Learn, Make, Learn
Learn, Make, Learn is two product geeks sharing qualitative & quantitative perspectives to help you make, better. Hosted by Ernest Kim and Joachim Groeger.
Learn, Make, Learn
When Values & Opportunity Collide
Ernest & Joachim dive into the dilemma faced when a promising business opportunity conflicts with your own or your company's values. The duo offer perspectives on how to navigate this conflict, including tools you can apply to your day-to-day work making products.
FOLLOW-UPS – 01:15
History of Jobs-to-Be-Done
WHEN VALUES & OPPORTUNITY COLLIDE – 02:15
Follow us on Threads
Apple’s Privacy Pledge Complicates Its AI Push
Google staff criticize leadership over lack of vision
What’s Gone Wrong at Boeing (paywall)
Majority of Gen Zers would quit their jobs over company values
SHOULD COMPANIES EXPRESS VALUES? – 04:52
What Should a Corporation’s Purpose Be?
Apple is becoming an ad company despite privacy claims
“Don’t be evil” isn’t a normal company value.
NO, IT'S ON US TO HOLD & EXPRESS VALUES – 07:36
BUT WHAT IF YOUR & YOUR CO'S VALUES DON'T ALIGN? – 12:13
Stafford Beer
The purpose of a system is what it does
EMBEDDING VALUES THROUGH CORP STRUCTURE – 16:25
Patagonia’s New Ownership Structure
OpenAI’s weird governance structure (paywall)
Is Rolex a Nonprofit?
IMPLICATIONS & TACTICS FOR PEOPLE MAKING PRODUCTS – 20:28
Inge Druckrey: Teaching to See
Train (board game)
Apple best-placed to benefit from AI
Selling Subscriptions
WEEKLY RECS – 31:37
Untrue (album)
American Fiction
‘Watchmen’ Writer Cord Jefferson
Poor Things
CLOSING & PREVIEW – 37:36
(Image generated via Midjourney)
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Rant, rave or otherwise via email at LearnMakeLearn@gmail.com or on Threads @LearnMakeLearnShow.
CREDITS
Theme: Vendla / Today Is a Good Day / courtesy of www.epidemicsound.com
Drum hit: PREL / Musical Element 85 / courtesy of www.epidemicsound.com
Hello and welcome to Learn, Make, Learn where we share qualitative and quantitative perspectives on products to help you make better. My name is Ernest Kim and I'm joined by my friend and co-host Joachim Groeger. Hey, Joachim, how's it going?
Joachim:I'm good, Ernest. How are you doing?
Ernest:Oh, pretty well, I think, finally recovering from the s snowpocalypse that we had, last week. Gosh, I can't believe it was just a week ago, but, it's, uh, now become essentially early spring here. So, that's been a nice change.
Joachim:Yeah, we had a, a, warming up of the weather as well at our end, but then everyone came down with some sort of cold, so we're just all a little bit under the weather and trying to recover from that, but we're gonna be okay. It's gonna be okay.
