341 | Stewart Brand on Maintenance as an Organizing Principle

Hello, everyone. 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's gonna be on the list. You know, what can we say? This 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. You know, all of the people who actually were nominated, you know, entertainers, comedians, and whatever. Not a lot of natural philosophers were represented. But I bring this up not just because, you know, I wanna 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 I 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 …