Sean Carroll

Okay.

We'll put that out there if anyone wants a tugboat in San Francisco.

But you're not out there doing circumnavigations of the globe.

You're mostly at the pier.

Is there a lot of maintenance involved in that endeavor?

Do I get the feeling, though, that it's becoming harder in the modern world for people to do routine maintenance on the gadgets that they have?

I mean, a Model T you could fix, but a car that I would buy new right now, no one even knows what's going on there, at least the typical person in the garage.

Well, one thing that seemed to be a thread running through the book, and I don't even know whether this is intentional or not, but there's sort of a relationship, a tension maybe, between innovation and maintenance.

There's like one pull to just do things really quickly and get them to work.

There's another that says, well, let's slow down.

Let's make sure this is going to last a long time.

Am I correct in perceiving that?

Well, actually, I was going to ask about that.

So let's get into it a little bit.

Am I right that the, quote, right to repair is a movement now?

There's people who stand up and say, like, it should be illegal for corporations to sell me things that I'm not allowed or can't fix.

So just to be clear, you're a supporter of right-to-repair laws?

On the other hand, as you also point out in the book, there's a sense in which we could imagine entering a golden age of repairing things because the Internet helps us find both information and parts.

I love the section on using YouTube videos to fix various things that you wouldn't otherwise have the knowledge to do.

And I was a little alarmed, nevertheless, that you mentioned how often surgeons use YouTube videos to check up on how to do a procedure.