Louis Rossmann が語る「修理する権利」――所有権を取り戻すための闘い

I recently chatted with McKinsey's Dan Swan about how businesses successfully transitioned to AI, the coming agentic wave, and even the sad loss of tennis line judges. Here's a sneak peek. Some people are buying software and calling it a transformation. The people that are really getting the most value from it are fundamentally doing something very different, which is they're taking that technology and they're incorporating it with changing the capabilities of their people, fundamentally redesigning their processes and tracking the impact through the bottom line. There's much more in the full interview with Dan Swan, which can be found in its entirety on Wired.com. Also, check out McKinsey's playbook, Rewired, available at your favorite bookseller. AI can make businesses faster. It can also make mistakes, expose data, and execute the wrong instructions faster. ThreatLocker helps organizations set boundaries AI cannot ignore by controlling what applications can run, what they can reach, and how they interact with sensitive resources. Innovation needs more than good intentions. It needs limits.

Control AI with zero trust at threatlocker.com slash wired. That's T-H-R-E-A-T-L-O-C-K-E-R dot com slash wired. For Wired, this is the big interview. I'm Brian Barrett, Wired's executive editor, sitting in this week for Katie Drummond. So I have an old iPhone 14 that I love, and I don't want to give it away. I want to hold onto it for as long as I can, but the battery's about to go. Apps are getting a little slower to load. Some of that I can fix. I can get the batteries swapped out of the Genius Bar. I could maybe do it myself. That'll buy me a little more time. But eventually, Apple won't support this wildly expensive device that has rare earth elements in it at all. There's not that much I can do about it. Apple did start offering self-repair services a few years ago, but involves renting 80 pounds of equipment, requires you to use official parts. It doesn't save you much money versus just going to Apple directly. If I buy a screen or a camera component from a third party, there's a chance my iPhone is going to lock me out of certain features because it doesn't recognize it.

And we see this with much of the technology we're using on a regular basis. It's cars, video game consoles, smart devices. Not surprisingly, a lot of people think this isn't fair, think it shouldn't be this way, and think there's a better way to do it. I think at this point it's safe to say it qualifies as a movement under the banner of right to repair. It's essentially this apparently radical concept that when you buy a piece of technology, you should truly own it. You should be able to freely maintain, fix, or modify it. Now in the age of AI, it started to gain even more traction as reverse engineering just without any software to hack the tech all around you becomes that much easier. I've been interested in this topic for some time, and the guy at the center of a new campaign that he calls Own Your Shit joins me now, Louis Rossman. Thank you very much for taking the time. Thank you so much for being here to talk about right to repair. It's something that we at Wired cover all the time, but you're someone who spends a lot of time not just evangelizing over right to repair, but I would imagine introducing it to people who don't know what it is. How do you do that?

How do you introduce, here's what right to repair is, and here's, more importantly, why you should care about it? I try to avoid talking about it, and I try to show people. So instead of telling people, here's why you should care about this issue, which sounds like lecturing, what I'll do is if I'm done fixing something for a customer and they say the Apple said it told me $2,000 and we could do it for $200, when they're giving me the hug and saying, thank you for getting back all of our baby pictures or something, I'll say, here's how closely we were to this never happening. And I like to tell them, this is the document that I use to fix your device. When they ask me what was wrong with it, and I'll tell them this chip, by the way, you should know that Apple tells the company that makes this chip not to sell it to me. And if everybody in that chain listened, I would not be able to fix this and you wouldn't have any of your data back. So I always try to show people and get them excited about what it is I'm doing. When I'm on YouTube, I have over 1,000 repair videos where I show people how to do what I was doing. And there are people that would say I was working at Walmart for $7 an hour, and I picked up a soldering iron and started fixing boards on eBay, and now I make triple what I did before. There are people that fix their own things.

So not just making careers for people, but maybe somebody saved themselves some money by doing a repair themselves. Or when I fix something for somebody that otherwise wouldn't have been fixed or that they were told couldn't be fixed. I always try to get people personally invested because lecturing people about it just doesn't make it very fun. And there are like so many examples of things that seem egregious. You have some of them of your own. I feel like your organization highlights a lot of you've got a wall of shame, almost of examples of things that companies have done to take away the ownership of a product. Because that's really what it is, right? It's like you buy something, you expect to be able to own it and do what you want with it. But that's not always how it plays out. What are some of the, to your mind, the more egregious instances of companies not letting you own what you bought? Some of my favorites are some of these thermostat companies. One of them sent out a firmware update after the company went bankrupt. They required that you pay $117 a year to get some of the functionality that you had beforehand. So it's not even necessarily when a company has a device that has a specific date when it's going to turn off. It's when they realize we need to make more money, so we're going to change what it is we're offering you after the sale.

