The Story
Ezra Klein brings on Stuart Brand as a kind of guide to an older, more idealistic version of Silicon Valley, one rooted less in domination than in curiosity, tools, and self-reliance. Brand has been present for a surprising number of turning points: the 1960s counterculture, the Whole Earth Catalog, early online communities, and now a late-career meditation on maintenance. The conversation starts with the hippie dream of starting civilization over. Brand describes a generation that left college, went back to the land, and tried to build new ways of living. Most of it failed. Communes collapsed under gendered labor, drugs, isolation, and simple boredom. But he still sees that period as fearless and useful, because people learned by doing.
That leads naturally to the Whole Earth Catalog, which Brand describes as a giant paper tool for people who had dropped out of conventional life and suddenly needed to know how to grow food, fix things, and make a home. Klein points out that Steve Jobs once compared it to Google before Google. Brand's version is plainer: it gave people agency. The same instinct sits behind his famous campaign asking why humanity had not yet seen a photograph of the whole Earth. He says he did not single-handedly make NASA do it, but he did understand early what that image could do to people's minds.
From there the talk shifts into the subject of Brand's recent book, The Maintenance of Everything. He defines maintenance simply as what keeps things going, and he widens that idea until it covers bodies, homes, cities, soil, civilization, and even the planet. Klein hears in that an argument against the dominant tech mood, which tends to fixate on invention and disruption while ignoring upkeep. Brand does not sermonize, but he keeps returning to the dignity of care, repair, and practical attention.
The tension sharpens around AI. Klein presses on the irony that the Whole Earth Catalog, a symbol of legibility and competence, now sits in places like OpenAI, where researchers openly admit they do not fully understand the systems they are building. Brand is less alarmed than Klein, though not naive. He treats AI as a new kind of mind, close enough to human language to be useful but different enough to unsettle us. His redwood-and-hummingbird comparison captures the scale mismatch: humans may house these systems without being able to track their speed or inner workings.
By the end, the conversation gets more intimate. Brand talks about his century-old wooden tugboat, about ritual as a way to make repetitive work bearable, about old age as maintenance becoming a half-time job. He backs right-to-repair laws, argues that companies should not lock people out of the things they own, and says societies should honor the people who keep systems running. For him, maintenance is not just a household chore. It is a civic ethic.
Main Themes
The episode keeps circling one idea: modern culture celebrates invention and overlooks upkeep, even though upkeep is what makes any decent life possible. Brand treats maintenance as biological fact, moral practice, and political necessity all at once. Living things maintain themselves. People maintain tools, boats, children, and institutions. A democracy does too, or it falls apart.
Another thread is legibility. Brand likes things people can understand well enough to repair, adapt, and live with. That is why the Whole Earth Catalog mattered, and why Klein worries about AI. Both men are asking what happens when our most powerful systems stop being intelligible to ordinary people, or even to their creators. Brand's answer is partial but interesting: agency still matters, and access to shared knowledge can restore some of it. He says YouTube now does for repair what the Catalog once did.
The episode also links maintenance to humility. The communes failed because desire outran competence. Consumer tech often fails this way too, by pretending life is endless upgrade rather than recurring care. Brand's view is steadier. Things wear down. Bodies age. Tools break. Systems drift. Paying attention to that is not dreary in his telling. It is how people stay in touch with reality, and with one another.
