The joy of tinkering, making, and sharing is part of the human condition. In modern times, this creative freedom too often is stifled by secrecy as a means of monetization - from non-compete laws to quashing people’s right to repair the products they’ve already paid for.

Adam Savage—the maker extraordinaire best known from the television shows MythBusters and Savage Builds—is an outspoken advocate for the right to repair, to tinker, and to put creativity and innovation to work in your own garage. He says a fear-based approach to invention, in which everyone thinks secrecy is the path to a big payday, is exhausting and counterproductive.

Savage speaks with EFF's Cindy Cohn and Danny O’Brien about creating a world in which we incrementally keep building on each others’ work, keep iterating the old into new, and keep making things better through collaboration.

In this episode you’ll learn about:

• How cosplay symbolizes what’s best about the instincts to make and share
• Why it’s better to live in the Star Trek universe than the Star Wars universe
• Balancing the desire for profit with wide dissemination of ideas that benefit society and culture
• Building a movement to encourage more people to be makers - and getting the law out of the way

If you have any feedback on this episode, please email [email protected]. Please visit the site page at https://eff.org/pod205 where you’ll find resources – including links to important legal cases and research discussed in the podcast and a full transcript of the audio. 

This podcast is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's Program in Public Understanding of Science and Technology.

Music for How to Fix the Internet was created for us by Reed Mathis and Nat Keefe of BeatMower. 

This podcast is licensed Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International, and includes the following music licensed Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported by their creators: 

JPEG of a Hotdog by gaetanh http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/gaetanh/6471

Tall Glass of Turnip Juice by gaetanh http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/gaetanh/6471

Gone for Smokes by gaetanh http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/gaetanh/6471

Declan’s Dipsy Doodle by gaetanh http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/gaetanh/6471

Whose Hand is That by gaetanh http://dig.ccmixter.org/files/gaetanh/6471