Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
341 | Stewart Brand on Maintenance as an Organizing Principle
19 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I don't know if you know, but recently the Golden Globes happened. This is one of those award shows where they give prizes to movie stars and TV stars and things like that. But they had a new category at the Golden Globes this year, Best Podcast. The Mindscape podcast did not win Best Podcast.
It was not nominated. It was probably not even noticed by the people who did the nominating and deciding who was going to be on the list. You know, what can we say? Our civilization continues to let me down in various ways. But I can't complain too much.
The winner of Best Podcast this year was Amy Poehler, who won for her podcast Good Hang with Amy Poehler, which I think I've mentioned previously. And it's a good podcast. All of the people who actually were nominated, entertainers, comedians, and whatever, not a lot of natural philosophers were represented.
But I bring this up not just because I want to put the idea in the minds of anyone listening that maybe I should be nominated in the future, but there was an episode of Good Hang with Amy Poehler featuring Kate McKinnon. I haven't actually heard this episode, but Jennifer, my wife, has heard it. I've heard other episodes.
And one of the things that happened in the interview with Kate McKinnon is that she expressed her enthusiasm for a YouTube channel by an Australian guy named Bruce the Plumber. And the YouTube channel is called Drain Cleaning Australia. Yes, you heard that correctly. 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.
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Chapter 2: How does maintenance relate to the Second Law of Thermodynamics?
Well, the first thing you need to do is some theory. You need to decide how can you encode a quantum entangled set of qubits in such a way that there is an algorithm for doing the equivalent of voting, right? You know, picking the majority rule. And so people have done that. And then you need to build into your quantum computer algorithms.
um, steps in the algorithm that along the way, uh, massage the qubits to make sure that they have not been, uh, have not been subject to noise. So you're going to have to build, it's going to be an important step if you want to build quantum computers that can do commercially useful applications.
That's fantastic. And, uh, do you think that's solvable and all this going forward with quantum computers?
I do, I do. It's going to be trickier than we thought to build large quantum computers. They're very, very fragile. And so the theory is there, the technology for building qubits is there, but keeping them all decohered, et cetera, or coherent, I suppose I should say, is going to be tricky. So, yeah.
So you have David Deutsch on Mindscape. Uh-huh. Where is he in all that? He's in the thick of quantum computing, I thought.
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, he was one of the people who invented the idea of quantum computing. But, you know, now there's money involved. So lots of people are very, very active in both the theory side and the technology side. And so the people like David who are, you know, the big picture creative thinkers, they're thinking about other things these days.
Well, it's interesting. He's become very popular in the tech world here. We're all reading David Deutsch and basically getting the kind of cosmic level optimism that goes with his understanding that all problems are solvable, but problems never go away. There's always new ones to solve. And that's what progress is made of. And in that sense, progress is inevitable.
Yes.
And so techies like that, because technological process progress feels, scientific progress feels like it's kind of built into the universe.
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Chapter 3: What are the challenges of modern maintenance in technology?
um donald rogers the one who cheated and suicided uh hated doing maintenance he called it sailor rising and uh if it was kind of unpleasant he would reward himself with a drink after uh after completing an unpleasant piece of maintenance and uh pretty soon he ran out of uh rum and wine and then went crazy instead
But my favorite was Moitessier, who was super good at planning ahead and had all the equipment. And when he was close to getting back to England, said, nope, I'm just going to keep going. I like this too much. I don't want to finish this race.
Yeah, exactly. And I knew the Joshua and I knew Bernard Metessier a little bit. I said, boy, you're both pretty fit. And he said, yeah, the idea for me is it has to be a new boat every day. It has to have everything in perfect working condition. And he could do that because he also insisted that nothing be complicated.
Chapter 4: How does the concept of 'right to repair' impact maintenance practices?