Ernest:I think that's a good message to take. It's gonna be okay as as rough as this year's already been. Um, okay, so this is episode four and what we're gonna discuss today is what happens when values and opportunity collide? What can you do as a person in the business of making products if a significant new opportunity arises that conflicts with your values as an individual or as an organization? But before we dive into this, we wanted to share a bit of follow up to our previous episode, How Jobs to Be Done Can Help You Make, Better. I wanted to note that while Clayton Christensen is most closely associated with jobs to be done and was most responsible for popularizing the concept, it's broadly accepted that Jobs to Be Done was originally developed by a man named Tony Ulwick, based in large part on his experiences as a product manager at IBM through the 1980s. That said, as we discussed during the episode, you can really trace the origins of jobs to be done back to the early days of Modern Marketing Theory, in particular, the writings of Theodore Levitt. And I loved your construction, Joachim when you noted that, where Levitt got us to recognize that we're not looking for a quarter inch drill, but a quarter inch hole, what Clayton Christensen advocated for was asking, well, why are you drilling that hole in the first place? That evolution is really the key thing to understand, but I wanted to make sure we also recognized Ulwick's role in establishing the jobs to be done concept. All right, well, let's get on to our main topic, when values and opportunity collide. This was actually sparked by a comment from a friend and former colleague, Jamie. In response to our second episode, Apple Vision Pros and Cons, he reached out via threads@LearnMakeLearnShow, all one word, and wrote quote, one thing that you didn't touch on is Apple's privacy stance. I think the stance is good, but it might deter Apple from advancing capabilities in the future, as in the more sophisticated AI stuff you are alluding to, unquote. And this felt like a meaningful and timely topic to address. For one, there's the challenge that Jamie highlights at Apple, where their stance on privacy as a fundamental human right could conflict with the massive opportunity to tap into LLM based AI models that require huge volumes of data. There's also the long simmering employee discontent at Google that now appears to be boiling over with longtime engineers and product managers openly criticizing the company's leadership and culture. And finally, there are the very public failures at Boeing which many are pinning on, as the Atlantic wrote, the erosion of a valuable corporate culture. In other words, they're a company that chose the opportunity for revenue over their own core values and, this is taken directly from their own website, their core values they state as being safety, quality, and integrity. I. Now, another reason we thought this was worth discussing is the research that's shown that a majority of people who fall into the Gen Z cohort generally defined as those born between the mid nineties to early 2010s want to work for a company that shares similar values to their own. For example, a LinkedIn survey found that quote, 87% of Gen Z professionals would be prepared to quit their jobs to work elsewhere if the values of the new company were more closely aligned with their own. That compares to about seven and 10 for Gen X. Now, I'm not a huge fan of attributing perspectives or behaviors across an entire generation, but for the sake of argument, let's accept that many of the people entering the workforce for the first time now more highly prioritize company values than the generations that came before them. Okay, so that's the zeitgeist. But before getting into a more tactical discussion of how this could be relevant to you as a person in the business of making products, we need to set some context. First, what are values in the context of a corporation? Is there a difference between a value statement and a mission statement? And should corporate values or statements of purpose ever go beyond creating shareholder value? Joachim, are you up for tackling that first question?
Joachim:Deep breath. I think the question of whether a corporation should have values and whether we as individuals who work at those corporations, should align ourself with those values or form our own values. That question taps into many aspects of our entire economy actually. When you pull on this thread of corporate values, you start pulling on every thread that involves every corporate decision ever. So for example, Apple values around privacy. They were very public about the types of techniques that they were using to obscure my data so that it couldn't be abused and hackers couldn't take it and use it against me. However, when money was on the table. That value started getting eroded very, very slowly. And it started with the opening up of their ecosystem to advertising. The value proposition advertisers in the digital domain like to make is they're saying if someone is looking for a word processing or note-taking app, I will make sure that your app will show up on the top because you've paid for that position and that will give you the prominence that you need. So in order to do that, you have to look at what people are doing. You have to look at their behaviors. that already starts coming into strong conflict with privacy. So as soon as money making is part of the equation, which it is, it's a corporation, these values become very, very, very, very malleable. And so if we take Apple's stance there, we can see they're eroding privacy because they're opening up a new moneymaking scheme. If you go way, way back to a corporation that had a very, very clear statement of what they wanted the company to avoid doing, that was Google. They said, don't be evil. it's still very vague, but it's the strongest statement ever of a corporation saying, don't take this action. And then they started an advertising business and then that was all about them making the proposition that we can see all this data from these people. and that's why when the time came to change the company's, structure, the values also changed: they essentially removed don't be evil because it was constraining them. It made people step up and say, Hey, this feels evil, please stop. Which is very different from a make sure everything we do is good, right? In some form, in some way. I think the most direct way to say this from my perspective is given that corporate values move as soon as the incentives move, they are essentially, essentially meaningless they can be revised, they are not etched in stone and constrained the activities of the company. So I think the ultimate value that a corporation can easily hold onto is make money. And then the question becomes who should have values? And it should be us, the people that work in these companies. Ultimately we are the people making things. We are the people that are, developing and innovating. We are the ones who've signed contracts that say everything that we come up with in our brains while we're at work belong to this company. Part of me worries about everyone's mental health to a certain extent as well. We are so interwoven with each other in the world. It is essentially impossible to stay clean and we're always compromising some piece of our value system. It sounds very nihilistic, but it is the reality of the contradiction of what it means to live in this very interconnected, modern world. And when you enter into a company, even if the placards say that they value these things, be ready, they're gonna disappoint you they're-gonna disappoint you. And, and it's okay because I think we'll talk about that. What can you then do as a, a value-driven product innovator? What can you do in that environment and how do you, to a certain extent, introduce your values back into the stack of this company but it really comes down to you have your values and if you don't have well articulated values, you better get them quickly. Um, and that's why I also think, I, I'm very cynical when I hear these things that you're alluding to, Ernest, about, uh, millennial, gen Z, wanting to have their values aligned with the company a certain extent. You are outsourcing your value generation to the corporation and you're saying, oh, that sounds good enough to me that that'll match what I care about. And you'll stop asking questions and you're missing out on those moments when you could actually be slowly eroding your own values in that moment.
