Sean Carroll

So this is volume one, which is Maintenance of Everything, just talking about the general concept of maintenance.

And he's a storyteller, Stuart, and he tells various stories about people in

single sailor sailing ships that have to fix their sails and riggings in the middle of a storm in the ocean, all the way up to fixing modern electronic infrastructure in various ways.

Now, of course, Stuart Brand is a famous guy.

He was the originator of the Whole Earth Catalog,

None of you were alive for that.

But back in the 60s and 70s, this was a big deal.

The Whole Earth Catalog was a way to like know where you could find the stuff you needed to exist in the world, which could be as simple as, you know, food or tools, but also where to learn, you know, computer programming or whatever.

Of course, these days we have the internet to teach us this stuff.

Stuart knows this very, very well.

He talks about it in his book, so the Whole Earth Catalog is no longer published.

But he also was one of the founders of The Well.

The Well, W-E-L-L, stands for Whole Earth Electronic Link, which is one of the first online communities, really, as well as a co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, which tries to

focus humanity's attention on the fact that there are things that last more than a couple years, and maybe we should think about the further future than we usually do.

So he's an iconic figure in various fields, and I find it just fascinating that this idea of maintenance is what he's turned his attention to.

And the book, as Stuart explains in the interview,

He's writing the book in real time, or at least he's writing it sequentially.

So he puts chapters online and then just collects them into a book.

So if he feels like, oh, I need to have a digression about motorcycles, then okay, we're going to have a digression about motorcycles.

Oh, we did a digression about rust?