Sean Carroll

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.

But this system, well, I guess, sorry, let's back up.

One of the things that you do talk about in the book is it's not just a machine that needs maintenance.

Systems need maintenance overall, right?

It's a bigger kind of picture thing.

And this system of having reliable YouTube videos might be under threat from AI-generated nonsense, things like that.

Now we're going to need maintenance to make sure that we're getting the right maintenance tips, right?

It is.

As someone who has their own podcast, I have to be overall in favor of the Internet.

I think it's doing a lot of good things for a lot of good people.

Trying to give out information, yeah.

Trying to give out thoughts and knowledge of different sorts in ways that weren't technologically feasible before.

I should have asked this earlier, but there's an example of the importance of maintenance that you could have mentioned in the book, but you didn't, which is the clock of the long now.

You're also, you know, the Long Now Foundation is one of your projects, and one of their projects is building a clock that will last 10,000 years.

So the physicist in me says, well, how hard can that be?