Ernest:I definitely agree, with your point that ultimately we have to bring our values into the equation. we can't just, um, outsource our values to the corporations that we work for, because that's just a recipe for, disappointment. That's an observation I've had as well. I'm not, I, I've kind of thought about is this something that's intentional or just by-product of the modern corporate environment, but something I've noticed is that corporations are incredibly good at, getting you to forget your values. it's this amazing phenomenon, at least that I've experienced, where you've walked through the door and then suddenly you're no longer a human. You're part of this big machine and, you know, you end up making decisions that in retrospect, if you kind of take a moment and take a step back, you just think, how in the world did I participate in that? you know, you just, it, it, this environment gets you to no longer think of yourself as, as an individual anymore. And I've, you know, experienced that myself personally. Just one example, you know, not giving any specifics, but a, a fundamental challenge in making physical products is sustainability. You know, you're making things that are comprised of atoms and those atoms come from somewhere and they have a, a shelf life and it can be really easy in a corporate environment where kind of the core value as you were alluding to is revenue, to forget that and to really just focus entirely on volume. You know, let's make as many of this thing as possible and, you know, not worry too much about the downstream effects it might have on our environment. So I think there, you know, it is so vital to bring your values into that and fight to keep those values at the surface, you know, don't push them down just because you're walking into the office. And to the point you'd made in, I think in our first episode, that it's so important to create products that have distinction. We know we're kind of living in this period where we're surrounded by me-too products. I think it's the same when it comes to you as an individual in the context of a corporation, that it's so important to still stay true to those things that make you who you are. And as you're saying, not just outsource those to the corporation you work for. I, this is kind of getting into the more tactical advice part of this, but I, at the same time, I would also say that you should recognize when you're in a situation where you're not going to be able to change the fundamental direction of the company you're working for. Because ultimately, if it comes to something like really central to you, let's say sustainability is something that's really vitally important to you, it's part of your own core values, if the company you work for doesn't share that value, it's going to be really, really difficult to change that from the bottom up. Maybe you could influence it a little bit, nudge it in a certain direction. But if the leadership of that company you work for really doesn't share that value, doesn't believe in that, and is more focused on other things like say just focusing on revenue or units, I think you're, you're ultimately going to be disappointed. I think you'd actually be much better off going to a company that, you know, does share those values at a, you know, high level or starting your own company built on those values. Because, if you can show success either at a competitor or by creating your own competitor, that's actually going to be much more likely to influence that original company you were working for than you as a entry level product manager, for example, kind of beating that drum. It's just funny the way companies work, they're much more open to influence from the outside than from the inside. So, I guess that would be one bit of advice I'd share as well. Just, it does seem maybe a little defeatist, you know, I think maybe we're both feeling this, but I think it's a truth that we've experienced. There's only so much you could do from the inside if your leadership doesn't actually believe those things.
