Do You Have the Right to Repair Your Products?

From iPhones and tractors to medical equipment, many products are designed to be unfixable by the average person. Host Roy Wood Jr. sits down with Youtuber and owner of the Rossmann Repair Group, Louis Rossmann, and Law Professor at the University of Michigan, Aaron Perzanowski to discuss how manufacturers limit customer’s repair options, the environmental impact of purchasing new products rather than repairing old ones, why it costs consumer’s more, and how the right to repair movement is hoping to fix this consumer issue. 

 

Watch the original segment: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UA7hZDfQDws

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
Welcome to Beyond the Scenes, the podcast that goes deeper
into topics that you've seen on the Daily Show. Let
me explain this podcast for y'all, know, the regulars, y'all
know you're tired of me doing this, but we always
got new listeners. Let me break down this podcast for you,
all right, all right? The Daily Show is French fries.
Them the beautiful fries that you get when you order

(00:28):
French fries. This podcast is the chili cheese that makes
it a chili cheese fry. We modified. We put gravy
on it. We call it poutine. We put a little
sprinkles of onions on it, and then that little grease
that's in the bottom of the chili cheese. But y'all
don't be drinking the grease and the bottom of it anyway.
I'm Roy wood Jigger. Today we are talking about the

(00:51):
right to repair and why products are designed to be
unfixable by the average person.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
Give me the clip a free market, but when it
comes to repairing electronics like smartphones, you are not free
to choose where to go.

Speaker 3 (01:06):
If you're the hopeless person with a broken gadget, you'd
immediately go to the Apple store. And that's exactly what
Apple wants you to do. The company and many others
restricts how and where you can repair your stuff. Anything
that has a chip in it right now is probably
impossible to repair without using the manufacturer.

Speaker 4 (01:24):
That means tractors and cars, it means your smartphone, It
means increasingly the refrigerators and washing machines that people have
in their homes.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
My first guest today is the owner of the Rossmann
Repair Group and a popular YouTuber who creates repair tutorial videos.
Lewis Rossman. Welcome to be on the scenes. How you
doing today?

Speaker 5 (01:44):
Hey, thank you so much for having me on. I
really appreciate it.

Speaker 1 (01:47):
That share is amazing. I would like to order one
from you. Give me the link after the show. We'll
do okay. The other guest is a law professor at
the University of Michigan now author of the book The
Right to Repair and Person Aaron. Welcome to beyond the scene.
How you doing.

Speaker 4 (02:03):
I'm great, It's great to be with you today.

Speaker 1 (02:05):
Now let's talk a little bit about this, because this
was something that I didn't even know was a thing
until I read Steve Jobs' book and they talked about
how mad computer designers were at Apple in the eighties
when the first Macintosh has started rolling off the assembly line.
But before we get into any of that, let's just
unpack first and foremost, what does right to repair mean? Aaron,

(02:28):
give us the legal mumbo jumbo of it, real quick
to me.

Speaker 4 (02:32):
At the core, the right to repair really boils down
to a commitment to this very basic idea that when
we as consumers buy things, when we own things, we
should have the freedom to fix those things in the
way that we choose. Right we should be able to
do it ourselves. We should be able to take it
to the independent repair shop of our choice. And that

(02:56):
means the manufacturer doesn't get to stand in the way
of that decision on our part to do what we
want with our own property. And I think it also
means that the legal system shouldn't recognize artificial barriers that
get in the way of people exercising that choice.

Speaker 1 (03:12):
Let's talk a little bit about it from your side, Lewis.
Talk to me a little bit about your love of
electronics and your desire to tinker and modify, Like, where
does that come from as a person, Because I'm just
wonder them people I buy some shit. However it come
out to box that's good enough for me. That's how
my corporate overlords wanted me to enjoy the item. So
where does the desire to tinker and play and move

(03:35):
things around come from?

Speaker 5 (03:37):
Being honest?

Speaker 6 (03:37):
In my case, I don't have some origin story where
I say I was taking apart my stereo when I
was four years old because I loved the tinker. I
bought something on eBay that I needed in order to
work on a recording session. The studio that I worked
at went out of business. I had no money because
I just lost my job, and the thing that I
bought arrive broken. I got a refund for the thing
that arrived broken from the eBay seller. So now I thought, hmmm,
I have this thing sitting here that I paid zero

(03:58):
dollars for. Instead of spending that money again on something else,
what if I got to pocket that money that for
the thing I just got refunded on and figure out
how to make this thing work?

Speaker 5 (04:06):
And I did so.

Speaker 6 (04:06):
The incentive structure for me was that if I could
make this work again, I now had a nest egg
of money that I could budget to do something else with.
And I always kind of had to I always kind
of enjoyed, you know, just learning how these types of
things work, opening things that you're not supposed to open.
Maybe it's oppositional defince disorder or something. But if it says,
you know, warranty void if removed them, the type of
person that would open it just because. So for me,

(04:28):
it really started out with this is a way to
save a few hundred dollars during a time in my
life when I didn't have a few hundred dollars.

Speaker 1 (04:34):
So then does that motivate your desire to be a
part of the right to repair movement or is it
rooted more in the legally so of just no, I
should have a right to do this even if I
don't want to fix that thing and I don't know
shit about that particular device. Or is it about just
wanting the freedom to be able to do things? You know, Culturally,
I'd say it's both.

Speaker 6 (04:53):
I mean, for me, I like the fact that I
went from making you know, like four hundred dollars a
month having a business with six to twelve people that
I could pay way more than hundred dollars a month.
And I also like seeing other people get to start
businesses when I get fan mail from people that say,
you know, I used to work at Walmart for ten
dollars an hour and now I make ninety thousand dollars
a year working from home.

Speaker 5 (05:10):
Thank you.

Speaker 6 (05:11):
Like that stuff motivates me. When it comes to the
legal side, what motivates me there is the sheer amount
of nonsense that you hear from regulators when you actually
meet them in person. So my friend actually had to
drag me to the New York State Legislature in May
of twenty fifteen because I was one of those people
that thought, this is a waste of time. I'm not
going to bother showing up here. Nobody cares, and I
showed up. I got in a room with one of
the legislators and they said, well, the lobbyist for the

(05:33):
other side said that when you replace a chip or
a fuse on this motherboard, you're turning it from a
MacBook into a PC and you're misrepresenting it as if
it is still a MacBook to your customer, which is fraud.
So that's why this bill is bad. And I know
my face almost turned red. I'm just thinking that's the
that's the biggest pile of something I can't say on
television I've ever heard of my life.

