Speaker 1: You're listening to Comedy Central. What's happening Here's edition listener.
Speaker 1: It's Roy Wood, junior correspondent for The Daily Show. You're
Speaker 1: about to hear an episode of one of our original
Speaker 1: Daily Show podcasts, Beyond the Scenes, hosted by me. It's
Speaker 1: the show where we dive deeper into segments and topics
Speaker 1: from the show with the shows writers, producers and experts.
Speaker 1: In this episode, we're breaking down all the shady stuff
Speaker 1: these corporations do where they make iPhones, tractors, and medical
Speaker 1: equipment impossible to be fixed by the average person. I
Speaker 1: sit down with YouTuber and owner of the Rossman Repair Group,
Speaker 1: Lewis Rossman, and law professor at the University of Michigan
Speaker 1: Aaron Persanowski to discuss how manufacturers limit customers repair options
Speaker 1: and how the right to repair movement is hoping to
Speaker 1: fix this consumer issue. Give it a listen, and if
Speaker 1: you like the show, check out the Beyond the Scenes
Speaker 1: podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Beyond the Scenes,
Speaker 1: the podcast that goes deeper into topics that you've seen
Speaker 1: on the Daily Show. Let me explain this podcast for you.
Speaker 1: I know the regulars, y'all know you're tired of me
Speaker 1: doing this, but we always got new listeners. Let me
Speaker 1: let me break down this podcast for you, all right,
Speaker 1: all right? The daily show is French fries. Them the
Speaker 1: beautiful fries that you get when you order French fries.
Speaker 1: This podcast is the chili cheese that makes it a
Speaker 1: chili cheese fry. We modified. We put gravy on it.
Speaker 1: We call it poutine. We put a little sprinkles of
Speaker 1: onions on it, and then that little grease that's in
Speaker 1: the bottom of the chili cheese. But y'all don't be
Speaker 1: drinking the grease and the bottom of anyway. I'm Roy
Speaker 1: wood Jigger. Today we are talking about the right to
Speaker 1: repair and why products are designed to be unfixable by
Speaker 1: the average person. Give m in a clip.
Speaker 2: We live in a free market, but when it comes
Speaker 2: to repairing electronics like smartphones, you are not free to
Speaker 2: choose where to go.
Speaker 3: If you were the hopeless person with a broken gadget,
Speaker 3: you'd immediately.
Speaker 1: Go to the Apple store. And that's exactly what Apple
Speaker 1: wants you to do.
Speaker 3: The company and many others restricts how and where you
Speaker 3: can repair your stuff, anything that has a chip in it.
Speaker 2: Right now, is probably impossible to repair without using the manufacturer.
Speaker 3: That means tractors and cars, it means your smartphone, It
Speaker 3: means increasingly the refrigerators and washing machines that people have
Speaker 3: in their homes.
Speaker 1: My first guest today is the owner of the Rossmann
Speaker 1: Repair Group and a popular YouTuber who creates repair tutorial videos.
Speaker 1: Lewis Rossman. Welcome to Beyond the Scenes. How you doing today?
Speaker 4: Hey, thank you so much for having me on. I
Speaker 4: really appreciate it.
Speaker 1: That share is amazing. I would like to order one
Speaker 1: from you. Give me the link after the show. We'll
Speaker 1: do okay. Our other guest is a law professor at
Speaker 1: the University of Michigan now author of the book The
Speaker 1: Right to Repair and Personowski and welcome to Beyond the Scenes.
Speaker 1: How you do It?
Speaker 3: I'm great, It's great to be with you today.
Speaker 1: Now let's talk a little bit about this, because this
Speaker 1: was something that I've been even though was a thing
Speaker 1: until I read Steve Jobs' book and they talked about
Speaker 1: how mad computer designers were at Apple in the eighties
Speaker 1: when the first Macintosh has started rolling off the assembly line.
Speaker 1: But before we get into any of that, let's just
Speaker 1: unpack first and foremost, what does right to repair mean? Aaron,
Speaker 1: give us the legal mumbo jumbo of it real quick.
Speaker 3: To me, at the core, the right to repair really
Speaker 3: boils down to a commitment to this very basic idea
Speaker 3: that when we as consumers buy things, when we own things,
Speaker 3: we should have the freedom to fix those things in
Speaker 3: the way that we choose. Right we should be able
Speaker 3: to do it ourselves. We should be able to take
Speaker 3: it to the independent repair shop of our choice. And
Speaker 3: that means the manufacturer doesn't get to stand in the
Speaker 3: way of that decision on our part to do what
Speaker 3: we want with our own property. And I think it
Speaker 3: also means that the legal system shouldn't recognize our official
Speaker 3: barriers that get in the way of people exercising that choice.
Speaker 1: Let's talk a little bit about it from your side, Lewis.
Speaker 1: Talk to me a little bit about your love of
Speaker 1: electronics and your desire to tinker and modify, Like, where
Speaker 1: does that come from as a person, Because I'm just
Speaker 1: wonder them people. I buy some shit, however it come
Speaker 1: out to box that's good enough for me. That's how
Speaker 1: my corporate overlords wanted me to enjoy the item. So
Speaker 1: where does the desire to tinker in play and move
Speaker 1: things around come from being honest.
Speaker 4: In my case, I don't have some origin story where
Speaker 4: I say I was taking apart my stereo when I
Speaker 4: was four years old because I loved the tinker. I
Speaker 4: bought something on eBay that I needed in order to
Speaker 4: work on a recording session. The studio that I worked
Speaker 4: at went out of business. I had no money because
Speaker 4: I just lost my job, and the thing that I
Speaker 4: bought arrive broken. I got a refund for the thing
Speaker 4: that arrived broken from the eBay seller. So now I thought, hmmm,
Speaker 4: I have this thing sitting here that I paid zero
Speaker 4: dollars for. Instead of spending that money again on something else,
Speaker 4: what if I got to pocket that money that for
Speaker 4: the thing I just got refunded on and figure out
Speaker 4: how to make this thing work? And I did so.
Speaker 4: The incentive structure for me is that if I could
Speaker 4: make this work again, I now had a nest egg
Speaker 4: of money that I could budget to do something else with.
Speaker 4: And I always kind of had to. I always kind
Speaker 4: of enjoyed, you know, just learning how these types of
Speaker 4: things work, opening things that you're not supposed to open.
Speaker 4: Maybe it's oppositional defines disorder or something. But if it says,
Speaker 4: you know, warranty void, if remove them the type of
Speaker 4: person that would open it just because So for me,
Speaker 4: it really started out with this is a way to
Speaker 4: save a few hundred dollars during a time in my
Speaker 4: life when I didn't have a few hundred dollars.
Speaker 1: So then does that motivate your desire to be a
Speaker 1: part of the right to repair movement or is it
Speaker 1: rooted more in the legally so of just no, I
Speaker 1: should have a right to do this even if I
Speaker 1: don't want to fix that thing and I don't know
Speaker 1: shit about that particular device, or is it about just
Speaker 1: wanting the freedom to be able to do things?
Speaker 4: You know, Culturally, I'd say it's both. I mean, for me,
Speaker 4: I like the fact that I went from making, you know,
Speaker 4: like four hundred dollars a month having a business with
Speaker 4: six to twelve people that I could pay way more
Speaker 4: than four hundred dollars a month. And I also like
Speaker 4: seeing other people get to start businesses. Can when I
Speaker 4: get fan mail from people say, you know, I used
Speaker 4: to work at Walmart for ten dollars an hour and
Speaker 4: now I make ninety thousand dollars a year. Working from home.
Speaker 4: Thank you. Like that stuff motivates me. When it comes
Speaker 4: to the legal side, what motivates me there is the
Speaker 4: sheer amount of nonsense that you hear from regulators when
Speaker 4: you actually meet them in person. So my friend actually
Speaker 4: had to drag me to the New York State Legislature
Speaker 4: in May of twenty fifteen because I was one of
Speaker 4: those people that thought, this is a waste of time.
