We live in a very disposable society. When something breaks we tend to just buy a new one. Often it's easier to buy something new than to pay for a costly repair. But this wasn't always the case. Over the past few decades, there has been a slow erosion of the right to repair the items you buy. Louis Rossmann wants to change that. He's leading the charge to restore the right to repair in the country.
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Sam Seder: Louis Rossman is the owner and founder of the Rossmann repair group. he's got a youtube channel and it focuses on being able to fix your stuff. which the right to repair has become has sort of re-entered into the the sort of the news in the wake of Joe Biden's executive order that he was going to ramp up antitrust things. Louis, welcome to the program. I'm here with Emma Vigeland.
Louis Rossmann: thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate you taking the time Sam: the first thing I want to say do you accept interns because I want to apply. I've I did a little bit of this back in the day with vcrs and and and i occasionally have rehabbed a lot of our computers in this in our office. and I think it's fantastic that you're sort of helping people to empower people to do this.
Louis: Well, we actually started offering workshops in the store. and I'm trying to do them about two or three times a week. where people can come by for two to three hours using the soldering equipment, the microscope and the hot air station. and they can bring in anything they want to fix. so last week we had someone show up with a broken Xbox, a cb radio and a Garmin gps. some of it we fixed. some of it we didn't. but I like having people come in on their own time to just be able to use the lab equipment if they don't have any at home. and yeah we are actually it's not an internship but we are actually allowing people to just come in from time to time with stuff that doesn't work a lot of times. and be able to use the equipment here to do their own fix. And if they can't figure it out then one of us will work with them and try to see if we can figure it out. so that they can learn something.
Sam: That's fantastic all right, well now let's talk about it in terms of you know there's obviously environmental reasons why you do that. There's obviously a whole host of reasons why you would do that. but let's talk about the ability to do that and how this sort of this idea of the right to repair ends up becoming a real political economy question. What has happened to our ability, our right to repair these things?
Louis: I think over the past 30 years there's been a really really slow shift away from the open availability of schematics and documents and parts. And it's just been kind of the slow fade that we didn't really notice until it was too late. As Steve Wozniak recently said, you know with the machines that he worked on in the 70s and 80s they came with thick books and manuals, they did the schematics and everything that you needed. and if there was a chip or something that broke in it you could just find a vendor and be able to purchase it. and now you fast forward to 2021 if you buy one of the latest macbook pros and it stops charging because the texas instruments charging chips stop working I can't go to texas instruments and buy that chip i can't go to newark or mouser or Digikey and buy that because they have a restriction they have an exclusivity agreement that bars me from being able to get that chip. so you're stuck now going to Apple paying one thousand and two thousand dollars for that repair and you're also not going to get any of your data off of the machine even if you do pay them for the repair because they don't offer it. so it's one of these areas where the manufacturer is not interested in offering component-level repair. but they're also putting in active measures to ensure that other people can't do it. and that's where I've tried to raise the alarm on this and showcase it on my channel. These are repairs that we're competent to do, we're able to do that and we're able to save people money.
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