And I don't think of that as an update. I think of that as ransomware. And when I started doing this, I was just talking about right to repair for Apple devices, which is what my small shop worked on. And I saw it from my small lens. I focused on the items where I knew exactly what was going on. And I really thought this is the problem that only affects me. And it wasn't until about 2017 when I went to Nebraska for this legislative hearing that I realized that it really is not just something that affects my small field. I actually thought I was in the wrong room. I was in a room filled with farmers that were talking about all the problems they're having with their tractors. And I remember looking at Jessa and going, where's the right to repair? And she said, this is the right to repair room. Everybody has this problem now. And that's when I started opening my field of view up to everybody who has this issue. And as time went on, my channel stopped just discussing right to repair. And I started discussing how right to repair is a small element under the umbrella of ownership. So an ownership being taken away is, in my opinion, the real problem. Your inability to fix what you own is one thing, but also the fact that everything is turning into a subscription, that the things that you buy must connect to the manufacturer's

server in order to work, which means that they can disable your product at any time. It's all small things under this large umbrella of ownership, and that's been slowly being taken away from people over the past 10 to 20 years. I want to go back to the farmers because they have been on the vanguard of this. They have been in a years-long struggle with John Deere specifically trying to get the right to repair their own tractors, and they haven't been able to. There have been some breakthroughs, though, recently for farmers. Do you mind talking through sort of wins like that, like how either that movement or other movements have actually been able to make changes happen? I think a lot of the change so far has been change that occurs at the cultural level more than the legislative level. Some of these changes have been memorandums of understanding where the company says, OK, we won't do this particular thing. I was speaking to one farmer. I think his name was Jarrett Wilson. but he was talking about how after you sign up to be able to get access to these tools, you also have to share your data. So people will think that, for instance, Apple released their independent repair provider program

that, oh, look, Lewis got right to repair because they have a headline that says that. But when you look into the details of the program, you'll see things like, I can't get a schematic to a motherboard, which is the main thing that I use to fix it. I can't buy chips from the manufacturers that make them because they claim they're not allowed to sell them to me. And while I'm not a farmer, I grew up, I lived in an apartment in Brooklyn, so there's not a lot of experience there with this stuff. But when I speak to farmers, it's very much the same version of what I deal with in my business where you'll see a headline where a company says they're supporting repair and then you actually look into the details of it and it's really very surface levels. And one of the examples I have of this is with Samsung. They had released this independent repair program and they made screens and batteries available so you could buy a battery, but the battery cost over $200 because they glued the battery to the screen and if you wanted to buy it, you had to buy both of them together. A $200 to $250 battery is pretty useless to a lot of people who have a phone that's worth $200 when it works. And one of the issues that I found when I'm speaking to farmers is at the end of the day, they still have the same problem that they did.

They're still using cracked Ukrainian software sometimes to be able to work on their tractor themselves without having to take it back to the dealer. So there's still a lot of work to be done. Well, it is in the news more frequently than it used to be. I think there are some outlets like Wired. Again, we've covered it for quite a while. Boone Ashworth, our staff writer, has talked to you before and has covered this quite a bit. But it seems like it has reached national prominence in the last couple of years even, that it didn't have, even though it's been an issue for a long time. Is there an inflection point that you can point to, or is it just sort of the gradual building of awareness that you and others like you have been working on for some time coming to fruition? I think it's been like a slow burn for the past 12 years. this is the cbc news did a piece on what on apple in 2018 that was a really fun one for me i remember the producer came to me and said we wanted to do a piece on how apple is bad with upgrades and i remember saying hey upgrades are not very fun but also the piece is starting with the conclusion you starting with doing a piece on apple being bad and there no there really no fun in that What if you do this Find a broken machine take it to Apple record what they say take it to me record what I say and let the story write

