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:
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 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 right to repair and why products are designed to be unfixable by the average person.
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.
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.
That means tractors and cars, it means your smartphone, It means increasingly the refrigerators and washing machines that people have in their homes.
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?
Hey, thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it.
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.
I'm great, It's great to be with you today.
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, give us the legal mumbo jumbo of it, real quick to me.
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 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.
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 things around come from?
Being honest?
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 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?
And I did so.
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, 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.
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.
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.
Thank you.
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 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.
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.
Yeah, that's biggest pile of bullshit I've ever heard of my entire fucking life.
So I thought like, this is no way in like, what caused you to believe this? Why did you believe this?
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.
So that was it.
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 if a bill doesn't get passed, just knowing that they're winning on.
Easy mode, like, are you kidding me?
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.
I was so pissed.
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.
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 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.
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.
And I've tried to kind of.
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 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.
And I find that really cool.
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. Is that great? Where does that fall in the gray area?
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 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 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 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 the crucial thing to understand here is this is a really recent shift.
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 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 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 the other devices that are kind of set up to be tamper proof so that the company can have the proprietary control over it.
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 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 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.
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, 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 block this?
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 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 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 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 holding these farmers hostage when it comes to.
Repair your track. They got two fact authentication, you're telling.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
That's not public.
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.
No, you don't.
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. 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.
You are and why you want it removed.
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.
And they went away.
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.
So that's one way.
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.
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 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, thus cutting them out of the repair money.
I think this is a really important part of the story.
Right.
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 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.
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.
Right, So you know, printers are a good example. Phones are a good example.
Right.
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 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 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.
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 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 their way to make repair hard.
So, for instance, you take a charging chip in a MacBook.
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 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, 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 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.
So it's not that we don't want you to fix it.
It's just it's just an afterthought kind of thing.
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. 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. Fuck you, Gulett Packard. Look, we're talking about the right to repair.
Now.
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 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.
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 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, 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 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, 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 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 still be kind of free, independent actors in the world. And I think we're losing some of that.
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.
Middle manager at footlocker right now for rowing, though, I mean.
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. 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.
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 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.
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, 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.
For the environment. I could talk about it till.
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 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 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.
This as a movement. But it is technically true.
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.
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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
What cases are companies making against the right to repair? Like, why are they so resistant to this?
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 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 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 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 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 at home.
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 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?
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. 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 device from a barebone schematic that says this resistor.
Is attached to this capacitor at this value.
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 we're only requesting the barebones minimum necessary to actually do our job well.
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 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 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.
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.
But a human packed. It was human packer.
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. 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, 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.
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.
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 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 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 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 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, and I imagine Lewis has some thoughts on that.
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.
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.
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 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. 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, 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 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. 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.
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.
They're going to rape you.
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.
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, Keep your data safe.
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.
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 to tell me whether or not this is legitimate steps towards change or as Garfield the Cat would say, insincere sincerity.
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 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, 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 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 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.
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.
If you want schematics, you do have to contact them.
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.
Which I do.
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 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 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 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 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 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.
This is useless.
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.
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 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.
Two years from nowhere. This is not possible. And here's why.
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.
At Norton instances, but I did. But he's can make what American history act. But continue will debate offline.
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.
Of your baby photos.
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.
Like this was.
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 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, because in many cases there are in any.
Beautiful Aaron real quick. How can people get involved?
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, 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 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.
Right.
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 of this issue, and then the behavioral change I think flows from there.
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.
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.
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, or wherever you get your podcasts.