Max Schoening: preference

Transcript context

…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? There's many reasons. One is, I think maybe the only thing that I have in common with this very accomplished person is that we're both German. And so sometimes I joke that I also aspire to disapprovingly just point at things with my walking stick and say, "This isn't good enough. This isn't good enough." The reason why is because I think if you speak German, this is one of the funniest clips that I've ever ... I just die laughing every single time. I'm actually curious how you think about how it ties to malleable software because the main reason why I use that as a clip of reference is I'm very much in the camp of design should be first useful and then beautiful. And I think a lot of the pieces there are predominantly things that you put in a museum for display. And if you try to sit on them, you'd be like, "What is this nonsense?" What I felt there is just like you see all ... I would think it was Frank Gehry and all these famous designers' pieces put up in a museum. And I think to most people, it'd be like, "Wow, this is so incredible and beautiful." You see somebody that has a status and a reputation and you assume this is great. And I love that he breaks that veil of like, "No, this is so stupid, what is this? What does this bunch of cabinets tie together? Doesn't make any sense."…

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