but he, he had completely equipped the boat, but he didn't have any solder, but he had some extra bulbs that he carefully disassembled and there were little tiny dots of solder in there. And he collected those enough and found a way to heat it and melted and, and laughter that connection. And that was classic Robin Knox Johnson. He was later knighted, of course, by the Queen Sir Robin. So his, his was making, and man and whatever comes deal with it, the stance of the optimist, the kind of the pathological optimist of Donald Crowhurst was hope for the best. And, you know, it killed him, led to the cheating and the cheat killed him. Bernard Matia was prepared for the worst. And in my view, it freed him. That gave him the sense that, so even in a, 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 handing through a storm is extremely tiring, he didn't worry about his equipment failing because he built it very strong in the first place and then maintained it daily. What he told me when I talked to him was I said, yeah, I mean, nice pretty fit sailboat here. He said, the rule is new every day. Basically a sailboat is if it, it was had just been made. So that winds up being the beginning of the book. 'cause it's just this nice kind of beautifully self packaged fable Yeah. To tell. And the, the point I'm making at the beginning of the first line of the, of the text of the book is probably a great, many famous stories can be retold in terms of maintenance. Here's one. And then I tell the globe story. But in a way, the whole book is, is revisiting various famous situations, including the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Egyptian invasion of the Sinai across the West Canal in 1973. And or with Israel in those cases, the, the army that was better at maintenance prevailed and militaries are really the place to look for good theory and practice on maintenance. So I wound up chapter two of the book was gonna be vehicles, but I had to call it 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. Rifle and the American rifle assault rifle and the American army equipped with what is an iconic name in, in weapons. But it, the time was an abject failure, which I knew nothing about, which is fascinating. It's the M 16.

- Right. - So the M 16 was essentially not functional. We, 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 Right. Which is quote, an inferior weapon. It didn't, wasn't as, as elegant or as smooth or fire quite as well, but you could keep firing it. And when it didn't fire, you could fix it and it made all the difference. Yeah. It's an incredible example. It

- Made all the difference. Yeah. And so in firefights, in, in the hill fights, the, the first really bloody combat between the BC and and American troops and Marines was, I I used to be in the army and, and then taught rifle training among other things. The AK 40 sevens that the Vietnamese had were incredibly reliable and incredibly easy to clean and fix. And they had, when, when an assault rifle jams, you cannot get the bullet jams in the, 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 claw it out. And, and, and so a number of American soldiers were found dead next to their disassembled M 16 trying to get the bullet that jammed out. The AK 47 has a cleaning rod mounted right under the barrel. And so if it jams, you should grab that, run it down. It's, you know, the length it needs to be. Just run it down and, and you unjammed the rifle and it'll carry on just fine. The American troops eventually, but not at the beginning. They didn't have cleaning rods with them in the field. Then they started to put them into the butt in a little compartment that you would have to open up, take out this fully up rod. Imagine you're in combat, you're running or you're flat on the ground trying to do all this stuff. Unfold the thing glued together and run it down the, the barrel. So the, the AK 47 was designed from the start to be incredibly reliable. It was gonna be used by Russian conscripts who many of whom couldn't read. There was not gonna be much anyway of training. There was not gonna be a manual. It had to be pretty obvious how it worked. And so it was easy to field strip, easy to clean, easy to put back together. And that was the opposite case for the M

- 16. Which, which I love. I mean, the other thing you are, many things you learn from the book that are not directly related to maintenance, but you know, the the unseen aspect of things, which maintenance you're pointing out is one of them is, is very powerful. And on the surface, the m sixteens a quote better rifle right. Than the AK 47, just not in practice. And the only thing that matters is practice. They weren't used. They weren't, they didn't test the, the model out in quote in the field. They pr 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 dust really means.

- Yeah. In, in Vietnam it's a humid environment. They were rusting out pretty quickly and you know, it's great out to 500 meters, but generally you're, you can't see 500 meters 'cause you're in jungle and things are all up close and personal. Some of the Marines wound up using their rifles as clubs in hand hand combat in, in the chuckle, but then again in Iraq. But yeah, you got 500 meters of distance sometimes to the enemy, but the sand and dust gets into everything and anything that you oil the sand gets into it. And then that turns out to be something that abides the, the weapon.