Speaker 1 (05:54):
Oh you'd say it right here, baby, it is we
on the internet. Baby, I don't give a fuck. Say
what it is.

Speaker 6 (05:59):
Yeah, that's biggest pile of bullshit I've ever heard of
my entire fucking life.

Speaker 5 (06:02):
So I thought like, this is no way in like,
what caused you to believe this? Why did you believe this?

Speaker 6 (06:07):
And he says, well, you know, nobody's ever shown up
to my office from your side until now, so I
never got to hear your side of the story, but
now I did. And then he started and I was like,
what are you writing? And he goes, I'm co sponsoring
your bill.

Speaker 5 (06:18):
So that was it.

Speaker 6 (06:19):
Like, you know, I showed up and I wasn't in
dress clothes or anything. I'm not a professional lobbyist. They
just showed up to my assembly person's office. I told
him why, you know, the people from Apple and tech
net were full of shit, and he just listened to me.
So I thought, I'm never going to allow them to
be in the room without somebody else to call them
on their shit as long as I live, Like, even

(06:39):
if a bill doesn't get passed, just knowing that they're
winning on.

Speaker 5 (06:43):
Easy mode, like, are you kidding me?

Speaker 6 (06:44):
You have legislators thinking that when I replace a fuse,
that I've turned a device into something else and now
I'm committing fraud. That just that, that just made me
so incredibly mad that I said I'm going to show up.

Speaker 5 (06:55):
I was so pissed.

Speaker 6 (06:56):
I also didn't have a camera rolling, so I said,
every time I go to a legislative hearing throughout the country,
I'm going to make sure there's a camera rolling. So
if you say some stupid shit like that, I'm going
to catch you and make you famous. And that's pretty
much what I've been doing.

Speaker 1 (07:07):
Jeezus, Christ you said it to all. You went from
easy to all mad one summer YO to that point.
Then Lewis, talk to me a little bit about how
the community is organized to help one another, and then Aaron,
I want you to break down how illegal that shit
is that Lewis is talking about about it. Talk to
me a little bit about the repair culture community, to

(07:30):
fix it culture community, and how people come together to
help one another, because there could be people there are
people that are dealing with the same bullshit that you
deal with with devices who aren't as tech savvy. They
don't own a bunch of micro screwdrivers and Alan wrenches
and all of that shit. So talk to me a
little bit about how people have come together and kind
of coalesced to try and fight the power on this.

Speaker 6 (07:52):
Well, what I've tried to do with my channel this
show as many people as possible how to do this
stuff for free. So you know, back ten years ago,
many people did thought that if they shared information and
had to fix something, that that would mean that my
competitor will be able to do the same job I do,
and then I'll go out of business.

Speaker 5 (08:05):
And I've tried to kind of.

Speaker 6 (08:06):
Disprove that over time by saying, here's one of the
most difficult repairs to do in our industry. I'm going
to open source pretty much every piece of information I
have on how to do this, so anybody can do
it that is willing to put the time and effort
into watch. And as time grew, it was really cool
to see other people start similar channels where they're showing
people how to fix stuff. And you know, everybody who
is in this industry realizes how hard it is to

(08:28):
get part to figure things out. It's so all these
different Facebook groups start web forums irc rooms, discord rooms
where people are sharing tips and tricks and how to
fix the newest devices.

Speaker 5 (08:40):
And I find that really cool.

Speaker 1 (08:41):
Aaron, how legal is all of that shit? He just said,
can people do all of that? Like? Because are your
stories of people meeting up in cafes and like the
same way you have a speed dating event. Apparently they
just have events where motherfuckers just all show up with
broken iPhones and they just all tinker together electronics and laptops.

(09:01):
Is that great? Where does that fall in the gray area?

Speaker 4 (09:07):
So you know, historically, from a legal perspective, repairing the
things that you own is one hundred percent legal, right.
There has historically been no question about this, And we've
got cases under US copyright law and US patent law
going back to the eighteen fifties where the US Supreme
Court recognizes that repairing the things that you buy is

(09:31):
a perfectly legal activity. What we've seen over the last
few decades, though, is a real shift in the way
that companies think about repair and in the way that
they're trying to get the legal system to think about repair.
They want to sell us things with strings attached, right,
They want to say, yeah, I'll sell you the phone,
but I'm going to impose all these limitations on what

(09:54):
you can and can't do with it. In some of
those restrictions enforced through software in many cases go to
the question of whether we have the ability to repair
our own things. And for me, from a legal perspective,
what I'm trying to do is remind courts, remind legislators
that this is an aberration. Right, this is a very

(10:17):
recent shift from the way we've handled technology, not just
in this country since eighteen fifty, but like literally since
you know, cave men were making hand axes. We've always
repaired the technology that we build, and we do it
in whatever way it kind of suits the needs of
the owner. And so I think that's really kind of

(10:40):
the crucial thing to understand here is this is a
really recent shift.

Speaker 1 (10:45):
What are some of the other products that kind of
fall under this, because this isn't just a solely electronic thing.
Like I'll tell you a story. So I have sleep apnea,
have a seapap machine. I had a seapap machine for
a while when I moved from LA when I got
The Daily Show twenty fifteen, Right, I go from New
York to LA. I go from La to New York

(11:06):
and I have to go to a new doctor. And
the new doctor is going, oh, well, I've got to
see the machine to adjust the air pressure level and
that'll be six hundred dollars deductible, deductible, deductible, and just
I was like, you know what, that don't even seem right,
And I went on YouTube and under forty five seconds

(11:27):
I figured out how to do something that cost that
would have cost me six hundred dollars. And I don't
know if that was me hacking my SEATPAP machine, but
I do feel like you motherfuckers could have told me
what buttons to press at the same time to bring
up the secret menu that you didn't want me to
know about, so that I could modify and adjust my
SEATPAP as needed. How dare you? What are some of

(11:49):
the other devices that are kind of set up to
be tamper proof so that the company can have the
proprietary control over it.