And so his self-healing device Instead of being complex, like most people where there's a bunch of ploys and hinges and whatnot that would operate the tiller, he developed a very simple device which was right on the axis of the rudder itself. And so the angle of the wind kept the angle of the rudder at a certain steady point. And if something broke it, which did, he couldn't fix it.
Whereas Robin Knox Johnston, he lost, when he was south of Australia, lost a part of his self-steering device that he couldn't replace. And from then on, he had to figure out how to self-steer just by setting the sails in certain ways on his catch. So... And then he had to worry about when he was sleeping below decks.
And if it jibed, which you can do with the sail whams over to the other side, he had to know that was happening or about to happen. And so he took from his bunk the sideboard so that when the boat was about to jibe, it would change its angle, dump him on the floor, And he would pick his bruised body up, go out on deck and reset the whole system. And that was his idea.
Chapter 5: What is the significance of Stewart Brand's book on maintenance?
That was the way he did maintenance was it was more important to maintain the rigging, which was becoming fragile, than maintaining his own personal bodily integrity. And so he got kind of bruised up.
You have to make some choices there. But I like the idea that maintenance is as much about psychology as it is about mechanics. Like there's an attitude one has toward it. And whether or not you're willing to get into it and enjoy it and take pride in it makes a huge difference about how effective you're going to be.
I think you do whatever you have to do. For some people, they make it a ritual that they enjoy as a ritual. It's like praying or something. Others do it as they can do it mindlessly while they are thinking or listening to something else entirely. There's a book called Round the Bend I'll be writing about soon. that it's basically an error.
It tells in the 1920s of airlines taking shape in the Middle East. And one of the aircraft mechanics is very interested in religion, and he becomes a kind of a sage that people come to and listen to. And he's teaching maintenance as basically a form of spiritual practice. And which is pretty interesting because Arab cultures are not so good on maintenance.
That's why they always lose wars in the Middle East. And there's a whole section in the print book about that. So a lot of these things are culture deep. And if your culture is making it hard for you to be a good maintainer, you've got to figure out the workarounds. Maybe make it a spiritual practice. Maybe ensure that the officers are involved in doing maintenance.
And that way, they will respect it and take it seriously. In the U.S. and in NATO militaries, it's the non-commissioned officers that are responsible for maintenance. And basically, the sergeants train everybody in maintenance, and they're the ones responsible for making sure that maintenance happens.
And the Russian military does not really have NCOs, non-commissioned officers, sergeants, and most of the Arab militaries do not. And when you don't have that, the maintenance doesn't get done, and then you lose the war.
So in other words, in those organizations, it goes right from high-level officers to low-level soldiers, and there's not enough people in the middle to overlap?
They overlap and they take responsibility and they keep the layers... respecting each other. This is a big part of... So that every single officer in the U.S. military has a non-commissioned officer who is with them at all times, keeping them alert to what the soldiers themselves need and want and maintenance issues and all of that sort of thing. And so the...
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Chapter 6: How does maintenance influence cultural practices and societal resilience?
You're mostly at the pier.
No, the tugboat, she's a blue water boat. She's been to Alaska and so on. But the way we refitted her both as a home and as a working tugboat is that we can cruise around the Bay Area in safety.
Is there a lot of maintenance involved in that endeavor?
This is a wooden boat that was built in 1912. And you can imagine that there's an enormous amount of maintenance. I can tell you that if she was in such bad shape when we got her in 1982 that The guy we paid $8,000 to to get the boat couldn't believe he got away with that much money because he was in terrible shape. But we brought her back up to a pretty cheery condition.
But, you know, wooden boats are basically made out of celery. Wood is a wonderfully adaptable medium, but it is, as we know, especially in buildings, water wants to turn it into something that isn't wood and something that doesn't keep leaks away. So a lot of maintenance.
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, partly it's because the products are lower and lower maintenance. And so you don't have occasion, like you did with the Model T, to constantly having to redo things. Putting in grease, putting in oil, cleaning up this, cleaning up that. One of the interesting things is that electric cars, when they first were built back around 1900, were very low maintenance compared to the gasoline cars.