- Yeah.

- So you basically had to keep an M 16 surgically cleaned to really function well. L

- Which is implausible as a, as a strategy. The, 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 'em. Knowledge was very, you point out knowledge was very secretive because it, it, it, it conferred honor and privilege and, and power. 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.

- Right. - Whereas the Israelis are constantly repairing and getting things back into the, into action. Often the Egyptians were abandoning their and the, and the Russians similarly in, in the Ukrainian war. And that's a piece of that story I've of that war I've never heard. It was fascinating.

- Hmm. Well it's, and remember the Egyptians were equipped and trained by the Russians.

- Yeah.

- And the Russian army is that equipment and troops are disposable dispensable and, and they don't try to bear down on, on maintenance. They're often good on maintainability. AK 47 is a, is a, a Russian weapon. And the G 55 tanks that they feel that for Egyptians in, in that war were pretty, pretty solid, I think the most widely used tank in, in the history in the world. But, you know, it was desert warfare and it was warfare and, and the weapons go down and, and like you say, the, well, there was a kind of a, the problem, I, I love this because one of the things about the American army and the NATO military is they all have non-commissioned officers, sergeants that have a lot of power, lot of respect. They're usually the most experienced person in a, in any unit. The officers respect them and the troops respect them. And they're the, they're the people responsible really for maintenance and for teaching. So the, which in a way is how they maintain troops is been training. So the, and and there was pretty good NCOs in, in the Israeli army and, and they've been training them up in the Ukrainian army. 'cause originally they had a sort of Russian system, but as they became closer and closer with nato, they, they started developing NCO schools. The Arab Barbies generally in the Egyptian interior ones in particular, have a kind of a case system where officers see themselves as quite superior to the troops. And they are not hands-on in any respect. They're proudly never touch anything. And that's, that's for what troops do. And indeed maintenance laws is done by the troops. But if, if you don't have officers who connect with that and have NCOs in the middle, which mostly the Arab armies don't, then the whole thing falls apart. And, and, and that turned out to be, in both cases in Ukraine and in Israel, pretty much the, the difference between

- Victory and and defeat. And you, you point out that in the British auto industry, a similar problem perhaps is responsible for their low quality, A class system where people don't easily give over authority to people seen as beneath them. I wanna say two things about the Israeli army. One is they're famous for allowing initiative and, and a flat under bottom up initiative system where, where people are encouraged to take charge of things. But I would also add that, you know, on October 7th and the weeks that followed when reservists came back to, to serve, they discovered that many of the stockpiled equipment, much of the stockpile equipment had not been maintained. Wow. Was needed replacement badly. An enormous, it's to me, one of the incredible stories of the war that hasn't been told well, but it 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 vest 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 to have to mobilize 120% of your reserves. Which 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 that

- Right? Yeah. Very bad, very bad. They don't,

- Do you have a, an explanation for that as an economist?

- I, I'll I'll try in a second. But, but, but the flip side of that is they're extraordinary and adaptive behavior. Yeah. So things go wrong because they weren't prepared, we weren't prepared here. But the ability of the average Israeli soldier, and it goes way beyond the military to cope in the aftermath of failing to prepare for something Right. Is quite extraordinary. Okay. And it's a little like Robin Knox Johnson. You know, it's true that we didn't prepare for everything and a lot of things are gonna break, but we're really good at fixing em. And that's true in the software industry here and, and in the military. So I don't have a theory about that, but I think it probably has something to do with the Middle Eastern culture generally. So it's, it's that optimism, foolish optimism combined with a belief that you will be able to cope with it eventually.