itself. And then what if they give a good answer? And I'm just smirking. I'm like, just let the story write itself. Have faith. And that's what happened. They took it to Apple. They said, you've got to do the motherboard, all this other stuff. And I see that it's a bent pin in the screen cable because whoever had worked on it before had likely tried to misroute the screen cable when they were plugging into the board, so they were stretching it, and they shorted pin one to ground, which caused the backlight to go out. So I take a tweezer, bend it back, and it works. That got tens of millions of views. It was featured on national news, and it's just been this slow burn. There's some inflection points, like in 2016, when Apple had asked if I would take down one of my videos showing where a fuse was. There was a video I did showing you how to fix a MacBook Air if you get some liquid around the trackpad and your trackpad and keyboard stop working there's a zero ohm resistor it's kind of like a fuse that will blow in that area so that the entire machine doesn't die so i showed how to replace this thing at 55 seconds in the video i'm showing where the fuses in the motherboard and they asked me to take the video down and i'm like i don't want to file a dmca claim and that got that got some attention to it i started a non-profit

to try and do this more professionally and push this forward in a more organized manner in 2021 It's just been this slow burn with the hundreds of thousands of little cuts that move people in this direction. I bought a $400 baby monitor from Miku, and the company went bankrupt, and the company that bought them says I have to pay $5 or $10 a month for my $400 baby monitor to have the features that I had before. And it just keeps happening over and over and over again. And there was one company, Haro, that said that they were testing their customers. They put a paywall on it. And this is a very funny one. This is one of my favorites. This is as close to personality disorder as you get. which is the device itself would give you a paywall and say you need to pay to get these features again. And they said, no, you don't have to pay to get it again. And people were saying, what the hell are you talking about? I see the screen on my device. Here's what they did. Once you entered your name and your payment information, it recorded that you were willing to pay, but it didn't charge you. This way they could figure out they had a database for the future, which customers were willing to pay more money for the same shit they already had and which ones weren't. They were calling it a test, and they weren't telling people what it is.

And when you have a company that's performing psychological experiments on you, and this is not a once-off thing. This doesn't happen every other day. This is just a Tuesday from the marketing department of these companies. It really starts to wake people up. You know, companies will say, and I know this because they say to us all the time when we go to them with stories about this, that fundamentally a lot of this is about quality control. If we let you use an unauthorized part, we're not going to guarantee that the device is going to perform up to our standards. If we let you tinker around with this, you might break it. We want to guarantee a certain level of quality with the experience of our devices. How does that excuse sit with you? I can guess. Well, if the issue is quality control, then why does my store have a better rating on Google Maps than every single Apple store in the country? If we're going to dig into that a little bit more broadly, you also said, well, let's say that somebody uses an unauthorized part, we can't check that. What is right to repair asking for? Right to repair very often asks for the ability to buy the same part that they are using. I want to be able to buy the parts that go into the device. And when I was doing this, even back almost 20 years ago when I first started,

when I would buy parts, when I would buy screens, I would buy them from the same vendors. So Apple would tell my customers, if you don't use an Apple screen, this is not going to work the way that it's supposed to. And I would open up the device in front of them and say, are you using an Apple screen? And I would say, no, I'm not. And they'd be like, what? I'm like, come over here. I would open their product up and I'd say, look at the part number on your screen. It says LG, LG Philips, or AU Optronics, or Samsung. And then I would take out my screen and it would have the exact same part number from LG. I still remember them today. LP-133-WX1-TLA1 for the A1101 MacBook. So we're looking to buy and put in the same parts that was used by the manufacturer. And when people don't do that, very often it's not because they want to use unauthorized parts because it's just because they want to screw up the customers, because in many cases you just can't get the original. I recently chatted with McKinsey's Dan Swan about how businesses successfully transitioned to AI, the coming agentic wave, and even the sad loss of tennis line judges.

Here's a sneak peek. Some people are buying software and calling it a transformation. The people that are really getting the most value from it are fundamentally doing something very different, which is they're taking that technology and they're incorporating it with changing the capabilities of their people, fundamentally redesigning their processes, and tracking the impact through the bottom line. There's much more in the full interview with Dan Swan, which can be found in its entirety on Wired.com. Also, check out McKinsey's playbook, Rewired, available at your favorite bookseller. AI tools can write code, access files, connect to the internet, and execute commands at a speed no human can match. That productivity is powerful, but it also means one bad instruction or compromised tool can quickly become a security incident. ThreatLocker helps organizations use AI without losing control. Put zero-trust guardrails around tools like ClaudeCode and control exactly what they can execute, access, and connect to. Set clear boundaries around the applications, files, systems, and online destinations your AI tools are permitted to use.