Speaker 4: I'm not going to bother showing up here. Nobody cares,
Speaker 4: and I showed up. I got in a room with
Speaker 4: one of the legislators and they said, well, the lobbyist
Speaker 4: for the other side said that when you replace a
Speaker 4: chip or a fuse on this motherboard, you're turning it
Speaker 4: from a MacBook into a PC and you're misrepresenting it
Speaker 4: as if it is still a MacBook to your customer,
Speaker 4: which is fraud. So that's why this bill is bad.
Speaker 4: And I know my face almost turned red. I'm just thinking,
Speaker 4: that's the that's the biggest pile of something I can't
Speaker 4: say on television I've ever heard of my life.
Speaker 1: Oh you can say it right here, baby, it is
Speaker 1: we on the internet. Baby, I don't give a fuck.
Speaker 1: I say what it is yeah, that was.
Speaker 4: Just the biggest pile of bullshit I've ever heard of
Speaker 4: my entire fucking life. So I thought, like, this is
Speaker 4: no way in like, what caused you to believe this?
Speaker 4: Why did you believe this? And he says, well, you know,
Speaker 4: nobody's ever shown up to my office from your side
Speaker 4: until now, so I never got to hear your side
Speaker 4: of the story, but now I did. And then he
Speaker 4: started and I was like, what are you writing? And
Speaker 4: he goes, I'm co sponsoring your bill. So that was it. Like,
Speaker 4: you know, I showed up and I wasn't in dress
Speaker 4: clothes or anything. I'm not a professional lobbyist. They just
Speaker 4: showed up to my assembly person's office. I told him why,
Speaker 4: you know, the people from Apple and tech net were
Speaker 4: full of shit, and he just listened to me. So
Speaker 4: I thought, I'm never going to allow them to be
Speaker 4: in the room without somebody else to call them on
Speaker 4: their shit as long as I live, Like, even if
Speaker 4: a bill doesn't get pass, just knowing that they're winning
Speaker 4: on easy mode, Like are you kidding me? You have
Speaker 4: legislators thinking that when I replace a fuse that I've
Speaker 4: turned a device into something else. And now I'm committing fraud.
Speaker 4: That just that just made me so incredibly mad that
Speaker 4: I said I'm going to show up. I was so pissed.
Speaker 4: I also didn't have a camera rolling, so I said,
Speaker 4: every time I go to a legislative hearing throughout the country,
Speaker 4: I'm going to make sure there's a camera rolling. So
Speaker 4: if you say some stupid shit like that, I'm going
Speaker 4: to catch you and make you famous. And that's pretty
Speaker 4: much what I've been doing.
Speaker 1: Geez, christ you said it to all. You went from
Speaker 1: easy to all mad one summer YO to that point.
Speaker 1: Then Lewis, talk to me a little bit about how
Speaker 1: the community is organized to help one another, and then Aaron,
Speaker 1: I want you to break down how illegal that shit
Speaker 1: is that Lewis is talking about about it. Talk to
Speaker 1: me a little bit about the repair culture community, to
Speaker 1: fix it culture community, and how people come together to
Speaker 1: help one another, because there could be people there are
Speaker 1: people that are dealing with the same bullshit that you
Speaker 1: deal with with devices who aren't as tech savvy. They
Speaker 1: don't own a bunch of micro screwdrivers and Alan wrenches
Speaker 1: and all of that shit. So talk to me a
Speaker 1: little bit about how people have come together and kind
Speaker 1: of coalesced to try and fight the power on this.
Speaker 4: Oh what I've tried to do with my channel of
Speaker 4: this show as many people as possible how to do
Speaker 4: this stuff for free. So you know, back ten years ago,
Speaker 4: many people did thought that if they shared information or
Speaker 4: how to fix something, that that would mean that my
Speaker 4: competitor will be able to do the same job I do,
Speaker 4: and then I'll go out of business. And I've tried
Speaker 4: to kind of disprove that over time by saying, here's
Speaker 4: one of the most difficult repairs to do in our industry.
Speaker 4: I'm going to open source pretty much every piece of
Speaker 4: information I have on how to do this, so anybody
Speaker 4: can do it that is willing to put the time
Speaker 4: and effort into watch. And as time grew, it was
Speaker 4: really cool to see other people start similar channels where
Speaker 4: they're showing people how to fix stuff. And you know
Speaker 4: that everybody who is in this industry realizes how hard
Speaker 4: it is to get part to figure things out. So
Speaker 4: it's so all these different Facebook groups start web forums,
Speaker 4: irc rooms, discord rooms where people are sharing tips and
Speaker 4: tricks and how to fix the newest devices. And I
Speaker 4: find that really cool.
Speaker 1: Aaron, how legal is all of that shit. He just said,
Speaker 1: can people do all of that? Like, because I hear
Speaker 1: stories of people meeting up in cafes and like the
Speaker 1: same way you have a speed dating event. Apparently they
Speaker 1: just have events where motherfuckers just all show up with
Speaker 1: broken iPhones and they just all tinker together with electronics,
Speaker 1: hit laptops. It's that like is that great? Where does
Speaker 1: that fall in the gray area?
Speaker 3: So you know, history, from a legal perspective, repairing the
Speaker 3: things that you own is one hundred percent legal, right.
Speaker 3: There has historically been no question about this, and we've
Speaker 3: got cases under US copyright law and US patent law
Speaker 3: going back to the eighteen fifties where the US Supreme
Speaker 3: Court recognizes that repairing the things that you buy is
Speaker 3: a perfectly legal activity. What we've seen over the last
Speaker 3: few decades, though, is a real shift in the way
Speaker 3: that companies think about repair and in the way that
Speaker 3: they're trying to get the legal system to think about repair.
Speaker 3: They want to sell us things with strings attached, right.
Speaker 3: They want to say, yay, I'll sell you the phone,
Speaker 3: but I'm going to impose all these limitations on what
Speaker 3: you can and can't do with it. In some of
Speaker 3: those restrictions enforced through software in many cases go to
Speaker 3: the question of whether we have the ability to repair
Speaker 3: our own things. And for me, from a legal perspective,
Speaker 3: what I'm trying to do is remind courts, remind legislators
Speaker 3: that this is an aberration. Right, This is a very
Speaker 3: recent shift from the way we've handled technology, not just
Speaker 3: in this country since eighteen fifty, but like literally since
Speaker 3: you know, cavemen were making hand axes. We've always repaired
Speaker 3: the technology that we build, and we do it in
Speaker 3: whatever way it kind of suits the needs of the owner.
Speaker 3: And so I think that's really kind of the crucial
Speaker 3: thing to understand here is this is a really recent shift.
Speaker 1: What are some of the other products that kind of
Speaker 1: fall under this, because this isn't just a solely electronic thing.
Speaker 1: Like I'll tell you a story. So I have sleep apnea,
Speaker 1: have a seapap machine. I've had a seapap machine for
Speaker 1: a while when I moved from LA, when I got
Speaker 1: The Daily Show twenty fifteen, Right, I go from New
Speaker 1: York to LA. I'll go from LA to New York
Speaker 1: and I have to go to a new doc and
Speaker 1: the new doctor is going, oh well, I've got to
Speaker 1: see the machine to adjust the air pressure level and
Speaker 1: that'll be six hundred dollars deductible, deductible, deductible, And just
Speaker 1: I was like, you know what, that don't even seem right,
Speaker 1: And I went on YouTube and under forty five seconds
Speaker 1: I figured out how to do something that cost that
Speaker 1: would have cost me six hundred dollars. And I don't
Speaker 1: know if that was me hacking my SEATPAP machine, but
Speaker 1: I do feel like you motherfuckers could have told me
Speaker 1: what buttons to press at the same time to bring
Speaker 1: up the secret menu that you didn't want me to
Speaker 1: know about, so that I could modify and adjust my
Speaker 1: seatpath as needed. How dare you? What are some of
Speaker 1: the other devices that are kind of set up to
Speaker 1: be tamper proof so that the company can have the
Speaker 1: proprietary control over it.