- And, - But you don't have the, the caste system to, to mess up the, the response. Maybe I, I wanna 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 sixties who were rifle instructors. And I'm curious why in your, with that pass, what that was like. Did, did that make challenging conversation with your friends? What, how, 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 was before the Vietnam War. And so places like Stanford where I eventually went, had ROTC programs for serve officer training. And I, my older sister had married a West Point Officer Tellerman and my older brother Mike had at Stanford, I guess gone to OTC and then went off to serve for two years active duty. And so, and I, I, I liked the idea of the military. I liked, I loved training and both doing it and especially receiving it. So I did parachute training and had at least part of ranger training too cold in the winter. Didn't make it through that. So, and training, being trained as an officer, you basically, it's a skill and, and so, you know, develop a command voice and you expect to be in charge or something. And so when I started things like the whole Earth Catalog, I wasn't deferential or uncertain about just, you know, taking charge and doing it then being responsible for other people's behavior and, and, you know, doing the things I've been taught to encourage good work and, 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. Doesn't mean it's gonna happen. You have to monitor it, important lesson. And then after, you know, any kind of action, you do an after action review right after when everybody's still sweaty and wiped out and so on. But everything's fresh in their mind. What went well, what went badly? What are the lessons here? What do we do different next time? This is how you do stuff. So among hippies, I and other people I knew Ken Keesey, Mary Pranksters had a number of ex-military people in it who his Ken Kes best friend, Ken Babs had been a helicopter pilot and officer in Vietnam. Wow. And he was a easy commander. Right, right, right, right. Let's get into this, you know, it's, it's one of the things you got to learn to do and take for granted.

- Now some, I'm sure a few, just a couple of our listeners have never seen the Whole Earth Catalog. Mm. One one of the aspects of it was the subtitle was Access to Tools. Right. And it was a catalog, but it also had a philosophy underlying it. It had a picture of the whole earth. Right. Which of course wasn't available until the late sixties from nasa. And what, 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 little.

- I had on LSD one day in San Francisco, the spring of 1966, gone up on the roof of the apartment that we lived in, in North Beach and with a kind of a low dose, a hundred micrograms of ski. And was just watching the afternoon happen, looking at downtown. And I persuaded myself that I could see that the buildings were on a spherical surface and that they actually fanned out a little bit. And then I imagined myself going further and further out where I could see the curve and then the curve that closed all the way on itself of, of the earth. And I thought, you know, God, we've been in his space for 10 years at this point, which we had. Sputnik goes back in 56, why haven't there any photographs of the, of the earth as a, as a whole from a distance? And I figure, okay, I'm gonna make this happen. I'm gonna make a button, and the button is gonna say mobile mumble. I wound up with it said, slightly paranoid question, why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet? And I sent 'em off to the Poll Bureau and Soviet Union and I sent 'em to people and American Congress and their secretaries, and I sent 'em to nasa. I got to know some of the astronauts later, and I of course wondered if any of that had gotten to them. And they, rust Schweikert was the one I know best. He said, nah, you know, we were surprised at when that photograph was taken and what came to be called earth rise. That is where the earth comes around the whim of the moon. And that photograph of a dead planet in the foreground, the moon and the really living beautiful jewel like blue and, and and white Earth from a distance was just inspiring. And at the time, environmentalist, which I was one of, I was a biologist by training and an ecologist specifically. They had been completely against the space crop program, but my mother had loved it. And so I grew up loving it. And the, you know, earth Day followed immediately after that photograph of the earth from space and basically the whole environmental movement took off with that photograph. So

- Yeah, - The environmentalist fought the wrong thing.

- Yeah. I want to. And but the catalog itself was a set of, you said many much of it were, of it consisted of books about how to do things so you wouldn't need other authorities. Right. And so on. But it, it had, it was a, it was a, a Sears catalog for more 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 had grown up thanks to my father who was a tinkerer. 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 heath kit radios 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 it, it, the catalog had a, 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 said at the beginning of it on an opening page, and it was an 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're, what would've been seen in earlier times is Godlike powers. And so step up to it, part of the hippie ethic was to 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 better tools are of great interest and better tools are often increasingly high tech. So whenever, you know, like the first calculators and then a programmable calculator, we were pushing those things in the whole Earth catalog. It, it, I guess that became part of the bridge for the part of the part of the counterculture was new left, which I was not. I spent some time working with 'em and realized it was self cancelling. So I was more in the Ken Keesey Mary Pranksters version of, of counterculture. And, and what I knew was that the people were starting communes, I was involved in, several of them were basically college graduates or, or college dropouts who had really no idea how anything worked. And so they were imagining they were gonna go back to basics and garden, but they didn't know how to garden. They didn't know how to bees or how to have goats or why you might want to do that or anything. It was just earnest and ignorant. So golden opportunity for, to come up with a place where like YouTube now and whole Earth's catalog. Then here's the, here's all the skills you need to do whatever you want.