Because a proven AI tool should not mean giving it unrestricted access to your environment. Control what runs, control what it can do, control what it connects to. Learn how ThreatLocker can help you safely embrace AI at ThreatLocker.com slash Wired. That's T-H-R-E-A-T-L-O-C-K-E-R dot com slash Wired. One day last year, police entered a mansion in L.A. County and discovered the couple that lived there had almost two dozen children, nearly every one of them born through surrogates. But those surrogates had been deceived. I started crying. I was like, what the heck did I just get myself into? I'm Ava Kaufman. The Journey is a new series from In the Dark and The New Yorker. Find it now in the In the Dark podcast feed. it's hard these days as much as we try not to have a podcast where we mention ai uh and this

could have been one but it's not going to be i'm going to ask you right now about it but in the spirit of right repair in the spirit more towards people getting control over their software i think We've seen stories in recent weeks where people have realized now that they've got cloud code, they've realized they can use it to check their smart TVs and get rid of all the bloatware and all the adware and have a more streamlined smart TV experience. I think those tools also give them access to, guides to, figure out how to replace all kinds of things, how to fix software in all kinds of ways. is that sort of part of the future of owning our things is making it easier to not just tinker with the hardware aspect of it but to get into the software and make it more in line with what we want out of our experiences and give companies less control over the advertising the spyware whatever it is i love it and i love seeing people being able to use ai in that way i love people being able i love the idea of it being used to break digital locks that you could

just get back access to what the company has taken away from you. I think that that is a great use of AI. The only issue there is when you're talking about ownership, when people are using these frontier models, if you're using Codex or Cloud Code for this, you're using a model that runs on somebody else's computer. And if you type the wrong thing, there are a lot of guardrails on it. And I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the future, enough of these companies started saying, hey, people are using Cloud Code to actually free themselves from our bullshit. Can you stop that and them stopping it. This is where it's nice to see that it's not just the U.S. leading in this. You have many other countries are creating their own AI models that can run on your system. And I'm very excited to see what happens as time goes on when models that can run on a standard laptop like this have the ability to actually do this so that I don't have to. You know, when people are remaking Adobe Suite with Claude Code, I wouldn't be surprised if one or two years from now they can't do that at all because it's able to detect, hey, you're trying to free yourself from Adobe. When Adobe shut off their activation service a long time ago,

a long time ago, you used to actually get a perpetual license when you bought any of their software. Yet you can't activate it when they shut off the servers. So if I tell Cloud Code, hey, I legally purchased this, here's my receipt. I want to be able to make it work again. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a time point at which that doesn't actually work because there are so many guardrails that have been put in place because these software and hardware companies have lobbied them for it, that you're not able to do that. What I'm hoping to see happen is enough local models that run on your system where you don't have to worry about some company that gets to tell you what you can do, being able to help people get around all these types of digital locks and bullshit. And I don think that that going to happen in the next year or two but I think it coming and I excited to see it I mean this does lead us to I mean the fact is those digital locks and bullshit are in legally murky territory sometimes right Or at least companies can claim legal defenses. I'm talking specifically about Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, something that you do not like. And I think, as far as I want to see it gone for good.

Do you mind telling us a little bit about what Section 1201 of the DMCA is and how it ties into this conversation? and makes it a little bit more fraught to do that unlocking that seems like it should be a no-brainer. Section 12.1 of the DMCA makes it illegal to bypass a technical protection measure, otherwise known as a digital lock, to gain access to a protected work, even if it's for the purpose of repair. It was put in place to try and stop piracy, and it was put together in one of the most corrupt ways possible. Congress repeatedly said no to this law, no, this is way too restrictive. so the architect of it, Bruce Lehman, decided to try and get it negotiated into an international treaty. And then he came back to the United States and said, look, we signed this treaty so now you have to pass this law. We're going to be out of step with our obligations to the international community. And he was laughing as he admitted this and I have a nice little two minute clip on my channel of him saying this. So he's essentially sidestepped Congress in order to get this law passed that says that you cannot bypass a digital lock even if it's on something that you own.