Speaker 3: So I think that's a really great example, right. I
Speaker 3: think the instances where this issue troubles me the most
Speaker 3: are the ones in which there's a piece of a
Speaker 3: equipment that a consumer is dependent on in a really
Speaker 3: important way. Right, And when you're talking about medical devices,
Speaker 3: of course, right, those are really crucial to people's lives.
Speaker 3: When you're talking about agricultural equipment. Right, Farmers need their
Speaker 3: John Deere tractors to work, and they need them to
Speaker 3: work every day. Right, it's a time sensitive operation when
Speaker 3: you're engaged in farming. To a lesser extent, right, we
Speaker 3: are all dependent on our smartphones as well. And so
Speaker 3: when you have that kind of dependence where people feel
Speaker 3: like literally or figuratively they cannot live without this device,
Speaker 3: then you know you can really take advantage of consumers
Speaker 3: by charging these exorbitant prices for repairs. And so we
Speaker 3: see this across the economy.
Speaker 1: Okay, so we're talking medical equipment, we're talking a tractor.
Speaker 1: Oh lord, my, my wheat harvester thing broke down and
Speaker 1: the wheat needs to be harvested this week, but a
Speaker 1: repair man can't come for three weeks, and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: lose crops or I would imagine appliances probably fall into
Speaker 1: that same game. If I run a laundry mat and
Speaker 1: I've got five dryers down and shit like that, what's
Speaker 1: to stop the farmer from doing what I did with
Speaker 1: the Sea pat machine and just popping the hood open
Speaker 1: on that bitch and then going on Google watching Lewis videos.
Speaker 1: The Lewis I assume at some point you're gonna expand
Speaker 1: your YouTube account to cover tractor equipment at some point.
Speaker 1: How do companies stop people from doing the hack or
Speaker 1: doing the self repair. What are the ways that companies
Speaker 1: block this?
Speaker 3: So there are a whole bunch of strategies. Some of
Speaker 3: the most obvious ones are just the way they design
Speaker 3: the hardware itself. Right, So you take a product like
Speaker 3: Apple's AirPods that are glued together, they're soldered together. They
Speaker 3: don't have screws, they don't have removable parts or replaceable parts.
Speaker 3: That makes it really tough to repair. Right. A John
Speaker 3: Deere tractor is not quite the same problem. They're a
Speaker 3: big piece of what we're talking about is how software
Speaker 3: built in to these devices restricts the ability to repair them.
Speaker 3: So one of the I think most troubling trends that
Speaker 3: we see is this idea of part pairing, right, which
Speaker 3: is the practice of taking software and using it to
Speaker 3: identify a specific piece of hardware, not just the screen
Speaker 3: on an iPhone, but your screen on your iPhone, or
Speaker 3: the optical drive in your PlayStation, and then preventing you
Speaker 3: from swapping it out with an otherwise identical part. Right
Speaker 3: if it needs to be replaced. We see that in
Speaker 3: the agricultural space, right. John Deere essentially does this by
Speaker 3: including software on their tractors. That means if you replace
Speaker 3: a component, even if it's an authentic John to your part,
Speaker 3: even if it's installed exactly the right way, they still
Speaker 3: have to send their technician out to your farm days later,
Speaker 3: weeks later to plug in the laptop and literally press
Speaker 3: a button to allow your device to work. Right. They're
Speaker 3: basically holding these farmers hostage when it comes to.
Speaker 1: Repair your track. They got two fact authentication.
Speaker 3: You're telling me, not quite that sophisticated, right, but it
Speaker 3: is a system that means if you don't have access
Speaker 3: to that software, your tractor is going to sit there,
Speaker 3: even though it's been fixed, until John Deere comes out
Speaker 3: and you know, gives their blessing and charges you for
Speaker 3: the you know, the time the technicians driving to your
Speaker 3: farm and the time they're driving back. Right, it's adding
Speaker 3: a lot of expense, and it's also slowing down the process,
Speaker 3: which farmers really care a lot about.
Speaker 1: Okay, so then the people that navigate you around those hurdles,
Speaker 1: people like Lewis. Lewis talk to me a little bit
Speaker 1: about the penalties. Howtid these companies come after you? Do
Speaker 1: they send you a cease and desist? Do they do
Speaker 1: they leave a dead horsehead in your bed Godfather style?
Speaker 4: In twenty sixteen, I had been doing repair videos at
Speaker 4: that point for about four years, and I would show
Speaker 4: schematics on the screen that were obtained from well the
Speaker 4: place I can say here. So you're not supposed to
Speaker 4: share these schematics. Nobody at the come but he's supposed
Speaker 4: to give them out. But somebody always winds up leaking
Speaker 4: them and giving them out.
Speaker 1: Wait, why can't I have the instruction repair manual for
Speaker 1: some shit I bought that's not public, like if I
Speaker 1: bought tractor device, or if I bought big refrigerator. Like
Speaker 1: I know there's basic constructions for the refrigerator, but the
Speaker 1: actual how the guts of it work, that's not public.
Speaker 4: That's not public. And if you share it either there
Speaker 4: is it could be civil or criminal liability for it.
Speaker 4: So I had a law firm called Kakpatrick in Townsend
Speaker 4: call and say, hey, we love your YouTube content. And
Speaker 4: I'm like, no, you're not. They said, oh, yeah, we
Speaker 4: love your YouTube content. This is this this one? You know,
Speaker 4: a portion of this video that we would like you
Speaker 4: to edit out. And I look at the portion of
Speaker 4: the video and it's the part where I'm showing the
Speaker 4: location of a resistor that's acting as a fuse on
Speaker 4: a MacBook. So if you spill water in the trackpad area,
Speaker 4: there's this zero and resistor that acts like a fuse
Speaker 4: that sits between the track pad and the computer, so
Speaker 4: you spilling liquid in your trackped doesn't kill your whole computer.
Speaker 4: It's a fine design. I have no problem with them
Speaker 4: having it there, but I wanted to show people the
Speaker 4: location of it so that they knew to check it
Speaker 4: because on this machine it was dead. And they said,
Speaker 4: we want that removed, and I said, well, I don't
Speaker 4: really want to remove it unless you file a DMCA claim.
Speaker 4: And I never heard from them again, because when you
Speaker 4: file a DMCA claim, you have to say who you
Speaker 4: are and why you want it removed. So that would
Speaker 4: have essentially forced Apple to say, we don't want people
Speaker 4: to know the location of a basic few as in
Speaker 4: our machine because we're assholes. And they went away, But
Speaker 4: I don't know if they would have went away in
Speaker 4: the same way if I didn't have like forty thousand
Speaker 4: subscribers at the time that I did that. So that's
Speaker 4: one way. You know, when you're showing people these things,
Speaker 4: if you're showing a schematic on screen, they there's technically
Speaker 4: there's legal liability there and they could just have your
Speaker 4: videos removed or your channel removed from the Internet.
Speaker 1: How much more profit our companies seen, because you know,
Speaker 1: there has to be a motivation and a reason for this.
Speaker 1: I don't imagine it's solely because Apple doesn't want you
Speaker 1: to be creative with their items. How much of these
Speaker 1: actions by corporations do the two of both of you
Speaker 1: feel free to speak to this. How much of their
Speaker 1: actions do you think are profit driven? Because you know,
Speaker 1: you take refrigerator, like my grandma got a fridge from segregation.
Speaker 1: That thing still running down in the bay. It's noisy,
Speaker 1: but that thing still going. Meanwhile, my MoMA's refrigerator died
Speaker 1: after like seven years. Are they deliberately building stuff more
Speaker 1: shitty so that they can make extra money in the
Speaker 1: repair and don't want us doing our own repairs, thus
Speaker 1: cutting them out of the repair money.