Speaker 4 (11:57):
So I think that's a really great example, right. I
think the instances where this issue troubles me the most
are the ones in which there's a piece of equipment
that a consumer is dependent on in a really important way, right,
and when you're talking about medical devices, of course, right,
those are really crucial to people's lives. When you're talking

(12:20):
about agricultural equipment, right, farmers need their John Deere tractors
to work, and they need them to work every day. Right,
it's a time sensitive operation when you're engaged in farming.
To a lesser extent, right, we are all dependent on
our smartphones as well, and so when you have that
kind of dependence where people feel like literally or figuratively

(12:44):
they cannot live without this device, then you know you
can really take advantage of consumers by charging these exorbitant
prices for repairs. And so we see this across the economy.

Speaker 1 (12:55):
Okay, so we're talking medical equipment, we're talking a tractor.
Oh lord, my my wheat harvester thing broke down and
the wheat needs to be harvested this week, but a
repair man can't come for three weeks, and I'm gonna
lose my crops or I would imagine appliances probably fall
into that same game. If I run a laundry mat
and I've got five dryers down and shit like that,

(13:17):
what's to stop the farmer from doing what I did
with the sea pat machine and just popping the hood
open on that bitch and then going on Google watching
Lewis videos. Lewis, I assume at some point you're gonna
expand your YouTube account to cover tractor equipment at some point.
How do companies stop people from doing the hack or
doing the self repair? What are the ways that companies

(13:40):
block this?

Speaker 4 (13:41):
So there are a whole bunch of strategies. Some of
the most obvious ones are just the way they design
the hardware itself, right. So you take a product like
Apple's AirPods that are glued together, they're soldered together. They
don't have screws, they don't have removable parts or replaceable parts.
That makes it really tough to repair. A John Deere
tractor is not quite the same problem. They're a big

(14:04):
piece of what we're talking about is how software built
into these devices restricts the ability to repair them. So
one of the I think most troubling trends that we
see is this idea of part pairing, right, which is
the practice of taking software and using it to identify

(14:24):
a specific piece of hardware, not just the screen on
an iPhone, but your screen on your iPhone, or the
optical drive in your PlayStation and then preventing you from
swapping it out with an otherwise identical part, right, if
it needs to be replaced. We see that in the
agricultural space, right. John Deere essentially does this by including

(14:49):
software on their tractors that means if you replace a component,
even if it's an authentic John Deere part, even if
it's installed exactly the right way, they still have to
send their technician out to your farm days later, weeks
later to plug in the laptop and literally press a
button to allow your device to work. Right. They're basically

(15:09):
holding these farmers hostage when it comes to.

Speaker 1 (15:11):
Repair your track. They got two fact authentication, you're telling.

Speaker 4 (15:15):
Me, not quite that sophisticated, right, But it is a
system that means if you don't have access to that software,
your tractor is going to sit there, even though it's
been fixed, until John Deere comes out and gives their
blessing and charges you for the you know, the time
the technicians driving to your farm and the time they're

(15:37):
driving back. Right, it's adding a lot of expense, and
it's also slowing down the process, which farmers really care
a lot about.

Speaker 1 (15:43):
Okay, So then the people that navigate around those hurdles,
people like Lewis. Lewis talk to me a little bit
about the penalties. Howtid these companies come after you. Do
they send you a cease and desist? Do they do
they leave a dead horsehead in your bed Godfather style?

Speaker 6 (15:56):
And in twenty sixteen, I had been doing repair videos
at that point for about four years, and I would
show schematics on the screen that were obtained from well
the place I can't say here. So you're not supposed
to share these schematics. Nobody at the company's supposed to
give them out, but somebody always winds up leaking them
and giving them out.

Speaker 1 (16:11):
Wait, why can't I have the instruction repair manual for
some shit I bought that's not public, like if I
bought tractor device, or if I bought big refrigerator. Like
I know there's basic constructions for the refrigerator, but the
actual how the guts of it work, that's not public.

Speaker 5 (16:28):
That's not public.

Speaker 6 (16:29):
And if you share it either there is it could
be civil or criminal liability for it. So I had
a law firm called Kakpatrick and Townsend call and say, hey,
we love your YouTube content, and I'm like.

Speaker 5 (16:38):
No, you don't.

Speaker 6 (16:39):
They said, oh, yeah, we love your YouTube content. This
is this is this one. You know a portion of
this video that we would like you to edit out.
And I look at the portion of the video and
it's the part where I'm showing the location of a
resistor that's acting as a fuse on a MacBook. So
if you spill water in the track pad area, there's
this zero and resistor that acts like a fuse that
sits between the track pad and the computer. So you're
spilling liquid in your track ped doesn't kill your home computer.

(17:00):
It's a fine design. I have no problem with them
having it there, but I wanted to show people the
location of it so that they knew to check it
because on this machine it was dead. And they said,
we want that removed, and I said, well, I don't
really want to remove it unless you file a DMCA claim.
And I never heard from them again, because when you
file a DMCA claim, you have to say who.

Speaker 5 (17:17):
You are and why you want it removed.

Speaker 6 (17:19):
So that would have essentially forced Apple to say, we
don't want people to know the location of a basic
fews in our machine because we're assholes.

Speaker 5 (17:26):
And they went away.

Speaker 6 (17:27):
But I don't know if they would have went away
in the same way if I didn't have like forty
thousand subscribers at the time that I did that.

Speaker 5 (17:33):
So that's one way.

Speaker 6 (17:35):
You know, when you're showing people these things, if you're
showing a schematic on screen, there's technically there's legal liability there,
and they could just have your videos removed or your
channel removed from the Internet.

Speaker 1 (17:45):
How much more profit our company seen, because you know,
there has to be a motivation and a reason for this.
I don't imagine it solely because Apple doesn't want you
to be creative with their items. How much of these
actions by corporations do the two of both of you
feel free to to this. How much of their actions
do you think are profit driven? Because you know, you
take a refrigerator, like my grandma got a frigid air

(18:09):
from from segregation. That thing still running down in the
bay's noisy, but that thing still going. Meanwhile, my MoMA's
refrigerator died after like seven years. Are they deliberately building
stuff more shitty so that they can make extra money
in the repair and don't want us doing our own repairs,

(18:30):
thus cutting them out of the repair money.

Speaker 4 (18:33):
I think this is a really important part of the story.

Speaker 5 (18:35):
Right.

