Sean Carroll

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.

But despite the importance of maintenance for living in a world with the second law of thermodynamics, as a subject, we all know about it, but we don't sort of take it as a particular theme of interest in its own right.

Maybe drain cleaning or fixing your car or something like that is of interest, but the general idea

aspect of maintenance overall is not given a lot of attention.

It should be because the world is becoming more complicated.

And there's even sort of flashpoints of controversy.

Increasingly, various companies don't want to let you fix their stuff.

They want to make it unfixable.

And people have fought against this with the notion of the right to repair things.

They want to have legislation passed saying, I get to fix things when they break.

I don't need to buy a new

iPhone or whatever from you.

So today's guest, Stuart Brand, has written a book that does in fact focus on this theme.

His book is called Maintenance, and it's volume one.

There's going to be more volumes coming up.