Speaker 3: I think this is a really important part of the story.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: Companies make money off of this in two ways. One
Speaker 3: is Roy exactly what you said. They want to They
Speaker 3: want to control the repair market for themselves. John Deere
Speaker 3: knows somebody is going to repair a million dollar tractor,
Speaker 3: but they want that money flowing to them. The other
Speaker 3: piece of it is companies don't want things to be
Speaker 3: repaired at all, right, regardless of who does it, because
Speaker 3: they actually don't want it. They don't want to make
Speaker 3: money off of the repair. They want to make money
Speaker 3: off of the sale of a new product.
Speaker 1: We're talking to you, printer industry. Fucking I would name
Speaker 1: the brand, but I don't want to get suit shitty
Speaker 1: asked printers and then you can make it buy another one.
Speaker 3: Sorry, keep going right, right, So you know, printers are
Speaker 3: a good example. Phones are a good example. Right. Apple
Speaker 3: keeps its shareholders happy, it keeps its stock prices high,
Speaker 3: keeps its quarterly earnings high by selling about two hundred
Speaker 3: million iPhones a year. Everybody's already got a phone. So
Speaker 3: who's buying two hundred million new phones. It's people that
Speaker 3: are replacing their old phones. Right. So, we've gotten so
Speaker 3: good at mass production, and this has been true really
Speaker 3: since you know, after World War Two. We're so good
Speaker 3: at mass production that we have to find ways to
Speaker 3: create demand for all of these products, right, and one
Speaker 3: way to do that is to make sure that it's
Speaker 3: difficult or expensive or inconvenient to repair them. And we've
Speaker 3: seen that idea of planned obsolescence really emerge in kind
Speaker 3: of the second half of the twentieth century. But companies know,
Speaker 3: I mean Tim Cook, right, CEO of app, has said
Speaker 3: publicly that when repair for phones is inexpensive and easy,
Speaker 3: they sell fewer products. So I think that's the economic rash.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 4: As pro repair as I am, and people like we'll
Speaker 4: look at stuff that's made seventy or ninety years ago
Speaker 4: and say, look, this thing has lasted this long, I
Speaker 4: think there is a bias and that all the crappy
Speaker 4: items from seventy years ago are long dead so you
Speaker 4: don't see them, so you don't know that they haven't lasted.
Speaker 4: And as consumers, I think if you had two devices
Speaker 4: in a store, if you had a fifteen hundred dollars
Speaker 4: appliance and it said fifty year warranty, and you add
Speaker 4: a two hundred dollars appliance, and it's like, I think
Speaker 4: most people would still go for the two hundred dollars appliance,
Speaker 4: So there is a small portion of it being people
Speaker 4: as consumers. This will decide listen, that's a quarter of
Speaker 4: the price I'm going to buy that because the people
Speaker 4: that are making the much more expensive stuff, they don't
Speaker 4: necessarily advertise, by the way, this will still work in
Speaker 4: fifty years now. There is the flip side of it,
Speaker 4: which are the things that companies do to go out
Speaker 4: of their way to make repair hard. So, for instance,
Speaker 4: you take a charging chip in a MacBook. Let's say
Speaker 4: this is very common repair we do that Apple will
Speaker 4: build seven hundred and fifty hundred dollars for and it
Speaker 4: requires a five dollars chip that goes back from either
Speaker 4: Texas Instruments or Innercil. If you google isl nine two
Speaker 4: four zero Facebook, the first result is somebody asking interracill, Hi,
Speaker 4: can we buy this chip, and them saying no, we're
Speaker 4: not allowed to sell it to you. That's an official
Speaker 4: company representative saying that. Stuff like that is stuff that's
Speaker 4: kind of like done on purpose in my opinion, to
Speaker 4: make repairs more difficult. But as time goes on, I
Speaker 4: would imagine when it comes to profitability, it's not just
Speaker 4: the immediate connection of man if you're able to fix
Speaker 4: your own stuff, you won't buy a new one. I
Speaker 4: think it's in order to make repair viable, we need
Speaker 4: to have an entire supply chain set up to make
Speaker 4: repair viable, and that costs money. So screw that, you know,
Speaker 4: if you read these books on the just in time
Speaker 4: manufacturing instead, like the Toyota way of manufacturing and things
Speaker 4: like that, when companies may take that and kind of
Speaker 4: perverted and diluted to the extreme. Making just enough parts
Speaker 4: to manufacture what we think we're going to sell versus
Speaker 4: having spare parts left over for repair. Network is far
Speaker 4: more profitable. So it may not even be I don't
Speaker 4: want you to fix that, I want you to buy
Speaker 4: a new one. It may also be, how you know,
Speaker 4: just considering repair at all within the supply chain will
Speaker 4: cost us a lot more money. So it's not that
Speaker 4: we don't want you to fix it, it's just it's just
Speaker 4: an afterthought kind of thing.
Speaker 1: After the break, I want to talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about who suffers the most under this weird archaic system.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna check with legal real quick during the break
Speaker 1: as well and see if I can shout out this
Speaker 1: printer company that's full of shit it's so oh my god,
Speaker 1: the show. They're so full of shit, and we're gonna
Speaker 1: talk about how the corporations are fighting back against people
Speaker 1: like you too. It's beyond the scenes. We'll be right back.
Speaker 1: Fuck that printer company. Beyond the scenes. We are back,
Speaker 1: and legal has told me that I cannot name that
Speaker 1: particular printer company that always sells me a printer and
Speaker 1: after two years it breaks in the cost of the
Speaker 1: repairs right neck and neck with the cost of a
Speaker 1: new printer, Fucky Gulett Packard. Look, we're talking about the
Speaker 1: right to repair. Now. We talked about what it is
Speaker 1: and kind of why companies do that, but beyond the
Speaker 1: computer user, beyond the cell phone user, even me with
Speaker 1: the CPAP, can we talk a little bit about the
Speaker 1: real life implications and how this affects regular, everyday Americans
Speaker 1: when companies aren't allowed to make repairs or companies can't
Speaker 1: afford to make the repairs on equipment that saves lives
Speaker 1: or supports full industries. Talk to me a little bit
Speaker 1: about the ripple effect of that, Aaron and how that
Speaker 1: trickles down to the average American.
Speaker 3: It just takes money out of people's pockets, right repairs
Speaker 3: are more expensive, we end up buying more new stuff
Speaker 3: than we need, and that costs American families. I mean,
Speaker 3: this is hard to pin down an exact dollar figure
Speaker 3: for but I think comfortably confidently we can say tens
Speaker 3: of billions of dollars right collectively, that we are that
Speaker 3: we are spending that we otherwise wouldn't have to spend.
Speaker 3: That's important, it's not the only important, right. So, one
Speaker 3: thing that I think the pandemic really helped to highlight
Speaker 3: is the ways in which we really depend on functioning
Speaker 3: markets for repairs and replacement parts. Right. So, we had
Speaker 3: issues where, you know, during the early part of the pandemic,
Speaker 3: when hospitalizations you know, were really high, we saw respirators
Speaker 3: breaking down, and the companies who make them, who insist
Speaker 3: that they're the only people qualified to fix them, weren't
Speaker 3: able to keep up. They didn't have enough technicians, they
Speaker 3: didn't have enough parts, and so hospitals had to find
Speaker 3: ways of doing this themselves or third party organizations came
Speaker 3: in and filled that gap. I think that's important to recognize,
Speaker 3: like the value that independent repair gives us, Right, we
Speaker 3: live in a world with these very complicated international supply chains,
Speaker 3: but they're kind of brittle, right. If the wrong thing happens,
Speaker 3: things start to fall apart, and somebody needs to be
Speaker 3: able to step in and fix those problems. And one
Speaker 3: of the things I really worry about when we live
Speaker 3: in a world where the manufacturer is the only person
Speaker 3: that's authorized to make repairs is that we don't develop
Speaker 3: the sorts of skills that people need, you know, to
Speaker 3: interact with this technology. And I'm sure Lewis can speak
Speaker 3: to this, but repair is a practice that builds up
Speaker 3: a whole bunch of really valuable skills, analytical thinking, problem solving,
Speaker 3: right thinking through a complicated problem, and it helps us
Speaker 3: to actually understand the way these devices work. And I
Speaker 3: think that's just important so that we're not dependent on
Speaker 3: these companies, so that we can use the technology but
Speaker 3: still be kind of free, independent actors in the world.