Speaker 4 (18:36):
Companies make money off of this in two ways. One
is roy exactly what you said they want. They want
to control the repair market for themselves. John Deere knows
somebody is going to repair a million dollar tractor, but
they want that money flowing to them. The other piece
of it is companies don't want things to be repaired
at all, right, regardless of who does it, because they

(18:57):
actually don't want it. They don't want to make money
off of the repair. They want to make money off
of the sale of a new product.

Speaker 1 (19:03):
You're talking to you, printer industry. Fucking I would named
the brand, but I don't want to get suit asked
printers and then you make the buy another one. Sorry,
I keep going right.

Speaker 4 (19:12):
Right, So you know, printers are a good example. Phones
are a good example.

Speaker 1 (19:15):
Right.

Speaker 4 (19:15):
Apple keeps its shareholders happy, It keeps its stock prices high,
keeps its quarterly earnings high by selling about two hundred
million iPhones a year. Everybody's already got a phone. So
who's buying two hundred million new phones? It's people that
are replacing their old phones. Right. So we've gotten so

(19:36):
good at mass production, and this has been true really
since you know, after World War Two, we're so good
at mass production that we have to find ways to
create demand for all of these products, right, and one
way to do that is to make sure that it's
difficult or expensive or inconvenient to repair them. And we've

(19:57):
seen that idea of planned obsolescence really emerge in kind
of the second half of the twentieth century. But companies know,
I mean Tim Cook, right, CEO of Apple, has said
publicly that when repair for phones is inexpensive and easy,
they sell fewer products. So I think that's the economic rash. Now.

Speaker 6 (20:18):
As pro repair as I am, and people like we'll
look at stuff that's made seventy or ninety years ago
and say, look, this thing has lasted this long, I
think there is a bias and that all the crappy
items from seventy years ago are long dead, so you
don't see them, so you don't know that they haven't lasted.
And as consumers, I think if you had two devices
in a store, if you had a fifteen hundred dollars
appliance and it said fifty year warranty, and you had
a two hundred dollars appliance, and it's like I think

(20:40):
most people would still go for the two hundred dollars appliance,
So there is a small portion of it being people
as consumers. This will decide listen, that's a quarter of
the price. I'm going to buy that, because the people
that are making the much more expensive stuff, they don't
necessarily advertise, by the way, this will still work in
fifty years now. There is the flip side of it,
which are the things that companies to go out of

(21:01):
their way to make repair hard.

Speaker 5 (21:02):
So, for instance, you take a charging chip in a MacBook.

Speaker 6 (21:04):
Let's say this is very common repair we do that
Apple will build seven hundred and fifteen hundred dollars for
and it requires a five dollars chip that goes back
from either Texas Instruments or Innercil. If you google isl
nine two four zero Facebook, the first result is somebody
asking Intersill, Hi, can we buy this chip, and them
saying no, we're not allowed to sell it to you.
That's an official company representative saying that. Stuff like that

(21:25):
is stuff that's kind of like done on purpose in
my opinion, to make repairs more difficult. But as time
goes on, I would imagine when it comes to profitability,
it's not just the immediate connection of man, if you're
able to fix your own stuff, you won't buy a
new one. I think it's in order to make repair viable,
we need to have an entire supply chain set up
to make repair viable, and that costs money. So screw that,

(21:46):
you know, if you read these books on the just
in time manufacturing instead, like the Toyota way of manufacturing
and things like that, when companies may take that and
kind of perverted and diluted to the extreme. Making just
enough parts to manufact what we think we're gonna sell
versus having spare parts left over for repair. Network is
far more profitable. So it may not even be I

(22:06):
don't want you to fix that, I want you to
buy a new one. It may also be, you know,
just considering repair at all within the supply chain will
cost us a lot more money.

Speaker 5 (22:15):
So it's not that we don't want you to fix it.

Speaker 6 (22:17):
It's just it's just an afterthought kind of thing.

Speaker 1 (22:20):
After the break, I want to talk a little bit
about who suffers the most under this weird archaic system.
I'm gonna check with legal real quick during the break
as well, and see if I can shout out this
printer company that's full of shit. It's so oh my god,
they're so full of shit. And we're gonna talk about
how the corporations are fighting back against people like you too.

(22:42):
It's beyond the scenes. We'll be right back. Fuck that
printer company. Beyond the scenes. We are back, and legal
has told me that I cannot name that particular printer
company that always sells me a printer and after two
years it breaks in the cost of the repairs right
neck and neck with the cost of a new printer.

(23:04):
Fuck you, Gulett Packard. Look, we're talking about the right
to repair.

Speaker 4 (23:09):
Now.

Speaker 1 (23:09):
We talked about what it is and kind of why
companies do that, but beyond the computer user, beyond the
cell phone user, even me with the CPAP, can we
talk a little bit about the real life implications and
how this affects regular, everyday Americans when companies aren't allowed
to make repairs or companies can't afford to make the

(23:32):
repairs on equipment that saves lives or supports full industries.
Talk to me a little bit about the ripple effect
of that, Aaron, and how that trickles down to the
average American.

Speaker 4 (23:42):
It just takes money out of people's pockets. Right, repairs
are more expensive, we end up buying more new stuff
than we need, and that costs American families. I mean,
this is hard to pin down an exact dollar figure four,
but I think comfortably confidently we can say tens of
billions dollars right collectively, that we are that we are

(24:03):
spending that we otherwise wouldn't have to spend. That's important,
it's not the only important thing, right. So, one thing
that I think the pandemic really helped to highlight is
the ways in which we really depend on functioning markets
for repairs and replacement parts. Right. So, we had issues where,

(24:24):
you know, during the early part of the pandemic, when
hospitalizations you know, were really high, we saw respirators breaking down,
and the companies who make them, who insist that they're
the only people qualified to fix them, weren't able to
keep up. They didn't have enough technicians, they didn't have
enough parts, and so hospitals had to find ways of

(24:45):
doing this themselves, or third party organizations came in and
filled that gap. I think that's important to recognize, like
the value that independent repair gives us. Right, we live
in a world with these very co implicated international supply chains,
but they're kind of brittle, right. If the wrong thing happens,

(25:07):
things start to fall apart and somebody needs to be
able to step in and fix those problems. And one
of the things I really worry about when we live
in a world where the manufacturer is the only person
that's authorized to make repairs is that we don't develop
the sorts of skills that people need, you know, to
interact with this technology. And I'm sure Lewis can speak

(25:29):
to this, but repair is a practice that builds up
a whole bunch of really valuable skills, analytical thinking, problem solving,
right thinking through a complicated problem, and it helps us
to actually understand the way these devices work. And I
think that's just important so that we're not dependent on
these companies, so that we can use the technology but

(25:50):
still be kind of free, independent actors in the world.
And I think we're losing some of that.

