This week we welcome Katie Treggiden, a speaker, podcaster, and author known for her expertise in craft, design, and sustainability. Katie's journey into the world of environmentalism took a unique path. Before she delved into issues like sustainability and circularity, she was a craft and design journalist.

What sets Katie apart in her approach to environmentalism is her ability to see the world through the lens of craft. For her, repair is not just about fixing what's broken; it's about storytelling and connection. She believes in the beauty of mending, where ordinary people can breathe new life into items using readily available materials and simple skills.

Katie's perspective on repair extends beyond the individual level. She envisions a world where repair becomes a cultural norm, where we value objects for their history and the stories they carry. The intersection of environmentalism and repair, as seen through Katie's eyes, isn't about sacrifice; it's about creating a future filled with joy and connection. Nor is repair isn't just a means to do less harm, instead seeing it as a tool for a path towards doing more good.

Katie’s most recent book is all about repair, and we talk through how it relates to everything from human connection to solving our oversized waste problem.

Travis Goodspeed has a unique relationship with “stuff.” A renowned “hillbilly hacker” from Tennessee, Travis is a reverse engineer and device hacker without peer. He’s best known as an outspoken advocate of “junk hacking” - the practice of probing low end, low stakes devices like children’s toys and consumer as a way to understand more complex, higher stakes technology - from enterprise systems to critical infrastructure.

But taking stuff apart is just one of Travis’s passions. He’s equally famous for the stuff he’s created. His Github projects have spawned hundreds of forks and include the GoodWatch, a modification of a Casio calculator watch that Travis re-engineered to transmit and receive radio signals; Goodfet, an embedded bus adapter for microcontrollers and radios; as well as the Tytera MD-380: a low cost DMR radio that he reverse engineered to run custom firmware.

Not surprisingly: Travis is a passionate believer in the right to repair, which he describes as a kind of “natural right” that individuals should exercise, regardless of legal and commercial impediments. But his deep experience exploring the innards of connected devices and years spent navigating around the shoals of copyright and computer hacking laws have given Travis a nuanced take on our ability to exercise that natural right to repair.

In this conversation, Travis talks to Paul about growing up in east Tennessee, in and around Dollywood, where his mother worked as a stained glass master craftswoman for two decades. We also talk about his unique take on the right to repair, and the growing legions of stuff that populates our world - one informed by a deep understanding of the common hardware and software hiding beneath the sleek exteriors of connected devices.

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This week we bring Ollee Means to the podcast, creator of the guilder, the platform that facilitates repair with its users spending zero money. The overarching goal of the platform is to socialize repair without any monetary exchanges. Instead, what users do is offer their services in exchange for something else.

Let’s say you know how to repair an iPhone, but don’t know how to sew and your jeans rip. You could repair someone’s iPhone in exchange for them patching up your clothes.

In the grand scheme of human history, monetary exchanges (using currency to buy and sell things) is relatively new. Moving back to a community oriented and socially connective practice seems natural. Part of what makes the guilder so compelling is that it moves against our current trends of fast-consumption, quick-disposal, and treating people as consumers first rather than humans. By instead focusing on the human element of repair, and how it can reinforce bonds within a community, there is a beauty that comes from these simple acts of mutual aid.