Full Transcript
This wildfire season, Smokey Bear has a reminder for all of us. Only you can prevent wildfires. For more than 80 years, he's taught us how to prevent unwanted wildfires through his tips, like using the drown, stir, drown, feel method for putting out campfires. Every responsible action makes a difference. Learn wildfire prevention tips at smokeybear.com. Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your state forester, and the Ad Council. We've got an announcement before we begin the show today. I am going to be hosting a forum on housing and affordability with some of the top California governance candidates on Friday, May 8th. We're going to discuss why housing in California, my beloved home state, is so damn expensive and what each candidate hopes to do about it. The event is being co-hosted by the New York Times, Housing Action Coalition, and the Turner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley and the San Francisco Foundation. Tickets are on sale now, so get them while they're available. We'll include a link and a promo code in the show notes. I think if you were to look for the philosopher, the thinker, who is most influential in the culture that became the internet, who sort of laid down the way Silicon Valley thought, at least in its more idealistic era, the person you'd come up with is Stuart Brand. Brand has one of these amazing lives where he seemed to be present, at least for a part of the culture, at almost everything that mattered. There in the 60s and the moment of the hippies, in a $20 a month apartment in San Francisco with other beatniks. There at the mother of all demos that creates much of the structure for modern computing, that foresees many of the places we're ultimately going to go. There creating the well, one of the earliest online communities. There with the whole earth catalog, which Steve Jobs describes as an early inspiration for what we now think of as the internet. When I was young, there was an amazing publication called the Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand, not far from here in Menlo Park. And he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 60s, before personal computers and desktop publishing. So it was all made with typewriters, scissors and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions. A list of all the places Brand was and all the things he influenced from the clock of the long now to his long-running correspondence with Brian Eno. It is very, very long. And along the way, Brand has been writing these very beautiful, unusual books. Not just the Whole Earth Catalog, but How Buildings Learn in 1994, which I love, and if you've not read, you really should. And then most recently, this book, The Maintenance of Everything, Part 1, which explores something many of us would rather avoid. The constant and almost spiritually important work of fixing our cars, of doing home repairs, of caring for each other. Brand makes maintenance sound philosophically potent, even beautiful. And one thing I think is interesting about this book at this moment, to be written by somebody with the weight of Brand, is that it points towards maybe a different way of thinking about technology. It points towards maybe a different ethos on which Silicon Valley, with its, you know, great man of history, conquerors of the world dimensions now, can maybe move towards something a little bit more humble, something a little bit more rooted in the natural relationship we all have to each other and that we all have to aging and to loss. So I wanted to have Brand on to talk to him about that and so much else that he's seen and thought over the years. As always, my email is reclineshow at nytimes.com. Stuart Brand, welcome to the show. Well, thank you, Ezra. Glad to be here. I want to start a little bit back in your history. In the 1960s, you were part of a movement that got called the Back to the Landers, Communards. What was that? Hippies? What was that? How would you describe the vision there for society? For various reasons, a whole lot of people basically in college in the early 60s and on through into the early 70s thought they needed to reinvent civilization. The 50s had been so successful, they became kind of bland. And the Beatnik poets who preceded us showed a kind of a revolutionary path of going wild and going deep. And so we figured out ways to go wild and go deep. Many dropped out of college, decided that since civilization had to be reinvented, it ought to go together with that period. And go back to the countryside and farm and build buildings and have their own rules and start over. They all failed. But they were all highly educational. We learned that free love isn't free. We learned that if you expect the women to do all of the really hard work of carrying the water and cooking the meals and taking care of the kids like pioneer women used to have to do while the guys were building jones and other interesting buildings. The other thing that we discovered was that the countryside is actually kind of boring, especially if you don't connect with your neighbors, which we did not mostly. And so we fled back to the cities. Some of us figured out how to do too many drugs. And some of the rest of us noticed that and didn't. But it was a wonderfully fearless time. We undertook wild and crazy things. We had this aesthetic of the most wonderful adventures you could with the least amount of money that you could. And you have to be creative under those circumstances. So that was the hippies. And the whole Earth Catalog was speaking in a way to the fact that they just want to go college dropouts who didn't know how to do any work. They had not been raised on a farm or a ranch. How