One Step Up #41
This week, we cover the future of 'human ownership', Taylor Swift & intellectual property law, The Future of Education, Netflix, problem solving biases, Jamie Dimon's latest annual letter & Apple
The Ponzi Career
Using examples of David Bowie, Lambda School & French entrepreneur Alex Masmej, Dror Poleg paints a world where the future of work is a pyramid scheme, where every person sells his favourite person to the next person.
I would highly encourage everyone to give this a read - because implications are wide ranging. We’re already seeing early signs of this.
The best way to handle the risks and uncertainty of scalable occupations is to share them. Doctors or fitness instructors or writers or investment advisors worried about the future can issue tokens and let their fans and customers participate in their careers' ups and downs.
And just like with celebrities, sharing risk is only part of the story. By letting other people invest in you, you are incentivizing them to promote your own story and do their best to increase your tokens' value.
In such a scenario, every career becomes a pyramid scheme. If you can attract enough people to buy your tokens, and they can attract enough people to buy even more tokens, the whole enterprise will continue to increase in value. This increase will happen regardless of how much revenue you can generate from doing your actual job. And it will continue until you run out of stories to tell, or until you run out of people to tell stories to.
Taylor Swift, intellectual property law, and due diligence disasters
An informative read for anyone vaguely interested in the music business - and a must read for anyone who is an artist or an aspiring one.
This story is wild and fascinating.
The Future of Education is Community: The Rise of Cohort-Based Courses
A very good overview of the evolution of the online education sector. As someone who wrote a little about MOOCs back in 2013 (here) - I found this summary incredibly useful.
There are 4 elements that distinguish cohort-based online courses from earlier waves:
Community
Accountability (by far the #1 reason I’m bullish on CBCs; and also the #1 reason I was sceptical if MOOCs would take off)
Interaction
Impact
It’s important to realize that each new wave in the history of online education doesn’t extinguish the previous one. It builds on it.
Each new wave adds a new layer of possibility and value to the previous ones. In the same way that the Web is built on layers of hardware, firmware, software, and websites, each wave of online education uses the capabilities developed in previous eras and bundles them into a new experience. Each additional layer expands the scope of things we can do, the people we can reach, and the outcomes we can deliver.
But it is very clear that the frontier of innovation has moved, and the model of sitting in front of a computer watching videos by yourself is no longer the best we can do. Pre-recorded, self-paced content will always have a role to play, but for the transformational education that people are seeking to cope with a quickly changing world, cohort-based courses will be essential.
The Fascinating History of Netflix
A chronological timeline of Netflix’s founding, its major milestones and the people behind it.
Did you know?
Inspired by Amazon's e-commerce model, the pair (Netflix founders) explored various portable items they could use to sell over the internet in a similar fashion.
After initially considering and rejecting VHS cassettes, they settled on DVDs as the perfect product. They tested their idea by posting a DVD to their homes in Santa Cruz, and when it arrived in perfect condition, they decided the time was right to break into the market with their revolutionary model.
Adding is favoured over subtracting in problem solving
People are prone to apply a ‘what can we add here?’ heuristic (a default strategy to simplify and speed up decision-making). This heuristic can be overcome by exerting extra cognitive effort to consider other, less-intuitive solutions.
Other interesting points:
The bias towards additive solutions might be further compounded by the fact that subtractive solutions are also less likely to be appreciated. People might expect to receive less credit for subtractive solutions than for additive ones. A proposal to get rid of something might feel less creative than would coming up with something new to add.
A real life example: For instance, when people feel dissatisfied with the decor of their home, they might address the situation by going on a spending spree and acquiring more furniture — even if it would be equally effective to get rid of a cluttering coffee table. Such a tendency might be particularly pronounced for resource-deprived consumers, who tend to be particularly focused on acquiring material goods. This not only harms those consumers’ financial situations, but also increases the strain on our environment.
Consider the Lego structure depicted above, in which a figurine is placed under a roof supported by a single pillar at one corner. How would you change this structure so that you could put a masonry brick on top of it without crushing the figurine, bearing in mind that each block added costs 10 cents? If you are like most participants in a study reported by Adams et al.1in Nature, you would add pillars to better support the roof.
But a simpler (and cheaper) solution would be to remove the existing pillar, and let the roof simply rest on the base.
And that is the bias we should aim to acknowledge and then work towards neutralizing.
Jamie Dimon’s Letter to JPM Shareholders (2021)
Besides being a great letter to get a broader understanding of the financial markets and the state of the economy, one point particularly stood out to me.
Bob Dylan said it best:
Apple's Rationale for Not Bringing iMessage to Android Revealed in Legal Documents
New court filings submitted by Epic Games in its ongoing lawsuit with Apple reveal just how executives at Apple rationalized their decision not to develop a version of iMessage for Android.
iMessage on Android would simply serve to remove [an] obstacle to iPhone families giving their kids Android phones.
…the #1 most difficult [reason] to leave the Apple universe app is iMessage . . . iMessage amounts to serious lock-in" to the Apple ecosystem, Mr. Schiller commented that "moving iMessage to Android will hurt us more than help us, this email illustrates why
In 2016, when rumours began swirling around the possibility that Apple might launch a version of iMessage for Android smartphones due to the company's increased focus on services, senior Apple executives shot down those rumours by admitting that having a superior messaging platform that only worked on Apple devices would help sales of those devices, which has been the company's classic (and successful) rationale for years.
Till next time.
A healthy man has many wishes, a sick man has only one.
Be grateful for what you have and take nothing for granted.