Speaker 3: And I think we're losing some of that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think one of the interesting things here is,
Speaker 4: you know, one of the biggest things that I think
Speaker 4: you lose in general is just when you think about
Speaker 4: the philosophical shift in our culture, the people like Steve
Speaker 4: Wozniak that are responsible for us having an apple at all.
Speaker 4: If he lived in a world where you were not
Speaker 4: supposed to open up any and you're not allowed to
Speaker 4: tinker with any of your own stuff. It could be
Speaker 4: a middle manager at foot locker right now for ROWINGO.
Speaker 4: I mean, what drives people to get into this, What
Speaker 4: drives people to decide I'm going to get a degree
Speaker 4: in electronics for engineering, or I'm not going to get
Speaker 4: into degree, but I'm just going to start making stuff
Speaker 4: on my own. Is the fact that they're able to
Speaker 4: open things up, they're encouraged to open things up and
Speaker 4: work on them. And this idea that you can't do
Speaker 4: that because of safety and security, which we're all nonsensical
Speaker 4: lies so that a company can avoid saying we just
Speaker 4: want to make more money is a really negative shift
Speaker 4: in the culture. And the idea that what you buy
Speaker 4: isn't yours, you don't own it, you have no control
Speaker 4: over it, you're just using it long enough to buy
Speaker 4: another one. This idea that you're shifting control away from
Speaker 4: you to the company. It's just it's a philosophical shift
Speaker 4: that I don't think is going to be healthy for
Speaker 4: property rights going into the next generation. And that's aside
Speaker 4: from all the money that consumers are going to lose
Speaker 4: when they're not able to fix something that has a
Speaker 4: basic problem.
Speaker 1: Lewis, how much did you consider the fight that you're
Speaker 1: fighting with the right to repair? How much shold you
Speaker 1: consider that what you were doing would also be good
Speaker 1: for the environment, like the environmental toll of the throwaway culture,
Speaker 1: you know, of people always having to constantly replace devices
Speaker 1: instead of fixing them. You know, did you ever think
Speaker 1: about the environmental aspect of it? Did you did you
Speaker 1: come into this as an environmentalist or did you even
Speaker 1: think of that or was it just like, hey, fuck them,
Speaker 1: that's not fair and then also, ooh, it's good for Earth.
Speaker 4: I honestly never thought about the environment while I was
Speaker 4: doing this for a number of reasons, like when the
Speaker 4: thing that first got me excited about repair, from being honest,
Speaker 4: was I was able to say five or six hundred
Speaker 4: bucks at a time when I was broke, which is
Speaker 4: really cool. The other thing that gets me excited about
Speaker 4: this is, you know when somebody says, I have all
Speaker 4: of my wedding photos on here and they're crying because
Speaker 4: they have no backup, and they give me a hug
Speaker 4: when I can get their stuff back as a result
Speaker 4: of you know, fixing a drive that's clicking or some
Speaker 4: or fixing a board that's dead. That makes me happy.
Speaker 4: Seeing other people go from working the you know, minimum
Speaker 4: wage at Walmart to making a living for their family.
Speaker 4: That's that's the stuff that gets me excited. For the environment,
Speaker 4: I could talk about it till I'm blue in the face,
Speaker 4: but just being honest and having met with so many
Speaker 4: legislators over the past eight years, nobody cares whether I'm
Speaker 4: talking to, you know, a Republican in an oil rich
Speaker 4: district or I'm talking to a very progressive person in
Speaker 4: an area where they claim they care about the environment.
Speaker 4: It's it's the thing that people care about the least,
Speaker 4: whether it's myself or like even just the people that
Speaker 4: I'm talking to that claim they care about it, that
Speaker 4: have legislative positions. What they usually care about is, you know,
Speaker 4: is this going to get me in trouble? Will this
Speaker 4: create jobs in my district? Will just get people to
Speaker 4: vote for me? And I always try to focus in
Speaker 4: the things that people are personally invested in. Because of
Speaker 4: the species, we're really good at caring about things that
Speaker 4: affect us right now, and we really don't care about
Speaker 4: stuff that's going to be a problem tomorrow. So if
Speaker 4: I can tell somebody, here's how you save nine hundred dollars,
Speaker 4: here's how you get your baby pictures back, here's how
Speaker 4: you go for making nine dollars an hour to making
Speaker 4: forty dollars an hour. I can get people on board
Speaker 4: if I tell people this is good for the environment.
Speaker 4: Like they'll see they care, but like they'll say they care,
Speaker 4: walk away, and you know, do something else. I just
Speaker 4: I can't rely on that being the thing that excites
Speaker 4: people about this as a movement. But it is technically true.
Speaker 4: I mean, if you're throwing something away versus recycling it
Speaker 4: or repairing it, there's a lot more waste involved there.
Speaker 4: Like if I'm throwing away, if I'm even if we're
Speaker 4: not recycling at all, if I'm throwing away twenty percent
Speaker 4: of the device instead of one hundred percent of it,
Speaker 4: that's still better for the environment.
Speaker 3: Seah, I mean, I think Lewis is right that you know,
Speaker 3: these environmental arguments I think are really important. But the
Speaker 3: environmental harms are very diffuse, right, They're not concentrated in
Speaker 3: the way that like money out of your pocket is concentrated,
Speaker 3: and they're often like really distant. The people who suffer
Speaker 3: the most from these environmental consequences aren't you know, wealthy
Speaker 3: people in the United States, right, they're poor people around
Speaker 3: the world. But I've started to take this kind of
Speaker 3: perverse pleasure in bumming people out about buying new stuff
Speaker 3: by talking about the environmental consequences.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: So normally we focus on the kind of e waste
Speaker 3: side of this, and that's a huge problem. You know,
Speaker 3: we create something like fifty million metric tons of electronic
Speaker 3: waste every year from consumer electronics. That number keeps going up.
Speaker 3: You know, electronic waste that's full of all sorts of
Speaker 3: like really toxic shit that arsenic and lead and mercury,
Speaker 3: that's going into the soil, that's going into the water,
Speaker 3: that causes all kinds of health problems, doesn't typically affect
Speaker 3: those of us in the United States all that much
Speaker 3: because for a long time, we shipped all of our
Speaker 3: electronic waste to China or to Vietnam, or to you know,
Speaker 3: some other country to let them deal with it. So
Speaker 3: that's one half of the problem. The other half of
Speaker 3: the problem is on the front end in terms of
Speaker 3: the production of these products, you know, raw materials, right,
Speaker 3: are being removed from the earth to make all of
Speaker 3: these these products. So, you know, we got cars, we
Speaker 3: got appliances, but like we make one and a half
Speaker 3: billion phones a year globally. Right, a smartphone contains something
Speaker 3: like seventy five out of the eighty three known stable
Speaker 3: elements in the universe. These are you know, complicated things.
Speaker 3: It's not just like copper and gold. There's a bunch
Speaker 3: of rare earth metals in there. Extracting all those materials
Speaker 3: starts basically with like blowing a bunch of shit up,
Speaker 3: and then you use a bunch of toxic chemicals to
Speaker 3: separate the metals from the ore, and then that creates
Speaker 3: like millions of gallons of toxic slurry that gets stored
Speaker 3: somewhere and eventually causes a bunch of environmental damage as well.