would you describe what the whole Earth Catalog looked and felt like to somebody who's never seen one? It was pretty big, actually. Bookstores complained about it because it was about as big as a laptop now, basically folio size. And thicker than a laptop now. I've seen them. It's big. Oh, yeah, yeah. By the time we did the so-called next whole Earth catalog, it was several pounds of everything. But I think that Steve Jobs in his commencement speech said it was like Google decades before Google. You know, the whole Earth catalog had all those books on how to be a beekeeper, how to grow sheep, how to make candles. We were actually candle dipping. So that was what the whole Earth catalog was. And it turned out it really did is what YouTube does now. It conferred agency. You mentioned that among the communards, some of them did too many drugs. I've always wondered if this story about you is true, that the reason we have NASA's picture of the whole Earth came from you doing psychedelics on a roof one day. Yeah, I was in San Francisco and kind of bored. And one of the things you did was bored at that time was drop some acid and see what happens. It was kind of my dose. It was about 100 micrograms. I went up on the roof of a $20 a month place that I lived in North Beach. $20 a month in North Beach. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Okay. That's already hard to believe, but it was true. Somehow it's easier to believe that you got NASA to take a picture of the Earth and that anything in North Beach ever cost $20. Well, it turns out it didn't really get NASA to do that. You know, we've been in space for 10 years at that point. We in the Soviet Union. And the cameras had always been looking outward or at pieces of the Earth, but they could have been looking back to see the Earth as a whole. And I was pretty sure that would change everything. I wound up starting a campaign. There was a button that said, why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet? And I know it got looked at by a lot of people in Congress and NASA agencies and so on. But I got to know some of the astronauts like Rusty Schweickert. And they took photographs. It came just a year or two later after my campaign. Got it. So it was a little coincidental. You had the idea on the roof, but the roof is not what led to the picture. I think that's correct. But it led to understanding the picture, I think, for a lot of people. That metaphor of the camera pointing outward as opposed to inward at what we don't yet have as opposed to what we do have, that actually feels like a nice metaphor for maintenance. And I hear this in the whole Earth catalog too, that in a way it feels like a lot of your career and thinking has been building up to this topic, that the whole Earth catalog was also a manual for maintaining your life, for maintaining the things you had. Let's begin with the most basic question. What is maintenance? It's what keeps things going. I'm a biologist by training. And so you find that everything alive spends a lot of its time basically maintaining being alive. Even the extent of reaching outside itself so you're not just eating a sort of a big, beautiful tree cutting down trees to maintain your dam, which is what protects the lodge. Most plants spend a lot of time basically helping the soil around them do things that work well for the plant. And the soil itself is alive. And we're always maintaining our bodies. We're maintaining our vehicles and our houses and our clothes and cities that we live in and protecting on that civilization is something they're maintaining as a whole. And even the planet, where now of tendencies and stuff like that. They call it toil, good word. And they try to automate it so that the system can be capable of seeing when a problem is coming and immediately get itself to go around it. And I'm sure that AI is going to bring many, many levels of that. That's the upside. The downside is you spend more and more of your life arguing with robots because, you know, we have a theory of mind, so you and I are talking and we each have a pretty good idea of what the other is doing mentally. With the AIs, that's not the case, and they're all different. So in a way, we're dealing with all these new species who talk our language but are from a different frame and some deep respects. The thing that AIs are going to teach us more about being human because we're going to see what a not-quite-human is like and get more acquainted with the difference. This podcast is supported by Nurtec ODT from Medipant. We know you didn't ask for an interruption, but migraine doesn't wait for the right moment to interrupt either. It just barges in, takes your time, and throws everything off. So when migraine takes your time, take Nurtec. It's for the acute treatment of migraine with or without aura in adults. Nurtec can provide pain relief in two hours, which can last up to two days. Ask your healthcare provider if Nurtec is right for you because your time is for you, not migraine. Don't take if allergic to Nurtec ODT. Allergic reactions can occur even days after use. Get help right away for trouble breathing, rash, swelling of face, mouth, tongue, or throat. High blood pressure and Raynaud's syndrome can occur. Get help for high blood pressure, numbness, coolness, pain, or color changes in fingers and toes. Common side effect is nausea. For full prescribing information, call 1-833-4-NURTEC or visit Nurtec.com. All right, back to your podcast. This wildfire season, Smokey Bear has a reminder for all of us. Only you can prevent wildfires. For more than 80 years, he's taught us how to prevent unwanted wildfires through his tips, like using the drown, stir, drown, feel method