Speaker 6 (25:55):
Yeah, I think one of the interesting things here is,
you know, one of the biggest things that I think
you lose in general is is just when you think
about the philosophical shift in our culture, the people like
Steve Wozniak that are responsible for us having an apple
at all. If he lived in a world where you
were not supposed to open up anything and you're not
allowed to tinker with any of your own stuff, he
could be a.

Speaker 5 (26:11):
Middle manager at footlocker right now for rowing, though, I mean.

Speaker 6 (26:13):
What drives people to get into this, what drives people
to decide I'm going to get a degree in electronics
for engineering, or I'm not going to get into degree,
but I'm just going to start making stuff on my own,
is the fact that they're able to open things up,
they're encouraged to open things up and work on them.
And this idea that you can't do that because of
safety and security, which we're all nonsensical lies so that
a company can avoid saying we just want to make
more money, is a really negative shift in the culture.

(26:34):
And the idea that what you buy isn't yours, you
don't own it, you have no control over it, you're
just using it long enough to buy another one. This
idea that you're shifting control away from you to the company.
It's it's a philosophical shift that I don't think is
going to be healthy for property rights going into the
next generation. And that's aside from all the money that
consumers are going to lose when they're not able to
fix something that has a basic problem.

Speaker 1 (26:56):
Lewis, how much did you consider the f that you're
fighting with the right to repair? How much shold you
consider that what you were doing would also be good
for the environment, like the environmental toll of the throwaway culture,
you know, if people always having to constantly replace devices
instead of fixing them. You know, did you ever think

(27:17):
about the environmental aspect of it? Did you come into
this as an environmentalist or did you even think of
that or was it just like, hey, fuck them, that's
not fair and then also, ooh, it's good for Earth.

Speaker 6 (27:28):
I honestly never thought about the environment while I was
doing this for a number of reasons, like when the
thing that first got me excited about repair, From being honest,
was I was able to save five or six hundred
bucks at a time when I was broke, which is
really cool. The other thing that gets me excited about
this is, you know when somebody says, I have all
of my wedding photos on here and they're crying because
they have no backup, and they give me a hug
when I can get their stuff back as a result
of you know, fixing a drive that's clicking or something,

(27:51):
or fixing a board that's dead. That makes me happy
seeing other people go from working the you know, minimum
wage at Walmart to making a living for their family.
That's what That's the stuff that gets me excited.

Speaker 5 (28:01):
For the environment. I could talk about it till.

Speaker 6 (28:03):
I'm blue in the face, but just being honest and
having met with so many legislators over the past eight years,
nobody cares whether I'm talking to, you know, a Republican
in an oil rich district or I'm talking to a
very progressive person in an area where they claim they
care about the environment. It's it's the thing that people
care about the least, whether it's myself or like even
just the people that I'm talking to that claim they

(28:25):
care about it, that have legislative positions. What they usually
care about is, you know, is this going to get
me in trouble? Will this create jobs in my district?
Will this get people to vote for me? And I
always try to focus in the things that people are
personally invested in. Because of the species, we're really good
at caring about things that affect us right now and
we really don't care about stuff that's going to be
a problem tomorrow. So if I can tell somebody, here's

(28:46):
how you save nine hundred dollars, here's how you get
your baby pictures back, here's how you go for making
nine dollars an hour to making forty dollars an hour.
I can get people on board if I tell people
this is good for the environment. Like they'll see they care,
but like they'll say they care, walk away, and you know,
do something else. I just I can't rely on that
being the thing that excites people about.

Speaker 5 (29:06):
This as a movement. But it is technically true.

Speaker 6 (29:08):
I mean, if you're throwing something away versus recycling it
or repairing it, there's a lot more waste involved there.
Like if I'm throwing away, if I'm even if we're
not recycling at all, if I'm throwing away twenty percent
of the device instead of one hundred percent of it,
that's still better for the environment.

Speaker 4 (29:23):
Seah, I mean, I think Lewis is right that you know,
these environmental arguments I think are really important, But the
environmental harms are very diffuse, right, They're not concentrated in
the way that like money out of your pocket, is concentrated,
and they're often like really distant. The people who suffer
the most from these environmental consequences aren't, you know, wealthy

(29:44):
people in the United States, right, They're poor people around
the world. But I've started to take this kind of
perverse pleasure in bumming people out about buying new stuff
by talking about the environmental consequences. Right. So normally we
focus on the kind of e waste side of this,
and that's a huge problem. You know, we create something

(30:05):
like fifty million metric tons of electronic waste every year
from consumer electronics. That number keeps going up. You know,
electronic waste that's full of all sorts of like really
toxic shit that arsenic and lead and mercury, that's going
into the soil, that's going into the water, that causes
all kinds of health problems, doesn't typically affect those of

(30:28):
us in the United States all that much because for
a long time, we shipped all of our electronic waste
to China or to Vietnam, or to you know, some
other country to let them deal with it. So that's
one half of the problem. The other half of the
problem is on the front end in terms of the
production of these products. You know, raw materials, right are

(30:50):
being removed from the earth to make all of these
these products. So you know, we got cars, we got appliances,
but like we make one and a half bill in
phones a year globally. Right, a smartphone contains something like
seventy five out of the eighty three known stable elements

(31:11):
in the universe. These are you know, complicated things. It's
not just like copper and gold, but there's a bunch
of rare earth metals in there. Extracting all those materials
starts basically with like blowing a bunch of shit up,
and then you use a bunch of toxic chemicals to
separate the metals from the ore, and then that creates
like millions of gallons of toxic slurry that gets stored

(31:36):
somewhere and eventually causes a bunch of environmental damage as well.
Right on the other hand, I hear the iPhone comes
in yellow now, so you know it's it's a trade off.

Speaker 1 (31:48):
What cases are companies making against the right to repair? Like,
why are they so resistant to this?

