Sean Carroll

It's all about cleaning clogged drains.

Bruce the Plumber, who in a hilariously cartoonish, over-the-top Australian accent, goes to various kitchens and restaurants and things like that and finds clogs and cleans grease traps and basically pulls out these ugly messes that have accumulated over the years in the pipes.

You might think...

This is somewhat of a niche kind of activity to have as a popular YouTube channel, but it's not just Kate McKinnon's favorite.

Every one of these videos that he puts up gets millions of hits.

They are intrinsically interesting to, I guess, a whole bunch of people.

And that does warm my heart because maintenance of our world is kind of important, right?

Fixing things is something that has an endless fascination for a lot of people.

Of course, it also has a repulsion for a lot of people.

Plenty of people don't have anything to do.

with doing important maintenance.

That's why these drains get clogged in the first place.

But you know, we live in a society that is increasingly interconnected, complicated, hierarchical, networked in various ways.

There's a lot of infrastructure, a lot of stuff that needs to be kept up from our cars to our kitchens to our houses to our

electronic infrastructure through which you're listening to this podcast right now.

And there's just a simple fact about the laws of nature and the second law of thermodynamics that things are going to break.

There's a lot more ways to be broken than to be in good working order.

And what we do to keep things from breaking is we maintain them in various ways.

You can think of the act of maintenance as generating entropy somewhere in the universe in the service of lowering it somewhere else, lowering it either in some mechanical thing or some electronic thing or in a biological thing.

Biology can be thought of as a set of systems that have solved the problem of self-maintenance, at least to some accuracy.