Joachim:So actually following on from what you just said, Ernest, it reminds me of this little pithy quote from, Stafford Beer, who was a cybernetics guy in the seventies. And he had this, principle, which was simply the purpose of a system is what it does. So to your point, Ernest, if the corporate structure does not let you have a voice inside of the company, then you're living in a hierarchy and it's coming from the top. So then it comes back to, does that leader actually truly hold themselves to those standards and act in that way? Then the rest of the company will follow suit in its values. I think it comes back to what you were saying, Ernest, which is sometimes you do need to just step away and you need to protect yourself in a very, very straightforward way. Saying This is not the environment that I thought it was. I am not gonna be able to influence this. This is a pyramid and I need to go somewhere else and I, I need to do something else. and so that also can hit your bottom line, which means you'll take a pay cut. Or if you wanna start a business that adheres to those principles, it will not chase the headlines of high revenue and explosive growth and VC funding coming in, and billion dollar valuations. If that's what you're chasing, then the system you need to build needs to chase that. But if you're trying to chase something that is a combination of your values and something else. The system that will emerge from that will look very different from other corporations. there's a piece that is still very hopeful because you're trying to direct your energy in the right spots and you're not gonna sit in a place that is clearly broken and you're gonna keep, to a certain extent, legitimizing that operation because you, yourself have values, people around, you know, you have those values, and yet you still work at this company. So I need to make a choice, active choice of acknowledging I'm gonna make a compromise and I'm gonna have to just stay here because I need to pay rent. I think it's important to just be very active in that choice as opposed to letting it happen.
Ernest:I think that's such great call out that this is a decision you have to make. You know, and I, I don't think there's a right answer. I think there's some pressures to suggest that certain answers are more right than others, but honestly I think that's, to your point, such a personal decision. One other thing you mentioned that I wanted to touch on too that I thought was a great point was you talked about structure and the fact that there are these fundamental structural forces that lead us down a certain path, you know, that lead us down the path of, maximizing economic value. And that's the risk where, you know, maybe you do have a CEO or a leadership team that, you know, holds these values that align to your own values. But what happens when that CEO goes away and you have a new CEO, the those existing structures are still there, those structural forces, and when the people change, then you know, there's a huge risk that, the values are gonna change as well. So. Let's say you're starting a new business and you, you know, really want to build that business around values. I think something to consider really strongly is putting structural, mechanisms in place to allow you to deliver on those values as a company in a durable way, you know, in a way that goes beyond just, the perspectives of the individual that happens to be leading at any given time. And I think there's a few examples of that. Perhaps the best example is Patagonia that, just a couple of years ago changed their, corporate structure from being owned by an individual and his family, Yvon Chouinard and his family, to now being owned by, a trust, a foundation, a nonprofit foundation essentially. You know, that might seem unusual, but there's other examples of that, like, I think one that a lot of our listeners might think of is OpenAI, which, you know, as came out during the whole kerfuffle, is actually, led by a foundation, a nonprofit foundation. But an, an example I think that might be more relevant for us, given our interest in watches is Rolex, which is also a company that's owned by a foundation and is not beholden to the same kind of, market pressures, I guess you'd say, as a, a company like, Omega that's owned by, the Swatch group that is a publicly traded company. And I think what those examples show is that you can be a company that's structured differently, you know, that's structured around values and still do really well. You know, Patagonia's continued to be an enormously successful company. Rolex, you know, continues to be an enormously successful company. But these structures have allowed them to approach business differently and take a much longer term perspective on things versus that quarterly report churn that a public company has to go through. So, there's some micro things you could do as an individual that we talked about, but then also some macro things you could do in terms of how you structure your company to, help to ensure that it does align with your values.
Joachim:What you are highlighting in those last two examples about Patagonia and Rolex, that's where I think the true economic value actually gets captured, which is we care about the long run. Even though the CEO and a company might only last a few years, the company persists and its choices persists, and we all. Have to face the consequences of that company's choices, And it can be something as simple as while they were CEO, everything looked great, but they were committing great fraud and the share price was doing fine. And we all put our 401k money into that company and then it collapsed and now our pension money is gone. There's always someone holding the bag at the end of the day. And really what you want to have in your corporate structure is a structure that internalizes those long run consequences. So, that's kind of a, a little heuristic that I think is quite important is if someone has built the company from the ground up to focus on the long run revenue generation, it'll be much, much easier to find ways to make the argument that, more value driven product will generate that long run value. You will be thinking beyond the quarter, beyond the launch of this one thing, and you'll actually start pushing towards a, a project that lasts and has impact for a long period of time.