for putting out campfires. Every responsible action makes a difference. Learn wildfire prevention tips at smokeybear.com, brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your state forester, and the Ad Council. Let me pick up on the AI question. Something that you write about in maintenance of everything, and in this section you're quoting the philosopher Matthew Crawford, is that there is a necessity to the intelligibility, is the word that gets used, of the things we use. And when I read that, I was thinking about a moment I had with one of your creations that relates to AI, which is, you mentioned the whole earth catalog, which is this remarkable, deep catalog of all these tools and ways to fix things and ways to know about things and to create a whole life in a do-it-yourself way. And the first place I ever saw one physically was in the offices of OpenAI. When I visited them before ChatGPT. This is probably 2021 or 2022. And I remember thinking that there was something almost ironic about this catalog that was so dedicated to making the world intelligible at this place where they were explaining to me that they didn't understand the fundamental center of how their systems worked, that they're creating something that one of its most fundamental characteristics was unintelligibility. And as somebody who's just been around Silicon Valley a long time, I wonder what you make of that. As somebody who cares about whether or not we understand things well enough to work on them, we are now, all the energy is creating things we don't understand so we can offload more of our work onto these systems we don't understand in a way that I think is also going to change who we are and what we are as human beings. So AI is moving very fast and is solving a whole lot of problems. And of course, it is creating a whole lot of new problems. They're kind of alien intelligences in a way. And one of the good things that happened with large language models is they trained basically on human communication. And so they are, in that sense, intelligible as human intelligence. How it actually functions in there in terms of the extreme niceties of what's going on down at the bits and bytes level is not so intelligible. But so far, we're kind of making them in a real imitation of human communication and to some extent human thought. It's going to move beyond human thought pretty quickly. And it's certainly reaching out in terms of data space much wider than a human can in a much shorter time. And that fact alone puts us feeling like redwood trees trying to communicate with a hummingbird. They're linked. They live together. The hummingbird maybe lives in the redwood tree, but the redwood tree isn't capable of paying much attention to who's in its branches or how fast they're moving. We're introducing new kind of pace layers into the world we've been in. And the cellular, the brain moves really quickly in these computers because they don't have to use chemicals the way our brain does. They go a lot faster. We can engineer at these levels more than we can understand it. Part of being a human society now is having a range of specialists that understand these things at depth that can speak up and say, well, here's what we're pretty sure is going on. I guess my question on this, and I'm going to be thinking about that redwoods and hummingbirds analogy for a little bit, is what role maintenance and the associated virtues and knowledge have in a world where technologically it's requiring now so much sophistication and specialization to understand things. And some of them, like AI, we don't even, even the people making it can't understand. A lot of the examples in the book, which I often found very, very moving, are sailboats and Model Ts. And even if somebody was precision calibrating every single bolt in the Rolls-Royce, somebody knew what those bolts did. Yes. And in that way, this book struck me as almost counter-cultural, that it was arguing for virtues that it feels our society is pulling further away from. I try to take a position of never shaking my finger and saying, you should brush your teeth, you should change your oil, you should be a nanny to your behavior, to your child, and wake up and be a grown-up and take care of things. Most things work pretty damn well most of the time. When they don't, it comes as a surprise. Suddenly there's a problem and, oh dear, oh dear, the people who do maintenance for a living obviously do not have that frame of mind. I mean, online access to information and the parts is just astounding now. And that's, I think, the great solution for people that'll have a problem with something they've owned for three or four years and it came with a manual, but they've misplaced that for sure. Well, it turns out they go online and here comes some recommendations for some videos for exactly your problem and exactly your make and model and year of the device that you're having trouble with. Actually, there's four different versions of the issue you have and four different solutions to resolving it, one notably better than the other. And you follow that and then things fix and you're all powerful. You've totally taken agency and that particular device is now more legible to you. YouTube has replaced manuals. It's replaced the whole earth catalog in terms of conferring agency on anybody to learn anything or fix anything. So it's mostly a happy story, but you've got to go online. You've got to dig the aggregate wisdom of humanity on the case. You've lived on a tugboat for 40 years? Yeah. That must require a fair amount of maintenance. Well, especially if the tugboat was made of wood and built in 1912. Wooden boats don't usually last more than a century. Ours