- It's very beautiful. I I want to, 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 a relatively inexpensive vehicle to be available to the masses. And that that was really an important, mostly, 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 tinkerers and people who wanted to replace things. And I wanna just give a couple 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 in the, this, I love the statistic. The Rolls Royce factory produced two cars a a day to, which is an enormous achievement. Let's not undervalue it, but the Model T factory produced a car every three minutes. And that is just, you know, I just find that it gives me goosebumps actually. It's extraordinary how unleashing the power of, of, you know, the assembly line and 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 7 37, they have some different models of it, but they're trying to even move to a single model now, the 7 37, I understand. And the value of that is, is one of those hidden things. The hidden thing is that you can always, all the people who work on 'em know what every plane looks like, know where they, 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 TI 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, an a, a warehouse of parts that 'cause 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.

- Yep. And, and the Model T was sort of a platform. The Rolls Royce, you would not tailor it 'cause it was so perfectly assembled and exquisite that, you know, doing the things that it did very well, running very powerfully, but very silently. The Silver Ghost was the name of that earliest one. Beautiful. And the model tree was noisy and it was basically an invitation to just, to get it to function properly, you had to buy some extra things to add in there and, and you had to learn how to grease it and, and how to get it to start. And, and everybody, everybody knew how to fix. They had to know how to fix their model Ts. And so it was this great common knowledge and even if you didn't understand what was going on with the timer or something, somebody else would, and, and, and so everybody did it, but then they turned it into tractors, they turn it into boats, they turn it into airplanes. The, the, the basic engine of the Model T was simple enough and fixable enough they, and adjustable. So you could really adapt it any old which way. And in a way that, and that, that, that took off that basically taught the world to, that you could buy something and then adjust it to your life, your ideas, your dreams. And, and it took off. I mean, it made for the richest man in the world by quite a long bit. And it, it, 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 do things that they wanted to do. When I put I and others put together a thing called the Hackers Conference in 1984, people had had, you know, just individuals had come up with software that was used by everybody. And because you send software from place to place, and, and we did, and, and you had this democratically empowering and empowered massive event where everybody had to have a model D and they could afford it. Everybody had to have a personal computer and they could afford it. And I dare say that AI is gonna be moving in the same direction. I certainly use it for research Gemini three, bro, and it's brilliant for me. It, it finds sources that I would never have found on my own. And that's so, and, and that's what you're gonna see more and more of. And then the forthcoming shows the maintenance of

- Everything. Yeah. This is only, this is only part one, but I wanna say something about, and this is strange. I I your book really prompted this thought. You know, the Model T is the early part of the 20th century and it's a machine. It's very much a machine. It's, it's, it's replacing a very sensual, physical breathing creature. A horse with a machine. And yet I'm sure, and this is just speculation, but 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 iPhone, which the app store allows of course, of course allows me to customize this experience to my heart's desire. I don't repair it. Right? And, and certain we could contrast machines that were sealed, do not touch, do not open this you void your warranty, et cetera, versus machines that people were encouraged to tinker with. And the Model T was one of the first ones, right? It's, which is, I, I'd never thought about that, but I want to, I wanna read a quote from the book from the philosopher Albert Borman. 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-bred and well-trained horse. More than a thousand pounds of big boned well-used animal, slick of coat and sweet of smell, obedient and mannerly, and yet forever a menace with its innocent power. And in eradicable inclination to seek refuge in flight and always a burden with its need to be fed, wormed and ed with its liability to cuts it infections to laming and heaves. But when it greets you with a nicker, nuzzles your chest and regards you with a large and liquid eye, the question of where you wanna be and what you want to do has been answered. And in most of human history, we use the tool of the horse, but the horse was a, was a living tool and we replaced it with unliving tools that we still have a connection to. And, and you say something quite extraordinary after this quote, you say, I wonder if that might come again someday a vehicle that cares back and that's a reference to the possible s and consciousness of AI and other things. But I want just talk about that, that whole idea of maintenance as building a connection between us and other things. Of course, parents feel this with their children.