Ernest:All right. Well, I mean, this has been a great conversation and I think we could probably go on for quite a while on this ourselves. But, you know, we've been talking more philosophically, let's take it down to the level of tactics. And for folks who are making products on a day-to-day basis, how could we apply this to you? And maybe one way to approach this is, you know, let's say for sake of argument that we think corporations do have a responsibility to express values, that go beyond economic value maximization. What can you do as a person making products if an exciting new opportunity arises that seems to conflict with your or your organization's values? For example, the situation that Jamie raised at Apple, where, you know, they have this stance around privacy as a human right that on the surface seems to conflict with the opportunity with AI, which is really driven by these huge data sets. So. Do you think Apple's stance on privacy is going to fundamentally stunt their ability to maximize the opportunity that AI presents?
Joachim:Fundamentally, I think we have to treat the privacy constraint as a constraint. Like any designer would treat constraints on their designs. And I think this is where the heuristic comes in, is a principle, is a constraint and constraints are good for design. and one of the things that comes to my mind is, a documentary that I watched on who is a graphic designer and she teaches, a graphic design course where a lot of the focus is on imposing constraints on the students. And she. Has assignments that are so constrained, it's not even funny. I think students must feel incredibly frustrated. She has one, which is, I want you to take two squares and place them on a, a white square, And that's it. That's their assignment. And when you start seeing what students generate, some of it's not surprising, some of it's very surprising, and it's forcing them to get creative with something very limited. she has a similar exercise with a three by three grid, And again, it has, there's a unifying theme. I think One is traffic and. They have to essentially get the notion of traffic control and transit into this three by three grid. And very surprising things emerge because they start stripping away a lot of the inessential things that were distracting them before. So I feel if you hold yourself to that constraint apple to the privacy constraint, you'll actually find yourself innovating in many ways. And I, this is an area that I've been thinking about a lot where I realized that to a certain extent, because all, there are no constraints on OpenAI. They don't have any computational constraints, they have no data set constraints. So you kind of get, to a certain extent, a little bit lazy. You just throw everything in the kitchen sink and every computer that you can imagine and racks and racks of GPUs at the problem. As opposed to a perspective that says, no, there are constraints and I'm gonna innovate within these constraints. And privacy preservation and training AI models on privacy, preserving data sets will generate potentially much more powerful AI systems and powerful, being efficient, using less energy, requiring less data, and actually genuinely pushing knowledge forwards as opposed to I just have everything and I'm, you know, it's like your rich friend, the kid who's can throw the crazy party that has everything and the swimming pool and the dj and it's not that fun because they had everything. But there's gonna be a more constrained party that's out there, that's just the close friends and they have, they're gonna do a very focused thing and something wonderful will come out of that, you know, and so. I strongly believe that personal values are constraints, and those constraints should be pivoted into constraints on the design of what you wanna do. I certainly do that when I think about how I'm gonna apply data science I want to be on the right side of things. Um, and so that's one of the heuristics that I think about is, is, this value that I hold, or the value that the company hold. can I turn that into a design constraint, an actual constraint on the design, and then innovate within that very rigid form? What about you, Ernest?
Ernest:Oh, I, I love that perspective. You know, not necessarily thinking of a constraint as a bad thing is, is super powerful. That's something I've experienced as well, personally, but then also in my work life. it brought to mind. I went to school for jazz performance and at one point, I could be wrong, but I believe it was Terrence Blanchard, who's a fantastic trumpet player, came into one of our classes and he did exercise with us, and he very similar to the example you gave, he said, you know, improvise on this, but with just one note. So it's giving you this fantastic constraint within which you could then be fantastically creative. So I think that point about constraints being a very powerful, catalyst for innovation is a, is a great point. And in the case of Apple, I think it is going to position them for success, this embrace of privacy, as a constraint on their approach to AI. It delivers on something that is important to many people, as you highlighted at the very outset of this. but also is going to enable them to create this sort of competitive moat around their offerings. Because, you know, what they're gonna do is do all the AI processing on device instead of up in the cloud. and it plays into their, strengths as one of the few vertical operators in this space. You know, they make the devices not only the devices, but the processors. So they, they can tune the processors to be, particularly good at doing on-device, AI processing. So it, it just makes so much sense for them, and they've turned this, what could be viewed as a constraint into this fantastic strength. At a personal level. I could share one example that I saw firsthand. A team within this company that I was working in was led by a person who had this really strong personal conviction around sustainability, which was distinct from, you know, kind of the values of the company as a whole. And they brought that conviction to their work, to their projects. And that really created distinction for them as an individual, but also for the projects that they led. And it led to great success for those projects, both within the company, but then out in the marketplace as well. Because, you know, again, getting back to that point you made, I think in our very first episode, the importance of products that, express a point of view. So within the context of this company, this person had this conviction and that came to life as a point of view expressed in the products as well. And because of that, those products stood out and, were successful. So I think that this is something that can be applied at a very high strategic level, as in the case of Apple, but also at a very localized individual level, and lead to fulfillment for you, but also success for the projects that you work on.