has because of a whole lot of maintenance. And boats are so lovable. We call them she. They are always dancing for us and wind dark seats are ridiculous. They're like a motorcycle in that respect of they're kind of hazardous. And so relying on them is an intimate process. So maintaining a boat has an endearingness quality to it that is attractive, though it's not attractive as the owner, but then the cost of it and the specializedness of the work that has to be done. It's like living inside a beautiful violin where all of the curves and all of the nuances are very carefully crafted and replacing parts after that detail takes some doing. But it's worth doing. One thing I enjoyed about the book is the way that it recasts work that can be described or thought of as tedious as almost a spiritual practice. You write, treat the boring task as a ritual, alive with aesthetic nuance and a welcome respite from the clamor of thinking. Find your own contemplative practice. Tell me about that idea of maintenance as a contemplative practice. Well, I can't do meditation. I get bored. But people who do meditation sort of embrace the boredom and utilize it as a way to calm their mind and maybe center their mind on something that they don't usually go to mentally. For example, often things of maintenance are done by Japanese with a great deal of ceremony. You know, just changing the lights of a streetlamp. There's guys in uniform. They have a special routine they do with a ladder where they go up the pole and do a little formal thing at the beginning and another little formal thing at the end. And it turns the simple task into a somewhat more complex dance. Moving together in time is one of the profound things that humans have been doing for a very long time and having a uniform way of doing something, especially a service, where you make that kind of a big deal of it. So ritual is one way to make really, really repetitive maintenance less onerous. The other dimension that struck I've been in the news for 6,000 years is a horse. And the horse takes a lot of maintenance. I'll read something here from the book if I may. There's this philosopher named Albert Borgman who wrote, you cannot remain unmoved by the gentlest confirmation of a well-bred, well-trained horse, more than a thousand pounds of big-boned, well-muscled animal, slick coat and sweet of smell, obedient and mannerly, and yet forever a menace with its innocent power and ineradicable inclination to seek refuge in flight. And oh, it's a burden with its need to be fed and wormed and shod, with its liability to Cuts and infections, and laming and heaves. But when it greets you with a nicker, nuzzles to your chest, and regards you with a large and liquid eye, the question of where you want to be, and what you want to do, has been answered. And I end with, I wonder if that might come again someday, a vehicle that can care back. Tell me what you make of that. Your children care back. That makes me think in a completely different dimension of vehicles. I think this is one of the things we may ask our AIs to do for us, give us things that care back in some sense. And the question is, are they faking it, or do they mean it? And maybe part of the design will be that they do mean it. There is somebody there caring. This gets to me, to a question we were sort of circling earlier. I mean, right to repair, it, among other things, is a legislative idea. It would be potentially legislation that the government would pass saying, companies have to do this. And one thing I was thinking about in the book is it is treating maintenance often as a question of our knowledge about the things we are caring for. But it is also a question of, first, whether the companies that make those things have made those things open to care, right, open to maintenance, whether you can get into the system, whether you can get into the innards. You know, they do not want you getting inside an iPhone. And second, because often, as you say with John Deere, the company would make more money by just having you replace these technologies on a structured timetable. Whether or not society, government, comes in and says, we actually are going to force you to make maintenance something people can do. So as you're thinking about right to repair, and as you've been around technology for a long time, do you think it is something we should pass? Do you think that if we're going to make maintenance a social value, it's something the government has to insist that the companies permit? Yes. Yeah, and there's already some laws in place in places like Massachusetts and Colorado, and it's moving pretty quickly. And some companies are getting out in front of it. So I have a Tesla, and Tesla is somewhat ahead of this one. They sort of fought back for a little while and then realized, oh, we've got all this information about your vehicle, and we'll share it with you. And there are lots of companies like Patagonia that, you know, have a whole video teaching you how to repair their garments. And so it goes. Some of this can get sorted out in the marketplace, but some companies have such a kind of grip on their field, and John Deere is one of them, that they don't feel they have to worry about competition. And if that's the case, that's where the government usually does need to step in. So if somebody read this book and they wanted to make regular maintenance more of a part of their life, but didn't quite know how or where, didn't feel like they have anything obvious to fix, but see this as a virtuous skill, a discipline, where would you advise them to start? How do you make this a, how do you weave this into a life in which you're not used to thinking about your possessions or even