Speaker 3: Right on the other hand, I hear the iPhone comes
Speaker 3: in yellow now, so you know it's a trade off.
Speaker 1: What cases are companies making against the right to repair? Like,
Speaker 1: why are they so resistant to this?
Speaker 3: The arguments that companies make against the right to repair.
Speaker 3: You know, they'll talk about you know, security and privacy
Speaker 3: and how important it is to protect those consumer interests,
Speaker 3: and of course I agree. Like, I'm not against security,
Speaker 3: I'm not against privacy. But if every day regular repairs
Speaker 3: open your device up to a security vulnerability, then your
Speaker 3: device is poorly designed. Right. You're just kind of telling
Speaker 3: on yourself there if the idea of it fixing the
Speaker 3: thing opens you up to some security risk. When it
Speaker 3: comes to privacy, I'll be honest with you, I'd trust
Speaker 3: somebody like Lewis to take better care of my data
Speaker 3: than I would the nameless authorized service provider at the
Speaker 3: local best Buy that Apple has a deal with, right,
Speaker 3: somebody who runs their own business, who is accountable, who
Speaker 3: has like a real commitment to you know, customer service.
Speaker 3: I think that's important. Apple actually had to settle a
Speaker 3: lawsuit within the last year or so for millions of
Speaker 3: dollars when one of its own technicians stole and shared
Speaker 3: nude photos of an Apple customer. Right, So they're not
Speaker 3: like the you know, the perfect example here of security
Speaker 3: and privacy. They talk about safety, right, and that's you know,
Speaker 3: independent repair or self repair is dangerous that we're going
Speaker 3: to like blow ourselves up swapping out the batteries on
Speaker 3: our phones. You know, people have been fixing their own
Speaker 3: cars in this country since there have been cars in
Speaker 3: this country. Anybody who wants to swap out the brakes
Speaker 3: on their five thousand, six thousand pounds hunk of metal
Speaker 3: that they drive around at eighty five miles an hour
Speaker 3: is free to do. So I think will be okay
Speaker 3: if some people give give, you know, swapping out their
Speaker 3: phone screen at home.
Speaker 1: A try Louis to all of everything that Aaron just said,
Speaker 1: have you ever seen anything proprietary when you cracked open
Speaker 1: the inside to some of these devices, Like, have you
Speaker 1: ever felt like, oh wow, this is probably something I
Speaker 1: shouldn't have seen in the company. If I was evil
Speaker 1: competitor B, I wouldn't make something very similar to like
Speaker 1: the same reason why the government tries to blow up
Speaker 1: drones when they crash in imy territory so you can't
Speaker 1: get our fucking schematics and all of that. Are companies
Speaker 1: justified and being against right to repair on the grounds
Speaker 1: of trying to protect their trade secrets?
Speaker 4: I don't think so, because if the entire argument is
Speaker 4: that we'd have competition that makes that that just copies
Speaker 4: are design and steals everything. So if you take a
Speaker 4: look at what I do, the schematics are available I
Speaker 4: mean again, it's not available through the channels i'd like.
Speaker 4: But if I'm able to get a schematic for five
Speaker 4: or ten dollars on some random non English website on
Speaker 4: the Internet, then surely Toshiba or ACER or somebody else can.
Speaker 4: So why haven't Toshiba, an ACER and everybody else created
Speaker 4: a complete clone of the MacBook. The reason is because
Speaker 4: the documentation we're requesting and the information we're requesting is
Speaker 4: not enough that you can create a carbon copy of
Speaker 4: this computer. It would be like if I took a
Speaker 4: picture of you and then I said, okay, from this picture,
Speaker 4: I can clone you, like you can't clone somebody from
Speaker 4: a picture, the same way that I can't clone a
Speaker 4: device from a bare bone schematic that says this resistor
Speaker 4: is attached to this capacitor at this value. There's a
Speaker 4: lot of information that's necessary for manufacturing that we are
Speaker 4: not requesting access to. So if you were able to
Speaker 4: do this, then realistically speaking, somebody would have cloned the
Speaker 4: iPhone using what they have in ZXW tool, or they
Speaker 4: would have cloned a MacBook from the You know, the
Speaker 4: three megabytes of schematics and PDFs that I share when
Speaker 4: I do a repair video, and that's just not happening
Speaker 4: because we're only requesting the bare bones minimum necessary to
Speaker 4: actually do our job well.
Speaker 1: After the break, we'll bring it home by talking about
Speaker 1: what progress has been made. We talked about the beginning
Speaker 1: of the right to Repair movement, but I would love
Speaker 1: to know where you all now with this issue, where
Speaker 1: some of the companies are now with this issue, and
Speaker 1: what can regular people like me do to be a
Speaker 1: part of the solution other than leaving hateful tweets at
Speaker 1: the Hewlett Packet Corporation for their shitty print. As this
Speaker 1: is beyond the scenes, we'll be right back beyond the
Speaker 1: scenes round and third headed for home the Right to
Speaker 1: Repair Before what will we get into what legal progress
Speaker 1: has been made and what changes the two of you
Speaker 1: would like to see. Lewis, is there anybody on the
Speaker 1: inside of these companies that have spoken to you, like
Speaker 1: off the record about what you're doing? How much do
Speaker 1: the people who work for these companies believe in the
Speaker 1: policies that these companies have in place.
Speaker 4: A lot of them don't, and one of them, I'm
Speaker 4: not going to say the company because I don't want
Speaker 4: out them.
Speaker 1: But a hugeanycker. It was human pack.
Speaker 4: There's somebody who worked at a company that I've that
Speaker 4: I've talked about quite a bit on my channel, and
Speaker 4: he said, you know, he was just upfront and notes
Speaker 4: and said, I've made a lot of money working for
Speaker 4: a company that I vastly disagree with. So when I
Speaker 4: started my fundraiser for a lobbying in all these states,
Speaker 4: he wired one hundred thousand dollars over without me even
Speaker 4: asking what he was going to do after I gave
Speaker 4: him the bank account details. So there's a lot of
Speaker 4: people that work within these companies that don't agree with
Speaker 4: their policies, and some of them have said, you know,
Speaker 4: I started actually getting in the really cool thing once.
Speaker 4: This is how you start to feel old. Is like
Speaker 4: once somebody says I started watching your stuff in twenty sixteen.
Speaker 4: I graduated in twenty twenty one, and I got my
Speaker 4: engineering job in twenty twenty two. So now I work
Speaker 4: at the company that you were essentially bad mouth before
Speaker 4: I even before I even started my career. So yeah, like,
Speaker 4: there are a lot of people inside these companies that
Speaker 4: don't agree with these policies, that just don't necessarily have
Speaker 4: the power themselves to actually work towards changing them.
Speaker 1: What progress has been made on the legislative side, and
Speaker 1: you know, what changes do the two of you think
Speaker 1: would be most impactful just in the short term, you know,
Speaker 1: on this issue.
Speaker 3: Just to give a little bit of the backstory here,
Speaker 3: all the way back in twenty twelve, the state of
Speaker 3: Massachusetts passed a right to repair law that applied to automobiles,
Speaker 3: and it required car makers to make repair parts and
Speaker 3: tools and software and information available to car owners and
Speaker 3: to independent repair shops on reasonable terms. That model worked
Speaker 3: really well. It was adopted by all the car companies
Speaker 3: at the time as essentially a nationwide standard, and it's
Speaker 3: proven effective in most respects. It also formed the basis
Speaker 3: for the bills that have been introduced over the past
Speaker 3: few years in thirty plus states around the country, and
Speaker 3: those bills have broad bipartisan support among consumers, among voters. Right,
Speaker 3: this is like a seventy to eighty percent issue, one
Speaker 3: of the few things that people really agree on across
Speaker 3: that sort of partisan divide. But we've seen really powerful
Speaker 3: companies spend a lot of money on lobbyists to block
Speaker 3: those bills, to water those bills down. You know, we've
Speaker 3: seen some success So there are bills progressing through state
Speaker 3: houses in a bunch of states right now. Last year,
Speaker 3: Colorado passed a right to repair law focusing on motorized
Speaker 3: wheelchairs because there was a really specific and egregious problem
Speaker 3: going on for folks that use motorized wheelchairs. It's a
Speaker 3: great law, but it doesn't go far enough. New York
Speaker 3: passed a bill as well that was overwhelmingly supported in
Speaker 3: both houses of the legislature there, but as Lewis will
Speaker 3: probably want to talk to you about in some more detail,
Speaker 3: was really watered down by the governor in New York,
Speaker 3: and I imagine Lewis has some thoughts on that.
Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah, So in the state of New York, there
Speaker 4: was a bill that we've worked eight years on and
Speaker 4: in the last week the governor allowed the opposition lobbyist
Speaker 4: to rewrite the bill, so the edits that were suggested
Speaker 4: by the opposition were directly written into the bill. So
Speaker 4: Kathy Cultel allowed Apple, Samsung and everybody else to literally
Speaker 4: write the legislation that they would be regulating them.
Speaker 1: Yes, I will write the law to make sure that
Speaker 1: I followed the laws. Where's the ink, ben? Thank you?
Speaker 1: And what about Massachusetts? In twenty fourteen. Talk to me
Speaker 1: a little bit about that and how they codify that law.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you know, Massachusetts did this, you know, in
Speaker 3: a couple of ways, actually simultaneously. So there was a
Speaker 3: ballot initiative that the voters actually got to vote on
Speaker 3: and it won by like eighty percent of the vote, right,
Speaker 3: And I think that is a really important signal here.
Speaker 3: If this issue is decided by voters, the right to
Speaker 3: repair wins. It's not even close. Right. It's just as
Speaker 3: we talked about in New York. It's when you get
Speaker 3: these closed door meetings, either with the governor or with
Speaker 3: state legislators, where you know, either the bills don't happen
Speaker 3: at all, or they get really watered down and limited.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 3: So I think that's something we've got to be worried about.
Speaker 3: It's a tough fight because it's happening simultaneously in a
Speaker 3: bunch of states all at once. I would prefer to
Speaker 3: see this issue fixed on a national level, a federal level,
Speaker 3: rather than by kind of state to state rules. There
Speaker 3: have been some important bills that have been introduced in
Speaker 3: the US Congress, addressing auto repair, addressing consumer electronics, addressing
Speaker 3: agricultural equipment. Those are good bills. But Congress is just
Speaker 3: like a dysfunctional mess, right, So getting anything passed there,
Speaker 3: even though the American public is broadly supportive, I think,
Speaker 3: is a tricky thing to do. There are other avenues.
Speaker 3: There's the executive branch. The Federal Trade Commission, under Lena
Speaker 3: Khan's leadership, has taken a real interest in repair. They've
Speaker 3: taken a pretty aggressive stance. They issued a really important
Speaker 3: report that shot down a lot of the manufacturer's arguments
Speaker 3: a couple years ago. They've been taking enforcement actions on
Speaker 3: repair restrictions against companies like Harley Davidson. But they can
Speaker 3: do more. They could adopt rules that make it clear
Speaker 3: that some of these practices we've been talking about should
Speaker 3: be treated as unfair and deceptive, you know, commercial practices.
Speaker 4: The most interesting part with the Massachusetts one is it
Speaker 4: was voted in favors seventy four to twenty six by
Speaker 4: residents and the manufacturer's commercials from General Motors, Toyota, Ford, Nissan,
Speaker 4: and Honda were saying that if this passes, if mechanics
Speaker 4: can fix your car, they're going to stalk you through
Speaker 4: parking lots, They're going to break into your house, They're
Speaker 4: going to rape you. This bill supports racism, redlining sexual
Speaker 4: assaults like the K Yeah, and I archived their website
Speaker 4: and I archived their advertisements because this was all taken
Speaker 4: offline the moment they lost. But they had these scary
Speaker 4: commercials where it'd be somebody walking behind you and the
Speaker 4: light would be very very blue, and as they got
Speaker 4: closer to you, you hear pop and then.
Speaker 1: You just wrench.
Speaker 2: If Question one passes in Massachusetts, anyone could access the
Speaker 2: most personal data stored in your vehicle. Domestic violence advocates
Speaker 2: say a sexual predator could use the data to stalk
Speaker 2: their victims, PenPoint exactly where you are, whether you are alone,
Speaker 2: even take control of your vehicle. Vote no on one,
Speaker 2: Keep your data safe.
Speaker 4: They threw all of this at just the ability of
Speaker 4: a mechanic to be able to fix your car, and
Speaker 4: they spend twenty five million dollars in all those advertisements
Speaker 4: and they still lost.
Speaker 1: So it must have been worth something to them. So
Speaker 1: then to that point, then Aaron, talk to me a
Speaker 1: little bit about these companies that are trying to get
Speaker 1: ahead of the pr nightmare that this would be for
Speaker 1: them by being proactive before there's legislation like with John Deere.
Speaker 1: I find this interesting, like break down what John Deere
Speaker 1: is doing, and then I want the two of you
Speaker 1: to tell me whether or not this is legitimate steps
Speaker 1: towards change or as Garfield the Cat would say, insincere sincerity.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's really it's a really important point. John Deere
Speaker 3: and other agricultural firms have signed what they're calling a
Speaker 3: memorandum of Understanding with the American Farm Bureau Association, which basically,
Speaker 3: you know, they've tried to tell this story that this
Speaker 3: is their effort to solve this problem and to give
Speaker 3: farmers access to all the things that they need to
Speaker 3: engage in repair. And I got to be honest with you,
Speaker 3: I've read these documents. They are not worth the paper
Speaker 3: they're written on. They don't do anything. They are completely voluntary.
Speaker 3: John Deere can back out of this agreement any time
Speaker 3: it wants to. It basically obligates the company to do
Speaker 3: nothing that they don't already say they're doing. So they say,
Speaker 3: we will make software available to farmers, But the memorandum
Speaker 3: of understanding defines software, and it defines it really specifically
Speaker 3: as one particular program the John Deere Customer Advisor program,
Speaker 3: which they tell us is already available to farmers, right,
Speaker 3: So if it's already available, what are farmers getting from
Speaker 3: this deal. The other thing is, even if you get
Speaker 3: access to that software, it doesn't do what you need
Speaker 3: it to do. It's not the program that can actually
Speaker 3: initialize or authorize these parts after repair has been done.
Speaker 3: So it's just about pr from my perspective, I don't
Speaker 3: think it moves the needle one bit. But when they
Speaker 3: made that announcement and sent out their press release, there
Speaker 3: are a bunch of news stories that were saying, oh,
Speaker 3: look at this, John Deere is so responsible. So I
Speaker 3: think the media fell for it in a lot of
Speaker 3: instances when they really shouldn't have.
Speaker 4: I think you have to separate the companies that are
Speaker 4: doing it genuinely from the companies that are not so.
Speaker 4: Like if you have a company like Framework, they release
Speaker 4: their laptop, every single part that to that laptop is
Speaker 4: available on their website. If you want schematics, you do
Speaker 4: have to contact them. There's no download link, but if
Speaker 4: you contact them, they will actually give you this skammatic
Speaker 4: to the device. So they are following through on their
Speaker 4: promise to be more a repair friendly company that was
Speaker 4: started as a repair friendly company. With Apple, they created
Speaker 4: an independent repair provider program. But that program requires that
Speaker 4: they can audit me at any time. If I have
Speaker 4: parts that I'm not supposed to have in my facility,
Speaker 4: they can kick me out of the program and get
Speaker 4: me in legal trouble, which I do. I have schematics,
Speaker 4: I have chips that I'm not supposed to have. They
Speaker 4: still restrict you from buying all these different chips. They
Speaker 4: don't make the LCD buy itself available. You can't buy
Speaker 4: a keyboard by itself. You can't buy a schematic, you
Speaker 4: can't buy a board view. The program when it first
Speaker 4: came out, didn't even allow you to actually stock parts.