Joachim:Yeah, I'm, I'm still trying to be in this mode of, you know, what are these little heuristics that you can keep track of in your mind? And one of them um, is, is your product tricking people? Am I taking advantage of my customer's inability to process something to get them to do the thing that I want them to do? someone told me this anecdote that I found really very amusing. I will not name any corporations, but he was working at a tech company that was kind of on the down. Um, but they still had one service, a subscription based service that was highly successful. For some reason it had bucked the trend. The rest of the company wasn't doing very well, but this service somehow just kept generating revenue. and then one day they had to update their terms of service and they blasted an email to all of their users and within a day. Their revenue disappeared because everyone realized they had been subscribing to this service and they had forgotten about the subscription, so the, you know, the true state of the business was one of that. There is no business here, but because it was kind of predicated on people not thinking about what they had done, it could, can be considered a financial success, but it wasn't sustainable. There's actually kind of an interesting recent academic paper in economics from, some researchers out of Stanford and, other schools where they have detailed credit card data and they can actually look at when a credit card gets replaced, whether people actively resubscribe to a service or they don't, and they just let it lapse. And of course it's very, it's unsurprising. We know this from our own experiences that, we tend to forget what we subscribe for. And it's only when a credit card fails to a, a credit card card transaction fails to go through at the subscription service that you go, crikey, I didn't realize I was still subscribing to this thing. So principle that I think is worth checking is are you doing something that is just tricking someone or getting them to forget that you are taking money from them?
Ernest:I've actually used a very similar technique, a technique that was similar, at least in principle, but, um, differed a little bit in the execution. On my part, if I ever found myself in a situation where I just wasn't quite sure if we were doing the right thing, I would, do my best, to put myself in the shoes of our customer. And I would-- the way I would act on that is that I would often physically leave the office. You know, like I mentioned earlier, I think, the corporate environment, both culturally, and even just in the design of the physical space, has this pernicious ability to erase our humanity. And so I would often leave the office and if possible, go to the place where our customers would be encountering this thing that we were working on, whatever the product was, and put myself in their shoes and just ask, all right, is this what I would want to be done for me? if the answer was yes, then, you know, I think we're good to go. If not, then it would force me to reassess the approach we were taking. But it comes back to that same idea, you know, the same question you asked: are we tricking the consumer? Just getting at it in a little bit of a different way. This has been a great conversation. I think, you know, again, we could probably go on for quite a while longer, but now that you've heard our perspectives, we want to hear from you. Have you ever in your work creating products faced this challenge of a seeming conflict between values and opportunity? If so, how did you address it? Let us know at learnmakelearn@gmail.com. Now let's move on to our recommendations of the week. Joachim, what has you excited this week?
Joachim:This week I rediscovered, an album that I really enjoyed when it came out,, around 2007. and it's the album's called Untrue by Burial, who's a British electronic musician for a long time. Totally anonymous, very secretive, so added to the mystique. 2007, you wouldn't think that over exposure to artists was a thing, but it was, So remaining anonymous was already difficult in 2007 as an artist. And so they managed to do that, which added to the atmosphere that surrounds this music. So it is electronic music, it's sample-based music. and a lot of the samples come from pretty bizarre places. Um, for example, video game, sound effects feature in I think there's a sample from metal gear solid of shells hitting the ground that is used as a percussive sound in one of the tracks. So it's very evocative, it's very atmospheric. Burial talked a lot about technology in one interview later on, and he was discussing the conundrum that he faced when he was looking at his computer screen and interacting with what was on there. And he simply asked the question, am I moving the mouse or is the computer telling me to move the mouse? This music, I feel, captures that unease that we would have with technology. You know, and these samples and sounds that he's picking and these atmospheres that he's generating make you feel a little bit uneasy about stuff. So Burial Untrue, it's great. It's a, it's electronic music. It is, what would be called dubstep or dub, but it is British dubstep, so it's not like skrillex. So if you do see a description, don't let it put you off. It isn't a big wobbly bass since it's far more atmospheric. so that would be my submission for this week.