yourself in this way? That's a child. That's a big, that's a big commitment to just learn about maintenance. This is this I-vow stuff that Martin Buber used to talk about. Having a relationship with the other stuff that feels like a relationship you have with a child or with a pet. Let it become shining with use, with tools, the rule of those guys, the best tools you can, if you use them all the time, gets the best you can. To send your sort of respect for the tool plays out in the care that you give to it. And honoring the process of taking care of things in yourself and in others. Sometimes maintenance tasks are seen as, you know, of a caste level difference. Who cleans the toilets? Who takes care of the dead things? And so many maintenance tasks are not only low status there, they're low paid. And that doesn't need to be the case. And people don't notice the really good maintainers or the social engineers because they're not paying attention. Well, the really good maintainers are worth paying attention to for the fact that they do get recognized, they do get paid, and they're basically honored as sort of the way we honor librarians or libraries. These are actually the pillars of civilization. The folk singer Pete Seeger said, you should consider that the essential art of civilization is maintenance. When I was asking you what led to the writing of this book, you said that maintenance is something that you yourself are not very good at or have not been good at traditionally. So since immersing yourself in it, both in terms of its technical questions and its spiritual and personal questions, how has your relationship to maintenance changed? What do you maintain that maybe you didn't before? What have you found as ways to do it that you know were not true before this project? I'm 87 years old. Guess what? At the time of your age, just being old is a half-time job in the maintenance thing. This is called the bathtub curve, like with a building. When it's brand new, there's lots of problems. But then they sort of even out into kind of a plateau on it and just stay at a certain level. And so it'll be okay with that one. And so, yeah, it's pretty old, especially if it's a wooden building. Problems increase. So the math on this is high maintenance at the beginning, middle of the sound, and high maintenance toward the end. But you know, if you're toward the end. Generically, you're probably generically. I'm somewhat of an optimist. That's fatal for maintenance. Maintenance are realists. They're pessimists who are always looking for what could go wrong and how can I get ahead of that. Or they hear a questionable something and I might say, oh, I don't think that's serious. But maintenance says that that sounds like it's serious. So there's a whole attitude issue that one becomes aware of. And I sort of covenants that I'm an optimist. I think that's a good place to end. So what was our final question? What are three books you'd recommend to the audience? I recommend David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity. It's basically optimism at a cosmic level. And it's full of the realization that there are always problems and there are solutions. And that goes on infinitely. You're always at the beginning of infinity when it comes to that. I recommend a book that used to be called by Simon Winchester. It was called The Perfectionist then he changed it to Exactly. But it's how precision engineers created the modern world. And then I wound up revisiting, I did a section on manuals. And so there are great manuals of history. But the one I was looking at was Diderot's Encyclopedia, which had diagrams basically of how all the trades and crafts of the 18th century actually work. But the French Revolution shot down all of the kind of rational optimism that was in that book. The Scottish Enlightenment, they were very impressed by and they all studied Diderot's Encyclopedia. And they came up with their own encyclopedia called the Encyclopedia Britannica, which went from strength to strength for a hundred years. And basically the Scottish Enlightenment was the source of our constitution, which is an enlightenment document, of our Declaration of Independence. And that's what really needs to be maintained if you want to maintain civilization on the planet well, is the engagement with science, with engineering, with open discourse, with the replacement of political leaders without bloodshed. Basically dealing with problems in a way that we honor that they can be corrected and that there will be other problems and that I'll be comfortable with that and moving with that and being as intelligent as we can be and managing all that. So those three books are what I'd recommend. Stuart Brand, thank you very much. Thank you, Ezra. This episode of Ezra Crunch was produced by Annie Galpin, fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our recording engineer is Aman Sahota. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Geld. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Roland Hu, Marie Cassione, Marina King, Jack McCortick, Kristen Lynn, Emma Kellebeck, and Jan Kobel. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Christina Samuluski and Shannon Vasta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser. This wildfire season, Smokey Bear has a reminder for all of us. Only you can prevent wildfires. For more than 80 years, he's taught us how to prevent unwanted wildfires through his tips, like using the drown, stir, drown, feel method for putting out campfires. Every responsible action makes a difference. Learn wildfire prevention tips at smokeybear.com. Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, Your state forester, and the Ad Council.