Now, I can't go to your house and break into your home. That's illegal. I should not be allowed to do that. But if I spend $600,000 on a house and I notice that there's a locked closet in the house, once I've paid $600,000 for the house, I should be able to break that lock to get into that closet because I own the house. And the problem with this law is that it allows companies to lock you out of things that you have already paid for. And the way that you see this being abused now is when you see companies taking away features from you or sending out firmware updates that stop features from working on the device after the company has gone bankrupt and they figure out, oh, wait, we need more money. I've had companies that have failed before, and I really wish I had the ability to say, you know what, I realize that I sold it at a price that's a little too low. I'm going to need to take $5 from every customer I had in the past year. I'm not allowed to do that. I can't stop my customers' products from working, but because I was selling a physical good that did not have any sort of firmware on it that connects to the Internet, I'm not able to do that. And Section 1201 of the DMCA is a law that came out in 1997. This was before most normal people even had the Internet, much less had their washing machine, their television, their dryer attached to the Internet.

Right now, almost your car attached to the Internet, your baby monitor attached to the Internet. And that law was, in my opinion, horribly put together for the world that it was built of the mid to late 1990s. And it is way worse built for today. The architect of the law also said that the purpose of it was to try and fight piracy, and he admitted in 2007 and 2013 when he was looking back on it that it didn't do that at all. It's very easy right now. I was able to show my 79-year-old father how to pirate television, movies, music, and it took me less than 10 minutes to show him how to use something like SoulSeeker, use that to be able to get whatever he wants. These laws fundamentally have not worked, but what they've done a very good job of is making it much more difficult for people who want to follow the law to be able to use their media. If I want to rip my legally purchased Blu-ray and be able to play it on my legally purchased phone, and I have to break the digital lock inside the Blu-ray just to do that, which is illegal. What I'm actually supposed to do is I'm supposed to buy another version of it that's only going to work on here. And it makes it much more difficult for people who actually want to obey the law.

And part of this, I think people are waking up to this, but for a while it has not been super clear. But software is copyrightable. And so when you buy a book on Amazon Kindle, say, and you have a Kindle book, what you're actually doing is you're signing an end user licensing agreement that gives you the right to access that book. You don't own that book in a technical way, even though it feels like you shouldn't, feels like you do. And so we've had cases where Amazon has actually removed books from Kindles after you bought them, and there's no recourse for that. I think the idea of ownership in the digital age is informed by so much of Section 1201 and the way that we approach copyright and software. Do you see any progress towards changing that? I know you guys are pushing to get this out of the code. Do you think it's going to happen? Do you think there's progress? Do you think enough exemptions can come through that are going to make it easier for people to do the things that you feel like they should be able to do? Instead of every single year going back and asking for an exemption, what we really like to do is we'd like to pass durable legislation

that doesn't require that we ask for an exemption. And we're starting with the area that is the most reasonable which is repair. If you want to be able to fix what you bought and paid for, that should not be a crime. You should be able to repair what you own. You should be able to show other people how to repair what they own without that being considered a copyright crime. We're not even asking and saying, hey, let me, let me, can I please rip my legally purchased Blu-ray so that I could watch it on my legally purchased portable media player? We're not even asking for that. Right now, we're simply saying, I would like to fix what I bought and paid for. And we have seen that getting anything pushed through Congress is very difficult because there's anybody who's been paying attention to American politics for the last two or five years can see. And even 10 years ago, there's the problem that I've experienced throughout this process is there's always an issue that is more exciting to people. There's so many issues that resonate far more with the voting public than than this. The right to repair is this really abstract issue. And when you start talking about digital locks, like I, my job, I see it is to get average, ordinary people to

understand why this acronym and set of numbers, how that directly ties into your thermostat saying it's not going to work anymore unless you give them $10 a month. And I don't think that I've done a good enough job of that over the past 12 years to get it on par with all these other issues that face people every day. And admittedly, if you're paying like five, $6 a gallon for gas, you're probably going to care about that before you care about this. So we're talking about long after the midterms. And you do have Democrats having control over the Senate and the House. You do have a couple of politicians who actually have been speaking out about right to repair who are in office now. Josh Turek in Iowa, Jake Johnson in Minnesota looks like he's going to get the seat. Is it encouraging even just that it's an issue? even just that it's something that people are talking about or is that still not enough what does a democratic house mean yeah it's encouraging to see that they're talking about it but i also realize that especially going into this next congress there is going to be so much

work and so many things that they're going to want to do like you know i remember somebody asking me like no offense lewis but i'd rather see like if they have to spend time on i don't know getting rid of pete exit after bombing the school or that was his example or right to repair like i'm choosing that. My job is going to be making sure that there's enough of a base of support and showing that there's enough people that care about this, that if you spend the 20 minutes to do something about this, that it will actually work in your favor. And that's part of what we've been trying to do with the Fulu Onyushik tour over the past few months. We've traveled around the country, I think to 13 different cities. And in every one of these cities, we are trying to bring together people, sometimes have them bring things to the events. We had one of the ex-FTC commissioners show up, which was really cool. He gave an inspiring speech in San Jose. And we're trying to get people to show, and we're also inviting their congresspeople to say, this is an issue that I will actually be more likely to vote for you if you care about consumer rights. I want to own what I bought and paid for. This is as important to me as the other issues.