Ernest:That's awesome. That concern over mind control seems even more relevant today with, you know, all the algorithms that seem to be, guiding and maybe directing, many of our behaviors.
Joachim:Yes.
Ernest:On my end, I wanna recommend actually two things, both films, and I'll explain the kind of thread that ties them together in, in a minute. But the first is something I saw just last night, a film called American Fiction that was written and directed by Cord Jefferson starring Jeffrey Wright. The whole cast is amazing, but Jeffrey Wright is phenomenal. It's based on a 2001 novel called Erasure by, Percival Everett. And it deals with a lot of different things. You know, it deals with race in America. a central theme as well is this challenge, the struggle of turning art into a commodity. In the terms that we've been talking about, you could say it was kind of about giving into market forces or put colloquially selling out. That's kind of a core theme of the story as well. But what I love about it is that it deals with these big ideas, but in a way that doesn't tell you what you're supposed to think. You know, a word that I initially was thinking of using to describe what it does is skewer,'cause it kind of, I, my initial reactions that it sort of skewers, the progressive left and, skewers academia to a certain degree. But instead, actually the reason I think it's so successful is that it, it doesn't skewer so much as just holding up a mirror to these things and, you know, showing you what they look like from a different perspective, and then letting you make a judgment, as to, you know, what you think about them. So a fantastic movie. I'll also share in the show notes, Cord Jefferson was one of the lead writers on the Watchman series on HBO a few years back, which I thought was just incredible. And,, after that show aired, Jefferson did an interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, the NPR show, which was absolutely fantastic. So I'll share a link to that interview as well in the show notes. So that's my first one is American Fiction. The second is another film called Poor Things, which I think a lot of people will have heard about by this time. Directed by Yorgos Lanthimos starring Emma Stone, but also again with an amazing cast. And that too was based on a novel, in this case, a 1992 novel called Poor Things by Alasdair Gray. You know, on the surface they might seem incredibly different, Poor Things and American Fiction. But the reason I wanted to highlight them together is, if you were to state the two films in the form of a brief, a product brief, I think they could both share the same brief, which is tell a story of personal discovery from the perspective of an outsider. It's, so I think cool to see how you can have the same core premise expressed in such distinct and different ways by two different artists, you know, working with these different casts. So, that's why I think those two together are, are kind of a nice pairing.
Joachim:I like that you point out that there is a unifying theme, but the execution is totally different. I think that's a very common fear when you're starting to create, you say, ah, this is, this has been done. why would I bother? And here you have two films kind of hitting the same core underlying truth. And the magic is in the execution and, and the, and the direction that you take it into. And then it becomes something very unique. It's the synthesis of that core with everything else that comes after that, that you get that innovation and these vast differences. because ultimately all stories kind of have a few truths that they rest on, and then it builds up into very, very different directions. I like that, that you were highlighting that unity amongst these things, but that they go off into totally different directions. I think that's exactly at the root of all innovation really.
Ernest:Alright, I think that does it for us. thank you to Jamie for suggesting today's topic, and to you for joining us here at Learn, Make, Learn. As I mentioned, we want to hear from you, so please send any questions or suggestions to learnmakelearn@gmail.com and tell your friends about us. In our next episode, building on the theme of selling out that I referenced in the, in the context of American Fiction, we're going to discuss the perils of crossing over from niche to mainstream through the lens of an interest shared by Joachim and me, namely wristwatches, and specifically through the lens of a website called Hodinkee, which has been described as the most influential brand in the watch world that is not a watch brand. But Hodinkee has lost some of that influence over the past year as it sought to broaden its influence to a more mainstream audience. We'll share our own experiences and perspectives on this topic on the next Learn, Make, Learn.