- We,

- We take care of our children for yeah. Anywhere from 20 years on 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 there. You're right about that. And I've always regretted that us hippies were kind of mean to our parents. That was just stupid. And I can tell you that when hippies reproduced and they had children, they were shocked that their children were know, just loving and, and you know, not nasty the way who he had been. So lots of regrets there. But you know, one generation makes a mistake and the next generation knows that it was a

- Mistake. What are your thoughts about how maintenance connects you to, to things and the, and non non-breathing things and do you agree with me or do you disagree?

- Oh no, I greatly agree. And and it is, part of, it's one of the things we do with pets is, is take on this intimate relation, which has a whole lot to do with taking care of them, feeding them and taking 'em to the vet and so on. And they tear back. I have a economics question for you if you don't mind. Sure.

- No, go ahead.

- I intend to have a lot of stuff on infrastructure in the book later on. And one of the big que one of the huge things of, of mega structures here, I'm gonna draw on the Economist at Oxford who did a book called How Big Things Get Done. And I got in touch with him and, and then called him and said, okay, infrastructure maintenance, tell me how to, I didn't see anything in your books about, you talk about everything's about building well or badly, these various megastructures of, of infrastructure and what about maintenance? And he said, I can't tell you anything. And okay, come on, you've looked at this stuff, you've looked, you've compared 'em all over the world, you know, all it, all those inside down and said, I kind of angrily. He said, I can't tell you anything about maintenance. And apparently what happens is that operations and maintenance are so blended together, definitionally and, and, and 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 any analysis on it. Is that, can you explain that?

- I can't, but I, but I have a thought, which I mean, I don't, I haven't thought, I haven't thought about, 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. It doesn't call out. Right. You know, my, my favorite example of this is one said a time management seminar and the facilitator said, how many people wish they read more books? And every hand went 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, a book just sits there. You know, I, I have a, anyway, so maintenance doesn't call out until it's too late. If it's not in your habit, it's too late. And I think, you know, books like yours encourage us to understand that that's, those are two different things. Maintaining a process 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 and is efficiently. The resources spend efficiently 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 wanna separate them in your book. And, and your thinking obviously is an encouragement to make that insight. And I hope Ben Kleberg 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, what 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, it's not a straightforward thing often it doesn't just run itself and then to, to maintain it doesn't happen automatically either. And often these projects are not the incentives to, to do those things are imperfect. And that's the nature of life. Many of them are public where the people responsible for them are not necessarily gonna bear internalize the costs and benefits of the decisions they need to, that they make to, to get those things done. You know, I think about World War ii, we had an episode with Brian Potter on the credible productivity of World War II airplane production. And, and that was a group of mostly men. I was gonna say men, it's mostly men almost exclusively at that point in life, in 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, the creation of the assembly lines that create it, instead of making cars that are ma now making say bombers or fighter planes or engines, those are people who are highly motivated because they felt they, the world was a stake and they were not wrong. It was, it was God's work was crucial. And if you don't think that's

- True, that's different than, than, than it's different than infrastructure. Manufacturing has a whole huge literature on maintenance. They love acronyms. It, it's all boring. I have not found a good soulful book, but there's no engine textbooks with all of these acronyms. And they always refer to the entity that they're maintaining as the asset. And they're mostly talking about the machines that are, they're manufacturing and, and you know, so the Honda developing the, the lean approach to all of that is very well thought out and, and very influential. And, and the, the, the, that is a well explored and, and theoretically rich, not soulful yet, but nevertheless very detailed that a lot of thought has gone into its manufacturing, is really aware of all of this. Aerospace is tremendously aware of maintenance behavior and costs. Life. It's life and death. Airplanes obviously, because they're,