And our job is showing the people that are elected that we care about this, because what's their job? Their job is to represent us. And if people are not talking about this issue, or it's only being talked about on a couple of subreddits or on the fringes of the Internet, I almost don't blame the representative for not prioritizing it. But our job is to show them that if they prioritize it, they'll be rewarded for it. So I am happy to see that there are people talking about it. I remember when Right to Repair was put into an executive order by Biden in the summer of 2021. And, yeah, I mean, I was excited, but there wasn't a lot that came from it. And because I'm hoping something different here. So and it's not just the own your shit tour, which sounds like a big success. You also as part of Fulu, you which is I want to make sure it's freedom from the freedom from unethical limitations on users. Right. So Fulu is your organization supports right to repair. You also have bounties that you pay out for people who can disable these digital locks. How is that going?

Have you successfully paid out bounties yet? Can you talk about that program a little bit and why you're sort of taking matters into your own hands here? That program came out about two or three in the morning. I was doing a video on Future Home after they see that somebody who works there sent me information on what they were doing. I used to work there. He was talking about this thermostat that when it got a firmware update after the company went bankrupt, it stopped you from being able to use some of the features you could use before. And I did the video going over it and I just sitting there at like 2 a editing this and thinking this is not enough And I said I give or to whoever makes this thing work again Because I was thinking back to what I was doing when I was doing all these repair videos showing the schematics. Now you have hundreds of people doing the repair videos that are way better than mine every single day on YouTube, and I love it. Back in 2013 and 2014, I didn't see anything like that. And that's because at the bottom right corner of the screen, it has this little message on the schematic. It says, proprietary property of Apple Inc., keep confidential. do not share and most people don't like getting sued or having their livelihoods destroyed for me i just that's like a tuesday i find it fun i enjoy going to court i encourage my employees to go to

court it's actually one of them i'm encouraging you to go to small claims court next week hope she does it great but in all seriousness i find this stuff to be a lot of fun and i i understand that most normal people don't find the prospect of their life being or their business getting destroyed so that they could you know just poke at something that they find to be unfair to be a cool hobby. So I was thinking, how do I get more people to start poking at these things? So we came up with this bounty and I said, 5,000 bucks to whoever makes this work again. And there was an employee that emailed me with a solution shortly thereafter. And he said, Lewis, I appreciate this. I would have done this for free though, but here's, I made a home assistant integration and people were able to use the thermostat again. So we're trying to do with the bounty program is we're trying to show people that A, this is a problem. And B, we're trying to incentivize people to start making things work again so that we can point to how bad this law is, and we can also point to things that tangibly work again. So it started to kind of snowball from there. There was this company that made an exercise bicycle, and they sent out a firmware update that stopped

allowing you to use third-party apps. And the first-party app has ads and subscriptions and everything else in it. And so we said $20,000 if somebody can make this work again. Now, the one foil here is we don't require people to release the solution. You just have to show that it works. And this makes it win-win because I'm not going to tell people to break the law for money. I definitely would never do something like that. I'm far too much of a law-abiding individual myself. So this way, when these lobbyists show up and they say that this is not a problem that exists, this is not real, I can say, okay, cool. Can you just contact this company that you represent and ask them if they're okay signing an affidavit saying that if he releases the solution, he won't get in trouble. You're not going to try to send him to federal prison because he makes his exercise bike work with third-party apps? And they go, well, no, I can't do that. Well, why not? And then the politician can look and go, oh, so it seems like it is a problem after all. So it's kind of a way to make it a heads-eye-win-tails-you-lose scenario. Heads-eye-win, a bunch of people get working devices again, and they get to understand what the issue is. And if they don't get a working device again, I get to point to this stupid law.

