Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:02:30 · Molly Graham, Lenny Rachitsky
So those are just examples for me. I bet you have some too, but to me, that is one of the biggest things I've been thinking about lately is as of today, I think there's some stuff we just shouldn't give away. [01:02:44] S0: Breaking news. That's what a departure from this. How many years ago did you write this? 13 years? [01:02:52] S1: Yeah, 13. [01:02:53] S0: Wow. That's something. That's a sign of- [01:02:56] S1: A sign of the times. [01:02:57] S0: ... the change we're living through that now there's some [inaudible 01:02:59] [01:02:59] S1: Hold on to some of them. [01:03:01] S0: Yeah. So interesting. There's a few thoughts I had here while you were talking. This is almost a discussion around what should AI do? Where do you want AI to be involved and where you not want it involved? One framework I've loved is this idea of you want AI in the middle of stuff. You want to be at the top coming up just like, here's kind of where we want to go and here's the idea, here's what I'm thinking. And then AI does a bunch of stuff, and then you review it, iterate until it's done. [01:03:29] S1: Sandwich. [01:03:31] S0: AI sandwich. [01:03:32] S1: Sandwich, Lenny. [01:03:33] S0: The human sandwich. [01:03:35] S1: Yeah, dude. [01:03:36] S0: Oh, man. [01:03:39] S1: Okay, we're getting there. We're getting a metaphor.
01:03:39 · Molly Graham, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:03:39] S1: Okay, we're getting there. We're getting a metaphor. [01:03:39] S0: That's the best answer. The other is something Tara, I just thought of as you were talking. So Tara shared this really good perspective that humans are going to be necessary to help guide us towards a world we want to have, a product we want to build versus the most optimal AI version. I think I was a longtime Airbnb person, nothing personal, but Booking.com, if you've seen it, a very different experience than Airbnb. Booking.com, their whole philosophy, let's optimize the shit out of every second of interaction. So it's just all these upsells and pressure and stress just like, "Oh, my God, only one spot left. You have five seconds left. Just book a hundred times, 100 people book it." [01:04:22] S1: Sounds stressful. [01:04:24] S0: It's so stressful, but so effective. You go there, you're like, "Oh, shit I got to book this right now." [01:04:28] S1: You're like, "I didn't even know I was booking it, but I booked it." [01:04:30] S0: I'm going to Japan. There's only one spot left. But it's so good. It's so effective at getting you to book. Booking.com appropriate. And it worked, and it's doing great as a business. So good idea, good stuff guys. Airbnb has always been, we don't want to become that. We want it to feel really nice, to have a great experience, feel good. So I think that's a big part of the answer as you were talking, made me realize is humans are there to guide towards the world we want.
01:04:30 · Lenny Rachitsky, Molly Graham
[01:04:30] S0: I'm going to Japan. There's only one spot left. But it's so good. It's so effective at getting you to book. Booking.com appropriate. And it worked, and it's doing great as a business. So good idea, good stuff guys. Airbnb has always been, we don't want to become that. We want it to feel really nice, to have a great experience, feel good. So I think that's a big part of the answer as you were talking, made me realize is humans are there to guide towards the world we want. [01:05:01] S1: Yeah. And to some extent what you're talking about is taste, that there is a big difference between something that's okay and something that's phenomenal. [01:05:11] S0: I think it's even beyond taste. I think it's like a vision. It's like, "What is your vision of where this should be?" Because you could say, people at booking.com, they have taste for a specific type. It's like a different kind of taste. But it's like, "Yeah, what do you want? What do you want this to be?"
01:05:11 · Lenny Rachitsky, Molly Graham
[01:05:11] S0: I think it's even beyond taste. I think it's like a vision. It's like, "What is your vision of where this should be?" Because you could say, people at booking.com, they have taste for a specific type. It's like a different kind of taste. But it's like, "Yeah, what do you want? What do you want this to be?" [01:05:25] S1: Totally. What do you want/ What do you want the world to look like? I like that. I'm into that. Yeah. I also just think we got to accept that at least for the moment, this is a bunch of interns, this is a bunch of junior employees. And if you're outsourcing your vision or the future of the world to a bunch of summer interns, we got problems. So I think the human brain is powerful at a lot of things. We are powerful at a lot of things. You individually are phenomenal at a set of things. Do not outsource that. You can enable it. You can amplify it to use your data, but don't outsource it to these weird robots that are effectively summer interns. [01:06:06] S0: The trick is as it gets better, can you hold on to things you want? There's parts of our job we love. A lot of engineers used to love to sit there and write out code, I think. And I wonder if you can hold out and just like, "No, I love this. I'm not going to let AI take this on."
01:06:06 · Lenny Rachitsky, Molly Graham
[01:06:06] S0: The trick is as it gets better, can you hold on to things you want? There's parts of our job we love. A lot of engineers used to love to sit there and write out code, I think. And I wonder if you can hold out and just like, "No, I love this. I'm not going to let AI take this on." [01:06:26] S1: Yeah. I have two reactions to that because I've been thinking about it a bunch since I had that conversation with that engineer. The first is, will there be a whiplash back? You see this in art, you see this in a lot of things. Actually, you see in a lot of different parts of tech where the trend is all AI, everything AI. Will there be the handmade? Somebody was talking to me about AI is going to make all this art, but doesn't that increase the value of true human-made art, you know? That you know it was made by a human? That you know it was crafted by hands? I have that same question. I'm not an engineer, so I'm not trying to say this, but will something show back up where the value of human written code or something like that suddenly gets valuable again or trendy? So I'm curious about that because I've seen those whiplashes enough times in life that it's hard sometimes to know what's a trend and what's permanent, particularly in this state. But I guess the other thing that I think about a little bit is, "Yes, you loved that, and, yes, you were extraordinary at it." And that is amazing. And we should grieve it. We should grieve that maybe that's going away. And there's this guy, Chip Conley, what am I saying? You know him well, who I- [01:07:49] S0: Podcast guest.
01:07:49 · Lenny Rachitsky, Molly Graham
[01:07:49] S0: Podcast guest. [01:07:49] S1: Yeah. He's coming on Worklife soon. [01:07:51] S0: Awesome. [01:07:51] S1: And I loved the conversation with him. He was talking about midlife, but he was saying, "Sometimes you need to throw a funeral for things. Do you know what I mean?" And I was like, "Yeah, man, sometimes you need to. The funeral is there for a reason." So let's take a minute and mourn what was, but then let's ask, "What could be?" What could you love that way again? What could you be extraordinary at that way again in this new world if the robots are doing X, Y, and Z? And I think both things can be true. You can be really sad about what you've lost, and there can be opportunity in what's coming, but we got to make space for both. And I think sometimes we're not allowing the grief because we're just like, "Just get excited about the future people." [01:08:37] S0: Such a powerful way of thinking about it. Just accepting it is going to change, just grieving it. That was nice. That was a nice world I had. [01:08:48] S1: I miss it. [01:08:48] S0: Maybe I didn't appreciate it as much as I should have. [01:08:50] S1: Totally.