Speaker 4 (31:55):
The arguments that companies make against the right to repair.
You know, they'll talk about you know, security in privacy
and how important it is to protect those consumer interests,
And of course I agree, Like I'm not against security,
I'm not against privacy. But if every day regular repairs
open your device up to a security vulnerability, then your

(32:17):
device is poorly designed. Right. You're just kind of telling
on yourself there if the idea of it fixing the
thing opens you up to some security risk. When it
comes to privacy, I'll be honest with you, I'd trust
somebody like Lewis to take better care of my data
than I would the nameless authorized service provider at the

(32:37):
local best Buy that Apple has a deal with, Right,
somebody who runs their own business, who is accountable, who
has like a real commitment to customer service. I think
that's important. Apple actually had to settle a lawsuit within
the last year or so for millions of dollars when
one of its own technicians stole and shared nude photo

(33:00):
of an Apple customer. Right, So they're not like the
you know, the perfect example here of security and privacy.
They talk about safety, right, and that's you know, independent
repair or self repair is dangerous that we're going to
like blow ourselves up swapping out the batteries on our phones.
You know, people have been fixing their own cars in

(33:21):
this country since there have been cars in this country.
Anybody who wants to swap out the brakes on their
five thousand, six thousand pounds hunk of metal that they
drive around at eighty five miles an hour is free
to do so I think will be okay if some
people give give, you know, swapping out their phone screen

(33:41):
at home.

Speaker 1 (33:42):
A try Louis to all of everything that Aaron just said,
have you ever seen anything proprietary when you cracked open
the inside to some of these devices, Like, have you
ever felt like, oh wow, this is probably something I
shouldn't have seen in the company. If I was even competitor,
be I wouldn't make something very similar to like the

(34:04):
same reason why the government tries to blow up drones
when they crash in anymy territory so you can't get
our fucking schematics and all of that. Are companies justified
and being against right to repair on the grounds of
trying to protect their trade secrets?

Speaker 6 (34:20):
I don't think so, because if the entire argument is
that we'd have competition that makes that that just copies
are design and steals everything. So if you take a
look at what I do. The schematics are available. I
mean again, it's not available through the channels i'd like.
But if I'm able to get a schematic for five
or ten dollars on some random non English website on
the Internet, then surely Toshiba or ACER or somebody else can.

(34:41):
So why haven't Toshiba, an ACER and everybody else created
a complete clone of the MacBook. The reason is because
the documentation we're requesting and the information we're requesting is
not enough that you can create a carbon copy of
this computer. It would be like if I took a
picture of you and then I said, okay, from this picture,
I can clone you, like you can't clone some from
a picture, the same way that I can't clone a

(35:02):
device from a barebone schematic that says this resistor.

Speaker 5 (35:06):
Is attached to this capacitor at this value.

Speaker 6 (35:09):
There's a lot of information that's necessary for manufacturing that
we are not requesting access to. So if you were
able to do this, then realistically speaking, somebody would have
cloned the iPhone using what they have in ZXW tool,
or they would have cloned a MacBook from the three
megabytes of schematics and PDFs that I share when I
do a repair video, and that's just not happening because

(35:30):
we're only requesting the barebones minimum necessary to actually do
our job well.

Speaker 1 (35:35):
After the break, we'll bring it home by talking about
what progress has been made. We talked about the beginning
of the right to repair movement, but I would love
to know where you all now with this issue, where
some of the companies are now with this issue, and
what can regular people like me do to be a
part of the solution other than leaving hateful tweets at

(35:57):
the Hewlett Packet Corporation for their shitty p This is
beyond the scenes. We'll be right back beyond the scenes
round the third headed for home the Right to Repair,
before we get into what legal progress has been made
and what changes the two of you would like to see. Lewis,
is there anybody on the inside of these companies that

(36:20):
have spoken to you, like off the record about what
you're doing. How much do the people who work for
these companies believe in the policies that these companies have
in place.

Speaker 6 (36:30):
A lot of them don't, and one of them, I'm
not going to say the company because I don't want
out them.

Speaker 1 (36:34):
But a human packed. It was human packer.

Speaker 6 (36:37):
There's somebody who worked at a company that i've that
I've talked about quite a bit on my channel, and
he said, you know, he's just upfront and nons and said,
I've made a lot of money working for a company
that I vastly disagree with. So when I started my
fundraiser for a lobbying in all these states, he wired
one hundred thousand dollars over without me even asking what
he was going to do after I gave him the
bank account details. So there's a lot of people that
work within these companies that don't agree with their policies.

(36:59):
And some of them have said, you know, I started
actually getting in the really cool thing once. This is
how you start to feel old. Is like once somebody
says I started watching your stuff in twenty sixteen. I
graduated in twenty twenty one, and I got my engineering
job in twenty twenty two. So now I work at
the company that you were essentially a bad mouth before
I even before I even started my career. So yeah, like,

(37:20):
there are a lot of people inside these companies that
don't agree with these policies, that just don't necessarily have
the power themselves to actually work towards changing them.

Speaker 1 (37:29):
What progress has been made on the legislative side, and
you know, what changes do the two of you think
would be most impactful just in the short term, you know,
on this issue.

Speaker 4 (37:40):
Just to give a little bit of the backstory here,
all the way back in twenty twelve, the state of
Massachusetts passed a right to repair law that applied to automobiles,
and it required car makers to make repair parts and
tools and software and information available to car owners and
to independent repair shops on reasonable terms. That model worked

(38:03):
really well. It was adopted by all the car companies
at the time as essentially a nationwide standard, and it's
proven effective in most respects. It also formed the basis
for the bills that have been introduced over the past
few years in thirty plus states around the country, and

(38:24):
those bills have broad bipartisan support among consumers, among voters. Right,
this is like a seventy to eighty percent issue, one
of the few things that people really agree on across
that sort of partisan divide. But we've seen really powerful
companies spend a lot of money on lobbyists to block

(38:48):
those bills, to water those bills down. You know, we've
seen some success. So there are bills progressing through state
houses in a bunch of states right now. Last year,
Colorado passed a right to repair law focusing on motorized
wheelchairs because there was a really specific and egregious problem
going on for folks that use motorized wheelchairs. It's a

(39:11):
great law, but it doesn't go far enough. New York
passed a bill as well that was overwhelmingly supported in
both houses of the legislature there, but as Lewis will
probably want to talk to you about in some more detail,
was really watered down by the governor in New York,

(39:32):
and I imagine Lewis has some thoughts on that.