What's a gateway drug into right-to-repair? If you want to get into repairing your own stuff, what is sort of the, like, an easy kind of, whether it's an iPhone battery replacement or a trackpad upgrade, what do you point people to as saying, this is something that you can actually do? This is something we can manage. It's going to make your life better. It's going to make your experience better. And it can show you that you can actually, these things aren't as technically complicated, as challenging, as inscrutable as they might seem. I don't have a very well-packaged answer for that. The best thing I could think of is, like, for me, it has to be something fun. It has to be, it's 103 degrees in Texas this week, and my asshole air conditioning technician has stiffed me three times. Let me open it up, and, oh, I just used compressed air on the contactor, and I blew out the fire end, so now it works again. That's what's going to get people excited about this. I get excited about repair not because of the repair that's being done, and admittedly not even the money. It's the story that's involved in it. I think there has to be some sort of story behind it that makes it worth it. I actually don't find repair fun. I don't think that putting 96 solder balls back onto a chip that's the size of my pinky fingernail is fun.

I don't do it for that. I do it for the hug that the customer gives you when you get back all their baby pictures. It's fun if you can't afford a new one. That makes it a lot of fun. It's fun if you're doing it to get something back. But there has to be a story. There has to be a reason that makes that particular repair exciting to you. And that's going to be different for everybody. And it's usually going to be based on whatever your circumstances are at the time. I feel like everybody has one at this point. Everybody's got something that's not working the way they think it should in their lives. Louis, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for taking the time. I really appreciate it. transformation in the past, right? You got to go and understand what's the opportunity,

how much is it worth, what's the investment required to get there, and is it going to be important for me to transform my business in that regard? But a lot of people don't actually go through that process of then understanding what are those two or three areas, and then making the hard call. Sometimes it's actually more difficult to say we're not doing four through six than it is to say we are doing one through three. There's much more in the full interview with Dan Swan, which can be found in its entirety on Wired.com. Also, check out McKinsey's playbook, Rewired, available at your favorite bookseller. AI can make businesses faster. It can also make mistakes, expose data, and execute the wrong instructions faster. ThreatLocker helps organizations set boundaries AI cannot ignore by controlling what applications can run, what they can reach, and how they interact with sensitive resources. Innovation needs more than good intentions. It needs limits. Control AI with zero trust at threatlocker.com slash wired. That's T-H-R-E-A-T-L-O-C-K-E-R dot com slash wired.

You need to hear. Think everyone and everything that you'd read about in the pages of Vanity Fair. So join me, Mark Aducci, on YouTube, VanityFair.com, and wherever you listen to podcasts. It's all fair game. The Big Interview is produced by Lina Macitsis. Our executive producer is Kate Osborne. Music and mixing by Pran Bandy. This episode was fact-checked by Matt Giles. And I am, of course, your host, Katie Drummond, Wired's Global Editorial Director. Check back here on Thursday for the latest episode of Uncanny Valley, where Wired's writers and editors add you to their Slack channel. AI can make businesses faster. It can also make mistakes, expose data, and execute the wrong instructions faster.

ThreatLocker helps organizations set boundaries AI cannot ignore by controlling what applications can run, what they can reach, and how they interact with sensitive resources. Innovation needs more than good intentions. It needs limits. Control AI with zero trust at ThreatLocker.com slash Wired. That's T-H-R-E-A-T-L-O-C-K-E-R dot com slash Wired. Hi, I'm Taylor Foggett, a senior editor at The New Yorker and one of the hosts of the Political Scene podcast. A lot of people are justifiably freaked out right now, and I think that it's our job at the political scene to encourage people to stop and think about the particular news stories that are actually incredibly significant in this moment. By having these really deep conversations with writers where we actually get into the weeds of what is going on right now and about the damage that is being done. It's not resistance in the activist sense, but I think it is resistance in the sense that we are resisting the feeling of being overwhelmed by chaos.

Join me and my colleagues, David Remnick, Evan Osnos, Jane Mayer, and Susan Glasser, on the Political Scene podcast from The New Yorker. New episodes drop three times a week, available wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, my name is Zach Barron. I'm the Senior Special Projects Editor at GQ, and I am pleased to introduce One More Question, GQ's new weekly interview show. Over the years in the magazine, I've written dozens of cover stories and traveled the world to talk to and write about some of the most interesting people in the GQ universe, from Martin Scorsese to George Clooney and Brad Pitt to Outcast Andre 3000. And now I'll be doing it weekly. I'm going to sit down with some of the most interesting people in the world and figure out what makes them, well, them. New episodes of One More Question will be available each week, wherever you get your podcasts, or on YouTube if seeing people in chairs is more your thing.