Speaker 4: You would have to take all your customers information, take
Speaker 4: their IMEI number, send all this stuff back to Apple,
Speaker 4: and then buy a part because you weren't allowed to
Speaker 4: stock it. So there are some companies that have come
Speaker 4: out with programs that, in my opinion, are complete garbage
Speaker 4: and they're just designed to show a regulator, look, you
Speaker 4: don't need to you know, you don't need to sign
Speaker 4: a bill. We're doing it all ourselves, when in reality
Speaker 4: that program provides us with nothing. And then there are
Speaker 4: companies like Framework or fair Phone where they are in
Speaker 4: good faith actually making parts available, schematics available, and everything
Speaker 4: that somebody like me would need to be able to
Speaker 4: work in a customer's product. And you know what Aarin
Speaker 4: said is very important, which is the moment that news
Speaker 4: came out from John Deere. You had like twenty or
Speaker 4: thirty news articles saying John Deere gives farmers what they want.
Speaker 4: So I just decided again, I grew up in Brooklyn.
Speaker 4: I'm not a farmer. I can barely, you know, grow
Speaker 4: a venus fly trap. I just called a farmer that
Speaker 4: I knew, and I said, hey, does this actually get
Speaker 4: you what you want? And I had a ten minute
Speaker 4: conversation with him where he very politely went through why
Speaker 4: this doesn't give him anything? And I was wondering, you know, gee,
Speaker 4: why didn't the BBC do that? Why didn't any of
Speaker 4: these news companies do that. Why didn't they just call
Speaker 4: a farmer and ask? And that's what happened when Apple
Speaker 4: came out with their self repair program too. You know,
Speaker 4: all these tech companies, all these news organizations that cover
Speaker 4: tech companies, I should stay started saying, look, Apple is
Speaker 4: now repair friendly. Apple supports the right to repair and
Speaker 4: it's like, no, they don't. I still can't buy anything
Speaker 4: I need to actually fix anything. But it allows you know,
Speaker 4: them to take advantage of lazy bloggers and journalists that
Speaker 4: don't call people involved in the field and get good
Speaker 4: pr for themselves. The same thing happened when Governor Cultchal
Speaker 4: signed this bill. You had all these people saying right
Speaker 4: to Repair wins in New York and I'm like, the
Speaker 4: ef it does is bill says that if they if
Speaker 4: the company says they don't want to sell you an assembly,
Speaker 4: they don't have to sell you an assembly. This is useless.
Speaker 1: What can people do to get involved in the right
Speaker 1: to repair movement? And how can consumers be more mindful
Speaker 1: about the products they purchase.
Speaker 4: I think that the best thing that anybody can do is,
Speaker 4: if they are somewhat good at repair in any way,
Speaker 4: shape or form, get other people to be excited. I
Speaker 4: want people to be personally invested. I don't want them
Speaker 4: to feel ashamed because they're buying something new. I want
Speaker 4: them to feel a sense of excitement and happiness because
Speaker 4: they just saved one thousand dollars, or excitement and happiness
Speaker 4: because they just made five hundred dollars this week off
Speaker 4: of a side geek that they otherwise wouldn't have made.
Speaker 4: If you can get somebody to be personally invested in
Speaker 4: caring about this because you've helped them recover data, you've
Speaker 4: helped them make something work again, you've helped them avoid downtime.
Speaker 4: Let them know at the end of it, by the
Speaker 4: way this we may live in a world two years
Speaker 4: from now where this is not possible. And here's why.
Speaker 4: It's Like at the end of the movie twenty fifth
Speaker 4: Hour with Ed Norton, he tells all of his kids
Speaker 4: after he escapes from him, after he escapes from having
Speaker 4: to go to jail, I probably shouldn't have spoiled the
Speaker 4: best that movie, but I did.
Speaker 1: But yeah, he's what American history acts. But continue will
Speaker 1: debate offline.
Speaker 4: Yeah, but he's you know, but he says this is
Speaker 4: he tells the Origin story to his kids, and he says,
Speaker 4: this is how close he or word it never happening.
Speaker 4: And one of the things I try to do with
Speaker 4: every one of my customers is I tell them, this
Speaker 4: is how close I was to not recovering any of
Speaker 4: your wedding photos or any of your baby photos. This
Speaker 4: is how close you were to paying two thousand dollars
Speaker 4: instead of two hundred dollars for repair. Get as many
Speaker 4: people personally invested as possible, And when it comes to
Speaker 4: the personal decisions people make on what they buy, that's
Speaker 4: a difficult one. Like this was something where twenty or
Speaker 4: thirty or forty years ago, I think you could have
Speaker 4: chosen this company for being repair friendly versus this one.
Speaker 4: But now, really in many industries, you really are just
Speaker 4: choosing between like the LEA twenty companies that are not
Speaker 4: going to make US schematic available, that are not going
Speaker 4: to make a part available, So it's really hard to
Speaker 4: recommend one company over the other. And you do have
Speaker 4: scrappy startups like Framework and fair Phone that are trying
Speaker 4: to produce products that are repair friendly. But many of
Speaker 4: these companies, admittedly, and while I do love what they're
Speaker 4: trying to do, they have limited funding, so you know
Speaker 4: you're getting a device that's last generation and they have
Speaker 4: a one size fits all product. So it's really it's
Speaker 4: not one of those things where it's easy to just
Speaker 4: pick the repair friendly solution now as it would have
Speaker 4: been let's say thirty or forty years ago, Because in
Speaker 4: many cases there are.
Speaker 1: In any beautiful Aaron real quick. How can people get involved?
Speaker 3: First, I'm contractually obligated to, you know, try to sell
Speaker 3: my book, So people should read the Right to Repair
Speaker 3: from the fine folks at Cambridge University Press, where I
Speaker 3: try to talk about a lot of the things that
Speaker 3: we've been covering today. But I think we should, you know,
Speaker 3: look at the resources that are out there and available
Speaker 3: to people. We should look at sites like I fix It,
Speaker 3: which provides repair ability scores and repair instructions for tons
Speaker 3: of products. You know, we should support the work that
Speaker 3: Lewis is doing. We should be supporting the work that
Speaker 3: Nathan Procter and the folks at us PERG have been
Speaker 3: doing around repair. But I think most importantly, we've got
Speaker 3: to be kind of reflective a little bit about our
Speaker 3: own choices and our own behavior. Right, the phone in
Speaker 3: your pocket did not materialize out of thin air. There
Speaker 3: was lots of labor, lots of resources, and lots of
Speaker 3: costs built into that device, and I think we have
Speaker 3: an interest in making it last as long as it can.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: So I'm not saying we all have to like read
Speaker 3: by candlelight and never use TikTok again. But I think
Speaker 3: we have to make these products last longer, and repair
Speaker 3: is really essential to that goal. And I think once
Speaker 3: people start to internalize that story and understand the way
Speaker 3: companies are trying to sort of manipulate their behavior, it
Speaker 3: becomes a lot easier to at least have some awareness
Speaker 3: of this issue, and then the behavioral change I think
Speaker 3: flows from there.
Speaker 1: Well, this has been a wonderful, wonderful topic. I cannot
Speaker 1: thank you both for all of this wonderful information. And
Speaker 1: fuck you, Hugh Attack could make a better printer. You
Speaker 1: cursed a lot.
Speaker 4: That's an opinion, actually, so I think legal will be
Speaker 4: okay with that. That's your opinion. You're asking them to
Speaker 4: be better. You're actually being a motivational speaker.
Speaker 1: We'll see. Our legal department is very litigious. I can't
Speaker 1: say anything you mean about anybody. That's all the time
Speaker 1: we have for today. Aaron Lewis, thank you so much
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