- Yeah,

- When they fall out of the sky with people on board, people are really upset and don't want that to happen ever. So there's a lot of really, really highly disciplined study of, of maintenance issues and, and airplanes. And then in space typically you've got something, you know, out in space and they've gotta fix everything. Like Robin Ox Johnson on a sailboat, they gotta fix whatever goes wrong with whatever's on board. That's it. And you know, once we get to Mars and well just the moon, but, and then to Mars, there's gonna be serious issues like that of, of how do you, you don't have the tools for the job, but you've gotta get this job done. How do you do that? Likewise, software, they talk about maintenance all of the time. How do you keep the links alive? How do you manage all the dependencies that develop? How do you deal with these different layers? And AI is getting in the thick of all of that now with coding. So, and then I was gonna have a, I wanna have a chapter on in Japan, 'cause Japan is more like infrastructure in the sense that there insanely good at maintenance. It is hard to find a roof tile in all of Japan that is broken and the roofs are that well maintained that they're, they're always gonna look good and there may be something having to do with the same culture and, and Judy and Gary and things like that and, and, and always wanting to look good, but there's more to it than that. And it's kind of hidden there. There I could find no Japanese poetry that talks about maintenance and you know, in American poetry you've got Robert Frost, a mending wall, something there is that doesn't up a ball, wants it down so on. And he winds up. That winds up being about unnecessary maintenance. And, and he wants it to stop. And there's, in Japan, the Buddhist chop wood carry water, but that's it. And so these things be quite hidden. And I'm pretty sure that taking the look for pattern, the, the inspecting for how does, how does it actually work? How does maintenance separate out, separate out from operation of infrastructure, for example? I guess there needs to be a another flight for like person who's gonna walk into that. 'cause he said he won't. It's too hard.

- It could be you. I think you're onto something when you talk about, I think you're onto something when you talk about the tile that's not broken. You said they want it to look good. I think there's a powerful aesthetic sense. Obviously it's not an insight, deep 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, that extends way beyond that narrow, narrow application. The point I was trying to make about the, about the World War II is that if you don't have a profit motive, which is a problem with much public infrastructure, maintenance gets, I think overlooked. And the, but if you think the world's at stake and civilization's at stake, that overcomes some of the lack of monetary incentive. There's a non-monetary incentive. And I, you know, I think about subway systems, the things that Kleberg 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 is the case in say a, a private factory. Right? So I think that's part of the challenge. That's, that's all I was saying there.

- The well right for repair is a thing going on in the US and I guess in Europe. And I'm about to, to write about that. So I've been studying up and there's an online version of the book where I put it up for comment and so on. And there's a couple of sections that are not in the print book that are gonna 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 a slightly better plow back in the days when plows were just taking off in the US in the Midwest. And it turned out to be a fascinating story. And, and he's one of the great success stories that's seldom told of how to really build a, a long lasting company that can scale. And it really scaled, it's still more than 50% of agricultural equipment in the US and, and in the world is, is from John Deere. But then the right to repair. So John Deere, the man was highly dedicated to his customers and he did everything with his customers and for his customers. And the, the company became famous for that, that that, that people, you know, would buy John Deere toys for their children because it was that level of, of dedication, kind of like Harley Davidson did with motorcycle people. They're willing to tattoo it on their bodies. So, but now in the right to repair issue in this century, John Deere is famous and sort of the poster boy for having your customers bite you and, and hate you because the software that's involved in physician agriculture, John Deere wants to totally own in 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 a hundred miles away from where you are in the plains. And farmers have always, you know, fixed their own stuff. So they are offended at, at all of this. And, and, and by the way, if you do try to mess with your machine, they cripple it through the air. They will, you know, make it so that you cannot use that machine in, in any bigger way than to get it back to the barn. And people really hate that. So yeah,

- I get that. You know,

- Laws are emerging on this and I, I looked into, you know, what was the dialogue inside the, the company as, as all of this started to break loose in the 2010s and 2020s where there's some people saying, oh, we, we take care of our customers, let's figure out how to do that. And it turns out that nobody was doing that there. The, there was a real argument in the company. It was between liners and soft liners. Soft liners said, well what's the minimum we can do that looks like we're okay with getting people to repair stuff, but we don't actually change things or others saying, no, screw 'em, it's our company. You know, just five these folks, they're not gonna pass laws. They're afraid to do that over too big a bail. All that kind of stuff. So that's how something as fundamental is how repairable is your stuff by the user becomes a fundamental issue in business. And John Deere has been around for in three centuries now and has started in 18 hundreds and prosper all through the 19 hundreds. And it is now in the 20 hundreds. And I don't think it's gonna make it through this century with that kind of attitude. What do you think?