Speaker 6 (39:35):
Yeah. Yeah, So in the state of New York, there
was a bill that we've worked eight years on and
in the last week the governor allowed the opposition lobbyists
to rewrite the bill so the edits that were suggested
by the opposition were directly written into the bill. So
Kathy Cultel allowed Apple, Samsung and everybody else to literally
write the legislation that they would be regulating them.

Speaker 1 (39:57):
Yes, I will write the law to make sure that
I followed the law. Where's the ink? Then? Thank you
and what about Massachusetts in twenty fourteen. Talk to me
a little bit about that and how they codified that log.

Speaker 4 (40:10):
Yeah, so you know, Massachusetts did this, you know, in
a couple of ways, actually simultaneously. So there was a
ballot initiative that the voters actually got to vote on
and it won by like eighty percent of the vote, right,
And I think that is a really important signal here.
If this issue is decided by voters, the right to

(40:31):
repair wins. It's not even close. Right. It's just as
we talked about in New York. It's when you get
these closed door meetings, either with the governor or with
state legislators, where you know, either the bills don't happen
at all, or they get really watered down and limited. Right.

(40:51):
So I think that's something we've got to be worried about.
It's a tough fight because it's happening simultaneously in a
bunch of states all at one. I would prefer to
see this issue fixed on a national level, a federal level,
rather than by state to state rules. There have been
some important bills that have been introduced in the US Congress,

(41:15):
addressing auto repair, addressing consumer electronics, addressing agricultural equipment. Those
are good bills. But Congress is just like a dysfunctional mess, right,
So getting anything passed there, even though the American public
is broadly supportive, I think, is a tricky thing to do.
There are other avenues. There's the executive branch. The Federal

(41:38):
Trade Commission, under Lena Khan's leadership, has taken a real
interest in repair. They've taken a pretty aggressive stance. They
issued a really important report that shot down a lot
of the manufacturers' arguments a couple years ago. They've been
taking enforcement actions on repair restrictions against companies like Harley Davidson.

(41:59):
But they can more. They could adopt rules that make
it clear that some of these practices we've been talking
about should be treated as unfair and deceptive, you know,
commercial practices.

Speaker 6 (42:11):
The most interesting part with the Massachusetts one is it
was voted in favor of seventy four to twenty six
by residents and the manufacturers. Commercials from General Motors, Toyota, Ford, Nissan,
and Honda were saying that if this passes, if mechanics
can fix your car, they're going to stalk you through
parking lots, They're going to break into your house.

Speaker 5 (42:28):
They're going to rape you.

Speaker 6 (42:29):
This bill supports racism, redlining sexual assaults like the kid Yeah,
and I archived their website and I archived their advertisements
because this was all taken offline the moment they lost.
But they had these scary commercials where it'd be somebody
walking behind you and the light would be very very blue,
and as they got closer to you, you hear pop
and then you just wrench.

Speaker 2 (42:54):
If Question one passes in Massachusetts, anyone could access the
most personal data stored in your vehicle. Domestic violence advocates
say a sexual predator could use the data to stalk
their victims, PenPoint exactly where you are, whether you are alone,
even take control of your vehicle. Vote no on one,

(43:19):
Keep your data safe.

Speaker 6 (43:20):
They threw all of this at just the ability of
a mechanic to be able to fix your car, and
they spend twenty five million dollars in all those advertisements
and they still lost.

Speaker 1 (43:29):
So it must have been worth something to them. So
then to that point, then Aaron, talk to me a
little bit about these companies that are trying to get
ahead of the pr nightmare that this would be for
them by being proactive before there's legislation with John Deere.
I find this interesting, like break down what John Deere
is doing, and then I want the two of you

(43:50):
to tell me whether or not this is legitimate steps
towards change or as Garfield the Cat would say, insincere sincerity.

Speaker 4 (44:00):
Yeah, it's it's a really important point. John Deere and
other agricultural firms have signed what they're calling a memorandum
of Understanding with the American Farm Bureau Association, which basically,
you know, they've tried to tell this story that this
is their effort to solve this problem and to give

(44:21):
farmers access to all the things that they need to
engage in repair. And I got to be honest with you,
I've read these documents. They are not worth the paper
they're written on. They don't do anything. They are completely voluntary.
John Deere can back out of this agreement any time
it wants to. It basically obligates the company to do
nothing that they don't already say they're doing. So they say,

(44:43):
we will make software available to farmers, but the memorandum
of understanding defines software, and it defines it really specifically
as one particular program the John Deere customer Advisor program,
which they tell us is already a available to farmers.
So if it's already available, what are farmers getting from
this deal. The other thing is, even if you get

(45:06):
access to that software, it doesn't do what you need
it to do. It's not the program that can actually
initialize or authorize these parts after repair has been done.
So it's just about pr from my perspective, I don't
think it moves the needle one bit. But when they
made that announcement and sent out their press release, there

(45:26):
are a bunch of news stories that were saying, oh,
look at this, John Deere is so responsible. So I
think the media fell for it in a lot of
instances when they really shouldn't have.

Speaker 6 (45:36):
I think you have to separate the companies that are
doing it genuinely from the companies that are not so.
Like if you have a company like Framework, they release
their laptop, every single part that to that laptop is
available on their website.

Speaker 5 (45:45):
If you want schematics, you do have to contact them.

Speaker 6 (45:47):
There's no download link, but if you contact them, they
will actually give you this schematic to the device. So
they are following through on their promise to be more
a repair friendly company. That was started as a repair
friendly company. With Apple, they created an independent pair provider program.
But that program requires that they can audit me at
any time. If I have parts that I'm not supposed
to have in my facility, they can kick me out
of the program and get me in legal trouble.

Speaker 5 (46:08):
Which I do.

