This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
BRIAN BARRETT: Louis, thank you so much for being here. 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?
LOUIS ROSSMANN: 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 Store 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 close you were to this never happening.”
I like to tell them, “This is the document that I used to fix your device.” When they ask me what was wrong with it, I’ll tell them, “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.
Got it.
I have over 1,000 repair videos on YouTube where I show people how to do what I do, and there are people that say, “I was working at Walmart for seven bucks 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 themself. 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.