And that was a major attraction among many other things. Then gas went out because they could go longer distances, and there were oil discoveries in the US and so on. But then once Tesla came along, once again, people realized, wow, these electrical vehicles have way, way less maintenance.
uh and their energy efficiency is enormously high uh whereas a gasoline internal combustion engine as they say uh it spends most of its energy just getting out of its own way so uh that That efficiency of energy and efficiency of maintenance is part of the story of progress. You see that also in the ways that we have dealt with corrosion, with rust over the years.
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Chapter 7: What role does maintenance play in the sustainability of civilization?
There's a whole story of that in my book about how From way back, like 4,000 years ago, people have been trying to make a kind of a steel that doesn't rust. The problem with steel is that, or iron, is that the... When it oxidizes into rust, that's a bigger molecule than the straightforward iron or steel molecule. And so it puffs up and then falls off and exposes more.
It's not protecting against future rust. So that became a big quest, and finally stainless steel was discovered. With enough chromium, you can make it so that there's an oxidized layer of chromium on there that does protect the steel. You still have to be careful.
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?
Yeah, and I think lots of things might as well be short-lived. And this is the whole idea of kind of disposable containers versus something that you're going to keep going. The cover of the book honors the idea of kintsugi, the Japanese art of basically repairing broken things.
pottery with a kind of a gold glue, and so it not only fixes it, but it makes it more beautiful, and you honor the mistake that broke it, and you honor the repair, and then you brag about it. So kintsugi is... is a way of kind of just honoring the fact that things do break. But nobody actually wants things to break.
And so what is being done with scientific and engineering progress is make things that are lower and lower maintenance. One of the things you lose in the course of that is people being skills and maintenance. We saw this when personal computers first came along and I happened to be in the thick of that, it turned out, in the Bay Area and the user groups
For a good while, we're carefully attended by the manufacturers because the users were, one, showing the problems, and two, showing the workarounds. And then the manufacturers needed to know about that. And then they could try to do a workaround way back to the manufacturing level so that particular kind of problem would not keep occurring.
With software, this is much harder to do because software keeps moving, whereas hardware stays the way it is. And that just is part of the history of these things.
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Chapter 8: What optimistic perspectives on maintenance does Stewart Brand offer?
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.
Right. And so, you know, Senator Elizabeth Warren is all over this, and the guys at iFixit, Kyle Weins, and others in the public world are... are basically, it's a form of insistence on the owner of repair rights to, if I own it, if you sell it to me and I own it now, I've gotta be able to fix it or I don't really own it. And I should not have paid a sale price.
Back in the day, Xerox was one of the first companies to sort of discover, how about we continue to own the copiers that you get from us, and you lease them, but we own them. And by the way, then we can take the amortized tax write-off on it, and you can't. But we're then responsible for keeping it working.
And they did that not as well as they needed to because the early copiers were really, really flaky. They were great, and Xerox became an enormously famous and rich corporation, and then they lost it, partly because it was just mismanagement in various directions, but they mismanaged the technicians that were repairing people's copiers, and that's why they didn't make it.
So just to be clear, you're a supporter of right-to-repair laws?
Yeah, and it's tricky because you can see from the company standpoint, if you control everything about the ongoing usage and upkeep and so on of these particular devices and you don't let non-company people fix them or the owners fix them,
um you get a lot more income and often it is uh like car sales the dealerships for cars up until when tesla came along were making more money off of fixing their cars than off of selling them and um
which also puts incentives in a funny place, because then you sort of want them to need service, and so you might design them in ways that look great, but after two months, you're going to have to go into the shop, and they own the shop, and they own the parts, and so it goes. But it's short-term gain.
This is kind of one of those acidification issues that once you're successful enough to really sort of control a domain of stuff and customers, the temptation is to start trying to extract rents. That is basically unearned income from the system.
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