Speaker 6 (46:09):
I have schematics, I have chips that I'm not supposed
to have. They still restrict you from buying all these
different chips. They don't make the LCD buy itself available.
You can't buy a keyboard by itself. You can't buy
a schematic, you can't buy a board view. The program
when it first came out, didn't even allow you to
actually stock parts. You would have to take all your
customers information, take their IMEI number, send all this stuff

(46:30):
back to Apple, and then buy a part because you
weren't allowed to stock it. So there are some companies
that have come out with programs that, in my opinion,
are complete garbage and they're just designed to show a regulator, look,
you don't need to you know, you don't need to
sign a bill. We're doing it all ourselves, when in
reality that program provides us with nothing. And then there
are companies like Framework or fair Phone, where they are

(46:51):
in good faith actually making parts available, schematics available, and
everything that somebody like me would need to be able
to work in a customer's product. And you know said
is very important. Which is the moment that news came
out from John Deere. You had like twenty or thirty
news articles saying John Deere gives farmers what they want.
So I just decided again, I grew up in Brooklyn.
I'm not a farmer. I can barely, you know, grow

(47:12):
a venus flytrap. I just called a farmer that I knew,
and I said, hey, does this actually get you what
you want? And I had a ten minute conversation with
him where he very politely went through why this doesn't
give him anything? And I was wondering, you know, gee,
why didn't the BBC do that? Why didn't any of
these news companies do that? Why didn't they just call
a farmer and ask? And that's what happened when Apple
came out with their self repair program too. You know,
all these tech companies, all these news organizations that cover

(47:33):
tech companies, I should stay started saying, Look, Apple is
now repair friendly. Apple supports the right to repair and
It's like, no, they don't. I still can't buy anything
I need to actually fix anything. But it allows, you know,
them to take advantage of lazy bloggers and journalists that
don't call people involved in the field and get good
pr for themselves. The same thing happened when Governor Ultcheal
signed this bill. You had all these people saying right

(47:54):
to Repair wins in New York and I'm like the
ef it does is bill says that if they if
the company says they don't want to sell you an assembly,
they don't have to sell you an assembly.

Speaker 5 (48:01):
This is useless.

Speaker 1 (48:02):
What can people do to get involved in the right
to repair movement? And how can consumers be more mindful
about the products they purchase.

Speaker 6 (48:11):
I think that the best thing that anybody can do is,
if they are somewhat good at repair in any way,
shape or form, get other people to be excited. I
want people to be personally invested. I don't want them
to feel ashamed because they're buying something new. I want
them to feel a sense of excitement and happiness because
they just saved one thousand dollars, or excitement and happiness
because they just made five hundred dollars this week off

(48:31):
of a side geek that they otherwise wouldn't have made.
If you can get somebody to be personally invested in
caring about this because you've helped them recover data, you've
helped them make something work again, you've helped them avoid downtime.
Let them know at the end of it, by the
way this we may live in a world.

Speaker 5 (48:46):
Two years from nowhere. This is not possible. And here's why.

Speaker 6 (48:48):
It's Like at the end of the movie twenty fifth
Hour with Ed Norton, he tells all of his kids
after he escapes from him, after he escapes from having
to go to jail, I probably shouldn't have spoiled the best.

Speaker 1 (48:57):
At Norton instances, but I did. But he's can make
what American history act. But continue will debate offline.

Speaker 6 (49:03):
Yeah, but he's you know, but he says this is
he tells the Origin story to his kids and he says,
this is how close you all word it never happening.
And one of the things I try to do with
every one of my customers is I tell them, this
is how close I was to not recovering any of
your wedding photos or any.

Speaker 5 (49:16):
Of your baby photos.

Speaker 6 (49:18):
This is how close you were to paying two thousand
dollars instead of two hundred dollars for repair get as
many people personally invested as possible, And when it comes
to the personal decisions people make on what they buy,
that's a difficult one.

Speaker 5 (49:28):
Like this was.

Speaker 6 (49:29):
Something where twenty or thirty or forty years ago, I
think you could have chosen this company for being repair
friendly versus this one, But now you really in many industries,
you really are just choosing between like the LEA twenty
companies that are not going to make us comatic available,
that are not going to make a part available, So
it's really hard to recommend one company over the other.
And you do have scrappy startups like Framework and fair

(49:50):
Phone that are trying to produce products that are repair friendly.
But many of these companies, admittedly, and while I do
love what they're trying to do, they have limited fundings,
so you know you're getting a device that's left generation
and they have a one size fits all product. So
it's really it's not one of those things where it's
easy to just pick the repair friendly solution now as
it would have been let's say thirty or forty years ago,

(50:11):
because in many cases there are in any.

Speaker 1 (50:12):
Beautiful Aaron real quick. How can people get involved?

Speaker 4 (50:16):
First, I'm contractually obligated to, you know, try to sell
my book, So people should read The Right to Repair
from the fine folks at Cambridge University Press, where I
try to talk about a lot of the things that
we've been covering today. But I think we should, you know,
look at the resources that are out there and available
to people. We should look at sites like I fix It,

(50:38):
which provides repair ability scores and repair instructions for tons
of products. You know, we should support the work that
Lewis is doing. We should be supporting the work that
Nathan Procter and the folks at us PERG have been
doing around repair. But I think most importantly, we've got
to be kind of reflective a little bit about our

(50:59):
own choices, in our own behavior. Right, the phone in
your pocket did not materialize out of thin air. There
was lots of labor, lots of resources, and lots of
costs built into that device, and I think we have
an interest in making it last as long as it can.

Speaker 1 (51:20):
Right.

Speaker 4 (51:20):
So I'm not saying we all have to like read
by candlelight and never use TikTok again. But I think
we have to make these products last longer, and repair
is really essential to that goal. And I think once
people start to internalize that story and understand the way
companies are trying to sort of manipulate their behavior, it
becomes a lot easier to at least have some awareness

(51:43):
of this issue, and then the behavioral change I think
flows from there.

Speaker 1 (51:47):
Well, this has been a wonderful, wonderful topic. I cannot
thank you both for all of this wonderful information. And
fuck you, Hugh Attack could make a better printer. You
I cursed a lot to say.

Speaker 6 (52:01):
That's an opinion. Actually, so I think legal will be
okay with that. That's your opinion. You're asking them to
be better. You're actually being a motivational speaker.

Speaker 1 (52:08):
We'll see. Our legal department is very litigious. I can't
say anything you mean about anybody. That's all the time
we have for today. Aaron Lewis, thank you so much
for going Beyond the Scenes before listen to the Daily
Show Beyond the Scenes on Apple podcasts, the iHeartRadio app,

(52:30):
or wherever you get your podcasts.