Max Schoening: evaluation

Transcript context

…I love this. There's this meme on Twitter, you could just do things. I love this version of it. You could just change things, which is a good segue to something you've been a big, I don't know, advocate of and proponent of this idea of malleable software, something you mentioned earlier. It feels like something that wasn't actually possible and now is like, okay, I could see exactly what you're talking about now. You've been honest from before the AI revolution. Talk about just this idea, malleable software, why you think it's so important, what you think people need to be thinking about here. Malleable software is the idea that software works closer to the interest of the people that use it than the interest of the corporation that makes it, maybe that's how I'd frame it. And in particular, I don't want to use software that is specifically just designed by the ivory tower in Cupertino. And I say this as a huge Apple fanboy, but imagine you lived in an environment where you do not get to rearrange your living room and the kitchen has to be exactly set up the way that someone else decided. We would not take that, right? But that is kind of the world that we have in software right now where we have this world of apps and apps are like this very, every layer is glued together of like the user interface, the data ownership and so on. And it's like this little square on your phone. And the moment you're like, "Okay, this is a really great app, but I just want to change a little bit." That is usually not possible, the behavior. You have the flip side, which is you could run your own Linux distribution and go that way. And I think then what happens is you realize, "Oh, okay, I like the malleability, but I also have other things to do and I don't always want to start from scratch and figure out why the trackpad doesn't work." And so to me, it just comes back down to, do you have ownership over your computing life? And I think increasingly, we don't. Now, you brought this up presumably because I think you may have not thought about malleable software too much before AI, but now you're making your own tools maybe for podcast recording, for prepping for shows or, I don't know, whatever. There's a myriad examples and people are awakening to this idea of like, "Oh, I can just make tools." And that is a form of malleable software, but it has to be built on top of a platform or an operating system that encourages this because otherwise, we're just doing individual ... Everybody has their own individual little tool. And I don't know, I like working with people and I like communal tools. And I don't know, this is a thing that the folks at Ink & Switch are obviously are at the forefront. I get to work with Geoffrey Litt every single day now that spend a lot of time thinking about how would we make software more malleable so that we feel more ownership over it without going back a long time and not having real-time collaboration and the security aspects and so on. I really love, and I just want to make sure we highlight this idea you're sharing. It's something that I learned also from Brian Chesky at Airbnb, this idea that you can change things, that the things around you are just made by other people that may not actually be smarter than you. And it's just this really empowering thing to always think about that things can change. This isn't the way things have to be forever. Humans made this thing, like humans made this phone and there are better approaches that other humans ... that you can come up with, other people will come up with. What I think about as I think about this is there's a video that you pinned to your Twitter profile that we'll link to, which I think is Dieter Rams. Is that who the person is? Okay. He's walking around and he's just criticizing all these designed chairs. Talk about what that video's trying to ... Why you pin that to your profile?…

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