- Right. I don't think they need legislation to fix it. It sounds like the market's gonna, they're gonna, they may have gotten a short term gain from it, right. Profitability of, of controlling those repairs. But obviously they've damaged their brand. Yeah, huge. Tremendously. It's the most profitable thing they do is, is is sequestered repair, which works if you have a company. But if you don't, you lose at all. We'll see, it'd be an interesting thing to keep, to keep an eye on. Yeah. I, I wanna close with, we've, 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 doomy forecasts about the impact of AI on our economy. I'm much, I'm not worried about that particularly. I think that's a misunderstanding of both what AI's gonna do

- And what do you think the nature of the misunderstanding is.

- I, I think AI is mostly gonna 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, I understand there is possibilities for darker things, but the, and again, I'm not referring to issues of, of consciousness or the worry that it'll turn us on to paperclips or those kind of things. But just on the normal economic macroeconomic effects, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm on the optimistic side, but I'm also, I think that part, which I think will be great overall. There'll be negatives, but, but also many good things. The human aspect of it is what I think about a lot. And not the non-economist or the non, I wouldn't say the non-financial part is what I think about a lot. And it comes back to what I was talking about before. I used Claude this week to do something that would've taken me, I don't know, I'm not, this is not a coding problem, this is a thinking problem.

- The

- Strategic question my college faces, I wanted its thoughts, Which means I wanted to talk to it and I did. And I spent an hour and it produced at the end of that hour a document that would've taken me weeks and I probably would've given up long before I would've pushed through to those levels. And it, at one point I said, you know, I think this is a strategic error to, to do this project. And I, I, I laid out why and then I asked Claude whether it agreed and it said it did. But it said, you've kind of forgotten these other possible positives. And I thought, you know, that's true. It's very thought provoking and the whole experience was embarrassingly exhilarating.

- Yeah.

- And, and in particular, as many people have noticed, I like spending time with Claude. Not just 'cause he is obsequious, which he is, but, and you can tell it not to be, which helps. But my point is, is that right? You know, we're moving away as human beings over the last 25 years into our screens, into our digital worlds. I I wonder whether that's going to ultimately be a good thing. I worry about that, but forget me. I want your thoughts. You're a very optimistic person on average, I would say. We've 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, one advantage of being in your eighties, as you've seen a lot of things come and go and, you know, I've seen the personal computer come and, and not go, I've seen the internet come and not go. And clearly AI is gonna be in, in that lineage of something that comes in and, and, 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 society comes to decisions on, on basically how to manage it and will fail in global ways in the sense that because different parts of the world will have different relationships with their AI and somebody may be more military than others and so on. There's gonna be some scary things that no doubt happen. And, but you know, that happened with gas, it happened with machine guns, it happened with various kinds of, of weapons over the, the nuclear. And one figures out a way, I mean this is, you know, pure David Joys. Have you had him on the program?

- Well, about, not about his view of human creativity, innovation, but on, we talked about antisemitism actually, but his book obviously beginning

- Of Infinity

- Yeah. Is about our capability. We are very capable human beings.

- Yeah. It's a, it's a 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 new problems that emerge with this new explanation, this new understanding. And that's the engine of, of progress is finding ever better explanations for the problems that keep emerging. And, and the process comes from actual experience, not imagination in the sense that this is one of the things we learned about technology early on is everything that came along, some people would say, oh, we can't do that. 'cause here's how I imagine things might go wrong. And very creative notion sometimes, but irrelevant because that isn't what went wrong, real stuff went wrong, and then that had to be dealt with. So generally the thing to do with a new technology is embrace it and become comfortable with it and then, and also become uncomfortable with it so that you adjust it to fix that aspect. And then when things go wrong in a bigger scale, you understand it from inside, from, from the actual behavior of that sort of tools in the world and, and you correct a perceptual mistake, not an imaginary mistake. And that's, that's the kind of explanations that I think move us forward from problem to problem, from technology to technology.

- My guest today is Ben Stewart brand. His book is Maintenance of Everything. We will link to his online versions as well for people who wanna see the next part as it works through the process.

- Oh good. Thank you

- Stuart. Thanks for being part of e-comm talk. Delightful to spend time with you.